Early Look at Steampunk Action-Adventure Game Dishonored 58
Dishonored is an upcoming first-person action-adventure game in a steampunk setting. It's being developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. As the game nears its October 9th release, Jim Rossignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun got some hands-on time with the game, and was impressed by how it is shaping up:
"The level I played saw me overpowering a government official from his laboratory high on a building above the lavish pseudo-London cityscape, and lugging him out to a riverside rendezvous. Initially I went in through the front door, bluntly killing the guards with a knife and sneaking inside. But I could have used all manner of other entrances, and other powers. I could have slipped in undetected by distracting the guards. I could have possessed a rat – zooming into the hapless thing in a manner of bodily possession/transformation reminiscent of forgotten FPS Requiem: Avenging Angel – and then rematerialized once I’d run in through grates and rat holes. I could have possessed an NPC and used the meatsuit to pass through the energy-field barricades. Or I could even have employed a short-ranged teleportation power, blink, and leapt and mantled my way up across the rooftops."
Re:steampunk = poorly thought out (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this seems to be the way that pop culture works. The first wave is exciting, new, and creative. The second wave is a refinement that may or may not sell out to the mainstream. The third wave is cheap and crass commercialization, almost entirely populated by hacks and fad-chasers. Around this time, all the hipsters will abandon it, and your parents (or even grandparents, if you're young enough) will start making references to it. My 60 year old mother talks about preparing for the "zombie apocalypse", when she goes out shopping for canned food. All you can do is grit your teeth and wait for the fourth wave, which is an ironic deconstruction. This will bring the hipsters back, unfortunately, but it will also cause people to recognize how intensely stupid and insipid the third wave was. Hopefully. After this, it can go in any direction, and there have been some cases where the ironic deconstruction was misinterpreted and turned into a big influence on the genre.
Roger Corman once dismissed the term "genre film", saying that people who use that phrase are simply unable to admit to themselves that they're making exploitation movies. This is why I like Roger Corman's work: he knows that he's making crap, and he doesn't have pretensions toward art. He's very self-aware. As long as we have people producing "genre fiction" or "genre films", we'll have hacks with delusions of artistic merit barfing out insipid, derivative work. This tends to pop up in the second wave of any fad and dominate the third wave.
Re:I don't get steampunk. (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is that steampunk is not defined by setting, but rather by use of devices that defy science (even future science). I don't think of it so much as a genre, but as an excuse for poor creativity.
It's called "suspension of disbelief". [wikipedia.org]
Steampunk, list most subgenres within the science fiction/fantasy umbrella, has little or nothing to do with the technology described... it's a backdrop for the story actually being told. Done well, it's fun and whimsical. Done badly... well... ever seen Wild Wild West? If you're getting hung up on the "science" of it, you're missing the point completely.