How you'd rewrite Dishonored death of the outsider if it was fully fledged game with 10 missions? (like Dishonored or Dishonored 2)
Oooh!! Enrichment in my enclosure - thank you for asking! Thinking about a total rewrite was a great exercise. Fair disclaimer: I haven’t read the books & their canon-status can’t hurt me. To me, the Dishonored games stand out due to their immsim design philosophy, and thinking about some of the industry reasons for DotO’s departure from that, if I could make a standalone game with ~ten levels I would, but with the same budget I’d also happily make two DLCs made slowly over a longer timeframe with greater attention to detail.
Game structure
Finding Daud // Billie’s past
The fate of the Outsider // Billie’s future
Game story
Setting & Characters
Billie: What has Billie been doing since she’s returned to Serkonos? Knowing the Dreadful Wale will sink, she’s sold it for scrap & has set up an agency in Lower Aventa. She’s something of a detective/odd-jobs man (& assassin when it suits her). Business is booming, life is good. I think a long-running implication that she's becoming Daud in some ways would make for an interesting subplot.
Karnaca: a city that unfolds. In the first levels, Billie feels like a forgotten woman, a ghost slipped through the cracks, but as levels progress there are hints & references to how her past actions have affected others & shaped the city
Alignments: Witches, gangs, religion, industry; missions for clients who can’t necessarily pay their way. Missions that allow the player to explore/understand Karnaca in a deeper way.
Daud: Billie is unsure if Daud again will bring her any closure. She’s been thinking of him since her time with Emily, and his name keeps popping up.
Deirdre: the charm is a more functional heart, similar to Jessamine, as well as her own character design. Perhaps she doesn’t see Deirdre until she chooses the powers, or until she’s in the void (see next point)
First arc: Finding Daud // Billie’s past
Powers: the Outsider offers Billie powers even though her life is finally, actually good, so she’s pissed off. A choice - she can take them, or play no powers mode.
Breanna Ashworth is this arc’s villain - she wants Delilah back, and knows that Daud has banished her before, wants to know how he did it. Grief & desperation has changed her, and she no longer has her high society veneer. The remnants of the Karnaca coven, now powerless, have stolen from the Overseers to arm themselves to the teeth, and to neutralise Daud’s powers, in addition to black bonecharms.
Billie’s in a race against time against Breanna to find Daud, but by the last level it becomes clear that Breanna *has* found Daud, and has been torturing him for information about the void. Her dynamic with Billie is complicated by their past.
I think betrayal would be an interesting theme, so maybe one of the levels gives you the option to ally yourself with Breanna under false pretences.
Second arc: choosing the fate of the Outsider // Billie’s future
Delilah is the core villain, but she’s obsessed with killing the Outsider so she can take his place, having been violently ripped from her perfect world in her own painting by Breanna (who meant well), & knowing the Empire doesn’t hold her interest... but a perfectly mouldable void & infinite power does take her fancy.
As remorseful Daud is obsessing about preventing Delilah from taking power, Billie’s doing some detective work and learns more about the Outsider (he’s not showing up and monologuing - she’s finding this out herself. A level idea could be a raid on a ‘haunted’ houses where the void is thin)
Delilah succeeds in taking the Outsider's place, leaving the Outsider dead or mortal depending on if you are able to save him. Delilah has split her soul from herself before and she’s very much clever enough to learn the Outsider’s name to render him mortal.
Daud knows he’s dying, though, and it might be an ultimate sacrifice to save both Billie’s life, and the Outsider’s.
So during the final battle, there’s an option to make Daud the Outsider, because Daud wants Billie and the Outsider to have a shot at a normal life, and his life was forfeit in his own mind…
… or, reluctantly accepting the Outsider’s help, Billie finds a way to cut the void’s access to the world, rendering Delilah an all powerful god over a dead & silent world.
Because of the past/present focus of this you could even have levels set in the past - missions with Billie & Daud. Perhaps Billie as POV character, and Daud dropping by the way that Billie did in Knife of Dunwall. That’d be neat.
A heap of ideas here, hope there was something you liked :)
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Wait. WAit. You are telling me sid is The. Only. Guy. In. The. League. Who still uses non replaceable skate blades and this is the reason why sometimes skate issues bench him for longer than normal??????
Ok. Ok sid. I get it. You have been catered to your entire life. You are the Special One. Nobody has ever told you that you are wrong. This is all valid. But this one issue is truly ridiculous. Wasnt that the reason he wasn't on the ice during overtime in that crucial loss two games ago? Because of a skate issue?
.sid. with all due respect sometimes change can be good, sid.
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Honestly, every single time the whole 'poppy playtime is a bendy rip-off' stuff ever shows up I find it all extremely unconvincing and silly.
For one thing, rip-off usually is meant to imply that it's a cheap lazy copy of a better more polished thing, and uh. Sorry but even from chapter 1? Poppy Playtime is a better game than Bendy, it has a simple but understandable story, the game manages to be thrilling, creepy, and very intense at times... I mean that Huggy chase in the vents ALONE puts it way above Batim for me.
I mean BATDR had the most slow stupid chase I've ever seen [and every other encounter with the ink demon is text telling u he's there and then a timer goes down and u get jumpscared] and batim's chases were either silly or just not nearly as theatric or terrifying as that.
When making the vent sequence I mean not only is it absolutely horrifying to realize how fast Huggy is in there but also it's so theatric and cool? The fact that you round a corner after thinking you escaped only to see a terrifying animation of that thing crawling toward you is awesome! I wish Bendy had stuff like that!
And all the stuff it shares with Bendy are generic things Bendy ripped from other horror games/media anyways. I'm not saying Poppy Playtime isn't inspired by Bendy I for sure think it is but Bendy is such a generic story that somehow fails to do tropes 100 other horror games have done any comparison only makes Poppy Playtime look better.
"It has employees being sacrificed for their company" That is not a concept Bendy invented, literally look at any of the sci-fi horror series Bendy is very inspired by. This is literally a twist in the original Alien.
"It has a scary woman forcing you to do tasks for her" Once again, not a concept Bendy invented, a scary mysterious person forcing you to do fetch-quests is a concept found in tons of horror media. And at least Poppy Playtime gave you a chase with her and let you defeat her, look at poor malice. She's barely on screen for more than 10 minutes before she gets stabbed.
"It has a cult worshipping the monster" This is something tons of horror games and media have done too. I mean In The Tall Grass has a guy who worships a giant magical rock in the middle of a grass maze, Bioshock [which Bendy has only been taking more and more direct inspiration from while failing to grab any of the compelling parts] also had a lot of themes of religion and cult-ish behavior, almost every horror media franchise has at one point done a cult thing.
Bendy couldn't even come up with a reason Sammy worships the ink demon, the best motivation we've ever gotten is just that 'he's crazzyyyy the ink made him insaneeee'. Who is the cheap rip-off here?
At least Poppy Playtime gave their cultist a motive for worshipping the monster + a proper boss fight that feels intense and looks awesome! Bendy didn't even let you kill Malice [she got stabbed in front of you and then just collapsed on the floor how thrilling] meanwhile you get to kill three of the villains in Poppy Playtime and the gameplay and action in those scenes have only gotten better as the game went on.
I mean Sammy walks into a room and goes "AAA SCARY I'M BEING MURDERED" then later shows up and for NO REASON sees a normal human man and assumes it's the ink demon before once again someone else kills him for you. In Poppy Playtime you defeat Catnap as he floods the world with this horrible nightmare-inducing gas that intensifies the color palette and his design. Fight off versions of him that are illusions that you need your flare gun for, then watch in a wonderful animation as he mistakes the monster for his savior before getting killed by it, in a brutal way I might add, which game are we accusing of being cheap, lazy garbage again?
I just find this argument to be people who Really Really need to find a reason to hate Poppy Playtime which I think is silly. The devs being weird, shady people is already enough reason to dislike the game, you don't need to invent reasons why secretly every part of the game is malicious or bad. But esp when I see Bendy fans saying they don't support Poppy Playtime or dislike it bc of its devs or even saying its cringe ummmm.
I have bad news about the fact Bendy's devs are worse and it took not one, but TWO over an hour long videos to cover it all. Plus the Bendy games are just the worse games in every aspect, if I could sell my batim copy for a copy of Poppy Playtime I wouldn't hesitate at all.
Saying this as a bendy fan, we have no right to be super judgy towards Poppy Playtime. If Poppy Playtime is embarrassing cringe, Bendy is too and is way more embarrassing of an interest. We shouldn't spread misinformation just because we all want to hate Poppy Playtime, you can dislike Poppy Playtime without making up a bunch of nonsense to justify it.
Honestly seeing people just blatantly be unfairly mean to Poppy Playtime only makes its critics look worse and makes it hard to take any backlash to the games seriously. Because surprise surprise if you spread misinformation to make a point people will quickly stop listening to Anything you have to say bc they won't trust you're telling the truth anymore.
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Since Danny opened up his trauma to Jason, did he ever comfort Danny whenever he had nightmare of his parents doing things on him?
Jason has comforted Danny after and during nightmares. Not all of them, he doesn't catch them all.
Sometimes Danny's nightmares are loud. Sometimes they're ice crackling out from him in waves, covering his room and the hallway and Jason just knows. He busts through the ice and the doors between him and his hurting king, melting the ice with his flames until he can finally get to Danny and wake his frozen body and remind him he's safe, he's whole, he's alive. Sometimes his nightmares are deafening, they're a Wail shattering walls and ceilings and everything around him. Sometimes Jason has to push his body one slow step at a time into the middle of a hurricane, bleeding and hurt but not half as hurt as his screaming friend.
But sometimes Danny's nightmares are silent. They're quiet because screaming didn't help. Screaming made it worse. Noise brought their attention back to him. Pleas and cries and screams made them angry, angry he was using their son's voice, their son's body. So sometimes Danny is quiet, locked in a silent prison of his own mind and the only way Jason can tell is if Danny didn't pull his aura entirely back into his body and he's able to feel the pain.
Danny has gotten better about locking his aura down as his mind slowly realizes he doesn't need to anymore, that he doesn't need to be in survival mode and he can make the subconcious decision to ask for help because he knows it'll come.
But sometimes the fear is stronger. And on those nights, Danny is alone.
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