Angelo, you're speaking my language. I haven't played Thief but I always wanted to. This could end up being a dark horse for game of the year consideration.
The DNA of Dishonored
Five games/series that reflect the heritage and influences of Dishonored
Let’s dispense with the obvious: both games star assassins, both games favor a stealthy, tactical approach while allowing for brute force, and both games contain some particularly nasty kills. All of this is enough to point to Assassin’s Creed as having common ground with Dishonored, but there’s one thing both games have in common that is somewhat unique to these two games: Assassin’s Creed’s notoriety system and Dishonored’s Chaos system.
In Assassin’s creed 2, Actions taken by the protagonist Ezio have a direct impact on his notoriety. As you can imagine, for someone whose profession requires anonymity and stealth, being notorious is not ideal. Generally speaking, notoriety is increased in the Assassin’s Creed universe by being socially disruptive. Things like attacking civilians, harassing guards, or being caught in the act of committing a crime will cause an increase in notoriety, causing guards to attack Ezio on site and rendering his talent for social camouflage utterly useless.
Likewise, Dishonored has repercussions for being socially disruptive, but the impact is far more than just an increase in enemy manpower and guard hostility. In Dishonored, yes you’ll see an increase in the amount of patrols for doing things like taking out targets in the open and killing indiscriminately, but you’ll also see changes to the environment itself. NPC dialogue and temperament will change, the presence and amount of rats in the city will increase or decrease, and the ending of the game will differ based on how chaotically the character behaves. This system is slower and more deliberate than the one in Assassin’s creed. The number crunching takes place behind the scenes, and the player can only judge their chaos level by the look and feel of the city over the long haul. By contrast, Assassin’s Creed places an indicator on the player’s HUD, and the system is more fluid, allowing for changes in notoriety to occur rather quickly.
Finally, both games also allow the player to recover their status, or stabilize the environment. In Assassin’s Creed, discreetly pulling down wanted posters, or bribing town heralds are ways to reduce character infamy. The development team on Dishonored has been quiet on the specifics or their counterbalances, but they have stated that there will be side quests in the game that can be completed to restore some order to a chaotic environment.
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