Dishonored DLC – Brigmore Witches EP1: Day at the Office

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 15, 2017

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 17 comments


Link (YouTube)

The Omar! I couldn’t remember the name of the blue-suit guys from Invisible War during the show, but that’s only because their name was dumb. It’s the Omar.

I’ve apparently forgotten 99% of my Dishonored playthrough (and watching the subsequent Spoiler Warning one) but I guess I remember the prison level really well.

I hadn’t noticed the similarities, but Chris is right: The world of Dishonored maps really well to Thief in a lot of ways. Daud’s assassins are a secretive group of stealthy manipulators like the Keepers. The Overseers seem to be majoring in fanatical religious authoritarian governance and minoring in steamworks technology, just like Thief’s Hammerites. Delilah has kind of this Pagan thing going on with her nature magic. Our lead character skulks around in the shadows knocking guys out. (Or shanking them, if he’s rubbish.)

Then again, this might be a byproduct of the setting. Once you create a world that’s just entering the industrial revolution, it’s pretty hard to NOT depict a tug of war between technology and nature, religion and freedom, rich and poor. These were all hallmarks of the Victorian Era and were a natural part of a society going through rapid change due to technology. A quasi-Victorian setting without pervasive class warfare might feel kind of toothless and inauthentic.

Sure, you CAN make up a world where this isn’t the case. But you’d need to spend a little more time and exposition on worldbuilding. If you’re just using the setting for aesthetic reasons, then there’s no reason mess with expectations. Throw in a few hints of religious fanatics, poverty, and civil unrest, and the user can extrapolate the rest of the world from the standard set of tropes.

 


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17 thoughts on “Dishonored DLC – Brigmore Witches EP1: Day at the Office

  1. baseless_research says:

    … and there was a mission in Dark Project where you infiltrate the Hammerites disguised as a novice, you need to cross a small bridge before entering the temple. Lastly, listen to the ambient sound effect at 16m 57 seconds and compare it to this thief dark project sound effect (the last one was also in base dishonored but it’s still neat). This level a very obvious homage/nod to Thief.

  2. Daemian Lucifer says:

    The influences on this game from thief are numerous,thats true.But the parallels are mostly weak.Except for delilah,she does seem like a deliberate homage to viktoria.

    1. baseless_research says:

      yeah, I’m not seeing the Hammerite/Overseers connection other than the rather archetypical “religious order w stick up ass, into smiting sinners” (and they’re not very religous either, were there any altars or unique iconography in the Overeer mission?). They don’t appear to be into steampunk as that honor is reserved to Sokolov, Piero and (in the sequel) Jindosh. Lastly – a major part of the Hammerite character was in the peculiarity of their speech – there is nothing in the way Overseers speak that sets them apart from the generic city guard or streetwise thug.

      Wanna gather for whiskey and cigars tonight?

      1. silver Harloe says:

        The Hammerites strongly revered a simple life of simple labors (mostly smithing). It was the Mechanist sect of them that was all steampunky.

  3. Infinitron says:

    Is there really any doubt about this? The developers of Dishonored spoke openly about their influence from Thief.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRPv7EZV5Ew

  4. Benjamin Hilton says:

    I thought this was a great way to reuse a level. The parts that are the same you get to walk through and really examine (as opposed to sneaking) and then stuff is added on. This was probably one of the least lazy ways to reuse a level I’ve seen in a game.

  5. Benjamin Hilton says:

    Me: “I wonder why Josh’s credits moniker says ‘No Witnesses!'”
    *credits footage of Josh shooting guards with explosive bolts*
    Me: “That’l do it.”

    1. Christopher says:

      There is something to be said for the Guts kind of assassination where there are no witnesses because everyone is dead, but it’s probably best in a universe where there are no kids around.

    2. Tizzy says:

      I had a similar reaction looking at the credit: “Weird, ‘No witnesses’ doesn’t go so well with the low chaos that Josh has been working so hard to maintain so far!… …Oh!… “

  6. Lachlan the Mad says:

    Random, unrelated-to-Dishonored complaint:

    I don’t have a Twitter account because I don’t see the need for one, but I do read the Twitter sidebar on this page, and sometimes click across to Shamus’s Twitter page to get context on what he’s talking about. But now it seems that I can’t access the “Tweets & Replies” section of the page (i.e. the part that’s actually useful) without having a Twitter account. Is this a Twitter-wide change to try and harangue me into actually joining the rest of the world there?

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I can see it.Though it does not load older tweets like it did before.But this one page alone was enough for me to see that the collectors edition of andromeda comes without the game,and that just put a smile on my face.

  7. Warclam says:

    I really like how Chris gives us a little taste of Doylist (game doesn’t give a crap about your choice, gas masked guys are cheap to model) vs. Watsonian (guy made up a story about Daud’s rescue of Billie, gas masks are for protection against the plague) analysis right around the 9 minute mark.

  8. SpammyV says:

    The bit in Daud’s base and the prison had a few really interesting books on other locations in the Dishonored world that I enjoyed reading. I haven’t played Dishonored 2 yet, but I’ll say that in Dishonored 1 I was really fuzzy about the world. Dunwall is the capital of the empire, okay. There’s this terrible place called Pandyssia, okay. There are apparently other cities, okay. But… differences in culture? Climate? What are the other places controlled by Dunwall that make this an empire? So, finding out any details about the rest of the world was very welcome.

    I liked this level, especially walking in as an Overseer. It’s not super open but it still does that Dishonored thing I like of giving you a lot of fun vertical level design and paths to take. And it also felt fun to have Daud revisiting a Corvo level. Also, the game takes note and mentions it in the end-of-mission screen if you never break your Overseer disguise, which I liked, and Josh probably isn’t going to do.

  9. Jabrwock says:

    Once again I’ve succumbed to the intrigue and bought a game on Steam just so I could play along. :P

    I’ve been doing a low chaos but high confusion run. Knocking everyone out, Batman style one by one. If the group won’t break up, I try to lure one with bottle chucking. So buddy walks off to investigate, finds his partner knocked out, as he’s asking what happened, *poof* in behind and knock him out too. Then pile them both in a container, no matter how far I have to lug the bodies. Preferably with a bottle or two of whiskey.

    The entire city watch is going to wake up in the morning with one hell of a collective headache wondering WTF they did the previous night.

    1. Baron Tanks says:

      Go forth my son, you are doing the Lord’s work.

  10. silver Harloe says:

    It almost feels like they had started writing DH2 before or during the writing the of the DLC for 1. Like it would be super easy to tie them together this well if that were the case. I imagine the majority of the time is in level design, not story design (but I could be way off)

  11. Isaac says:

    “Daud's assassins are a secretive group of stealthy manipulators like the Keepers.”

    nah. the keepers were explicitly about not physically interfering with the City’s politics and only observing & recording it’s goings on. not at all like a group of for-hire assassins.

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