T w e n t y S i d e d

This season reminds me of Alan Wake. It’s a game that does a lot of things right, to the point where I feel guilty for not loving it. I do wonder if it sold well enough to warrant a sequel.

The odd thing about making a sequel is that they named this game after the events of the story. Your character is dishonored. So if they made a sequel, would they have you become dishonored AGAIN? Or would the game take on a new protagonist who is dishonored. By naming the franchise this way, they’ve sort of boxed themselves in to making games about people who lose their honor and must struggle to reclaim it. It’s like calling Max Payne “Guy Who Has His Family Murdered”. Great. Now do we kill them AGAIN in the sequel?

Worse, Corvo’s dishonoring is basically the least interesting or memorable aspect of this game. Looking back, we remember the setting, the plague, the corruption, the Victorian style, and the whale oil. It would be like if they named Half-Life 2 “Dystopian Train Station”.

And of course, I strongly suspect that they would make the typical bone-headed mistake of keeping the same stupid protagonist for subsequent titles. He’s completely devoid of character, so it’s not like we get the enjoyment of seeing the return of someone interesting. But they would feel obligated to shoehorn in a bunch of exposition to explain what happened in the first game. And this would leave us with a bad case of “John MccLane syndrome”, where multiple unrelated adventures all happen to the same guy, thus transforming what was originally supposed to be a quasi-relatable character into some sort of fate-driven superhuman. Of course, you could use the Outsider to justify this, but the Outsider is such a slice of stale dry toast that I can’t bear the thought of seeing him again.

My suggestion: Same world. New city. New protagonist. Keep the Outsider, but have him appear in a completely different form, with a different personality, and a different voice. (The Outsider appears in different forms to different people.) Wipe the slate clean. If needed, we could revisit Dunwall and (say) meet adult Queen Emily, but otherwise we can just make a clean break. Keep what works, throw out what doesn’t, and don’t let yourself get mired in an ever-growing sea of lore and backstory that will repel newcomers without bringing value to returning fans.

Videogame have steadfastly refused to do this, alas. But hey, at least we’ll get to keep that awesome iconic brown-haired white dude that makes the game so distinct.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I said in this episode that I played through the game 1.5 times. Now that I’m thinking back, I actually played through the first few missions, started over and played all the way through, and then played through again to the halfway point. The point being, I played through this section of the game three times and never noticed the Pendleton brothers moving around.

So between the four of us we played through this section no less than seven times, and we never had an instance where one of the brothers wasn’t in the steam room. According to the wiki:

Morgan Pendleton will always be in either the Smoking Room or the Steam Room. Custis Pendleton will always be in either the Gold Room or the Ivory Room.

It sounds like there’s a 1:2 chance of Morgan being in the steam room. So the odds of me playing the mission three times and always having him there are 1:8. The odds of it happening to all of us is 1:128. Of course, maybe Morgan did appear in the smoking room on some of our play-throughs and we just forgot. This is the downside of our format: It’s sometimes months between playing the game and discussing it.

I am now going to make a prediction: I predict that the comments are going to become hopelessly sidetracked in probability theory. Either because someone misunderstands it or because I flubbed it above. (Shamus! You said “chance” when you should have used the word “odds”, which is distinct from “probability” and now we have to haggle over whether the position of Custis needs to be counted in our chart of possible outcomes!)

Mark my words. This always happens. But that’s okay. Probability conversations often get lost in the weeds, but they’re usually smart and interesting and polite. Unlike some topics I won’t mention.

My favorite part was when Josh decided to double back over the entire level to get one lousy bone charm, then we steered him wrong by sending him back to the Golden Cat, then he died in a pointless fight with a bunch of respawned guards. Good times.

Most importantly: The Golden Cat is an amazing piece of environment design. Varied, lush, colorful interior, richly detailed and having multiple routes through. I’d love to know what photographs or buildings they used for inspiration.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.