At a time where video game productions are getting more outrageously expansive every year, Dishonored 1 and even the more recent Deathloop (2021, also Arkane) remind us that games are meant to be FUN.
I recently played through deathloop for the second time and am now approaching the end of dishonored 1 for the third time, and at every step I've been thinking, it's just a fun game. It doesn't try to punch above its weight and do stuff it can't manage, it's just a solid gameplay experience that doesn't hate the player, which is a rarity these days.
When talking about fun in video games, I am always reminded of David Sirlin's philosophy to approaching Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Yes, that's what the game was called lol. Instead of trying to put on a grandiose show or wowing audiences with graphics, he focused on making solid gameplay, and he did this through balance. His idea was that if the game was balanced, people would ultimately find their fun (considering it's a 2-player versus game). He made the controls easier so that skill came not from knowing the weird and hard combos like quarter-circles, but from the strategic gameplay, i.e. Yomi. Good players were still good, but newer players reached the intermediate level much faster. Ultimately, this is good for everyone: less frustration to new players, and more opponents to experienced players.
My fellow co-admin was asking about Death Stranding a few days ago which got me to boot the game up again and, let's be honest, it's a movie that pretends to be a game. You may disagree and that's fine haha. Kojima doesn't hide his affection for cinema, but playing DS just got me asking... why not make a movie at that point? The gameplay of DS is often reduced to being a 'walking sim' but I didn't find it boring like the name walking sim implies. Rather, I felt like the gameplay was only a glorified countdown until I could unlock the next cutscene. And sorry but that's just not what I'm looking for in a game, nor what I think games ought to be, because they don't have to compete with movies!
In Dishonored, the story is only a pretext for more gameplay (it's basically the count of monte cristo with extra steps), the characters are one-dimensional and it's not a super long game. Because of that, themes don't have time to develop and the story has no real climactic or impactful moments.
BUT... it works. It's fun, it's a solid experience, and it's one of the few games that can catch my attention for hours at a time.
Its level system, which was getting outdated by 2013 standards already, basically drops you into a self-contained sandbox with an objective: kill your target. How you get to your target and how you take them out is up to you. A nonlethal option is always possible, if you find it. And that's all you get. Once you're in a level, it's basically you and the objective. There's no new cutscenes or exposition or people endlessly yapping in your ear about how to complete your objective. The game leaves you to it and doesn't try to shoehorn you into doing one thing or another.
There's some collectible stuff but nowhere near the level of what you see in modern games, e.g. having to dismount from your horse every 15 meters so you can pick up a brightly glowing plant that you'll use to make some potion in a menu. I think one thing that makes the levels work is that you also can't go in a straight line; they are crafted to make every method to your objective viable. In contrast, in open world games you usually end up walking in a straight line to the next objective marker because you just want to get to the game. Nobody takes the train just for the sake of taking the train: you travel to go place. In Dishonored, the level is the objective so it doesn't feel like you're traveling so much as you're completing an objective.
In other words, it doesn't sidetrack you with bullshit every 10 seconds trying to get you to do something different. I think this is something games are sorely missing nowadays; in an industry that has so much competition, a lot of the overall effort is put into the graphics and into retaining the player's attention. This is a mistake, as Dishonored shows the player will invest their attention in a game naturally; it doesn't need to keep yelling "hey! hey! do this! do that! go get this! upgrade that!" all the time.
The pacing is sometimes very fast, but it's fine because the game keeps moving forward to the next set piece. It's level after level and you keep asking for more.
There's more I could say but this is getting long lol. In closing I would like to say please make games that are fun, not tedious. The purpose of a game - video or not - is to be fun, and fun comes from different places. A story can be told through a variety of mediums, but only a game is interactive.
