Bethesda and Arkane Studios still have a lot to give fans of Dishonored 2 open-ended stealth gameplay. Come January 23, the game’s second major update will go live on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, bringing with it a plethora of options for those looking for some added challenge while traversing the city of Karnaca. Those of you on PC can look forward to putting the patch through its paces early on January 18 by way of the Steam beta program, which includes custom difficulty settings.
Rather than offer multiple different levels of difficulty (those are present too, by the way), Update 2 will mark the implementation of over 20 different sliders that allow players to tweak gameplay to their own tastes. Examples provided by Bethesda on its news post are the ability to adjust how long it takes for Sleep Darts to run their course on enemies to how effective Corvo and Emily are at staying hidden while peeking over cover.
Straddling the line between challenging and masochistic, Update 2 will also see the arrival of Iron Mode. Aside from taking away the ability to manually save or load your progress, being killed in Iron Mode will result in your chosen character suffering a permanent death. If you cherish your free time, this one’s probably not for you. Nonetheless, its inclusion is nice for those that perhaps thought the vanilla game was too easy.
Finally, the frequently requested option to replay specific missions will be included in the bumper update. Update 2 comes off the back of Arkane’s first post-launch patch for Dishonored 2, which introduced New Game Plus mode. Arkane has yet to announce any DLC plans for Dishonored 2, but we suspect such things aren’t far off now.
Stay tuned.