Assassins? no thanks, AR is here

CHENNAI: This season brings us the release of the most awaited videogames of this year: Assassins Creed Origins and Call of Duty WW2 towards November, Forza and Wolfenstein in October. Gamers across platforms have united in staying awake days to finish these games once they are out. Well ahead of the forthcoming terror months, this week brought another installation of everyone’s second favourite stealth-assassination game  (Creed is first, and Hitman third) — Dishonored.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider features a rugged Billie Lurk, a ‘foreigner’ who moonlights as an assassin (is it really moonlighting if the whole game is shot in darkness? DC, you have competition). The E3 trailer had music like the ones horror movies use these days — a young child singing an innocent song and laughing — only it sounds very creepy, like someone scratching your eyes through the back of your head creepy.

With new Dishonored games, come new powers. There’s one which I’d like to call ‘Arya’ — in which you can replace the protagonist’s face with the face of one of the non-playable characters to strengthen your stealth. ‘Foresight’ allows you to scan a room and mark targets before you actually enter it.

The new powers encourage quick killing alongside stealth — the chaos system has been removed in this game. The number of kills no longer determine the game’s ending. Billie can also take contracts (side missions), which provide a challenge through its additional objectives.

But before you can even load another level of Dishonored... In other news — Augmented Reality steals its thunder, because it looks like its back and here to stay! With the new iPhones highlighting AR as one of its selling features, the excitement on games in this new format is rising. We’ve moved from dreaming of a SuperMario AR, to actually hearing The Walking Dead announce a location-based AR game in the likes of PokemonGo. After having a look at the aspirational trailer of TWD: Our World, I am forced to concede that this game would be a huge joke in our country, and we’ll end up hitting a lot more real people as we walk on the road with our AR powered phones. Meanwhile let’s stick to playing Dishonored, in a less-safe, more imaginative, alternate reality.

Anusha Ganapathi

Twitter @quaffle_waffle

(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)