DLC #142 - Dishonored - The Knife of Dunwall

After the gruelling Dunwall City Trials DLC experience, a change of direction to finally close off Dishonored for good was hugely necessary.

In hindsight, I would have perhaps been better off completing the Trials DLC last, because the burnout has made me just want to finish up here and move on as quickly as possible.

Anyway, that wasn't the case and here we are, with the Knife of Dunwall, the second of three DLC packs for Dishonored, and the first of a two part story-driven experience that sees you take control of Daud, the leader of the assassins and protagonist from the main story.

The spin-off is based on events that occur just after the beginning of the main story, immediately following the aftermath of Daud's involvement in killing the Empress, Jessamine Kaldwin and the kidnap of Emily.

Daud is immediately stopped by the Outsider, who informs him that he's now in a bad situation and his actions will have consequences, but is also given the chance of redemption if he can find out the meaning of the name "Delilah".

This story is told over both remaining DLC packs, starting here with 3 new chapters to progress towards the halfway point of this new plot, with the core gameplay being mostly unchanged from the standard Dishonored experience of having the option to fulfil the end goal of each chapter however you see fit, with multiple options provided to the player as you progress through the level.

There are a couple of neat gameplay additions, including new upgrades exclusive to Daud and his assassin powers, such as Void Gaze, which allows you to see objects and people through walls, and the ability to buy "Favors" from assassins pre-mission, which will bribe you advantages or important pieces of intel to assist you throughout the level. It is mostly an unchanged formula though.

The pack also adds 10 additional trophies, most of which are progression-related, but you'll also be required to run through the 3 new chapters at least twice courtesy of 2 trophies that are awarded for beating the DLC in both low and high chaos respectively, following the trend from the main game's list.

In another closely followed trend to the main list, there are also a further 2 trophies that also require you to beat the DLC without alerting anyone, and also without killing anyone, which are best done in tandem within the low chaos playthrough.

The game will offer the option to choose a difficulty setting at the start of the content, but the trophies are not difficulty specific, and you're free to play through without any repercussions for choosing a lower difficulty level. I decided to play through on the default setting, which was Veteran, the second least challenging difficulty out of 4 options and found it relatively straight-forward on both low and high chaos runs.

You do have to make sure you save often on the low chaos run, particularly given the fact you should also be running for the trophies awarded for finishing the DLC without alerting anyone, and also without killing anyone. It can be easy to be spotted suddenly, so ensuring you save often will limit unnecessary rework, though my only real gripe was the fact that it made it somewhat tedious having to save so often with the fear of being unexpectedly spotted around a blind corner.

There are also 2 further trophies that are considered missable, due to the fact they require you to perform chapter specific actions. They're not hidden, so I wouldn't consider them spoliers to reveal them - So you'll need to assassinate an enemy by jumping from the top of the Empress statue in chapter 3, and you'll also need to speak to the statue of "Delilah" in the Timsh Estate in chapter 2. If you don't grab them on either your low or high chaos playthrough, you'll need to go back through for another run.

As a final note, you'll need to make sure you grab enough coin on the low chaos run in order to account for a directly linked trophy present in the Brigmore Witches DLC follow up pack. It won't make sense here to go into that in detail, but you need to be finishing the low chaos run with anywhere between 3000-5000 coins in hand.

With 2 runs of the 3 chapters, you can probably expect to complete this within 8-10 hours. It'll probably take slightly longer on the low chaos run as you go for the no alerts/no kills trophies at the same time, and as long as you remember the 2 chapter specific missable trophies, this is a fairly relaxed completion in comparison to the Dunwall City Trials. Just make sure you don't overlook that final point about the low chaos coin in hand in preparation for the final DLC pack.

Platinum #107 - Wreckfest

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 4/10

As someone who much prefers the realistic simulation racing titles, the destruction racing genre is possibly one of the most untouched genres in my entire collection.

I've never really looked any further beyond the Motorstorm series, and even then, the most recent Platinum trophy I have for that was from the latest instalment in Motorstorm : Apocalypse, as far back as late 2012.

I do also have the Burnout Paradise Platinum from my very early days of trophy hunting at Platinum #2, but aside from that, this is a scarcely featured genre.

Wreckfest is a demolition derby style game with huge variety in vehicular racing. It has the mixed vibes of the original Destruction Derby games on the Playstation 1/2 with it's track-based banger racing elements, and Motorstorm with the vehicle variety that will see you racing stock cars, campervans, buses and even lawnmowers. 

Despite there being some nice attention to detail to the simulation aspect of racing, including tuning, upgradable components and other customisation options, this is still a destruction racer at heart, and those elements are quickly forgotten about through some excellently realistic damage modelling that impacts the performance of the vehicles and also looks the part visually when things quickly descend into chaos, which, after all, is ultimately the most important selling point of a destruction racing title.

The trophy list is small in size, with just 21 trophies including the Platinum, and is almost an entirely Single Player experience, barring a solitary Multiplayer trophy.

Truth be told, it's a pretty disappointing trophy experience, and it's entirely down to the fact that the trophy list doesn't really encourage you to go any further within the Single Player Career than the absolute bare minimum required to reach the end goal.

Despite the destruction racing genre being relatively untapped, I do have alot of experience with simulation racing titles, and most of them follow relatively universal patterns, where the Platinum trophy will require you to win races and events consistently, reaching more prestigious events to then go on to win further championships, usually culminating in you having pushed yourself to the very top and beaten everything. Need for Speed follows this blueprint, as does Grid, as does Dirt, and they've all been rated in difficulty accordingly, but Wreckfest is different, and also the reason this ends up rating much lower on the scale.

The "World Masters Champion" trophy, awarded for Completing World Masters Championship, is the climax of the Career mode, and will be awarded as you progress through 5 different Championships, ranked in order from Regional Juniors right through to World Masters, with progression based trophies awarded for passing each Championship with enough points in order to unlock the next.

Each Championship contains a series of events, with a specific number of points allocated to each event. The points correspond to your placement within each event, whether this be an individual event or a series of events, and the number of points awarded will depend on your overall position, with more points naturally awarded for higher placed finishes. Once you've accumulated enough points collectively, you'll progress and be promoted into the next Championship, to then repeat the process with a fresh set of events until you reach the end.

Whilst this gives you the freedom to be able to cherry pick which events you play, and the full flexibility to be able to leave some behind entirely and ignore them, this makes it a fairly easy journey to the top. The points threshold in order to advance to the next Championship is not set particularly high, and whilst winning events will give you back more points, you don't necessarily need to win them in order to promote yourself into the next Championship, which is where I mostly feel like this list wasn't maximised to it's full potential. Racing should have an emphasis on winning, but maybe that's just the standard I'm used to based on other games I've played across the racing genre.

As a consequence of this more relaxed progression approach, it's a very straight-forward Career mode. You can alter the AI difficulty if you want to increase the challenge, along with settings for vehicle damage which can add extra dimensions to the challenge, with "realistic" damage impacting vehicle performance and handling, as well as durability.

Even choosing the "hard" difficulty, I was seldom challenged, and whilst I didn't win many events, the lack of necessity to do so meant the difficulty level didn't really make much of a difference. I'm going to assume it was harder to win because of the tougher AI, but without any reasons to go back over the events to actually try to win them, that will remain speculation.

You can grab 5 trophies, which is exactly a quarter of this list, on your way to achieving this one, as you progress through each of the 5 different Championships, with other trophies being unlocked along the way as you play through events. These also include 3 level-based trophies for hitting milestones at level 10, 25 and 50 respectively, as well as other naturally achievable trophies for expanding your car collection and earning race winnings.

The "Highballer" trophy, awarded for Completing all Career Challenges, needs to be mentioned purely for reasons based around making sure you don't make the same error as I did.

This trophy is awarded for beating the 23 events that are labelled as "Challenges" within the event card display graphic, which I had naturally beaten all but 2 of throughout the Career. However, every single event/race has a secondary objective, which is exactly what I thought this trophy related to, meaning I fulfilled the requirement of every single objective in the Career for every race - An incredibly grindy and tedious journey.

Of course, it's my fault for misunderstanding the trophy requirements, though I do believe it could have been signposted better, especially after reading up and finding out it wasn't just myself that had misunderstood this task, and is also specifically referenced within certain trophy guides not to get the secondary challenges mixed up with the Career challenges.

It actually ended up slightly changing my overall difficulty rating, as these secondary race objectives were more akin to the challenge I had been looking for, throughout this experience, because they require you in some instances to win the race, or win it by a certain distance, for example, and playing on "Hard" difficulty tested my capabilities to win races in conjunction with these secondary tasks.

However, it turns out you just need to beat the 23 special challenge events, which merely require you to fulfil a specific goal to beat the event, whether this be a winning a 1 v 1 race, wrecking an entire grid before the reaching the finish line or wrecking a certain number of opponents before being wrecked yourself. They're all much easier than the secondary objectives, so I won't list this trophy at notable, though I feel like it was important to share this particular experience because I felt like it was a part of the journey, albeit an unnecessary one.

The "Human Lover" trophy, awarded for Winning 20 Events in Multiplayer, is where the challenge from this list will mostly stem from, as you venture online to take on the Wreckfest community and win 20 times against them.

The rules for online racing communities are relatively universal, regardless of whether destructive racing is encouraged or not, and this will always be your biggest challenge when it comes to any racing title that includes online trophies. Clean racing is often disregarded anyway, but at least it's more befitting of the environment here.

You can choose to earn the 20 wins through whichever game mode you're most comfortable in, whether than be a banger race or destruction derby and you can even filter out lobbies specifically by car class or tracks so you can race with vehicles you're most comfortable with on the courses you're most comfortable with, so the added customisation flexibility is something you should look to take advantage of.

I managed to get 20 wins within 92 races, which isn't a terrible return, but is still the biggest challenge within this entire trophy list. I found it easiest to approach each race with a survival mindset, and also avoided destruction derby events for this reason too. Being able to be cautious and steady, rather than fast and reckless allowed me to at least finish races in most instances, as I watched others crash out and bail out of the race. It sort of goes against the nature of the game, but it's going to yield the best results.

You will have to be aware for common online racing perils, such as other players deliberately intent on wrecking you to the point where they'll drive around the track backwards, or sit at cross junctions lying in wait for you, but there's not much you can really do other than try to avoid them as best as possible. These hazards do contribute to making this the only difficult trophy in the entire list. 

Given how small the trophy list is, there isn't really much else mention. The remaining trophies are very random and involve tasks you can easily fulfil within any mode.

I think it summarises this list well that the most challenging element of this game I faced ended up coming from my own misunderstanding of the trophy requirements, which meant I ploughed alot more time into this list than what was necessary. Some of those secondary objectives within the individual race events were the most challenging aspect of the game, but ultimately not required for the Platinum trophy, and therefore not factored into the final difficulty rating. I think the fact I practically had to accidentally create my own challenge nicely summarises the justification for what is a very low score.

All you'll need to focus on is the accumulation of 20 wins online, and you're practically free to enjoy a very leisurely Career mode within Single Player that doesn't demand much from the player at all. Just make sure you understand the trophies and their descriptions.

Notable Trophies -

World Masters Champion - Complete World Masters Championship.
Human Lover - Win 20 Events In Multiplayer.

Hardest Trophy -

Human Lover

Win 20 Events In Multiplayer

DLC #141 - Dishonored - Dunwall City Trials

It's quite a rare occurrence for myself to abandon a challenge on the grounds of it being too difficult, but this is exactly what this first piece of DLC for Dishonored did to me.

I initially attempted this around the middle of 2019, and got into a decent rhythm of working out how to achieve 3 star ratings within these trials. Then I hit a wall. The challenges got harder, I couldn't seem to work out how to collect 3 stars in some of them.

I then moved onto some of the miscellaneous trophies within the list, to then also find them too hard and that was it. I just stuck the game on the back burner and practically forgot about it.

My increasing pressure from within to clear my PS3 backlog has bought me back round, and whilst the experience of finishing this list wasn't actually as bad as I remember it being, there are strong caveats to that which will be explained, and this is still a great challenge for a variety of different reasons.

The Dunwall City Trials adds a series of 16 challenges, which are categorised into 4 groups; Combat, Stealth, Puzzle and Movement. There are 10 individual "Normal" trials, of which 6 contain an enhanced "Expert" version, just tweaked slightly to add different mechanics into the levels that heighten the challenge.

These challenges are cleverly designed, fun (for the most part) and will test your ability, especially when it comes to the trophies. The goal within each trial is to accumulate a points score, and this is converted into a star rating upon completing each trial, ranging from 1-3 stars. It's a fairly simple concept that translates well to the various game mechanics of Dishonored.

The pack adds 10 trophies, and most of them are made up of very specific challenges to complete within the trials themselves, some of which are going to be detailed shortly. Some of them are quite easy, and the others are much more challenging, leading to a very rollercoaster experience on the whole. There is also a small collectible venture to accomplish, along with a requirement to strive for perfection through obtaining 3 stars within every level;

Void Star - You completed all Normal and Expert challenges with a 3-Stars rating.
By My Hand Alone - You made it to Wave 13 in Back Alley Brawl killing all combatants personally.
Headhunter - You completed Assassin's Run with 100% accuracy using only head shots.
Daredevil - In Bonfires, you performed all the special combination jumps in 1 round.

The "Void Star" trophy, is the main goal within this pack, requiring you to beat all challenges with a 3-Stars rating. This includes the 10 "Normal" base challenges, as well as the 6 "Expert" variety challenges on top. Some of these challenges are easy to obtain 3 stars in, and some are much more challenging. The biggest nuance I had with this trophy is the fact that crucial elements of scoring are often left out from the scoring explanations within the trial briefing, and are just left down to the player to figure out themselves, or possibly just not mentioned.

That might seem like an unreasonable gripe, but, to use an example;

The "Burglar" challenge, which has a "Normal" and "Expert" variant, requires you to gain access to a mansion and loot it without being caught. The primary objective is to steal 6 golden eggs across the 4 floors of the mansion, with the secondary objective to collect as much extra loot as possible in order to boost your score. This is explained well within the briefing, however, I reached a point where I could collect everything, never be spotted and reach the exit point and yet still not achieve the 3 star threshold of 30,000 points, and I never knew why. It didn't make any sense, until I discovered that, the golden eggs actually act as a multiplier, and you're meant to sweep through the whole house first to collect all 6 eggs, and then scour the house again to collect the loot because having all 6 eggs in possession gives greater multipliers for when you gather the extra loot.

Each floor contains 2 eggs, and will also contain a handful of loot, so it naturally made sense to sweep everything up 1 floor at a time, but apparently this isn't the case, and the briefing fails to point out the fact that you'll score better multipliers on additional loot by grabbing all 6 eggs first, which was a hugely frustrating revelation. I understand that I could have read up on that and saved alot of hassle, but I always like to give things an honest try before I turn to guides for assistance, and I feel like important details that could influence the scoring should be mentioned to the player if it means the difference between 2 and 3 stars on a trial.

Just to throw out another example, the "Bonfires" trial, which also has a "Normal" and "Expert" variant, requires you to move around a map at speed, using beams of light as checkpoints in order to earn points and extend the time, as explained within the scoring section. However, I always seemed to fall short of the required 30,000 points and was always left scratching my head as to how I could achieve the points threshold.

I read up and discovered that you can do "tricky jumps", which are certain combination jumps you can perform by moving through certain checkpoints in specific ways which will grant you more points in return, which is also left unexplained by the scoring brief. 

They're not what I could consider minor complaints when these finer details become the difference between 2 and 3 stars, and even after knowing the key strategies within the examples provided, it was still tough to hit 30,000 points in certain trials, especially the "Expert" varieties.

Once, or even during, your quest for all 48 stars, you'll tackle the miscellaneous trophies, which are about as gruelling as a collection of miscellaneous trophies I've personally encountered from a piece of DLC ever.

The "By My Hand Alone" trophy, awarded for making it to Wave 13 in Back Alley Brawl killing all combatants personally, is the pick of these trophies. This requires you to kill 12 waves, totalling 53 enemies, and you have to be responsible for dealing the killing blow on all of them. It might not seem tough on face value, but the element of luck plays a huge role in this trophy. Each wave consists of 3 to 5 enemies, randomly selected from the games vast array of factions, but the catch to this trophy is, they will fight each other whilst you're trying to get through each wave.

There are around 6 factions that will all react to each other differently, and it's important to know the mechanics behind this because the spawning patterns are random, and not-predetermined, so the combination of enemies spawned for each round is never the same. There are certain consistencies, for example, round 8 will always contain all soliders who won't attack each other, and round 9 will always spawn a torturer, who is extremely powerful and will take out non-soldiers very quickly.

The spawn points within the map are all random, but it's so easy to become victim of really bad luck and have 2 enemies spawn directly next to each other who will instantly start fighting, and 1 of them will die before you even notice it because you were pre-occupied cleaning up the enemies on another part of the map.

There are other really cheap scenarios that can work against you that I encountered, such as having slow-motion kill animations interrupted by another enemy dealing a killing blow, enemies standing in the way of gunshots from soliders or bolts from asssassins, causing them to die and when the tallboys come into the fray from rounds 10-12, their missile projectile is devastating and will kill smaller enemies within seconds, which is simply just too quick to react to. It feels like you're really up against it, and this easily took me over 100 attempts at anywhere between 1-8 minutes per run.

Once you reach round 6, you will unlock the Bend Time ability, which will allow you to freeze the landscape at the beginning of each round and make it much easier to accumulate these kills at a fast enough rate to ensure better success in latter rounds when there are more enemies to dispose of. The Griff will also appear 3 times, in order to drop health and mana vials, both of which are critical to replenish yourself on, especially given the fact you'll need the mana to still use the Bend Time ability for when the tallboys show up. 

You can persist and eventually get the luck you need to get through this challenge, but it'll more than likely require alot of perseverance. Being able to learn the intricate details of the map, such as spawning locations and the way factions interact with each other, does go a long way to help, and I did feel like I was progressing and getting closer each time, even if that did mean getting painfully close on a couple of occasions and still failing. This was the final trophy to seal this pack though, and I haven't felt this level of relief for a bronze DLC trophy in some time.

The "Headhunter" trophy, awarded for completing Assassin's Run with 100% accuracy using only head shots, isn't as bad as "By My hand Alone", but still caused similar frustrations through seemingly helpless circumstances.

You have to negotiate your way through a map, killing every enemy within a single head shot, of which there are 17 in total (Just to quickly note, that 17 total is up to the final room, which contains another 3 enemies, but you can glitch your way through this room to the exit point without needing to kill them and earn the trophy, which I shamelessly took advantage of).

Every enemy is an assassin, so it's important to make sure you take your time and remain unseen. Once they become aware of your presence, they're incredibly tough to put down with a single shot because they teleport, move at speed and their attack animations are incredibly hard to track. The moment you waste a single shot, the challenge is over and you'll have to restart.

There's a very specific segment where there are 2 enemies you have to shoot through a window at reasonable distance using free-aim. One of these enemies is patrolling around a circular staircase as a continuously moving target, where you also have to account for arrow drop when lining up your shot. This is where you'll mostly struggle for consistency, and I think I only ever nailed this shot twice. It's frustrating because the segment appears quite late on in the level, so you risk resetting a decent amount of progress if you fail.

There are other niggly elements to this level, such as getting spotted when clearing out a few of the early rooms with a small handful of assassins present and having to desperately fire out a shot before they kill you, and some questionable hit detection whilst lining up almost certainly guaranteed head shots which didn't turn out to be the case for some reason. It didn't take me over 100 attempts at least, but the runs here are generally a bit longer, which is the offset to the fact it didn't require as many attempts for this trophy.

The "Daredevil" trophy, awarded for performing all the special combination jumps in 1 round in Bonfires, is also equipped with it's own barriers to fulfilment. This was used as an above example to outline my nuances with the "Void Star" trophy, and I may have worked out an effective scoring strategy for this level had I attempted this trophy sooner, but naturally, the miscellaneous trophies come last when clearing up a DLC list, so what can you do?

Regardless, there are 6 combination jumps and they all award more points than traditional means of going through checkpoints. Whether you'll get the opportunity to perform all 6 jumps in 1 round again just comes down to mostly luck.

You'll need to have 6 specific beam of light spawn locations in order to fulfil each jump at least once, and this isn't always guaranteed. This is also probably the one trophy that requires a solid element of skill too, because you'll need to use the Blink ability accurately and move across the map very quickly. There were a handful of times where I managed to get the spawn of light I needed, but would then fail the jump, and if you're not flawless, you generally won't succeed. Luck does still play a massive part here because you need the spawns to be kind, and this is completely outside your control, but still having to properly execute the jumps is down to your own ability.

It does help that the first 2 beams of light are pre-determined, and this will give you 2 opportunities to begin with, because they're both in locations you need for 2 of the 6 jumps, but there's still potentially alot of trial and error here, and I would also estimate I took well over 100 attempts for this trophy too.

Overall, I'm extremely glad to finally have this one in the bag. It makes Dishonored a very credible 100% completion to have in the collection, though this doesn't technically take me to 100% just yet, but I don't forsee any issues with the other 2 DLC packs for this game, so I'm happy enough to make this declaration.

I can't really put a time estimate on this pack. This isn't tracked anywhere within the game's menus, but I spent enough time on it, both in terms of my first and second spell with the DLC, to suggest it isn't just a simple matter of a handful of hours. The patience levels required are as high as anything I've experienced with any game, and the desire to not give up will be incredibly important if you're looking to finish this game fully.

It does also make you raise the bar of your own skill levels, purely for the reason that you'll be completing these challenges in manners which Dishonored hasn't made you play through before. The main game is very much focused on stealth and critical thinking, and the Dunwall City Trials shift this dramatically, including challenges that require explosive actions, sleight of hand and fast reactions. It's a fine combination of perseverance and skill, and makes this DLC pack a worthy addition to the collection.