Spoilers for the final level of Dishonored, natch.
About a month ago, we posted StealthGamerBR's absurd takedown of Daud's forces in Dishonored's Flooded District mission. Now, we get to see similar treatment of the game's last level. There's blood for the blood god, limbs for the limb god, bullets for the bullet god, and plenty of other creative killings performed in worship of their respective deities, probably.
And hey, while we're here, let's also post this other high-chaos stealth montage from a few weeks ago.
And... Actually, here's a link to StealthGamerBR's channel, featuring plenty of cool murder montages and a gratifying lack of unbearably smug commentary. Good work, person who is much better at games than me.
Well, this is a bit embarrassing—in an apparent rehearsal for its Sunday E3 press conference, Bethesda accidentally broadcast a few minutes of conversation between Arkane Studios Raph Colantonio and members of Bethesda live on Twitch. The conversation also mentioned Harvey Smith, who co-directed 2012's Dishonored with Colantonio. Those who caught the Twitch broadcast live claimed that Dishonored 2 was mentioned during the brief unplanned livestream.
A snippet of the conversation uploaded to Youtube here (backup on Kotaku, if that link goes down) does indeed include Colatonio and Smith rehearsing for tomorrow s press conference, but best as we can tell, Dishonored 2 is never explicitly mentioned. The word honored is mentioned about 45 seconds into the clip, but in the context of honored to be here rather than Dishonored 2.
It s possible Dishonored 2 was mentioned elsewhere in the accidental broadcast, but we can t say definitively that they were discussing Dishonored 2 based on the clip. Still, we can safely say that Arkane Studios Smith and Colantonio will be at Bethesda s conference talking about a new game. That game being a sequel to the successful Dishonored seems like a smart bet.
This video is almost enough to make me regret doing a (mostly) non-violent playthrough of Dishonored. The only thing that gives me solace is that I'm nowhere near good enough to do any of this.
It's an spectacular playthrough of a section of Dishonored's Flooded District mission. The video is marked as High Chaos, although Highest Chaos might be a more accurate way of putting it. Aside from an absolutely beautiful trickshot, we're also treated to frenetic combat and some pretty convoluted traps. It's an impressive five minutes of work.
As with so many of the best open world games, the real star of Dishonored is its setting: Dunwall city. The game s tale of urban blight, thievery, and betrayal plays out in a darkly-mirrored London that provides safer refuge to rats than the poor people who carry the city on their shoulders. There s little in the way of hope for them, but then again, the blackness of its heart is what I love about Arkane s 2012 stealth-action game.
Chaos in Dishonored s world—and its resolution through the player s actions as assassin Corvo Attano—is what makes the game such a brilliantly rendered slice of alternate reality. Science and the supernatural mingle and mate in a soot-stained alley to produce one of the most memorable game worlds of the last 10 years.
I get to smile and eat jellied eels, but every trip to Dunwall also has me thinking about the piles of coal and bloody refuse that produced so many of our modern glass and steel cities. Every metropolis has a history only its rats can tell—some are just more honest about it. Dishonored faces this truth head-on.
For this edition of If you like I look at books, art, and cinema that project similar shadowy visions of cities that only exist in our imaginations. These are strange urban sprawls that haven t quite forgotten the industrial past and dirty living of the 19th and 20th centuries...
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
The lies of locke lamora
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Scott Lynch s debut novel features thievery, deception, and questionable characters, all set against the wonderfully weird backdrop of Camorr—an island city with many districts and many problems. Lynch s Camorr excels at giving you a vivid, bottom-up perspective as it unwinds the story of orphan-turned-con-artist Locke Lamora.
From its very first lines, Lynch s novel pays deep attention to the rich strangeness of its fantasy urban setting: At the height of the long wet summer of the Seventy-seventh Year of Sendovani, the Thiefmaker of Camorr paid a sudden and unannounced visit to the Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro, desperately hoping to sell him the Lamora boy.
Dishonored s visual design is one of the game s most striking aspects. Arkane avoids an approach that favors hyperrealism and instead builds a world that often feels like you re walking—or blinking—through a digital painting. This is a style we can see in the work of Sergey Kolesov, an artist Dishonored s art director Sebastien Mitton called one of the most talented painter/illustrators worldwide.
As we can see from Mitton s comments in the link above, Kolesov s work was obviously influential in shaping Dishonored s distinctive style and he has since joined Arkane Studios as a concept artist. I can only hope he s hard at work on a Dishonored 2, or something like it. Above I ve included a video of him speed painting a strange machine that looks like it could be right at home in one of Dunwall s back alleys.
An online gallery of Kolesov s prints is available here, and you can also check out his official blog.
Gotham by Gaslight, writer Brian Augustyn, artist Mike Mignola, inker P. Craig Russell
Gotham By gaslight
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When we see Bruce Wayne deep in conversation with Sigmund Freud at the outset of this graphic novel, we realise immediately this is going to be an unusual take on Batman. The alternate setting presents Batman in the year 1889. Wayne is still the troubled rich loner we ve come to know, but the world around him speaks more to the fears of the 19th century than to the high-tech interpretations of the Dark Knight experienced in the recent Christopher Nolan films.
It s a time when a madman with a sharp knife can put an entire city on edge. There s no question that this comic builds on some classic ways of playing with the Batman-as-dark-guardian story we ve read before, but Gotham by Gaslight s nod to Victorian-era architecture—and the specific kind of horror those cities created for their citizens—makes this a good fit for fans of Dishonored s grimy Dunwall.
Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas
Alex Proyas 1998 film Dark City borrows a lot from familiar urban noir storytelling, but its style and story both have their own deceptions to uncover, which I won t spoil here. It s enough to say that it begins with amnesia, a deadly crime, and a man on the run.
As in Dishonored, life in Dark City centers on its residents uncertainty about where they stand—literally, given the city s let s say unreliable topography—why they re doing what they re doing, and what it all really means. In a place of apparent monolithic size and dimension, nothing stops moving. Navigating this anxiety are a cast of characters anchored by Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, and William Hurt, and they all turn in suitably uncanny performances. Dark City was also one of the late Roger Ebert s best-reviewed movies, and for that reason I link his writing here. There may be spoilers, but Ebert s take is worth it.
Although both films are much more well-known than Dark City, you might also check out Terry Gilliam s Brazil or Christopher Nolan s The Prestige. The two movies give more than a few tips of their hat to many of the themes surfacing in Dishonored s fallen city.
Speedruns are artistry. Not only do they demonstrate complete mastery over a game, but they also poke away at the edges of what a game intends you to do. Watching a perfect speedrun is similar, I imagine, to watching good gymnastics, but they're more than just skill-based. They're borne of a curiosity about the edges of games: the things we're not meant to see and the things we aren't supposed to do.
There's a whole science behind speedruns. Players spend weeks and sometimes years chiselling a perfect path through a game. They exploit minor traversal bugs to gain speed, they tap away at the outer limits of a game world in search of hidden routes, and then they move to execute all these tricks in one graceful swoop. There's a strong collaborative spirit among speedrun communities, because in the end, it's all about what's possible, not who wins.
There are lots of different speedruns, and the rules vary depending on the type of speedrun a player hopes to achieve. Most of the runs I've featured below are Any% runs, which simply require the player to complete the game under any difficulty setting as quickly as possible. These contrast with 100% runs, which as the name suggests requires full completion of the game (any secret worlds or any optional collectibles, for example).
What follows aren't "the best speedruns of all time" but instead a selection of especially impressive runs. I've tried to collect those most suited to spectating, so there are a lot of shooters and platformers. Meanwhile, I've generally avoided speedruns too heavily reliant on glitches that bypass huge sections of a game (like this Pillars of Eternity run, for example). I'm not arguing these aren't legitimate: just that they're not as fun to watch.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda made a big deal of Skyrim's 100 hour potential back in 2011, but I'm sure they're not surprised that speedrunner gr3yscale has beaten the game in less than 40 minutes. After all, Skyrim QA guy Sam Bernstein managed to complete the whole game, glitch and cheat free, in two hours and 16 minutes. If you know what you're doing, the biggest games can be reduced to a series of carefully timed leaps.
Gr3yscale's world record time of 39:24 uses a number of built-in exploits, but arguably more interesting than the run itself is this accompanying tutorial video on how he achieved it. The lengthy video is a step-by-step instructional, detailing everything from the graphics settings you should use (as low as possible) through to how to steal the Blank Lexicon from Septimus Signus in less than five seconds. If you've got any interest in the painstaking process of routefinding for a speedrun, it's a must watch.
Dark Souls
For the best example of speedrunner Kahmul78 s thoroughness, look no further than the 1:56 mark below. The way he switches his inventory load out in the middle of a plunge attack demonstrates that every second is precious for an adept speedrunner. He won t need those newly equipped arrows for a while, but when you re looking to shave off precious seconds in a notoriously difficult game, you don t waste time.
After clearing the tutorial area, Kahmul78 takes a very unconventional route through Lordran. Using the Skeleton Key starting item he passes through New Londo Ruins and Valley of the Drakes into Darkroot Basin, then onto Undead Parish. This not only skips the second boss encounter, but it also means facing off against the first mandatory boss battle by the eight minute mark.
For the average first time player it s likely to take up to five hours to make that much progress (or about ten, if you re like me). The fact that this whole run wraps up in under 48 minutes naturally
attracted a lot of attention when it was first posted. There are quicker Dark Souls speedruns out there which exploit a major glitch, but this is the real deal.
Dishonored
With so many tools at his disposal it's little wonder that Corvo Attano can get the job done quickly. He's not really meant to do it this quickly though, with speedrunner TheWalrusMovement completing the stealth adventure in 34:35. Attano's Blink ability a lightning quick dash mainly used for covert operations is utilised a lot in this run, to the extent that it's difficult to keep track of TheWalrusMovement's routing.
Nonetheless, Dishonored is a surprisingly enjoyable game to spectate, and TheWalrusMovement is forthcoming with his secrets. This world record run can probably be improved the runner's commentary points out a couple of areas of improvement but this is the best out there in the meantime.
Doom 2
Picture this: you ve just returned from Hell only to find that Earth is in worse shape. You were really looking forward to having a beer though, so you want to save the world as quickly as possible. But how quickly is as quickly as possible? How s 23 minutes and three seconds sound? Not bad at all! Start pouring.
The work of speedrunner Zero-Master, this Ultra-Violent mode playthrough managed to topple a record set in 2010 by Looper. That s a long time in speedrun years and it only managed to come out on top by 22 seconds. A backseat speedrunner will no doubt see areas of improvement in the below video, which Zero-Master concedes to in his YouTube description, but for the time being this is the quickest run there is.
While Doom 2 is probably the most popular speedrunning instalment in the series, it s worth checking out speedruns of the two Final Doom WAD packs too. These outings upped the difficulty dramatically, and if you want to see a run with a few clever rocket jumps, look no further.
Duke Nukem 3D
Duke 3D s Build engine is home to a lot of glitches very handy to speedrunners. As Duke speedrunner LLCoolDave explains in this video, a major one is crouchjumping . If you crouch while freefalling and then hit the jump key before touching the ground, Duke can clip through certain walls and structures. The engine in Duke 3D is less than stable, allowing for switches to be triggered from unintended vantage points and whole regions of levels to be skipped.
As in most glitchy speedruns, triggering the engine s limitations at just the right moment is an impressive skill in itself. Speedrunner Mr_Wiggelz manages to complete the game in 9:19 below, though it s worth noting that only the first three episodes of the Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition feature (the fourth episode didn t appear in the original game).
Mr_Wiggelz admits that he messed up a couple of times during this run, so it probably won t be long before we see it bettered.
Some genres, especially platformers and shooters, are particularly suited to the speedrun. Others, like the open world RPG, definitely are not. That doesn t stop people from trying to beat the likes of Pillars of Eternity, Skyrim and Fallout 3 in the time it takes to prepare an English breakfast, but there s inevitably glitches involved. Games like these are designed to eat up your time and life.
Rydou s 18:53 speedrun of Fallout 3 (that s 18 minutes, not hours) utilises a few glitches, but no cheats or third-party programs. As he explains on his YouTube page, this run makes liberal use of a quicksave bug. Basically, if you rapidly quicksave and then quickload you ll briefly have the ability to clip through walls. In this way, the player-character goes from birth to saving Washington in less than 20 minutes.
After a bit of publicity off the back of this speedrun, Rydou moved to emphasise the difference between cheating and exploiting glitches. For those who wonder about the legitimacy of the run, using and exploiting glitches have always been a part of the speedrun community. This is a way to push the game even further, and [is] not considered cheating.
Half-Life 2
An hour and 32 minutes might not sound impressive for a Half-Life 2 speedrun: the game's an all time classic and ten years old to boot. You can blame the game's regular unskippable dialogue sequences for that record, but hey, at least it gives record holder Gocn k some time to take a break. He needs it.
There are some interesting strategies in this video. GocAk makes liberal use of two traversal glitches common in Valve's Source Engine, namely Accelerated Back Hopping and Accelerated Side Hopping. For a stunning example of the former skip to the 29 minute mark, where a sequence of careful jumps actually propels the player into the air.
Sourceruns.org has a more detailed description: "When you exceed the game's speed limit, the game tries to slow you down whenever you jump, back to the desired speed. By default the game thinks that you're moving forwards, so when you exceed the speed limit, it'll accelerate you backwards. If you are facing backwards, this will only increase your speed. So, the faster you're going - the more you will get accelerated."
Hotline Miami
No big tricks or glitches here, just an exceptionally talented player. Speedrunner Dingodrole completes Hotline Miami in 20 minutes and seven seconds, but his ultimate goal is to get below the 20 minute mark. If you watch the whole run you'll notice there's very little room for improvement, and Dingodrole seems to have the routing down pat. He's been steadily chipping away at the time for a while now, so it's probably inevitable that this will be beaten some day.
I Wanna Be The Guy
It pays to know a game intimately before embarking on a speedrun, but that rule has a different meaning when it comes to I Wanna Be The Guy. A parodic love letter to 8-bit platformers, I Wanna Be The Guy subverts every reliable trope in the platformer rule book. Shiny red apples aren t collectibles: they ll kill you. Don t worry about reaching those spikes: they ll come to you. Nothing is predictable, and everything is learnt from the experience of dying. You can t learn this game, you have to memorise it.
So it s always fun to monitor the speedrunning community s progress with I Wanna Be The Guy (as well as its many follow-ups). You need a great memory and superhuman dexterity to complete the game once, let alone in 28 minutes and 40 seconds without glitches, as Tesivonius has done.
A few caveats: this is a segmented Portal speedrun, which means the game wasn't completed from beginning to end in a single playthrough. Instead, the best level times were stitched together for the final video. Additionally, there were four different speedrunners involved: Nick "Z1mb0bw4y" Roth, Josh "Inexistence" Peaker, Nick "Gocnak" Kerns, and Sebastian "Xebaz" Dressler. Some would argue a segmented speedrun is illegitimate, but wherever you stand on that matter, it's still interesting to see what's possible.
This run uses neither cheats or hacks, but it does exploit a number of glitches. "This run first started after the discovery of a new glitch, which snowballed into a whirlwind of discoveries of new tricks, skips, and glitches," the team writes. As you'll see below, the glitches make for a disorientating watch, but its fascinating nonetheless.
Quake
The Quake speedrun scene used to be massive, boasting its own highly organised community in the form of Quake Done Quick. The below video sees all four episodes of the game completed in 11 minutes and 29 seconds (on Nightmare difficulty!) and demonstrates world class bunny hopping and rocket jumping skills. The occasional glitch is implemented and whole chunks of certain maps are skipped with the help of rocket jumps, but no cheats were used.
Spelunky
Twitch streamer Bananasaurus Rex is, or was, the world authority on Spelunky. It was he who figured out how to kill the game s invincible ghost. It was he who achieved a solo Eggplant run (this involves carrying an Eggplant to the end of the game, obviously). It was he who collected $3.1 million worth of gold in a single playthrough. Arguably the highest bar he set was the legendary 5:02 Hell speedrun. Simply reaching Hell is difficult enough on its own, but completing the whole game using this route is punishment. Doing it in five minutes is God tier.
Unfortunately for Bananasaurus Rex, someone managed to beat his Hell run, and not by a measly couple of seconds. Youtuber Latedog beat secret boss Yama in 4:36, creating a new record which let s face it will probably only be beaten by accident. Like Bananasaurus Rex he utilises the warp device, which is somewhat reliant on luck but pretty much crucial if you want to shear minutes off a playthrough.
Super Meat Boy
When humankind is wiped off the face of the earth by some malevolent alien society, the planet s new inhabitants will learn a couple of things as they sift through the rubble. First, we really liked bottled water. Secondly, Coca-Cola was an especially totalitarian leader. Thirdly, we were really bloody good at Super Meat Boy.
Speedrunner Vorpal has been chipping away at the world record for a while, but this is the best he/she has managed so far: the base game completed in 17 minutes and 54 seconds. That stat doesn t include the dark levels or any of the retro themed ones, but anyone who has spent half-an-hour with Team Meat s punishing platformer will peek through fingers as Vorpal passes the final boss run by the skin of his teeth.
VVVVV
Speedruns can be beautiful. Twitch streamer sheilalpoint completes VVVVV in 12:12 in the below video, and watching it (with the sound down) can be like watching a weird 1970s art film about a little man s efforts to euthanise himself in outer space.
The beauty of this run is that there aren t really any major tricks, just a thorough knowledge of the game s layout. Sheilalpoint pulls some interesting maneuvers with the game s checkpoints particularly in one sequence where hitting them as they collide with spikes actually increases the momentum of the player character but otherwise, this is plain old fashioned mastery.
For more awesome speedruns, speedrun.com and speeddemosarchive.com are invaluable resources. Think we've missed something important? Leave it in the comment section below.
In
Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it's brilliant. Today, Sam marvels at the attention to detail in Arkane's Dishonored.
There s nothing memorable about the toilets in most games, but I ll never forget the toilets in Dishonored. When I reflect on the WCs in gaming s recent past, I can remember plenty instances involving toilets—flushing the loo in almost every first-person games, for example or finding a recording in a particularly dirty one in BioShock—but the toilet itself, as a piece of visual design, is always unremarkable. It doesn t need to be an outstanding flourish of a prop, after all, because it s functional. PC Gamer would not mark a game down for having a boring toilet. Even in Andrew Ryan s Rapture, the best that mankind has to offer is satisfied with a bit of familiar porcelain—unless mediocre lavatories were the real reason the civil war kicked off, which I m pretty sure isn t what Ken Levine and company were going for.
Dishonored s fancy opening and closing chamber pot, pictured below, shows just how granular the team at Arkane got with world building in the 2012 immersive sim. It s so pretty that I d happily use it as an ottoman in my flat. I love this toilet because it shows how far the team was willing to go in making even the most functional elements of the world a little bit special. Late last year, I played through for the second time and invested hours in exploring every detail, locked room or systems-driven variables in how I completed each level. I wanted a comprehensive playthrough, having foolishly mainlined the story the first time. What I considered along the way is that Dishonored s environments are collectively the perfect size: enough for the player to get a proper snapshot of the world, but not so large that it feels like it s repeating itself (even instances where you revisit parts of the world later in the story are given a strong narrative justification).
You might only spot Dishonored s toilets once every few missions, or maybe not at all, but I enjoy the idea that getting something like this right is as important to Dunwall feeling coherent as something high-concept, such as the Tall Boy walkers or automated turrets. World-building should not be limited to just the big stuff, and it speaks to how consistent Dishonored is as an immersive sim. I can t think of a single basic element of the game that they get wrong: later parts of the story that leave the mission structure behind might lack the energy of earlier levels, but there s little I can think of that would improve the art direction, combat, AI and stealth.
Dishonored is a brilliant piece of work, whatever angle you take with it—the success of creating this world comes down to that ideal balance between size and detail. Even if you empty these worlds of NPCs—and I did, because I prefer the kind of stealth scenarios where everyone dies in increasingly novel and hilarious ways—it s worth hanging around to pick out the side rooms and artistic flourishes. Like the very best immersive sims, Dishonored tells a story with its art direction, one of class difference, outrageous and gaudy wealth built on a foundation of socioeconomic decay. The contrast between rich and poor is one of the strongest visual ideas this game has, but this only works because the world feels so lived in and fleshed out. Every piece of set design is there for a reason, to contribute to the telling of Dunwall s story. Even the shitter.
I've played through the beginning of Arkane Studio's Dishonored at least a half-dozen times, each time dreading the moment the killers make their move. Launching worldwide on April 16, Dishonored's second helping of downloadable content puts the assassin's dagger in players' hands. Can The Knife of Dunwall be redeemed?
It's chilling, seeing Corvo and the Empress from that angle and knowing what comes next, isn't it? That tragic event launches the master assassin Daud on a quest for redemption. The mysterious Outsider is an equal-opportunity enhancer, granting fresh new powers to this anti-hero to aid him on his journey. He'll track down Bone Charms and Runes with his Void Gaze, while learning to use deadly variations of Corvo's abilities.
Along with a little black magic, Daud will be able to summon his assassin brethren, daze enemies with Chokedust and Stun Mines, and launch a wide variety of darts from his concealed Wristbow.
Along with fresh locations like the Legal District and the whale carcass-studded Rothwild Slaughterhouse, Duad's journey will also grant players fresh perspective on key events from the main game.
More than just a simple side-story, The Knife of Dunwall is only the beginning of a larger tale, introducing players to a mysterious woman named Delilah, whose story, along with Daud's, will continue in the upcoming final add-on, The Brigmore Witches.
The Knife of Dunwall releases globally for the Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 on April 16 for $9.99 or 800 Microsoft points.
Ten new trophies for Dishonored hint that the title of its second DLC extension is coming soon, and it'll be titled "Other Side of the Coin."
When additional chapters were first mentioned by publisher Bethesda back in the fall, it said the second installment would deal with Daud, the leader of "The Whalers," a group of supernatural assassins. "Make your way through new Dunwall locales and discover Daud's own set of weapons, powers and gadgets in this story-driven campaign. How you play and the choices you make will impact the final outcome," the listing said at the time.
Five of the trophies call the series "The Other Side of the Coin." Bethesda has declined to comment on the listing. The game's first DLC package, "Dunwall City Trials," released in December and cost $5.
It looks like I may be about to add a third outlet to my tiny list of "stores I buy gaming shirts from", because Gametee—a new outlet that's about to hit its Kickstarter goal—is designing some very attractive tops.
He's worked on trailers and cinematics for games such as Halo 4, Far Cry 3, The Elder Scrolls Online, Lord of the Rings: War in the North and Dishonored.
Over the years he's also worked on a number of motion pictures, including Wolverine, The Grey and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they're big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".
Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you're in the business and have some concept, environment, promotional or character art you'd like to share, drop us a line!
It looks like I may be about to add a third outlet to my tiny list of "stores I buy gaming shirts from", because Gametee—a new outlet that's about to hit its Kickstarter goal—is designing some very attractive tops.
