I recently finally played dishonored, which was one of those games I knew I’d enjoy but never got around to playing. I was going to review it, but since my complaints about it are mostly not very interesting, I thought I’d just go in depth about a specific one.

Dishonored was great and I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I wanted to gripe about their implementation of “Dark Vision” which is essentially detective mode, eagle vision, or whatever you want to call it. It’s an augmented view of the game which calls out information to the player and is pretty ubiquitous in those types of games.

It’s easy to see why: detective mode lets you design more complex levels since you don’t have to worry as much about players getting lost. It helps prevent some obnoxious gameplay situations, like walking around a corner into a guard’s face. It presents the player with an assortment of small, obvious, achievable goals to select and pursue in that moment, keeping them engaged (if not necessarily immersed).

Still, it always feels wrong to me. I’m one of those “try to play optimally” folks, and in a lot of cases that means making frequent use of detective mode. Why wouldn’t I check every door before going through it, just to be sure?

Dishonored’s implementation in particular got me thinking on the topic. From the very start, you have Dark Vision, which lets you see enemies through walls, as well as their vision cone, but only if they’re pretty close. I like that aspect; you can use it to check around corners, but not to survey an entire courtyard.

It also costs some of your mana, which at first I was intrigued by. Is this a game where I’ll have to treat detective mode as a tool to be used sparingly? The answer was no, apparently. In Dishonored, your mana used for dark vision regenerates shortly after. To me that felt like they wanted use of Dark Vision to be more of a decision, but couldn’t come up with a good enough design for it prior to shipping.

Other parts of the game point to this too. Dishonored has this great mechanic where doors have keyholes, which you can look through to get a sense for what’s going on in the room. Sweet, a more immersive version of Dark Vision! It was clunky though, and after the first few levels I stopped looking through keyholes and just used my Dark Vision to see through the door instead.

Eventually, I end up about halfway through the game, still using Dark Vision all the time. I haven’t put any skill points into it though, because I thought it would be more fun to get some combat abilities going. I can kill stuff fine though, so I decide to up my Dark Vision to level 2. Suddenly EVERY interactable item is called out to me in bright green. Money, food, bulllets, guards, traps, switches, I had it all! This one skill up turned Dark vision from “Check for guards around walls” to “scan everything for pickups”. I immediately wished I’d invested this as my first point and felt dumb for not having done so until now. Think of all the secrets I missed! Unlike every other ability I could put points in, this second point on dark vision felt like more of a mandatory skill than a play-style choice.For all that, I think a simple Batman style toggle button would be preferable. Dishonored made it a minor hassle to use dark vision, but since you still end up using it all the time, I felt the result was unnecessarily cumbersome.

I feel like there’s gotta be a better system which can solve some of the same problems, but isn’t so heavy handed.

I’d like a system that:

• Is as immersive as possible
• Feels satisfying to use, but is used infrequently
• Doesn’t need to be used for very long at a time
• Stops players from getting lost
• Stops players from inadvertently stumbling across enemies (or traps)
• A way to call out key items of interest (clues, etc)

I want players to use detective mode to plan their execution of the level, but then not need it during. We can probably allow players to freely toggle it and just design such that they don’t feel a need to, except for planning. I thought Assassin’s Creed did this pretty well with eagle vision; You use it initially to find and mark your target, then they remain marked outside of eagle vision and you can go hunt them down.

I’m thinking something similar. At the start of the level, you hit your detective mode key and start scouting around. You see where the enemies are, and maybe where some traps, key objectives, or environmental tools for you are. If the player wants, they can mark npcs. Marked npcs can be tracked by the player in the game itself somehow. Maybe a glowing orb visible through walls, a shimmer or outline, something noticeable but not too distracting, which shows the npc’s direction and movement.

It might make sense to limit the number of enemies the player can mark. Then you can play with that number throughout the game, maybe giving the player the ability to mark more targets at times. Care would have to be taken here to prevent the min/max use case of ‘use detective mode all the time’, so maybe skill progression (like dishonored tried) isn’t ideal here. More random, temporary bonuses from items, buffs, or something like that might be a better way to implement this, especially if it’s a “one time use” bonus. That way, the player can sometimes decide to take on some levels with more or less marks available, depending on how tricky they are finding it.

I’d want to play around with this system to see if that’s actually a better design or not, but I think it’s always good to explore these kinds of features when they become ubiquitous. It would be awesome to see some more varied takes on detective mode and get things to a place where detective mode feels like an integrated part of each game, rather than a copy/pasted quality of life feature.

Edit: I’ve since played Far Cry 3, which uses essentially this system. I thought it worked really well for large open areas, but would need some iteration to feel as good in tighter dishonored-style levels.