Dishonored Dunwall City Trials DLC Revealed

It's been revealed that Dishonored will be getting three add-on packs, the first of which will be released in December.

The Dishonored: Dunwall City Trials DLC will cost £3.99/€4.99/AUD$8.45/$4.99/400 MS points and will add 10 challenge maps to the game, designed to test players' combat, stealth and mobility skills.

The trials on offer will range from fighting waves of attackers and pulling off drop assassinations to racing against the clock. There'll also be global online leaderboards and new achievements.

Some additional details have also been released for the second add-on for Dishonored due next year, which will apparently be a story-driven campaign. The pack is targeted for next Spring and will focus on Daud, the leader of a group of supernatural assassins called The Whalers. It'll add new locations within Dunwall, as well as powers, weapons and gadgets that you'll be able to liberate from Daud's clutches.

Nothing is known about the third DLC pack, other than that it'll also be story-focused, but it's been confirmed that all three DLC packs will release simultaneously on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

If you're struggling with some of the trickier of Dishonored's moments, head over to IGN's Dishonored wiki now for a slew of tips, tricks and video walkthroughs.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

Win Dishonored And An Alienware PC

To celebrate the impending release of Bethesda's supernatural assassin title Dishonored, we've launched IGN Dunwall. What is IGN Dunwall you ask? It's the IGN you'd read if you were an inhabitant of Dunwall, the fictional city that Dishonored is based in.

You can find IGN Dunwall by following this link: go.ign.com/dunwall

Whilst you're exploring the dark and murky world of IGN Dunwall you should also find a competition to win a copy of Dishonored on PC plus a brand new Alienware PC to play it on in style, so head over to the site and have a look around. You need to enter your details on the competition page (which can be found as the fifth item on the story carousel at the top of the page), before 1pm on 12 October 2012 to be in with a chance of winning.

This competition is open to IGN readers over the age of 18 who reside in the United Kingdom (not Dunwall) with full terms and conditions on the competition page.

Source : ign[dot]com

Dishonored IGN Livestream This Week

IGN has been excitedly following the progress of Dishonored since its announcement, but now you can see what all the fuss is about for yourself. This Wednesday (26 September) from 7.30pm BT (or 11.30am PT if you’re in North America, and 4.30am AEST Thursday 27 September if you’re in Australia) IGN and Bethesda will be showing off the Kaldwin’s Bridge level of the game, not once but twice, to demonstrate the countless different ways you can get through the game.

The livestream will be taking place at an event in central London and one of the game’s developers will be on hand to provide insight into the game. Then, directly after the playthrough, we’ll be linking up live with Arkane Studios president Raphaël Colantonio and co-creative director Harvey Smith for an exclusive question and answer session to find out more about Dishonored.

Of course, you’ll be able to catch it all on IGN – indeed, on this very page – so don’t forget to bookmark in preparation for Wednesday’s unveiling. And if you want to get involved, simply Tweet your question to @IGNUK using the hashtag #IGNDishonored.

See you Wednesday!

Source : ign[dot]com

Why Dishonored is my Most Anticipated Game This Year

If you’ve been following Dishonored on IGN, you probably read Charles’ “Death at a Dinner Party” adventures earlier this year, in which he crashed a masked ball and caused total chaos, attracting the whole city’s attention by murdering guests and throwing canisters of explosive whale oil at guards. I sat down with the exact same mission recently, and was a bit concerned that I’d have nothing new to write about. How wrong I was.

Everything was different. For me and Charles, literally not one single thing, apart from the mission itself, was the same. This has instantly made Dishonored my most-anticipated game of this year. This is the first game I’ve played since Dark Souls last year that hasn’t patronised or restricted me for one second, instead just pushing a set of tools and powers into my hands with an avuncular wink and leaving me to do what I want with them. It gives you freedom, it gives you options, and it lets you work things out for yourself.

Here’s the first difference: I made it through the whole scenario without killing anyone. Not even my assassination target. (Well, I did kill a few rats by possessing them for so long that their tiny brains exploded, but that doesn’t count.) Here’s the second: I didn’t find the equipment menu, so I played for more than an hour without the incredibly useful instant-teleport Blink power or any weapons. Here’s the third: because I took a wrong turn on my way to the mansion garden party I was supposed to be infiltrating (my sense of direction is legendarily awful, in games as in real life), I discovered a whole neighbouring area of slum-houses that I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed.

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I like to play Dishonored like a spy, rather than a superhero

I like to play Dishonored like a spy, rather than a superhero. That’s in line with how I approach most open-world games - I like digging around in people’s diaries for information in Skyrim (and digging around their houses for possessions to liberate. I hacked into and read several thousand mundane emails on the computers of corporation employees in Deus Ex. I like to explore a place and hunt for the tiny details hidden in basements and dusty old books and peeling propaganda posters on the walls. Dishonored’s Dunwall is rich with this detail. If you take your time, avoid attention and keep your eyes open, you can really drink it in.

The premise of this mission – the same one shown at Quakecon and Gamescom – is an assassination during am exclusive masked ball hosted at the Boyle family mansion. Lady Boyle is your target, but the problem is, there are three Lady Boyle’s and all of them are in similar creepy porcelain-doll costumes of different colours (the game randomises the mission each time, too, so you can never be 100% sure which Lady Boyle should be the object of your stabby assassin affections.) There are three options (that I could work out, anyway): find out which is guilty, kill all of them, or kill one at random and hope for the best.

Infiltrating the mansion’s grounds is a mission in itself; the night streets are patrolled by police and Tall Boys, those heavily-armoured striders with the power to vaporise you on sight. You begin the mission on a boat in the nearby canal, and you have to work out how to get in by yourself. It’s gratifying that the game doesn’t give you hints; it doesn’t tell you which way to go, and no button brings up a magic light-trail showing you the best way in. You can swim through the sewers and try to find an inlet to the mansion. Getting up to the rooftops and climbing the fence is a more obvious solution.

I got chased into an alleyway after being spotted in the water by guards and accidentally discovered a slum-house with stairs leading promisingly upwards. Upon entering, I noticed a few prone bodies in the neighbouring room; I did not expect them to suddenly spring to life, run at me and cough black plague-goop into my face whilst blood streamed from their eyes. These people are the Weepers, the diseased poor of Dunwall whom the government has been systematically exterminating. You won’t find them in the opulent mansions where the rich are hiding away – they hide in the slums, evading the Tall Boys.

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I did not expect them to cough black plague-goop into my face

You’re supposed to feel sorry for these guys, but man, they behave a LOT like zombies, with all the moaning and the stumbling and the blood and the spontaneous attacking – not that you can’t empathise with zombies, but they’re terrifying. I ran away upstairs and climbed out of a window, taking in as much of the decaying building as I could. Soiled mattresses were lying about everywhere, with plague information pamphlets and posters trodden into the floorboards. When I got into the roof, I realised that – fortuitously – I was right opposite the Boyle mansion, and one of the windows was open. Leaping between the windowsills, I climbed into the guardhouse and scouted it out. I’d managed to make my way in without having to scale any walls, swim through any sewers, steal an invitation or kill anyone. And now, after stealing them from a hook on the wall, I had the keys to the whole place.

You’re undercover at the party, where your masked-assassin outfit blends into the other guests’ fancy-dress ensembles. You can walk around more-or-less freely, listening to conversations (apparently one of the absent society ladies likes to get carnal with her male siblings and nephews) and scoping out your potential targets. The first Lady Boyle I meet is rather… over-friendly, leading me willingly away to a secluded assassination-friendly bedroom after a glass of punch on the promise of some drunk party-sex. Feeling massively uncomfortable about either murdering her without proof or jumping into her bed (the game wouldn’t let me, anyway), she eventually got bored with the masked guy hanging awkwardly around in her room and wandered off, at which point I read through her diary and stole some jewellery. The diary contains no allusions to illicit murder-worthy activity, making me think she probably wasn’t my target after all.

The other rooms upstairs are locked, so I head back downstairs to look for a way in. There’s a rat scuttling about in the grand ballroom; after possessing it, I head into the first vent I can find and emerge in a room that controls the giant security forcefield barring the way up the grand stairway. If I could find a hacking module, I could modify it to fry anyone who walks through it, which sounds massively entertaining but not enormously helpful to my goal of causing as little chaos as possible.

It’s after I’ve met all of the Lady Boyles stalking the party in red, black and white costume that a guest in a scarecrow-esque mask approaches me and whispers that he knows who I’m looking for – and that he’s in love with her, and understandably would rather I didn’t stab her to death. He promises to take her away and keep her safe if I deliver her unharmed to the basement. It doesn’t sound… entirely above-board, but at least I wouldn’t have to kill anyone.

Getting into the other Lady Boyles’ bedrooms is easy once I’ve found some more rats in the cellar to possess and scuttled through the mansion’s network of vents. Another diary reveals my true target: it’s the Boyle in black. Now I just have to get her to the basement and send her away with her lover without alerting anyone by striding through the party with an unconscious body draped across my shoulders.

This turns out to be pretty easy. I just walk straight up to the Boyle in question and tell her I’m out to murder her unless she comes to the basement, right now, a request to which she acquiesces with surprisingly little consternation. I knock her out in a quiet spot and sprint the rest of the way down to the basement before the guards stroll past. Once we’re there, the masked guy from earlier is waiting on a barge to take her back out into the canal. “She’ll have a long time to learn to love me back, now,” he says, calmly sailing away to wherever on earth he’s going with the unconscious Lady Boyle prone on his boat. Oh. Well. It looks like I’ve accidentally delivered someone into a life of imprisonment and possible sex-slavery. But at least I didn’t kill anyone.

It’s only when I’m comparing experiences with others later on that it becomes clear how unusual this experience of Dishonored was. Some players were relying on magic to teleport them across rooftops, facilitate an escape from the Tall Boys or possess guards to open doors for them. Others got eaten by fish in the canal. Most were causing violent chaos, turning the party into a colourful disaster, summoning hordes of voracious rats to nibble at the attendees. Not one other person found the slums, or the force-shield hack, or managed to make it through without killing. You could play that same mission five or six times and never do anything the same.

And that is exactly why this is the most interesting game of this year.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK, and expects the end of her year to be totally dominated by supernatural assassination (and probably a bit of Wii U). Follow her on Twitter and IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

Dishonored Dev: People are Tired of “the Same Thing Over and Over”

Dishonored’s executive producer Julien Roby disagrees with the sentiment recently expressed by EA Labels president Frank Gibeau that late in the console cycle is a poor time to launch new IPs.

We asked Roby for his thoughts on the matter during a hands-on with the game in Sydney late last week.

“Well, you probably have some insight on that but I think as long as the game is good, whether it’s a new IP or not, if the game is good, it gets a good review and it’s marketed properly people will want to look at it,” said Roby. “Specifically now, because it’s been a few years where we’ve only got sequels of sequels of sequels of sequels. I think people are getting tired of just playing the same thing over and over.”

“

I think people are getting tired of just playing the same thing over and over.

“So I hope that they’re going to try Dishonored for the fact that it’s trying to do something a little different that those other games.”

Roby agreed that it’s perhaps telling that two of the most-talked about games of E3 and Gamescom this year were, like Dishonored, both brand new titles: Watch Dogs and Remember Me.

We asked Roby whether he felt gamers are craving something new.

“I think so,” he said. “You look at the line-up for Christmas this year and it’s like something number six, something number five, something number seven. I really think people are starving for something new. Something new in terms of universe. Something new in terms of gameplay. Something new in terms of visuals.”

The level available to playthrough, already detailed in part here, was packed with a glut of ways to complete it. The target building can be entered via several means; teleporting from a higher neighbouring building, possessing a fish and swimming underneath the cellar, or simply finding the right credentials to walk straight through the front door. The target herself, one of three similarly dressed women at a masquerade party, can be identified in a number of different ways and can be taken care of, either lethally or non-lethally, in even more. With the combinations of powers at players’ disposal, and the freedom to complete hits however one sees fit, Roby and the team hope gamers will exchange stories on how they’ve tackled the game’s missions and encourage one another to experiment and re-experiment.

“We really hope players are going to talk together and say, ‘Oh, you did it this way?’ and ‘Oh, you did it this way?’ and realise that they actually created their own little stories in terms of how they did their objectives,” said Roby. “And then they’re going to get back to it and try different things.”

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It’s a lot about experimenting... [G]o through different routes, use different powers, try different things that you didn’t try the first time.

“It’s a lot about experimenting... [G]o through different routes, use different powers, try different things that you didn’t try the first time. It’s not about running through a linear corridor.”

On the topic of multiplayer and forcing it into games that don’t require it, Roby and the Dishonored team are pleased the game is remaining a dedicated, single-player title.

“Bethesda has been very supportive of that since the beginning,” said Roby. “I mean, it doesn’t make any sense to make multiplayer if it’s just to add it on the box. As a checkbox, you know?”

“The idea was to make a great single-player experience, as we did with a lot of player choice, and if we had to lose some time making multiplayer it means we would lose focus on the single-player and spend more time on multiplayer and in the end you just get lower [quality] single-player and crappy multiplayer.”

One of the key pillars of Dishonored is emergent gameplay and the ability to combine powers with unexpected results, results that sometimes surprise even the designers. The tricky thing is balancing the ability to let players circumvent things in ways the designers may not have realised was possible and keeping the game functional.

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If the player thinks about something we want to make sure they can actually do it.

“Well, there is of course the possibility that people will be able to break the game if they really try to insist on wrecking it, but what we wanted to ensure was that the player always feels in power and that we always say yes to the player,” said Roby. “For instance, if the player thinks about something we want to make sure they can actually do it, that there are no stupid rules that prevent them from doing it. So we prefer to overpower the player a little but still let them have fun rather than trying to direct the game so much, and let the player do what they want to do.”

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about Die Hard with a Vengeance, cars and single-player games here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.

Source : ign[dot]com

Bethesda Releases Dishonored: Rat Assassin for iOS

Bethesda announced (and launched!) Dishonored promo-game Dishonored: Rat Assassin onto the iOS App Store today. The free app’s description promises that gamers will be able to “Help rid the Dunwall streets of plagued rats, one slice, dice, and crossbow shot at a time.”

If that sounds to you like Fruit Ninja but with disgusting rats instead of delicious fruit… then you’re exactly right.

The game’s Endless “Assassination” mode tasks gamers with slicing as many rats with a finger as possible without hitting a bomb. Where do all these rats come from? Why are they flying in from off-screen in patterns? Is someone throwing them? Don’t worry about it. Just slice.

Rat Assassin’s meat is in its surprisingly robust Challenge mode. It is made up of 36 hand-crafted levels, each with a tricky three-star score to achieve. Each one puts a little twist on the game’s basic rat-slicing formula.

So, here’s the deal: Dishonored: Rat Assassin is a very weird product. It’s very casual, but was built to promote a super hardcore title. It’s surprisingly violent (menu selections are made by slicing a rat in half). The App Store listing links to RatAssassin.com which loads nothing but a 403 Forbidden error (as of now).

But still… it’s still pretty fun. And free, which certainly engenders a lot of goodwill. At the very least, gamers that have mastered slicing fruit should enjoy the free romp through Rat Assassin’s challenge mode.

Justin is Editor of IGN Wireless. He has been reviewing mobile games since the dark days of Java flip phones. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

All-Star Cast Revealed for Dishonored

The voice cast for Dishonored has been revealed, and it's quite impressive to say the least.

Academy award-winner Susan Sarandon, appearing for the first time in a video game, plays Granny Rags – a former aristocrat, she's been driven mad from years living on the streets of Dunwall. Chloë Grace Moretz ( Kick Ass's Hit Girl) voices Young Lady Emily, the daughter of the Empress who is kidnapped after her mother's death. Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones) stars as Emily's caretaker Calista.

Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Brad Dourif (The Lord of the Rings Trilogy), and John Slattery (Mad Men) also lend their vocal talents to Arkane Studio's first-person action game featuring a supernatural assassin driven by revenge.

And if that wasn't enough, it even stars Princess Leia. Well, Carrie Fisher will be heard throughout the city of Dunwall, broadcasting government propaganda on a speaker system.

“Having such talented actors voice Dishonored's compelling cast of characters adds a rich, powerful element to the game,” said Raphaël Colantonio, president of Arkane Studios. “We want to draw people into this virtual world and make it feel real. This celebrated cast adds wonderful depth and credibility to the overall Dishonored gameplay experience."

Dishonored is set for release in North American on October 9, 2012 and in Europe on October 12, 2012 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

Daniel is IGN's UK Games Writer. His favourite dystopia is the one we live in. Follow him on IGN and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

Dishonored UK Pre-Order Exclusives

Bethesda has revealed the pre-order exclusives for its forthcoming Dishonored. A full list of what you can get and where you can get them lies below.

GAME & GameStation Special Edition – Dishonored branded 72 tarot card deck with instructions to play the ‘Game of Nancy’  & the Arcane Assassin Downloadable Upgrade Pack, which includes:

• VOID CHANNEL: Powers duration and damage bonus (exclusive)
• WHITE RAT FRIEND: White rats will not be hostile (exclusive)
• GUTTER FEAST: White rat consumption for mana (exclusive)
• WHALE IN-GAME STATUE: Unlocks one additional slot for bone charm bonuses (start with an extra slot earlier on)
• UNHIDDEN BOOK: “Filed Notes: The Journal of Granny Rags” (exclusive)
• 500 BONUS COINS

Tesco – Shadow Rat Downloadable Upgrade Pack, which includes:

• DELICATE TOUCH: Breaking Glass noise reduction (exclusive)
• VOYEUR: Key-hole peeping magnification (exclusive)
• DEEP BREATHER: Underwater breathing capacity bonus (exclusive)
• GOLDEN RAT STATUE: Unlocks one additional slot for bone charm bonuses (start with an extra slot earlier on)
• UNHIDDEN BOOK: “Filed Notes: The Royal Spy” (exclusive)
• 500 BONUS COINS

Shop.to.net – Backstreet Butcher Downloadable Upgrade Pack, which includes:

• FENCER: sword vs. sword advantage bonus (exclusive)
• FIRE WATER: increased whiskey bottle explosions (exclusive)
• BLAST RESISTANT: reduced explosion damage taken (exclusive)
• WOLFHOUND IN-GAME STATUE: unlocks one additional slot for bone charm bonuses (start with an extra slot earlier on)
• UNHIDDEN BOOK: “Early Life and Times: Slackjaw”
• 500 BONUS COINS

Amazon.co.uk – Acrobatic Killer Downloadable Upgrade Pack, which includes:

• RAVEN: Health bonus for drop-down assassination (exclusive)
• QUICK DODGE: Bolt / arrow dodging bonus (exclusive)
• RIVER AFFINITY: Increased swimming speed (exclusive)
• HAGFISH IN-GAME STATUE: Unlocks one additional slot for bone charm bonuses (start with an extra slot earlier on)
• UNHIDDEN BOOK: “Rumours and Sightings: Daud”
• 500 BONUS COINS

Dishonored is out in the UK on October 12th, 2012.

Daniel is IGN's UK Games Writer. You can be part of the world's worst cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com