Dishonored 2 returns with double the trouble for those who threaten the throne at Dunwall Tower
When Arkane Studios unleashed Dishonored into the world in 2012, everything about its creation defied expectations. Conventional wisdom said if a publisher is debuting a new title in the summer, it should make the announcement at E3. Instead, Bethesda revealed Dishonored to the world a month after the yearly showcase on the cover of Game Informer. Conventional wisdom argued making a single-player focused game was madness in an age where multiplayer was taking over. But Dishonored shunned competitive and cooperative play altogether to focus on a simulation-driven, emergent fantasy of playing a supernatural assassin who, unconventionally, doesn’t need to kiljl to complete his missions. Conventional wisdom also claimed releasing a new intellectual property late in the console cycle was a death sentence - how can you stand a chance when you’re standing toe-to-toe with a field of well-seasoned sequels? Dishonored came out seven years after the debut of the Xbox 360 and more than stood its ground. It thrived.
The stealth-action hybrid debuted to near universal critical praise, earning a Metacritic rating of 91 on PC and in the high 80s on consoles. The game also defied Bethesda’s sales expectations. A month after release, Bethesda VP of PR and marketing Pete Hines said, “We clearly have a new franchise.”
Arkane teased its plans for Dishonored 2 with an impressive video at last year’s Bethesda Showcase, revealing that the studio’s impulse to give the middle finger to convention is alive and well. The helpless child and heir to the throne from the first game, Emily Kaldwin, is all grown up. After a coup drives her out of Dunwall, the Empress follows in the silent-but-deadly footsteps of her father, Corvo Attano, to reclaim her rightful place as Empire of the Isles’ ruler.
We journeyed to the company headquarters in Lyon, France, to see Dishonored 2 in action for the first time and learn how Arkane’s approach to game design has evolved for its unconventional sequel that asks players to shape the future of the Empire of the Isles. Do you paint the walls red with the blood of the usurpers, or break the circle of violence and find another path to peace? And who acts as your instrument of vengeance - Corvo or Emily?
15 YEARS LATER…
Moving away from Corvo Attano in only the second game of the series seems like a peculiar decision considering how beloved he is to Dishonored fans. His impressive skills, badass-looking mask, and the mystery surrounding his background and how he got close enough to Empress Jessamine Kaldwin to father the heir to the throne all makes for a compelling action hero. Striking gold twice on a hit character seems like a chance Arkane didn’t have to take, but the studio had its reasons.
A few months after Dishonored’s celebrated release, the creative leadership group at Arkane started thinking about directions it could take the series in the future. Creative directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith kept returning to one character in particular: Emily.
“We couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to this 10-year-old girl that you were protecting in the first game, whose mind and actions were being altered by your play style,” Smith says. “People thought she would be an annoying child character, but the way her drawings changed and her voice lines changed based on how people were playing resonated. When you come back from a murderous spree and she’s drawing black crayon disturbed drawings, it changed the way people played; they started to consider the moral consequences of her actions.”
Building off this feedback, the designers asked themselves what Emily would be like 15 years later. Apparently, she’s much more dangerous than your typical empress.
“Part of our background fiction is that Corvo is a little paranoid about protecting his daughter,” Smith says. “After the assassination of Jessamine Kaldwin during the rat plague, Corvo decides that Emily needs his training. He says, ‘Someday people will come at you with knives, and I want you to be ready.’ So Emily spends the next 15 years training on and off with Corvo. And Emily is a character who loves going out at night and running along the rooftops of Dunwall much more than she enjoys being an empress and listening about a trade dispute.”
That training comes in handy when dissidents successfully pull off a coup d’état. Emily escapes the bloody fate of her mother, but loses her seat of power. After growing up in a place of privilege, she is now on the run and mingling with the very people her sweeping decisions have been affecting on a daily basis. Players can assume the role of Emily Kaldwin to exact her revenge and reclaim the throne, or once again task Corvo with the same job. Either choice you make, at a high level the game plays out essentially the same.
When fans found out they could play Dishonored 2 from the perspective of Emily Kaldwin, they were overwhelmingly positive. “The response was stunning for us,” Smith says.
With two playable characters, you might assume Arkane has plans for cooperative play. It does not, which is something that Smith says should be emphasized in all caps. “Our game is about observation, stealth, taking your time, and playing at your own pace,” Smith says. “Co-op would destroy it. Maybe there is a way somebody could do it, but this is not that experience.”
Given that Emily and Corvo each have unique weapon tuning, assassinations, supernatural abilities, and emotional reactions to the story that unfolds, Arkane is essentially making two unique ways to play through the game. Why undertake this expensive endeavor given the knowledge that a vast majority of players will probably only play through the game once?
“If you make all your decisions based on what you think is selling well, you end up with this kind of indistinct mess,” Smith says. “Whereas if you go with what is in your heart as a gamer… that’s kind of how we think. It doesn’t make financial sense, but counterintuitively that’s how you get rewarded financially. When [From Software] made Demon’s Souls, it broke every rule that a triple-A publisher would tell you was smart thinking at that moment, and it launched this franchise and this team. We think similarly. There is a lot of our game that nobody sees. We’re throwing away huge amounts of work from that perspective. But from our perspective, that’s what makes it special – the fact that as you proceed through the game you constantly have this sense that it’s much bigger than what you’re doing.”
Dishonored 2 begins and ends with missions in Dunwall, which has a much different atmosphere than it did in the first game. The Walls of Light and Tallboys are gone, and with the plague neutralized many abandoned parts of the city have been revitalized. But the majority of the game takes place in the southernmost region of the Empire of the Isles – the Serkonan city of Karnaca.
THE POWER OF A KALDWIN
Our first glimpse at Dishonored 2 picks up somewhere during the first third of the game. It begins in typical Dishonored fashion, with a boat rowing up to an inconspicuous dock in Karnaca. The face sitting across from Emily is familiar – the natural philosopher Anton Sokolov, who helped Piero Joplin discover the cure for the rat plague. The years have thinned his hair and whitened his beard, but he’s still imparting wisdom to the Empress.
This region of the city is known as the Dust District, given its name because of the hazy plumes of silver dust that nearby mines kick across the area. The power-mad Duke of Serkonos is currently driving production at twice the normal capacity to fund a war with the northern islands of Tyvia and Morley, which has had dire consequences for this blue-collar part of the city formerly known as Batista. Sokolov says the dust has driven off most of its inhabitants. Emily quips about the duke not caring whose lives he ruins as long as he sips from silver cups, to which Sokolov replies, “And what are the cups in Dunwall Tower made from, Empress?”
Emily is here to find the office of Aramis Stilton, a former prince of industry in Karnaca. Sokolov tells Emily to meet up with a compatriot named Meagan Foster to figure out a way to gain entrance and perhaps find some useful information to use against the duke.
Graffiti lines the nearby walls after Emily disembarks, proclaiming “the crownkiller is watching.” Perhaps Emily is assumed dead by some? Moving out of the dock area, Emily turns a corner and gets a beautiful glimpse of the crescent-island city below. The view of the bay is breathtaking, but we’re not heading toward the city center below just yet. Emily continues cautiously to her left, being careful to avoid the glances of the Grand Serkonan Guards stationed nearby. The guards gripe about losing too many good men to a gang called the Howlers and the Abbey of the Everyman, who are having a territorial dispute in the cordoned-off district.
Massive, wooden windbreaks line the facades of large buildings to protect them from the forceful gales barreling down on the district. They can also be used by nimble climbers to reach high vertical spaces. Emily skirts the environment and shows off her Far Reach power to quickly scale a nearby building. Arkane says verticality is a much larger factor in Dishonored 2, and like Corvo’s Blink, Far Reach is Emily’s tool for quickly moving around the environment. Unlike Blink, however, it is not a teleportation power; Emily physically moves to the new location, which means enemies can spot her.
Emily vaults to the top of a fan directly overlooking the patrol below and jumps to perform a drop assassination, but this one has a twist. Instead of lodging a sword in the enemy’s neck, Emily merely incapacitates the target, using his body to soften her landing.
The other guards take notice, and in this short encounter we see several new mechanics at play. Guards are now smart enough to vault and scale obstacles, ensuring they can bring the attack to the player. It doesn’t help this group, however, because after a quick slide assassination, some explosive crossbow shots, and a Far Reach upgrade skill that allows Emily to grab a nearby canister of whale oil and whip it at an enemy for a quick kill (think Daud’s Pull power from The Knife of Dunwall DLC), she’s already on her way to the rendezvous point with Foster.
From the safety of a building, Foster breaks down the lay of the land. With the Howlers and Abbey at war, players have several options at their disposal. You could kill the Howler leader and bring his body to the Vice Overseer to gain entrance to Stilton’s office, do vice versa, kill them both and muscle your way in, find an off-the-beaten-path, non-lethal solution, or try to crack the code of the ridiculously hard-to-solve Jindosh lock on the front door (which Arkane says has 100 million possible configurations). The choice rests with the player.
Leaving the building, Emily enters a neutral zone inhabited by Karnacan civilians, one of several of these types of spaces coming to Dishonored 2 where players can get a better sense of the city. By interacting with the denizens, the player may learn more about the city and perhaps discover that secret passage into Stilton’s office. Instead, Emily chooses the bolder measure and ventures into the region guarded by the Abbey.
Moving cautiously, Emily comes across an Abbey executioner standing before a blindfolded man who is reading off the man’s litany of crimes before sentencing him to death. She interrupts the proceedings by using Far Reach to yank the executioner to her – another high-level upgrade to the base power.
The ensuing fight against the nearby Abbey guards showcases another useful combat enhancement. After staggering an enemy, you can put them in a choke hold. From here you can use them as a shield, assassinate them, or incapacitate them for non-lethal players. This recurring mention of new non-lethal options is no accident; Arkane heard the criticisms about the underdeveloped stealth options in the original game, and is taking measures to ensure it offers just as much variety as the combat-centric experience. This applies both to regular combat and the supernatural powers that both Corvo and Emily wield.
Moving into the Vice Overseer’s building, Emily uses another of her unique powers, Mesmerize, to put three enemies in a momentary stunned, dreamlike state. While they are distracted, she can move quickly through the space undeterred. Bloodthirsty players could also take this opportunity to add to their body count.
In the next room she finds one guard sleeping on a bed while another tends to a boiling pot. After incapacitating the chef, she places him on a bunk next to the other dozing solider. No one will be the wiser about his condition.
Emily moves up the stairs and locates Vice Overseer Byrne in an office with four other Abbey guards. Byrne is giving a presentation with a projector, talking about his bigger plans for the Abbey, which run against the grain of his relationship with the Duke of Serkonos.
This is the perfect scenario to showcase another of Emily’s extraordinary powers: Domino. This upgraded ability allows her to link up to four people together. While sharing this supernatural bond, whatever happens to one character happens to the rest of them. In this instance, Emily links the four guards together, creates a distraction to lead one away from the rest, and places a stun mine that goes off when he gets near enough. The result? Four incapacitated enemies lying on the ground.
“I think Domino is one of the most open-ended powers,” says lead designer Dinga Bakaba. “It’s also a QA nightmare, as you can imagine.” This can be a particularly intriguing power to combine with others. For instance, you could summon another Emily using the Doppelganger power, Domino three high-end enemies to her, and assassinate the doppelganger to clear the room of heavies.
Taking out the guards all at once gives Emily the window she needs to move on to the Vice Overseer, and she uses the predatory Shadow Walk ability to move in close for the kill. This skill, first seen in the E3 trailer, lets Emily slink in the shadows and squeeze into tight spaces. Making a lethal strike cancels the power, but this can be upgraded so you can chain more kills together.
With the fatal blow struck, Emily must deliver the body to the Howler leader, Paolo. While navigating to Howler territory, a dynamic windstorm suddenly comes out of nowhere. These storms rage with a persistent, horn-like sound echoing through the buildings and heavy clouds of silver dust lowering visibility. Since enemies have diminished hearing and vision, players can gain the upper hand by using Dark Vision to stalk the foes or simply navigate quickly through a patrolled space as Emily does here.
Once Emily reaches the Howler region of the city, she can rest easy and walk down the street without fear of reprisal. This is only because she is carrying the Vice Overseer on her shoulder; should she drop him off somewhere, all the Howlers would view her as a threat and attack.
Entering the Crone’s Hand Saloon that serves as the Howler base, Emily drops the body of the Vice Overseer on the bar in front of Paolo, who takes a swig of booze in appreciation for the gift he has received. He says he has been trying to bring down Byrne for months, and that a lot more is at stake in this conflict than just territory. Paolo muses he plans to send the body to Dunwall and explain things to the High Overseer and the Empress herself. Emily says if the Howlers do come into power, she hopes Paolo will conduct himself better than the duke has. He says she can count on it, hinting at the reformation possibilities at the disposal of players as they reclaim Emily’s rule.
The demo concludes with Emily going upstairs to Paolo’s office and coming across an Outsider Shrine. As she picks up the rune, she is transported into the Void and comes face to face with the Outsider.
“We’ve revamped the Void,” Smith says. “It’s much more impressive now and more dynamic. And we’ve updated the Outsider – we give you more insight into his history.”
AN UNINTENDED HOMECOMING
Should players choose to tap Corvo for this revenge mission instead of Emily, the grizzled Lord Protector returns to the city of his birth. The homecoming is fitting considering players are also returning to the familiar array of supernatural powers from the first game. In a second playthrough of the same mission from Corvo’s perspective, we see firsthand how his powers have expanded and evolved.
We also immediately notice one other big change to the stealth maestro: He now has a voice.
“One of the things people said about the first game was because Corvo was a silent protagonist, he felt a little cold and you never were sure how he felt about things emotionally,” Smith says. “Somebody would say something and he would just be flat. We really embraced that piece of fan feedback, that they wanted more emotional engagement.”
The voice behind the grizzled assassin should sound familiar to fans of stealth games considering Arkane landed Stephen Russell, the actor who voiced Garrett in the original Thief.
“Raf and I talked about how cool it would be to work with Stephen Russell because we’re big Thief fans,” Smith says. “Waiting until Dishonored 2, which takes place 15 years later, it means that Stephen Russell is even more appropriate in a way because he has that gravelly action-hero voice but with more thought behind it. You can feel his age in the voice; you can feel he’s very seasoned as Corvo.”
Akrane uses Corvo’s playthrough to demonstrate more of the myriad paths players can take through the Dust District. Like the levels in the original game, observant players can find new avenues to their objectives. No paths are arbitrarily locked to Corvo or Emily; each can reach any area of a level.
Corvo ventures into a building infested with bloodflies, a parasitic insect that is harmless in small numbers but comes at you in lethal swarms when you get near the fleshy nests they burrow into corpses. A human nest keeper is tending to the various nests in the area, and Corvo remarks he’s never seen the bloodflies this bad. They react to noise, movement, and speed, so moving cautiously is advised.
Corvo has other plans, sicking two swarms of rats on the nest keeper (one of the expanded uses of Devouring Swarm) and then using Bend Time to advance time while the rat swarm is on the nest keeper to do him in.
“Bend Time level one just slowed things down, which was this cool kind of ballet of motion,” Smith says. “Bend Time II is much more useful; it stops time altogether. But sometimes you wish that you could still advance it a little.” That led to the team creating this upgrade to the power, which gives players the ability to fast-forward small chunks of time.
Then we see another evolution of a classic power in action as Corvo uses Possession in a new way, chaining possessions from rat to bloody fly to move around the room quickly. You can even upgrade the power to possess corpses this time around, which still have enough of a nervous system to allow you to peer from their perspective or just allude pursuit by playing dead.
These three enhancements are just a few of the ways Corvo’s powers are changing in Dishonored 2. Arkane has devised a new approach to upgrades that gives players more options when upgrading both Corvo and Emily’s abilities.
“In Dishonored, you had a power and an upgrade to the power,” Smith says. “For what we were trying at the time, that was the right call I think. But after talking to thousands of Dishonored players over the past few years, one of the things we really wanted to do was branch out all of the powers into a tree. You can take the power and express in the direction of non-lethal or stealth.”
Bakaba says every power-upgrade tree is different; some go in a straight line and then branch, and others fan out wide from the start.
Arkane also tweaked some powers to make them more effective right out of the gate. For example, players can use Blink to assassinate enemies through glass windows, and Dark Vision has been streamlined to be less invasive visually while still giving players the ability to identify threats. When you use Dark Vision it pulses three times, each time sending out a sphere of coverage. When you move, the next pulse happens from your new position, causing the spheres to overlap and give you a wider snapshot of the threats in your surroundings.
As the second demo concludes, we ask if players will gain new insight into Corvo’s past considering we are in his hometown.
“There’s a fine line here,” Smith says. “With Dishonored, one of the things that people liked was that we didn’t answer all of the questions. We left an air of mystery. Yet at the same time one of the things people asked for was the answer to those mysteries. It’s kind of like the TV show Lost or The X-Files. The reason you are watching is because you don’t know, and as soon as you’re satisfied – the couple you’re interested in kisses – then it’s sort of over. We had to find a way to give people some of the answers they wanted, but ask new questions. So yes, you’re going to find out more about Corvo.”
WIDENING THE SCOPE
Though it looks and feels quite different, the largely abandoned, derelict Dust District is reminiscent of the sparely populated regions of plague-ravaged Dunwall. Arkane promises the game isn’t a series of industrial ruins, but will take players to many different locations throughout Karnaca.
One of those places is the impossible looking Clockwork Mansion from the debut trailer. Arkane lives by the philosophy that if they show something in a trailer, players have to be able to do it in the game. We got a brief glimpse of this location, which due to its many different configurations looks like a designer and playtester’s nightmare. “Several of our new missions are massive headaches,” Smith jokes.
The rooms pull apart and reconfigure at the pull of a lever, giving players access to new parts of the mansion. Savvy players can also use Blink or Far Reach to access the inner mechanizations behind the mutating rooms.
Arkane is embracing challenges like this both with the level design and meta game. In Dishonored, some complained that the chaos system was too binary; if you killed a lot of people you got the “bad” ending, and if you were sparing in your bloodshed you got the “good” one. Smith hopes the new approach to calculating chaos will alleviate some of that frustration.
“We wanted to make sure that this time there was more variance in that,” Smith says.
“We weight people differently now based on some things, and you can use the Heart in the game to assess more about the morality. Then they have a different weighting that influences chaos more or less.”
Players also have more agency in framing the ending via their actions throughout the game, as evidenced by the possible outcomes over who rules the Dust District in the playthrough we witnessed. “There are many endgames this time, and many variations on those endgames, that drive the outcome of the game based on who you empower in your wake,” Smith says. Coupled with the high and low variations of those, players can directly shape the trajectory of the Empire of the Isles.
TWO TRAJECTORIES, ONE GOAL
Combined with the prospect of going through the game with the perspective of the other playable character, the wider variety of outcomes could possibly encourage more gamers than the hardcore to do something unconventional – play through the story more than once. Fans of Emily and Corvo may feel they have no choice, as once you select your playable character, the other is left on the sidelines for the vast majority of the game.
Before we leave Arkane Studios, I ask the team who they think players will gravitate to on their first playthrough. They aren’t convinced they know the answer.
“It’s going to be super interesting to watch how people choose,” Smith says. “Are more gamers going to choose Corvo because they know him from before and want to hear what his voice sounds like? Are they going to choose Emily because they are excited about the new character? Or is it going to break down by gender lines? I just don’t know.”
We’ll all have to wait to find out until after Dishonored 2 comes out this November.
Creating Karnaca
Dishonored’s emergent gameplay earned much of the praise when it released, but its painterly art style conceptualized by Victor Antonov and Sebastien Mitton also captured admiration from critics, developers, and fans alike. Now a creative consultant for Bethesda as a whole, Antonov is less involved with Dishonored, but Mitton is still leading the charge as art director and has grand ambitions.
“The art of Dishonored 2 is a knife in the neck of generic sequels,” Mitton says.
To bring this vision to life, Mitton has enlisted the help of several talented European artists like Sergey Kolesov and Piotr Jablonski. The art team’s process is comprehensive, involving sketching, painting, sculpture, photography, and eventually culminating in animation.
Designing a new setting for Dishonored 2 doesn’t just start with dropping down buildings and citizens into a blank canvas. The artists first think anthropologically and politically, asking questions like who the first settlers were, which foreign powers took up residency in the region, and how the various tides of culture have left an imprint on the city over the course of several decades.
With the fictional history outlined, the team painstakingly designs everything from the furniture and architecture to fashion stylings of the multicultural Karnacan populace. The inspiration the team draws from during this process is not from other video games, but history itself and the work of master artists hanging in museums across the globe. “For us, art is not graphics,” Mitton says. “Too many people judge the visuals of a game focusing only on polygon count, shaders, and technology… If your design is weak, you will fail, and your graphics won’t save anything.”
That being said, Arkane has also increased its capacity for generating better graphics. Unsatisfied with the dated rendering tech used to make Dishonored, the studio invested in a new technology base dubbed the Void Engine. Using id Tech as a foundation, the engineers designed a new platform that can handle the unique visual style of Dishonored, which rests somewhere between realistic lighting and an impressionistic world, while at the same time servicing the unique needs of a game that lives and dies on player agency and emergent experiences.
The resulting work is unique and impressive. In contrast to the heavily industrial, U.K.-inspired Dunwall, Karnaca calls to mind tropical islands and sunny Southern European cities. A dense forest and sharp ridges cover the majority of the island, and the city runs along the crescent shaped shoreline.
Though the city largely feels like a real place, fantastical elements also color the setting. A monolithic mountain looms over Karnaca. The giant peak is cleft in two, with the gap funneling wind toward the coastal city. The Karnacans have harnessed these gales to power the city, funneling the wind through the use of long, stilted pipes that rise above the city buildings. Touches like this and the Clockwork Soldiers seen in the E3 demo give the city just enough unfamiliarity to make it feel unique.
Stealth Your Way
One of the challenging things about designing a game around player agency and emergent gameplay is that not everyone walks away with the same impression of difficulty. While some found Dishonored to be very hard or just right, a small percentage of hardcore fans who mastered Corvo’s various powers found the game to be exceptionally easy. For Dishonored 2, Arkane Studios is introducing an array of sliders to let players determine how hard or easy they want the game to be. For instance, players can tweak how visible they are when crouching behind cover and peeking around the corner. “It might still change because we’re in pre-beta, but currently we’re still constantly making the base game slightly more challenging just because you have more tools,” says lead designer Dinga Bakaba.
Dishonored 2 also introduces quick saves and quick loads to all versions of the game, alongside a checkpoint system so less mindful players don’t lose long segments of progress.
Speaking of player-governed experiences, one of the biggest fan requests in the Dishonored forums is mods. When we ask creative director Harvey Smith about whether or not Arkane has plans to support user creation, he says, “We can’t talk about our plans in that area just yet.”
A Dreadful Home Away From Home
After each mission in Dishonored, Corvo returned to the Hound Pits Pub. The sequel has a similar mechanic, but instead of going to a mainland hub, either Emily or Corvo take up residency in a smuggler’s freighter known as the Dreadful Wale.
This rickety 1850s style vessel may be a far cry from the opulence of Dunwall Tower, but it serves its purpose. Here players can interact with ship captain Meagan Foster, Anton Sokolov, or other characters who make occasional appearances. Players can also upgrade their quarters based on what they’ve done and found in the world.
The Assassins’ Tools
Corvo didn’t need a vast array of weaponry to exact his revenge on Jessamine’s killers in Dishonored. Combined with his supernatural powers granted by The Outsider, all he needed to get the job done was a pistol, sword, and crossbow. This same basic loadout returns in Dishonored 2 for both characters, but Arkane Studios is embracing differentiation between Corvo and Emily.
While each wields the same three types of weapons, each looks different. Given that Emily is an Empress, her weapons show the craftsmanship you would expect for a person of her stature. Players can upgrade the gear by visiting the various black-market shops found throughout Karnaca. Spend enough capital improving your weapon, and you can eventually unlock one of the masterwork versions. Players must choose between an endgame upgrade for each. For instance, if Emily chooses the Red Siblings masterwork, her gun will shoot in bursts of three, which is enough firepower to take down multiple enemies at once if they are positioned close enough. Corvo and Emily both have unique masterwork varieties to the weapons that you cannot unlock with the other character.