At long last, we were able to stop Delilah and save the Princess Emily from her fate as one of Delilah’s puppets. This is the end of Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches.

If you wish to see content like this being recording live, remember to follow me on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud or on Twitter @newdarkcloud.

Overall, both this and The Knife of Dunwall go a lot to refine the base formula set by Dishonored, and address a lot of the concerns from the original game.

They also did a lot to put female characters in positions of power in both DLCs, which was a common criticism of the base game (where most of the female cast were in subservient roles as maids or prostitutes). Many of the quest givers and faction leaders in this DLC, even the main villain, are female. Heck, they even introduced Billie Lurk in Knife of Dunwall, who would go on to become one of the franchises most interesting characters.

For players of Dishonored 2, this DLC also introduces Delilah, who becomes especially relevant in that game. Her scheme to take control of Emily is interesting, even if I think it could further developed before the grand reveal. Overall, a really good DLC.

And speaking of: Next time, we start Dishonored 2. Look forward to it.

When I popped the disc for Vampyr into my PS4, I wasn’t entirely sure what I should be expecting. I knew the broad strokes: That I was taking the role of a surgeon, newly turned into a vampire during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 London. But beyond that, I knew nothing about the what the game could be. Starting a New Game, before I became a creature of the night, a message popped up on screen:
“In this game, difficulty is tied to your actions. The more lives you take, the easier the game will be.”
Without knowing it, I was already introduced to one of the most fascinating concepts in Vampyr. Other vampire games before this have tried to capture the constant push and pull between a bloodsucker’s need to maintain their humanity and their need to feed. Vampires: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, for one, did this through the “humanity” mechanic inherent to the tabletop RPG series it draws from. The way Dontnod’s Vampyr chose to systematize this inherent push and pull has stuck with me long after I finished my adventure because of how clever and unique it is.

Being an action RPG, players gain experience in the process of playing Vampyr for completing quests, advancing the story, and helping out the people of London. However, these sources are finite and the amount of experience gained from fighting enemies in the streets is minuscule. While players can use them to gain power, they will eventually find themselves several levels behind their foes. Defeating these enemies is still possible, but the damage bonus afforded to the hunters, rogue vampires, and assorted beasts of the night for being higher level reduces the player’s margin for error. Mechanical skill can make up for the difference in power, and weapon upgrades can help close the gap. Yet even the best player will die many times due to the difference in damage output. Death may be temporary, merely costing a percentage of blood points to revive at the latest checkpoint (which are mercifully plentiful), but it is still a setback. To truly even the odds, it is necessary to imbibe the blood of the innocent.
While the story has newly undead protagonist Dr. Jonathan Reid work to uncover the source of and stop the Spanish Flu epidemic, the true conflict is between the player’s competing desires to grow stronger to more effectively combat the above threats, and to protect the citizens of London. There are 4 districts that the player will travel to throughout the course of the game, and each of those districts has a health meter for how healthy the population is. By healing the sick and saving people from the predators that stalk the night, players can improve the health of each district and the lives of the people within. If an area’s population gets too feeble, then they’ll no longer be able to defend themselves and vampires will quickly overrun the area: It’s population either dead or turned into undead abominations.
Each citizen also has an amount of experience that they can impart to the players if they are drained of all their blood, an act the game refers to as “The Embrace”. While this heinous act can empower Dr. Reid, it comes at a dramatic cost to the well-being of the community, reducing its overall health. The more influential the person is to the community, the more experience they are worth, and the worse off their neighbors will be for their absence. In this way, we as players feel Dr. Reid’s struggle between his profession and his vampiric nature through the mechanics of the game itself. By abstaining from human blood, he is deliberately hindering the development of his powers. However, embracing his true nature is a fundamentally destabilizing act, especially while the city is in the throws of one of the worst biological disasters of all time.
Yet that is only one way that Vampyr emphasizes this conflict of character. Players do not simply level up once they meet experience threshold like in many other RPGs. To cash in on all the upgrades they can afford, players need to seek asylum in one of the many hideouts scattered across the city and spend the day resting. Unfortunately, time does not stand still for the world outside while they are sound asleep. The people of London act out their daily routines during this time, and that’s when the effects of Dr. Reid’s nightly activities start to make themselves known. If the player has been treating people’s illnesses and reigning in the impulse to feed, they’ll see the health of each borough improve. If they’ve been neglecting their duties or feasting upon the populace, then the regions will suffer and may fall if left unchecked.
Time doesn’t advance until the player rests in this manner, so by spending experience to grow stronger, players expose the city to the risks that their actions have opened up. Even if they’ve been a perfectly good steward to the civilians, the people may still grow sick as a result of their daytime activities. This means that even the player who chooses not to feed needs to be careful of when and how often they rest, lest they need to “make the rounds” and spend too much time and resources so that London remains healthy. In this way, Vampyr even makes the passive accrual of power a risk to the population, and exacerbates the consequences of unchecked hunger.
One of the first things that Vampyr teaches players about it’s version of its titular monsters is that they do not necessarily need blood to survive. They are immortals, and aside from their own weaknesses, they will endure. That said, blood allows them to stay strong and use the powers that their undying form affords them. Every part of the game is a constant reminder of this fact. Whenever Johnathan Reid talks to an innocent person, there is a HUD displaying the amount of experience their blood would confer to him. Each death, each difficult fight, and each overly long load time serve to underscore how the adventure would be so such easier if the player would give into their instinct and consume. But despite this, the only way to get the game’s best ending is to endure. Only by affirming their strength of will, and resisting this nearly constant temptation, the player can prove that they held onto their humanity even through the worst of it. That is the strength of Vampyr, and why it shines as one of the best examples on how to mechanically capture the horror of the titular (yet archaically spelled) bloodsucker.

Welcome to the final part of Interactive Friction plays A Way Out. This is the final part of our playthrough of the game, and one of the better parts of the game. Or at least, one of the most interesting parts of it.

If you want to watch content like this as it is recorded live, be sure to follow my Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

At the time of recording, we had yet to start our run of Detroit: Become Human, which is why we talk about it as if it’s not out yet. (It wasn’t.)

It seems also silly to have this really personal story about two guys escaping jail and taking revenge on someone who wronged them both end in a third-person shooter co-op campaign. It’s lower-budget, but the idea is the same.

While I really like the scene where we confront Harvey, it’s one of the most cliche scenes in a game full of them. That’s the main problem with A Way Out. All of these scenes are well made, but I’ve seen most, if not all of this before in other movies and/or games.

And if it was more than just “another movie-like game”, then the ending might have more impact if I had some attachment to either Vincent or Leo. The twist is executed well, but it hinges on drumming up emotions that I just didn’t have towards the protagonists. I wish I had more to say than that, but there’s just nothing to work with.

Good game, but I wish there was more meat to sink my teeth into.

And so we being the second of Dishonored’s story-based DLCs: The Brigmore Witches.

Unlike the previous DLC, we weren’t able to finish the whole thing in a single session. The plan will be to finish the last mission and then transition into Dishonored 2 if there is time remaining.

If you wish to see content like this, be sure to follow me on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

What I find most interesting about the Brigmore Witches is the way it experimented with new gameplay concepts in Dishonored, and remixed a few old ones together.

The return to Coolridge is a intriguing from both a lore standpoint and a gameplay one. It’s always fun to see how a game designer can reuse old assets in new ways, and this was no exception. Further, it’s a complete inverse on the first mission in the base game. Where Corvo had to break out of prison, Daud needs to break in to rescue somebody. And as the stream audience pointed out, Dishonored is clever in the way it uses randomization to make sure that players still need to go through the motions, even on repeat runs. They can’t have magical foreknowledge of safe combinations or objective locations.

On top of that, we even see an (optional) return of the social stealth mechanic from Lady Boyle’s Last Party. It’s limited, and there are a lot of ways to break cover, but it feels good to hide in plain sight as I did in this mission.

As for the next mission, the most obvious mechanic being toyed with is conflict between multiple warring factions. We’ll see another twist on this core mechanic in Dishonored 2, but here it feels very much like they were testing the waters. They start with both factions hostile to Daud, but also each other. The player can use the tension between them to take care of guards without actually staining their own hands in blood. Then, once the Dead Eels become neutral to Daud, they feel the freedom of being able to navigate a space without being accosted by guards.

In terms of upgrades to the toolkit, this is where Corrupted Charms, that offer a positive and a negative effect, were first introduced. I have mixed feelings on them. While I like to make interesting trade-offs, Dishonored is a stealth game at its core. Therefore, it seems strange to take on effects that hinder the player’s ability to sneak around. Meanwhile, since combat is to be avoided, most players will ignore any adverse conditions that effect fighting prowess. It’s doesn’t matter if I take more health damage per hit, I shouldn’t even be getting hit in the first place.

The stun mines also start to finally give non-lethal players some utility in what they can do. They didn’t go far enough in The Brigmore Witches, but just starting to experiment with more non-lethal options opened the door for Dishonored 2 to refine a lot of what was introduced in both Brigmore Witches and Knife of Dunwall. It’ll be excited to speak more on that once we get to it.

Interactive Friction returns with the second part of our three part series on A Way Out.

We successfully found A Way Out of jail. And now, we’re in another predicament. With Harvey and the police after us, we need to evade our pursuers and get revenge. Will we find A Way Out of this? Or will the Oscars defeat us once and for all?

If you wish to see content like this recorded live, be sure to tune in to my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

First off, I did not realize how offensive the “Reeeeeee” meme is when I recorded this stream. Now that I know, you won’t be seeing me doing it again.

Second, you can find the Far Cry 5 article I mentioned here.

Whether this is good or bad is hard to say, but the most striking part of this game is how much fun I’m having when I ignore the story and wander about looking for things to interact with. We didn’t do absolutely everything we could in these scenes, but we definitely had our fair share of fun.

It’s a shame that whenever the main story becomes the focus, the game gets noticeably weaker. It’s not to say that they’re telling a bad story by any means. The problem is that it does nothing to stand out from the other jailbreak stories that exist elsewhere. Neither does it stand out much as a co-op game. While there are strong elements in both the beginning and ending of the game that leverage the split-screen co-op gameplay, the whole middle part we play here is… okay.

Sam and I have the problem where almost as soon as we see the setup we know instantly how its going to go beat-for-beat. It happens more than a few times in this video alone. Despite the cries of “Fuck the Oscars”, it’s clear that Josef Fares still has a love for cinema, and the tropes common of this genre of film.

It’s disappointing in a way, but what’s here is still really good.

Now that we’ve finished vanilla Dishonored, it’s time to keep going with the DLC. Starting with The Knife of Dunwall, the developers at Arkane started making a ton of improvements to the core game that had a huge impact of the end-user experience.

Remember, if you wish to watch these get recorded live, you should subscribe to my Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

The most immediate change was to Blink. Unlike Corvo, Daud has the ability to stop time and precisely aim where he lands. This might sound minor, but it makes it a lot easier to perform some of the trickiest maneuvers. Where Corvo has to carefully time his blinks while in the air, Daud can simply hold still, cease gravity’s pull, and accurately jump to his destination. This change was so welcome that it became part of Corvo’s arsenal in Dishonored 2.

And though the performances often fall flat, the addition of voice acting did much to solve the problem where the player character’s silence felt uncanny. In also helps to have Billy Lurk serve both as an assistance and a soundboard for Daud to play off of.

This is also where Dishonored starts to experiment with more non-lethal tools. The staff at Arkane seemed nervous about making non-lethal tools function similarly to lethal tools, but it was a start. Even in this run, we found more than a few uses of Chokedust both defensively, to retreat, and offensively, as cover to safely knock out enemies mid-combat. If memory serves, Brigmore Witches would further expand on the potential for non-lethal play.

Which is why we’ll continue with that next time.

It’s been really fun to play Dishonored on stream, for all the people who joined in. In this last session, we were able to finish the Campaign in Low Chaos.

Remember, if you want to see this content as it’s being recorded live, be sure to follow my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud. The next time I have a variety stream slot open, I’ll continue with the Dishonored DLC (Knife of Dunwall/Brigmore Riches).

Credit to both IGN and AARONMACKENZIE for their videos on the High Chaos run of the game. It made it easier to talk about them with a visual handy.

While I adore the original Dishonored game, and believe it serves as an excellent start to the franchise. This is where the core gameplay was established, going back to the sandbox 0451 games of old.

That said, there was a ton of room for improvement. While the idea of non-lethal gameplay helped add to the idea of players choosing their own path, the implementation left a lot to be desired. There weren’t many options for non-lethal players in terms on interesting gameplay since most of the equipment and power set was designed for lethality. Devouring Swarm, Windblast, Springrazors, Grenades, and Pistols were all practically useless for a non-lethal run. And the non-lethal takedowns for assassination targets, while appreciated, felt like a last minute addition most of the time (because they were).

I wrote some words about the chaos system way back when, and while my old writing leaves a lot to be desired, I stand by the sentiments expressed in that article.

As we delve further into the franchise, I look forward to exploring the many changes and additions made during each game, and how they addressed some of these problems.

Welcome to a new chapter in Interactive Friction. Sam and I are glad to get back to playing games, but the sad fact is neither one of us has enough time to produce the highly edited content you guys are used to from us. For that reason, we’ve decided to transition to the more accessible territory of streaming, much like my Dishonored LP.

To that end, here is the first of our VODs from our 3 sessions on A Way Out. If you want to see more content like this live, as it happens, by sure to subscribe to my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

Apologies for Sam’s audio early on. After about 10 minutes, he eventually recognizes and fixes the problem.

The Detroit VOD I was talking about early can be found here.

I think Sam made an interesting point in comparing this camera work to the “single shot” camera in the new God of War. That said, I hesitate when he makes the claim that it will/should be the “future” of gaming. Not only is that a lot of work to get that working right, but there are benefits to having those discreet stopping point that the single shot composition lacked in God of War. The camera is a large part of why that game’s story just keeps “going on”.

As a student of film himself, I’m also intrigued by Sam’s jealously of the video game camera. It’s easy to understand that since the camera isn’t a physical object, but rather a point of origin for where to draw the scene, that you can “get away” with shots are completely impossible in real world space. However, I’ve never really thought too much about it until Sam pointed it out here. That’s not to say that game directors have it any easier or harder than film directors, but that a different set of considerations and skills are required.

Lastly, at the time of this recording, Detroit: Become Human had not been released. Considering how well it sold, I doubt any of the comments we made about David Cage and his games will matter at all. (Not like they would have if the game sold poorly, but y’know what I mean.)

We’ll work to get the remaining 2 sessions on YouTube whenever we can. Given Sam’s schedule and E3 going on now, that’s unlikely to happen soon.

Those of you who have been following my streams know that I’ve been busy recording A Way Out with Sam.

With that out of the way, I returned, at least briefly, to my run of Dishonored.

One of the big topics that came up in the middle of the recording was the really strange, casual sexism that does exist within the game. Some of it is less overt, like the fact that all the female characters are in some subservient role. Most of background ladies are either brothel workers or maids in some capacity. Stuff like this is hard to notice unless you’re aware of the issue and are actively looking for it.

The first obvious example is the one where Piero spies on Callista taking a bath. This is my fifth run through Dishonored 1. As much as I love this game, I still have no idea what the underlying purpose of this scene is. It never comes up again and the player doesn’t really get a chance to call him on how disgusting that behavior is. To top it off, if they want to be nice to Sokolov, then he demands money from them immediately after being caught peeping through a lock.

Then there’s Lady Boyle’s low-chaos, non-lethal takedown. Rather than kill her, you can knock her out and hand her to her creepy stalker, who promises that she will be neither seen nor heard from ever again. While it’s not outright stated, the game heavily implies that she’ll become his sex slave.

None of the non-lethal takedowns, aside from Daud later on, are particularly forgiving. Most of them involve some sense of karmic justice. The High Overseer, who abused his authority over Dunwall’s central religion, gets forever ostracized from said institution. The Pendleton brothers, who abuse the lower class and treat their workers as expendable fodder, are punished by being forced to work their own silver mines with their heads shaved and their tongues cut out. It’s brutal, but you see the logic behind these punishments.

With Lady Boyle, her crime was funding the Lord Regent’s forces. Some of the ambient conversation in the middle of the mission implies she may not necessarily agree with him. but is funding him out of a genuine sense of affection. Obviously, her funding is allowing him to destroy the underclass, but the punishment from the non-lethal option doesn’t fit the karmic justice angle that the other targets face. It’s sadistic in a different way, one that even in my less aware, younger days, I saw as problematic.

What’s really strange about all of this is that it seems quite likely that all of this casual sexism is just the result of a massive oversight. Once critics called Arcane on it, every other Dishonored game took steps to address these problems, putting female characters in positions of authority in the world on Dunwall. Harvey Smith even apologized for these mistakes.

Hopefully I’m able to get to those other games, because I do want to talk more about how successful Arcane was in fixing this.

I’ve been wanting to play Dishonored for an LP ever since I completed the Hitman Let’s Play series, but I was struggling to find time to do it.

Then in walked streaming into my life, and suddenly what would’ve been a huge commitment is now much easier on my time.

The idea for this run to be more “improvisational” than I usually am when playing Dishonored or any immersive sim. When I play for myself, I tend to save scum. If something goes wrong, I’ll glad boot up an old save and do it again. And since I’m constantly on the Quick Save key, I’m rarely thrown back too far.

Since so many of the great stories from this genre are born from screwing up and adapting in the face of adversity, I want to force myself to roll with the punches. Since nobody enjoys watching someone else save scum, doing this on stream will force me to break the habit.

It’s also nice to have a presence to bounce ideas off of while playing the game. Knowing someone is watching makes it easier to roll with my train of thought and communicate my ideas.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. If you want to watch this live whenever I next record, be sure to follow my Twitch channel.
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