Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Welcome back fellow Steemians, it's that time of the week again, time for your weekly game review fix.

This week we head back once again to the streets of Karnaca, which we last visited in Dishonored 2 as Emily Kaldwin, daughter of Corvo Attano and the Empress of Dunwall, who was assassinated in the very first game. We pick up on a completely different story this time round, which pretty much follows after the events of the last game. If you played the last game you would recall one of the characters you met during the game, Billie, the lady who was kind enough to drive you around on her boat to all the locations you needed to get to. She takes the lead as the protagonist in the story, and this is sort of an expansion to Dishonored 2, but it is a standalone game, which means you don't have to own the previous game in order to play this. I would recommend that you do, that's because I'm fickle about story and continuity, but you can still enjoy the game and the story without having to have played the one before.

Our story this time picks up just after the events of Dishonored 2, where Emily Kaldwin is reinstated as empress and begins to salvage the Empire previously broken by Delilah's rule.

Billie Lurk wakes up aboard her ship, the Dreadful Wale, having the same recurring nightmare regarding her right arm and eye, with no explanation why. So she decides to track down her old mentor Daud, who she finds at a boxing club run by a Void-worshipping cult called the Eyeless. Upon arriving at the boxing club she witnesses Daud being tied down and restrained by a special device that cancels out his Void-given powers. Luckily Billie is able to free her old mentor just in the nick of time, and the old man is delighted to see her and asks if she would be willing to go on one last quest with him, to kill the Outsider. Who if you can remember is the mysterious dark entity who has been responsible throughout the series for bestowing dark powers on the Corvo and Emily. Daud explains that Eyeless is in possession of a ritual knife, a special blade that was originally used to create the Outsider thousands of years ago, but may also hold the power to kill him. Billie is then visited by the Outsider, who gives her a cryptic message, and also replacing her right arm with a Void-made arm, and her eye with a special red artifact, both giving her supernatural abilities.

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Death of the Outsider puts you in control of a familiar face and takes you down a very dark side story which neatly wraps up the entire series.

This game is part origin story and part epilogue, which fills in a lot of the lore and the mystery of the Void as well as the Outsider. If you loved the first two games, there's no doubt you will thoroughly enjoy this too, there are a few minor improvements when it comes to having more freedom to use the abilities. Speaking of, Billie has her own unique set of Void powers, much different than with Emily and Corvo, who's abilities were very similar. Your main movement ability is called Displace, and instead of just teleporting to a location as Corvo does with Blink, you can now drop a ghostly image of yourself wherever you’re aiming, and you can reactivate Displace to hop to the ghost, as long as you have line-of-sight. The brilliant replacement for Dark Vision, which is probably the most important and most used power is called Foresight. Instead of being able to see through walls in real time, Foresight freezes time and lets you fly around the map, marking targets and scouting out the area around you, but be careful cos it drains Void energy. Luckily the developers changed the Void energy bar in this game, which now automatically fill.

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"Here you are at last, in a ruined and drowning world, held captive by the man who killed your Empress, the assassin Daud. Your friends poisoned you and dumped your body in the river. Did they do it to protect themselves, so no one would ever know what they’d done? Or was it because they were a single move away from controlling an empire, and they knew you’d never let them manipulate Emily? Maybe none of these. Perhaps that’s just the nature of man." - The Outsider

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My overall thoughts of the game is that it's pretty awesome being back in the mysterious Dishonored world.

I would say that my biggest gripe with the game was that it is nowhere near as long as the previous two games, even with the new game plus which I didn't bother playing. There were two main reasons for this, firstly because the developer decided to throw out the chaos system, which gave you a different outcome based on how you played the game. Either go in guns blazing killing anything that moves, giving you a high chaos rating. The other option was to for the more difficult low chaos play through, where you kill no one and stay unseen, this involved loads or sneaking and a massive amount or restarting when you get seen, which made the previous two games feel far more challenging. Secondly the only real change was the Void powers, and not much to upgrade when it came to gear and weapons, or personal customization. Death of the Outsider feels like an extension of Dishonored 2, which it pretty much is, despite being sold as a standalone game and costing exactly the same for what feels like half a game. All in all, it’s a worthy end to the story that began five years ago.

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Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is an action-adventure stealth video game developed by great folk at Arkane Studios.

They were responsible for the entire Dishonored series as well as Prey, which I recently reviewed and also BioShock 2 which I still need to play sometime soon. The game falls under Bethesda Softworks publishing which you all know by now, this game is a standalone expansion pack following Dishonored 2, which just mean it is a game all on it own and you do not need to own the previous game to play this, but it does help when is comes to the story. This title was released on 15 September 2017 and available on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, unfortunately you won't be able to play this on previous generation consoles. I would definitely keep an eye out for this on Black Friday next week.