Goombd Was There! - E3 2012: Dishonored

Bethesda had a big presence at E3 this year. While not presenting a humongous list of games in their booth, the handful of titles they did show were pretty impressive. Among them, at the top of Goombd!'s favorites, was Dishonored, a hybrid game of stealth and action set in a gorgeously designed 'steampunk' world.

Visually, Dishonored is pretty striking; backgrounds emulate the look of matte painting concept art drawings, characters have an European comic book influence to their design and the overall presentation is very slick.

It's easy to throw out the word 'hybrid' about a game, and in Dishonored's case, it's probably the best way of describing it - there is, however, more depth to be found once you get past the fact that Arkane Studios took lots of notes from games like Bioshock and Thief and applied some of the best parts of these series into Dishonored.

While 'hybrid' certainly does not describe that mix of designs, it can easily fit to explain how you can actually go about in Dishonored. As a revenge fueled assassin that happens to have some cool powers (some reminiscent of Bioshock's spell book) and is bent on taking down a country's tyrant ruler.

In the guided demo, our assassin was given the mission of killing two distinct targets that happened to be in a brothel. The approach they could take was free form, and from what I witnessed, Dishonored handles both of the obvious ways to finish the mission quite well. A violent method with guns blazing attracted an army of guards, and after a pretty bloody shoot out and display of some of the supernatural abilities that were set to 11 in the demo - you won't be nearly as strong at this point in the actual game - so both targets were dead in a matter of minutes. The game doesn't shy away from violence, and deaths were pretty graphic and detailed in just about every kill.

On the other hand, the stealthy approach was about as sneaky and clever as you would expect, with some interesting twists throw in for good measure. Dishonored features a morality system, that according to Bethesda, acts as a crossroads in regards to which branches the story takes along the way. While nothing brand new, this system is in full effect when you play the game being stealthy. There are ways to avoid killing innocents, but at the same time, you can achieve a similar result, in a quiet fashion, while making a pile of corpses along with the intended victims.

According to the developers, and what I got during the demo, your options won't be so binary, allowing for a mix of the two, thanks to the different paths you can take both in gameplay and in how you evolve the main character's powers. This upgrade system was not shown during the demo, and as mentioned before, the assassin was overpowered for the demo's sake.

Dishonored was one of Goombd!'s highlights at E3 2012 and it's stated for an October release on Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. Keep an eye out for a write-up on it soon!