Dishonored 2: The Royal Conservatory No-kill Glitch

Still playing and, until now, thoroughly enjoying Dishonored 2. It may have been an error in judgement, but I decided to do my first play-through as a no-kill, no-spot, collect all the runes and bonecharms run. Unfortunately I, and many others, have hit something of a wall in Chapter 5: The Royal Conservatory.

[Minor Spoilers Ahead] The Conservatory has been overrun with witches. To beat the area without deaths, you must activate a machine that eliminates the witches powers. This can incorrectly result in some of the unconscious witches dying.

Apparently this can sometimes be rectified by determining exactly which witches won’t walk again and putting sleep darts in them before activating the device. Unfortunately this did not work for me as can be seen in the following video:

In my case, activating the machine results in four dead witches. After a significant, time-consuming search, I determined which four were dying and collected them in the burglars apartment. In my case this group included the two  would-be bushwhackers encountered outside of the Conservatory.

All four are resting comfortably on the floor and alive. Pull the switch and all four are dead. Reload and sleep dart the lot of them, then pull the switch. Now the statistics only show a single death, however examining the bodies directly show them all as dead.

Frustrating!

You can read more about this on this Steam Discussion. Harvey Smith of Arcane Studios has also acknowledged the bug in this Twitter thread. Here’s hoping for a quick and stable patch!

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  1. I’ve been screwing with this glitch for the last 2 days. In my case there are 2 Witches already dead in the basement of the Conservatory (even though after I pull the switch it only says 1 dead) I have tried every method from sleep darting them to sleep darting and moving them to moving them then sleep darting them etc… this is fing BS and I’m DONE screwing around wasting time! What realky sucks is that I absolutely LOVE the Dishonored franchise… Up until now that is!!! How could something like this get by the QC/QA team? Especially with a stealth game where the “No kills. Never seen” ghost run is so popular. It’s a game breaker/game ender for me and I want my $ back from Arcane!

    1. I finally ended up redoing the level. Happily(?) you can get to the “break point” within about 20-30 minutes – I did this without touching or alerting ANY of the witches and it “worked” – I was able to activate the device without a kill count. A few points:

      • I left the two witches outside the conservatory alone as well (these seem to be a sticking point for some people).
      • You MUST distract the witch atop the turtle in the courtyard (a stray bolt from an upper window will do it) or she’ll fall to her death.
      • Once the sabotaged machine is activated, all of the witches will go unconscious (some will actually disappear entirely), giving you free reign of the facility for looting.

      Of course, I didn’t get out COMPLETELY unscathed… although I found all of the bonecharms, my end-of-level stats claim I missed two. It did that on the following level as well. That’s a glitch I’ll wait for the next play-through to deal with, I guess.

      SUCH a wonderful, totally broken game! ;^)

      1. Try looting Breanna. She has two bonecharms on her after you knock her out. (You can’t choke her though, so sleep dart or stun mine)

        1. Cool, thanks! I would still (maybe petulantly) argue that them not showing up “in the heart” is a bug, but at least I know now that they actually exist!

          Despite several more frustrations (especially with Delilah at the end) I was able to successfully complete my “no kills, no sightings” playthrough. I’m still regretting the decision to do that FIRST, but it’s done.

          I have to go abroad for a few weeks – and may very well get distracted by “The Last Guardian” when I get back, but a high chaos, kill everybody run is just what I need to clean the slate, I think!

          Thanks again!

        2. Cool – thanks!

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