I’ve played the game around seven years ago for the first time on my laptop and enjoyed my time a lot. Back when I got my first PS4 around a year later (2017ish), I got the game on there too but ended up not playing the game at all because I couldn’t get used to the controller gameplay.
A couple of days ago, I started the game up again for lack of other games to play right now and have, as many probably, started a low-chaos ghost run. For the uninitiated, “ghost” means that you go through the entire game without being detected once. To achieve this, you’re either cracked at the game and know what you’re doing, or you resort to save scumming, which I also did.
However, I seem to have fucked up in the last mission (saving Emily, getting rid of the two Pendleton twins) and have been detected somewhere without noticing it and loading a previous save. When I ended the mission and was shown the statistics, I contemplated starting the mission over because I didn’t ghost through to mission but opted not to.
While I do feel kinda bummed about “messing up” the achievement, I feel like this’ll prove to be beneficial for my overall experience with the game since I won’t have to keep reloading the same passages for 15 times just to get some arbitrary achievement that doesn’t even bear any meaning.
I’ll still go for a low-chaos run (not killing anyone), but I won’t be bothered to keep reloading saves now: If I’m detected, I run away and hide and take the game on naturally.
How have your experiences with the game been? Which playstyle do you prefer? What games did you ruin for yourself in hindsight because of save scumming?
I used to get myself into traps like that a lot, “I need to get that impossible achievement”, “I need to play only at the highest difficulty”, “I need to get 200% completion”.
At the end of the day video games are just toys, play them as you like and if you’re not enjoying it just do something else instead. After I realized that games are fun again.
This ghost achievement in particular is a very hard challenge run, the kind of thing you go for after you finished the game and want more with an extra twist, trying to force it on your first time playing is guaranteed to be frustrating
I really appreciate how FromSoft does achievements–theirs are the only games I ever really go for the 100%, since that usually entails simply playing and mastering all the content that they have prepared. Achievements like “beat the whole game under x arbitrary condition” or “get this super specific scenario to happen” just aren’t that interesting to me, but “beat every boss, collect every important item, visit every area” I find very satisfying.
Actually, these “collect x item” or “x amount of y item” do kinda piss me off in FromSoft games. I went for a platinum for both Sekiro and Bloodborne and in Sekiro’s case, you had to grind out XP to get all the skill upgrades I think. It took me like 2h of just pure grinding some path when Ashina castle was burning even though I was on NG+2 or something. It was awesome to experience all of the content as in beating all the major bosses, seeing all the endings and stuff but that achievement pissed me off a little.
In Bloodborne, most of the achievements were fine iirc. Getting all of the runes (?) and weapons was a little annoying though since some of these were a little harder to get and require my reading their wiki entries.
I definitely had a spreadsheet for when I 100%'d ds1
I feel you. I do get a “sense of pride and accomplishment™” when I go for certain achievements, maybe even platinums, but there are usually some stretches of gameplay that aren’t too much fun. I imagine I’d have finished a lot more games I played if it weren’t for achievements.
I hear that. This isn’t really my first run, but it might as well be since it was so long ago that I played the game. Maybe I’ll try Ghost after I’m done with this one. Ghost + high chaos sounds fun.
I usually just play the game without worrying much about achievements
Yeah. Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing video games for 30+ years now, but I’m always kind of vexed by the people who seem to have a compulsive need to get every achievement in every game they play. I just don’t get it. I don’t even look at achievements until Steam tells me I got one, and I want to see what it was.
I feel the same way, but part of that might be because back when we started gaming (that’s 35+ years ago for me), “achievements” meant finishing a game or getting a high score. Sure there were sometimes games with multiple endings or extra secrets to discover, but there was no laundry list of accomplishments for any game like there are now with achievements.
To me, trying to get achievements feels like homework, and my brothers and sisters, I played video games to avoid homework not do more of it!
BUT, as I’ve grown older I’ve realized that the human experience means that there is no lack of preferences out there that will be foreign to my own. People should just play how they want so they’re having fun. I don’t have to understand why getting 100% of the available achievements is fun to some, just that it is. I won’t be doing it, but the option being there doesn’t take away from anything for me. I don’t feel anxious about ignoring them.
When I’m long dead, my kid probably won’t browse my steam/playstation profile and marvel at my numerous achievements. “Wow, dad is really good at this Hitler Waifu game. So many achievement. I’m proud of him” said no kid ever.
IDK, my kids actually like looking through my achievements. I try to tell them they’re not important, but they’re fascinated somehow.
But once they get older, they’ll really understand that it doesn’t matter.
I’ve ruined games for myself by starting over repeatedly to get some achievement I don’t even enjoy trying to get, not having fun, and never finishing the game. (I do the same thing with higher difficulties.)
I wish there was an option to just disable all achievements in games - it would help me enjoy games a lot more. You’re probably thinking “If he doesn’t like achievements, why doesn’t he just ignore them?” but I can’t.
The worst is actually a sandbox game I play that tracks achievements per-save. (It’ll tell you that you failed the achievement in that save even if you already got it in a different one.) There’s an achievement that requires doing something boring for several hours as soon as you start the game, or otherwise you can’t get it on that save. So of course I feel compelled to do that boring thing every single time I want to start a new save.
I ignore them completely, have never once targeted one, and disable them from popping up where I can.
I still hate them existing. Knowing they’re there annoys me.
I completely understand where you come from. Sometimes I just can’t ignore options because they are there.
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I savescummed nethack as a kid, telling myself I was learning how to play. Then one day I decided to play on an online server where that wasn’t a possibility. There is nothing like the feeling of achieving a goal the legit way. I learned soooo much more during those many perma-death runs than I ever did by save-scumming, and I’m actually proud of those ascensions.
Ha, I start scum sometimes but save scumming just takes away from the game lol. That feeling of I fked up, or this game wants me dead. All that great stuff you lost and forgot to use. The death screen is the real nethack. DYWYPI??
I had a ton of fun with dishonored but my favorite playatyle was basically complete idiot good guy. Self imposed rules of no killing and unable to sneak. Basically a lot of just trying to run away from an entire building full of alerted guards. It was super hard, I never finished that play through, but it was a lot of stupid fun.
In Dishonored 2, there’s a corrupted bone charm called “Clumsy Assassin”. That’s what I’m imagining, accompanied by the Scooby Dooh theme or the Benny Hill theme lol
No sneaking… That’s the fun part of a game to me. Outmaneuvering the opponents. 😊
To give a different perspective: I save scummed the hell out of the original Deus Ex to not get detected and do one hit nonlethal takedowns just to get Paul’s approval and Ana’s distain. Was fun.
One of my first times through the original Deus Ex, I fucked up sneaking past one of those ED-209 looking robots and had my legs obliterated. I ended up beating the rest of the game without legs thinking I could just replace them with cybernetics at some point.
I had a similar experience with Dishonored. I got ghost on a few missions since low chaos is more akin to my natural play style, but found it to be more enjoyable to set my own “rules” for my playthrough. It’s also a game that’s worth a second playthrough just to experience the opposite side of the spectrum. Super fun game any direction you choose, but you’ll miss a lot of cool aspects by limiting yourself to one extreme or the other.
For sure! In my very first playthrough, I wasn’t really paying attention to what I’m doing in the missions, so I ended up killing a lot of people without really thinking about it. In the final mission, I just had to restart the game because Samuel got mad and that got to me. I think I might have actually done a clean ghost run then.
I played through Dishonored for the first time this year and completed all the achievements but for the “Ghost” achievement I actually followed a speed run guide that was actually really crazy to see what is possible to do and then do it with save scumming first time I would then try to do it without save scumming sometimes just to see actually managed to do it for some missions was really fun.
Have you managed to ghost through it without save scumming? How difficult was it following the speed run guide?
I was close once but the last couple missions I always messed up. The speed run guide was surprisingly easy to follow and memorize myself after messing up say 4 times I could run the whole mission without any guidance.
I absolutely love playing stealth in games that let me take that option. My preferred route in the Dishonored series is low chaos/ghost because of how challenging it can be, but I always reload saves to get though them because I like to experiment to see what works (and what doesn’t), and also because I honestly just suck at getting things to go the way I want them to sometimes.
However, even though low chaos is apparently canon, I would like to point out that a stealth high chaos run where you murder every last guard/thug/weeper from the shadows can be sublime. Shadow Kill helps immensely here because when they dissolve into ash there are no bodies to hide (though half of the fun for me is finding out-of-the-way hiding places for everyone I’ve choked out and/or murdered).
And while it doesn’t have nearly as much replayability because it ditches the chaos system entirely, Death Of The Outsider is loads of fun simply because you can literally do whatever you want, without having to worry so much about the consequences.
I’m also of those weird people who really likes the second game, too… maybe even more than the original, though they’re both basically equal to me. Really don’t understand the hate that one gets from some fans.
I used to love playing this way in Splinter Cell: Double Agent. My friend and I would play on the mode where it you’re detected, you fail the mission
Stealth + high chaos does sound fun, you’re right. I might just try that after this run.
Yo what? I haven’t played Death of the Outsider yet, but I just assumed that the chaos system would be present again. So there’s just basically no consequences for your actions and the story just always ends the same way or are there other decisions to be made?
You get the same types of choices that you get in the first two games, but it’s really streamlined. And you can absolutely murder/spare people as you see fit because it doesn’t really affect the outcome. There is an achievement for clearing a single level without killing anyone, but not one for the whole game.
I didn’t even realize there wasn’t a chaos system until I finished the first level. I still played my usual way on that first playthrough, though (ghost/clean hands). On the second run I murdered everyone. Third run was the Original Game+ (where you get to use some of Corvo’s and Emily’s powers instead of your own)… that one was actually the hardest because Billie’s powers are honestly better, at least in this one.
The only thing I’ve never really done in these games is go with the combat-- I’m purely stealth. I know the combat is amazing and completely open-ended, but I honestly suck at it.
You can never kill the mind goblins, but you can put them to sleep. Dishonored is such a goblin heavy game that yeah, just giving up and not playing by its rules makes it waaay better. Apparently, you can even kill a few dudes and get the low chaos ending just fine?
Another game that kinda gets me in the same way is Celeste - those strawberries, aargh
Yea, I don’t know the threshold, but I think you can at least kill all of the assassination targets and still get the low-chaos ending.
Dude, the fucking strawberries :D Probably one of the reasons I put the game down
cries in Clean Hands
Not killing people seems rather easy to me compared to ghost though, right? As long as you have tranq bolts and can hide as soon as you’re detected, you can just choke people out if necessary
No… AND Ghost
I‘m also an achievement hunter and I found the low chaos Ghost run immensly satisfying and actually not too difficult. It just felt like it‘s the right way to experience the game. What soured me a bit was the challenge DLC. That one was lame as hell. The base game and story DLCs were great.
I get that! Can you recommend any strategies?
It‘s been too long for me to have any personal tips, but trueachievements (website) has a walkthrough for it and their walkthroughs are usually an easy ticket to platinum. Just google „game name trueachievements“ and look for the „Walkthrough“ link on top. If there‘s an asterisk next to it, it means someone‘s posted a full achievement walkthrough.
It also helps gauging how long it‘ll take since they give you number of playthroughs required and estimated time in the overview.
You can also look up specific achievements on there where people post different strategies and/or cheese.
The site‘s for Xbox but big games usually have achievement parity across different versions so it‘s the same for PS/PC.
Awesome, thanks for sharing! I’ll have a look
I like to save scum. Part of redoing a section over and over again is to overcome a difficult trial. The feeling of success is the reward for me, but we also become better for it.
I used to prefer low-chaos runs but I like to blast through like Rambo these days since that’s where the challenge is.
I’m struggling to imagine any time I’ve ruined am experience with save-scumming other than the present popular game Lethal Company. The fun is experiencing the cycle with others and I’m not beholden to my ships accessories. One of my crew had me do it and I’ll never do it again.
Ultimately: do what you want to do and makes you happy and comfortable :)
This is one of my favorite games. I prefer to decimate every enemy I can find and allow others to find the corpses.
