Stealth Mechanics

[Abomination]

I dislike most stealth sections since they do not seem to be a test of skill, but of patience.

Some of the better ones involve needing to backtrack through an area in a hurry while stealthed, remembering the path you took and where any nooks or crannies were in order to avoid being spotted by a patrol. But if you spend most of your time just waiting for stuff to happen or patrols to pass by then it's not engaging.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

There are quite a bit of AI options that you can change up in Dishonored like how easy you can be seen when leaning around corners IIRC. I wouldn't consider the Dishonoreds straight-up stealth games because a little thought about how to utilize your abilities and the games become hilariously easy if your goal is just to complete the levels. I view the Dishonoreds as basically true sandbox games because you are really given so much power and so many ways to utilize that power, that's it sorta up to you to be creative and make your own fun. You can really just teleport above every enemy and drop assassinate them but that, of course, gets both boring and repetitive fast.

If there are such options, I can't find them. (Maybe buried somewhere under "new game" when you choose the difficulty level?)

I agree that the game could be much easier if one didn't care about being spotted or killing people, but the game seems to express such disappointment in you when you do that, for all its open-ness, I still feel as a player that I'm playing it the "wrong" way. "Oh, you got spotted seven times, and killed twelve people? Oh, no, no, that's okay. Play the way you want to play it, I'm not judging you (continues compiling stats for next level)..." Making the choice whether or not to play through the game without powers an in-game decision felt like an extra kick, too. ("Oh, you're making a deal with the devil again...? No, no, I'm sure you have your reasons...")

As I said, I'm coming off of Mafia III; I'm slowly adjusting. I don't doubt I'll get through it, with perseverance and a bit of re-familiarization with quick save/quick load functions. For a game about choice, though, it sure is happy to rub the player's face in all the opportunities missed.

One person's "replay value" is another's "shameless guilt-tripping", I guess.

They might only be there when you start a new game, there's even a custom difficulty option. You can change quite a lot of the AI behavior from how much they look up to how fast they stop searching. I recall changing the lean behavior like right away because I remember you could lean in the 1st Dishonored and never be seen and in the 2nd one, they see you pretty fast when you learn around a corner. I feel like if I execute what I wanted to execute, I'm playing the "right" way. Like if I have some cool plan to take out a room of guards and one sees me because say I placed a springrazor near a couple guards so I grab one and throw him into his buddy (who sees me) to knock them into the springrazor, then that fits an assassin to me. I just don't run around killing guards just to do it but try to come up with interesting ways to utilize the levels and abilities.