After the success of the first two Dishonored games, Arkane Studios has now released a standalone expansion called Death of the Outsider, which is set a couple of months after the events of Dishonored 2. Instead of playing as Corvo or Emily, you now take control of Billie Lurk who is out to do the impossible: kill the Outsider.
Billie Lurk is a minor character from Dishonored 2 that has taken a new name and is looking for her mentor Daud in the city of Karnaca. After the first mission, you are reunited with him and accept his plea to kill the source of chaos within the Empire, the Outsider. In order to kill a powerful being like him, you first have to find a ritual knife that is capable of hurting your target. After acquiring this knife, you basically spend the rest of the game looking for the Outsider.
Underwhelming story
The story of Death of the Outsider starts out pretty strong, but quickly loses focus and becomes uncompelling. Not much actually happens after the intro, which is disappointing if you wanted to learn more about the Outsider and the crazy cult that worships him, called the Eyeless. Daud, a fan-favorite character of the series, is also cast off quickly and gives the impression that the writers didn’t know what to do with him after the first hour of the campaign. Even the Outsider himself, the main antagonist of the expansion, barely gets any screen time which undermines the buildup of your eventual encounter with him. If you’re a fan of the Dishonored universe, then don’t expect too much new information and additional lore in Death of the Outsider.
Same great gameplay
Luckily, storytelling was never the main selling point for any of the Dishonored games. Their success primarily came from their stealth gameplay mechanics that raised the bar for other stealth-focused games. Death of the Outsider continues this tradition with excellent level design and tweaking of well-known powers and abilities. Instead of refilling your Void Energy for your powers with potions, you now simply recharge it automatically. This makes it easier to perform quick kills and traverse the levels at a faster pace, but it also makes the game a little easier when compared to its predecessors since you now don’t have to carefully plan your attacks in order to avoid running out of energy. Some may take this a bad change, others as a good one. It simply depends on what your preferred playstyle is and how challenging you want it to be.
The powers themselves are also improved versions of older ones or completely new. Displace replaces Blink by letting you drop a ghostly version of yourself wherever you want in your line of sight. This ghost is where you’ll teleport to once you activate it. This makes you able to pickpocket a guard and instantly teleport to the upper floor when he turns around. This goes well together with Foresight, which is the replacement for Dark Vision. With Foresight, you can freeze time for a while and freely scout the area without having the risk of being detected. Using this power will make it a little easier to predict enemy movement patterns and discover new ways of getting around the level. The third and last power you have is a new one, called Semblance. Knocking someone out with this power will melt your victims face off and give you the ability to disguise yourself as him or her. This makes you undetectable by enemy guards, although guard dogs can still smell your scent and identify you. It’s a great new addition to the powers of Dishonored and is accompanied with great visual effects. Melting people’s faces off has never been this much fun (in a videogame).
Contracts
Death of the Outsider is also the first Dishonored game that features a new mechanic called ‘Contracts’. These are basically optional side missions that you can complete to make the game even more challenging. For example, in the first mission, your main objective is to turn off a device. The contract in this mission is that you burn a specific guard dog’s corpse before completing your main objective. It’s a great addition to the already solid gameplay of the Dishonored series, although they’re primarily focused on players who prefer the stealth approach. If you play the game like a murderous maniac, you can’t complete most of the contracts.
While the Contracts system is great in itself, it does come with a downside. It’s basically a replacement for the Chaos system, which determined the ending you’d get in previous Dishonored games. Did you kill everyone in most missions? You got the bad ending. Did you spare most enemies and only knocked them unconscious? Then you got the good ending. This mechanic is completely gone in Death of the Outsider, meaning that your actions don’t determine the ending, which is quite a shame since you it gives you no motivation to choose the stealthy way of playing, which is more difficult and challenging than simply killing everyone. It also undermines the final mission in which you get to choose how to end the game. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that even if you’ve killed everyone in the game, you can still get the good ending by simply choosing the right dialogue options.
Conclusion
Death of the Outsider offers fans of the excellent Dishonored gameplay a great expansion that is again filled with great level design. The contracts system and improved powers are fun to mess around with, especially if you take the non-lethal approach. The story is underwritten and simply too short to be enjoyed by fans and newcomers to the series. The biggest flaw is the lack of the Chaos system, which was such a staple mechanic in the Dishonored games. In short, most fans of the Dishonored gameplay will enjoy Death of the Outsider, but those who want to know more about the universe itself will find the expansion lacking.
