Dishonored 2's next update finally lets you replay missions

Dishonored 2’s second free update will launch later this month, introducing a pair of promised features to the stealth game. The game will finally get custom difficulty settings and a mission select option on Jan. 23, publisher Bethesda Softworks announced in a blog post.

Bethesda initially planned to include custom difficulty settings in the game’s first update, which came out in December. These will allow players to design their Dishonored 2 experiences based around just how much stealth they use throughout the game. There will be more than 20 different sliders to mess around with, which alter the effectiveness of things like leaning from behind a wall to scope out the enemy or knocking foes out with sleep darts.

There’s also a slider called Iron Mode, which players can choose when starting a new game. It will prevent them from ever manually saving or loading while also adding permadeath into the mix.

For those who just want to replay missions they’ve already completed, a mission select menu will allow them to choose and restart any level they’ve already played before. Harvey Smith, developer Arkane Studios’ co-creative director, promised not long after launch that the team would work to add a mission select to the game at a then-undisclosed later date.

The first Dishonored game let players replay missions from the start, and it sounds like Dishonored 2’s version will be similar. All progress made by the player up to the point they first played the mission will carry over in each subsequent replay, much like in the earlier game.

Some players were disappointed by the lack of mission replay when Dishonored 2 first launched. They instead had to rely on several manual saves if they wanted to retry a mission in the hopes of completing a perfectly “clean” run, finding all the collectibles or trying out different abilities, which could be frustrating.

That will change when the update hits Steam in beta on Jan. 18. The full version will launch on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One the following week, on Jan. 23. Check out our Game of the Year 2016 write-up for Dishonored 2 in the meantime; the game landed in seventh place on our list.