Dead Exit got another review this week. It was another 8/10. That seems to be the consensus among the review giving community. The pessimist in me was expecting more hate from the people who would pick it up for 10 minutes and just say “Nope”, or from people blaming the game for when the game fails to connect over the internet for any number of reasons. That hasn’t happened and I’m grateful. Consistent 8’s are a very respectable score and I want to thank reviewers for taking the time to get to know the game a bit rather than rushing out a review.
I’m currently trying to figure out a few things with back end stuff on Dead Exit before I can do a proper Xbox update. Already put a PC one out there but that can thankfully happen much faster than xbox due to admin and complexity of creation.
I am guilty of perhaps not spending as much time on that as I should though as I wanted to chill a little bit after getting the game out and that is now manifesting as me working slightly shorter hours than I should while spending more time with my family, and finally getting round to playing a couple of large games that I’d been putting off getting into before release.
The first of these is Dishonored 2 which was fun, and very nicely put together. It is by all accounts a good game, but in my opinion it falls short of great simply because it lacks the confidence to be what it wants to be.
I played stealthily but the stealth is not great and I would controversially argue it falls short of even the old thief games. Line of sight is touch and go, while darkness appears to have no bearing on stealth at all. Furthermore, the audio stings can distract badly and sound similar to the alert nose, and worst than that the player foot noises sound incongruent to the character motion and are incredibly loud compared to other sounds in the game.
On the other hand choosing a combat route while using your powers quickly becomes ridiculously easy, even on the hard difficulties due to the generous mana potions, ability to get mana back, and the large quantity of ammunition and tools scattered around.
Additionally, despite the plot there is a strange emphasis on stealing stuff and gaining lots of money. This somewhat flies in the face of plot, the character portrayals, and even the societal structures of universe. Then there are other little things such as needing to locate something, but still having a magic doohickey on your already filled in map that tells you exactly where to go to find that thing.
To sum it up, the Dishonored series has committed to trying to please everyone, touting it’s love for the old thief games, but spreading gameplay thin enough to appease gamers who want to play it as an action adventure. Never really managing to find true form in either style.
That isn’t a rant. It is a very good game. I just felt I needed to justify my minor complaints about the game by giving anyone who disagrees an actual argument to think over.
After completing that I finally got round to starting Breath of the Wild. I’m really enjoying it, but I’m only 40 or so hours in and won’t want to give my detailed thoughts until after completing and stepping away from it for a while to get perspective.
You might be wondering “Why on earth is he even mentioning any of this in the dev blog. Seems like a long winded excuse for not working as hard as he could be?”
The real reason is of course to justify the fact that I haven’t done any kind of post mortem on Dead Exit yet. It was just over a year of development so it’ll take a bit longer to be able to gain proper clarity on the immeasurable number of things that were done poorly, but it’ll come in time.
The other thing I’ve been doing while slacking is of course improving on the little space ship arena game I made.A lot of back end stuff such as a ship state manager, but the thing you’ll notice if you play it, is a total change to the controls to modernise them. For those of you familiar with the old controls this is going to be jarring, but I promise it is objectively better in the long run. Also, the whole thing looks a little nicer again.
There may be more, smaller updates during the week, so look for us on social media, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube . Bye for now.