‘Dishonored 2’ Beginners Guide: How To Choose Your Playstyle And Which Are Best For Achievements Or Trophies
I’m a huge fan of the Dishonored series. Dishonored was one of the first games I played where you could choose stealth or action yet both felt fully fleshed out, fun and rewarding. So many great games comes out these days that I very rarely playthrough an entire game twice. But Dishonored drew me immediately back in. My go-to playstyle is to be pretty stealthy but if I get into a fix, I’ll kill who I need to kill. For my second playthrough, I wanted to see if I could get through the game without killing anyone and the experience was super rewarding.
Dishonored 2 carried on the tradition of almost being two games in one, since levels play out so vastly differently depending on how you play. Below is a guide to some different ways to play and the Achievements or Trophies you can unlock by sticking to that style for the entire game.
Stealth vs. Aggressive
At the most basic level, your main choice is between being stealthy and aggressive. Stealth in a lot of games is slow, methodical, and sometimes boring. The Dishonored series broke that tradition by adding abilities like Blink - which lets you quickly teleport limited distances away. It can be very fun to pop around the map, being stealthy but progressing far more quickly than the classic stealth game allows.
The other core way to play is aggressive. Corvo and Emily have some fighting chops and abilities that can make them powerhouses on the field. Their health is relatively low compared to other action games and the game is built in a way that makes it very easy to get overwhelmed. Thus the pure aggressive style (run into a room start killing everyone, move to next room) can be punishingly difficult. Most aggressive players, besides some youtube masters, still utilize a little stealth to thin the ranks before they go all out.
Chaos Level
Your actions in every level can serve to increase the ‘Chaos’ in the world by varying amounts. Did you kill a ton of people and leave the bodies out for all to see? Were you spotted by enemies many times in the level? These actions will increase the Chaos and alter how future levels play out. In a world with high Chaos you will find more security and enemies, more suffering innocents and so on.
Chaos is not directly influenced by your choice of Stealthy or Aggressive play. For example, you could sneak through levels never being detected but brutally murder everyone you find. Or, you could play fast and aggressive but only use sleep darts or other non-lethal weapons. Certainly a Stealth playstyle will make it easier to keep Chaos low and vice versa, but part of the fun of a Dishonored game is finding your own weird moral code for your character.
There is another level in thinking about how you want to play the game that leads to hard to get Achievements/Trophies.
Ghost and Merciful
In each level you be ranked Ghost or Merciful based on your actions.
You will receive Ghost if neither you nor the bodies you leave around are ever spotted by the enemy. You move through the game completely undetected. You can still kill as many people as you want, as long as no one finds the bodies.
If you beat every level without being detected, then you will receive the ‘Shadow’ Achievement.
Merciful is based completely on lives taken. Under no circumstances can you kill a human. As mentioned above, you could play very aggressively, get spotted many times in each level, but as long as you never take a life, you will be seen as ‘Merciful.’ But remember, Bloodflies, Animals, Clockwork Soldiers, etc. are not people so go wild. (Especially on the Clockwork Soldiers - do it for me.)
If you beat every level and never take a person’s life, then you will get the ‘Clean Hands’ Achievement.
For both Ghost and Merciful challenges, I recommend keeping a save file in the beginning of each level because when you’re out there alone, sometimes it’s hard to control your bloodthirsty rages…
If you want to be a super pro, go for both in one play through, i.e. never get spotted and never take a life. But don’t come crying to me when midway through the game your sanity breaks and you wipe out the entire Grand Serkonan Guard. Seriously, don’t think I don’t know about those bloodthirsty rages.
There's another achievement in there for you if you reject the heretical teachings of the Outsider.
Good luck, have fun out there. Save the Empire!
