“How many whales still live in Dunwall?”
If you’ve ever wondered that, you might be the ideal player for Harvey Smith’s latest project Dishonored 2 . Even if you haven’t, odds are you’re aware of the first game in the series. Dishonored was an award-winning, breakout hit for Smith and the team at Arkane Studios.
It deserved to be. A genre-defining stealth action RPG with some incredible mechanics and a pitch perfect steampunk setting that also featured a fantastic ethics system. If you decided to solve problems violently you saw the chaos created by killing your enemies leave the world a black and mangled place. If you chose a sneakier, non-lethal path you left the game with Dunwall a better place than you’d found it.
Dishonored ’s design tapped into genuine emotion and connected with fans on a level that inspired the nerdery posed in the opening question. (No one really knows, btw. Smith is just tickled that people think about it.) For Smith, the Co-Creative Director at Arkane, there’s a type of player he keeps in mind when thinking about how to play Dishonored 2.
“The way writers have ideal readers, we have ideal players. For us the ideal player is trying to sneak and then when things go to shit they go hog wild. And that's when things get fun in a perverse kind of way, but then they go back to trying to sneak,” he told iDigitalTimes at Quakecon 2016. “It's just fun that the game lets you do both.”
In Dishonored , players could make their life-or-death judgments by using a little heart. Literally, a heart players carried in the game would reveal the motivations of the men and women around our hero, Corvo Attano, as he sought to avenge the death of his lover (and the woman The Heart came from) the Empress Jessamine Kaldwin.
“We had The Heart as a radar for runes and bone charms and that was cool ... but how do we make this more interesting? What if you could eavesdrop on the senses of people? Then it's like a spy tool,” Smith said.
The whispers players heard when they used The Heart on other people could reveal secrets and motivations they wouldn’t discover otherwise. Smith explained that it resulted in an obvious player behavior worth exploring.
“Last time people were playing the game with The Heart. they were deciding who to kill or not based on what The Heart said about them,” he said. “We just tried to listen to players and make it more nuanced this time.”
Imagine two people. One an elderly woman, breaking her back day in and day out as a landlord in a rundown tenement. The other, a haughty guard for the vile emperor who is well fed and full of life. The woman seems pitiful and meek and, if you had to kill one of them, you’d kill the guard. (Then reload the last checkpoint, kill the old woman and see what happens then too I know I know).
But if you used The Heart, you’d learn the old woman was secretly murdering her elderly tenants and taking their valuables, while the guard worked extra hard to support his family alongside two other poor families in his neighborhood. That kind of narrative subtlety isn’t just for the sake of Dishonored 2 ’s story and is part of a more complex mechanic.
“For the new game we've deepened a lot of those systems around that. We have different weightings with people in the world. You have to use The Heart and listen to what it says and discern which is which, but people now can be sympathetic or guilty or murderous. Those are the three states and they have different weights,” he said. “There’s a difference between those two people. And so we weight them differently.”
For players, ideal or otherwise, this kind of complex environmental/ethical mash-up is likely to be at the core of what could make Dishonored 2 a stand-out game in 2016. Sure, the gameplay mechanics already sound great, but those nagging “what ifs?” will be what get you to pick up the controller again and again and again. Don't’ forget about the whales, either.
Dishonored 2 is scheduled for release on Xbox One, PS4 and PC on November 11, 2016.
