Despite all the new and very good games that have come out lately, I’ve spent most of the last month playing through MachineGames’ Wolfenstein releases from 2014 and 2017. I started playing the first one, Wolfenstein: The New Order, for much the same reason I played through all those Call of Duty games recently. As […]
In that vein, if anyone likes well written, story driven, stealth / action / immersive sim games, the Dishonored series & Prey (same devs, different universe) are incredibly worth going back for.
Made by former Bioshock / System shock developers, and they’re just some of my all time favourite games, and I only played them because of all the time I suddenly had with the COVID lockdown, but they hold up incredibly well. Dishonored 1 (2012) honestly feels and looks better than Dishonored 2 (2016) because of the Xbox’s auto HDR and auto FPS boost, but both are super fun and gorgeous games.
I wouldn’t say the writing for dishonored is terribly strong. The first game has a pretty bog standard plot, and the set up for the second was quite contrived. The gameplay and world are their strengths.
I would generally agree with you about the main macro plot beats in Dishonored 1 and leading into 2, but I would still argue that the writing is quite good overall.
In Dishonoured 1, you still have Daud’s storyline which I found a bit more interesting on a macro level (both in the main game and both expansions), but then I would also argue that the Dishonored series has great micro writing which is a large part of the world building and the fun of exploration.
They both know how to write good little interesting world building hooks and stories, and how to pace them out and not overload you with junk documents and writing.
The Outer Wilds, Bioshock, Subnautica, Remedy Games (Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control, etc.), Obsidian (New Vegas, Outer Worlds, Grounded, etc.), are all masters of rewarding you with more story and world building.
Conversely studios like Bethesda (Starfield, Skyrim, etc.), and Ubisoft (all their RPGs), are pretty bad about trying to make the world seem realistic at the expense of having a ton of just hastily written uninteresting documents around that bore you as much reading real world documents at random would.
And while I would put games like Cyperbunk and the Witcher and even Deathloop, somewhere in-between, I would put all the Dishonoreds and Prey right up there at the top with the best.
I agree that Bethesda’s RPG writing is amateur at best, and I can’t dispute that there can be some good points in Dishonored. But at least for me, a mark of bad writing is that I find myself unable to care about the outcome for any of the characters in a story, and in Dishonored, I personally didn’t care much about any of the character’s struggles or personalities, as they were all pretty one-note. I can’t recall a single character’s name from Dishonored except for Corvo, since I found it novel to hear Stephen Russell as a main character again (big Thief fan, which incidentally I would point to as a game with excellent writing).
There was one instance in the main base/hub of dishonored 1, where there’s a short excerpt of a story about a whaler in a book, I think in the room where Emily was supposed to chill out in. I thought the writing of that little short story was so compelling, I sat back in my chair after I finished it and thought “Why isn’t this game about that?”, because I felt it highlighted how boilerplate the actual game’s story was in comparison. So in that way you’re right, the micro-writing, the world building, the atmosphere, is all top notch. I just wish the characters and plot were able to match it, as then it would be a masterpiece.
I should mention that I’m pretty difficult to impress with writing in video games, as I don’t think most of them can compare to the quality of writing available in books except for a handful of examples such as Thief, Gemini Rue, Mafia, and the original Deus Ex.