Dishonored - Half Life 2 meets Deus Ex, Dark Messiah and lots of rats

Dishonored’s foreboding city of Dunwall bears more than a passing resemblance to Half Life’s iconic City 17. Arkane Studio’s new first-person, action adventure, blends steam-punk design with more traditional 17th century architecture to create a familiar, yet unique look and a semi open-world design that boasts many impressive landmarks.

The similarity to City 17 is quite deliberate as art director for Half Life 2, Viktor Antonov, also worked on the setting for Dishonored. However, this new title is a re-imaging of London in the 1600's and doesn’t depict the post-Soviet harbor city of Half Life 2, which featured mostly Eastern European architecture. Here, structures are more Western European in style - yet Half Life 2’s influences are clear as you stumble across a harbour, cobbled streets and abandoned alleyways.

Taking place in the midst of a fictional industrial revolution, Dunwall is a rat-infested city that is the grips of a plague epidemic. Nonetheless, it’s still teeming with life as bowler-hatted gents go about their daily business trading in Dunwall's most precious commodity, Whale Oil. Each day they run the risk of being hunted down by a pack of hungry rats, who will pursue anyone that gets too close, before feasting on their skin and leaving nothing but a pile of bones lying in the street. There is a hostile atmosphere on the streets of Dunwall, born from a clever mix of haunting audio, moody visuals and the disgusting rat-infestation. That anxiety looks to be intensified by a fusion of slick stealth play and intense action combat.

In Dishonored, players step into the role of Corvo, a bodyguard falsely accused of the murder of his beloved Empress. By becoming a supernatural assassin he seeks revenge and justice on those who killed his mistress. Judging by the first ever demo, gameplay will largely involve gathering Intel to clear your name, while attempting to assassinate a number of high-profile targets. The mission we’ve seen, for example, tasks you with taking out a lawyer who is heavily guarded and locked away in a fortified mansion. Okay, so the storyline and kind of missions we’ll end up involved in do seem rather generic, but Dishonored is all about giving you choice - and the open-world design, multi-layer environments and weapon/power variety enables you to tackle these missions in a variety of ways. In fact, with Harvey Smith of Deus Ex fame on board, it’s clear that this inspiration may well have been taken from the popular RPG series.

You can, for example, play the game entirely without killing anyone for a slower-paced, strategic experience that requires use of the environment and shadows to sneak past people. Playing stealthily also involves executing enemies silently and then hiding their dead bodies out of the way so that other guards aren't alerted to your presence. Or you can, if you wish, use your array of sorcery powers and more traditional weapons to attack enemies head-on for a more aggressive play-style. Alternatively, you might opt for a combination of both – the choice is entirely yours.

Abilities, such as super jumps and increased agility, allow you to traverse the city with a free-flowing parkour style, while powers such as teleportation and a rat shape-shifting ability allows you to access areas otherwise impossible to reach. These supernatural powers sit alongside a range of other abilities such as bullet-time and more offense-based powers that allow you to use sorcery in a similar vein to Dark Messiah Might And Magic - another top tier title that Arkane Studios has previously worked on.


The Chaos system serves to compliment each player’s style too, and depending on whether you side with stealth or combat, the branching storyline arcs in that direction and the gameplay follows suit. This might, for example, make for a more aggressive enemy A.I. if you try and blast your way through. However, the latest gameplay demo really shows Dishonored’s strength as a stealth game, with a lot of sneaking around in the shadows and watching enemy A.I. behaviour before sneaking past unnoticed or committing a stealth kill. The influence of Dark Messiah Of Might and Magic is clear when indulging directly in combat, but creeping across roof-tops and working out the best way to break into the fortified mansion is more in line with the brilliant Thief series.

Dishonored is still early in its development phase, but what we’ve seen so far is encouraging. The Half Life 2 inspired locations, the sneaky Thief-style gameplay, and the hard-hitting visual spectacle of the Dark Messiah of Might and Magic-type sorcery looks to be a great combination. It’s also going to be interesting whether the rats that flood the city streets and play an integral role in the game bring something different to the genre, or just out to be plain annoying.

Source: Dishonored - Half Life 2 meets Deus Ex, Dark Messiah and lots of rats -- PlayStation Universe

RPS: It must be pretty hard work showing off a game like that at a show like Gamescom, trying to convey any of the nuance and possibility in 20 minutes when half the people there just want to see all the guns and violence…

Raphael Colantonio: [Laughs] and then we show something slow…

Harvey Smith: Well, at least Bethesda have darkened rooms where the sound of the show is somewhat muffled. It is interesting, because putting together a demo that’s consistent every time is actually a little difficult for us. Because the whole run is that something goes wrong and you improvise, right? And that doesn’t work as well if you have to do demos over and over all day. But it is cool, because we’ve been in places before where you’re just out on the floor, people are screaming y’know? If you’re going to make a game like this, it’s better inside, in the dark.

 

RPS: The sense of improvisation was what I most got it from it – that bit where [Raf] came out from the assassination kill and all the alarms had gone off, there were turrets and stilt-walkers around and you had to crazily dash out of there using all these different powers, apparently just making it up as you went along.


Raphael Colantonio: Yeah. Actually, we’ve decided we’re going to take a bit of a risk now, because we’ve done the demo 20 times and we’ve always done it the same way. So now we’ve said ‘how about we play it differently every time now?’ It’s kind of crazy, but it’s the point of the game as well – it’s a pain in the ass for us, because the game is supposed to be different every time, but we always show it the same way. So we’re going to break it now.


RPS: You’re concentrating on a fairly violent path in what you’ve shown so far. Is it definitely possible to kill absolutely no-one – to not even do the assassination at the end?

Raphael Colantonio: Oh, yeah.

 

Harvey Smith: So, an interesting thing about the game is that, in the missions, it’s made so you can be extremely high Chaos and it’s fun, or extremely low Chaos and if you like sneaking it’ll be fun. And then for the key targets in the game, your missions, you’re giving alternate outcomes that the thorough player can trigger. The truth is about this demo is that it’s not a true piece of the game, actually, it’s a separate thing made from pieces of the game. We made it as a proof of alpha, and it has little pieces all over the place and it’s custom content… We used pieces of it everywhere. But it’s very representative of the missions that we actually have, but we’ll reveal those later.


RPS: I’ve been told you guys are planning to go dark on the game for a little while after this?

Harvey Smith: We would like to.


Raphael Colantonio: Six months, maybe.



RPS: Does that imply there are an awful lot more ideas you’ve yet to show, or even make?

Harvey Smith: What’s funny is the game’s systems are mostly done, and the art direction is fixed. What we’re doing at this point is layering the level design, playing through, playing through, iterating. Iterating on the Chaos system and the actions to Chaos.


RPS: It’s sort of amazing that we’ve suddenly got several immersive sims on the horizon from big publishers – Deus Ex 3 is out in a few days – given a few years back we thought we’d heard their death knell. What’s changed, as you see it?

Raphael Colantonio: We do discuss that, there are tons of theories. My theory is really that those games have failed a lot in the past, for whatever reason it is, and surprisingly a game like BioShock comes out and makes money, is a hit, and is recognised as ‘hey, you know what? There are alternatives to the standard games.’ And then Fallout 3 comes out and makes even more money, and then we’re like ‘hey, that means that the industry and publishers are ready to go with bets.’ Which is awesome. Bethesda always knew it, so for us it was great to work with them.


RPS: Is there a conscious line you’re aware you probably shouldn’t cross, in terms of how complex and unusual the game can be, if you’re to reach a big, populist audience?

 

Raphael Colantonio: Well, be beautiful.

Harvey Smith: Yeah, you’ve seen our game, and it doesn’t look like we compromised in how terms of how odd the world is. It’s not sequel, it’s not in any location you’ve ever seen before, it goes full-on into a first-person combat system, first-person melee, and it goes full-on into the stealth system, darkness and light perception, the Chaos, there’s three different ways you can upgrade your character. There’s a lot of mobility options in this non-linear level design approach that we have, so it’s pretty much a dream game for us, honestly. To be working on it is gratifying.


Raphael Colantonio: Yeah, but the thing we realise also is that this kind of game, no matter who they are, for people it’s the art that sells, that makes people first attracted to any game. So I think in the past a lot of these kinds of games have been more like ‘oh, what about the depth and then the presentation doesn’t matter so much?’ I think it does matter, for everybody. We all want pretty things.


[Raf has to leave for another demo at this point]
Harvey Smith: And so our team not only has game designers that get this kind of game, but also art director Sebastien Mitton and Viktor Antonov – getting those guys for our team was a huge win, because we knew ‘this is a solved problem now.’ Going forward, as much as this type of game is our religion, and stealth and RPG features presented from first-person are our religion, for those guys it’s all industrial design and palettes and things like that, and it’s fantastic. Most of the teams I’ve worked on have been design-focused, or I’ve been at the wrong place and it’s been production-focused, but Arkane is very design-focused and art-focused. It is an amazing confluence of events, because actually our programming team is very strong too – so performance, and running on all the platforms internally, is the focus of the company. So we feel like we have strength in all the areas right now, including publisher-side, which is not always true. So we have somebody who understands, they’ve had great success by trusting creative, who get first-person with depth, so it’s like ‘wow. Pinch me!’

RPS: Does that developer supergroup mentality, where everyone’s got big ideas and pedigree, mean it’s that much harder for one side or the other to compromise? For instance, you’ve got the art guys making this amazing-looking city, then the design guys having players potentially spend half their time only seeing pavements and tunnels within it.

Harvey Smith: It’s an ongoing struggle, in a good way. We’re used to that – Raf and I are co-directing the project, and that brings its own inter-personnel issues. We agree like 85% of the time anyway, but y’know… Then Viktor and Sebastien Mitton have to get on the same page, and then those guys as an art group, we have to get on the same page as them, and then our lead level designer who worked on BioShock 2 and Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah leads the level team – and he has to get on the same page with all of us. And it is a struggle, because let’s say the artists set up a room, and it’s a nice dining room with a very long table in an aristocratic home. They want to put 16 chairs around the table, right? And we want features like ‘well, I want to mantle up onto the table, or I could move close to it and crouch under it, bump the chairs they make noise and a guard might come in…’ but maybe that’s too many chairs for the performance of that level. Especially if you have multiple dining rooms like that.



So from the artists’ perspectives they want the chairs, and from the programming perspective maybe the chairs need to be not dynamic, and from our perspective it’s yes we want it to perform well, and yes we want it to look great, but we feel like it needs to be dynamic. So it’s an ongoing thing – every step of the way it’s negotiation, basically.

RPS: I’ve got a comedy image of someone storming out the room because they could only get 15 chairs in.


Harvey Smith: Haha, yeah, totally. Because we say things like ‘can’t we get away with four chairs around the table?’ and the art director face-palms and says ‘no! It will not look like a dining room!’


RPS: I guess he’s right, but on top of that you’ve got however the player might see it. They’ll probably not even think about the chairs or what the room evokes, because they’re too busy trying to do something you didn’t even plan for, like stealing food from the table.

Harvey Smith: Right, or can I crouch here under the table and not make any noise, because my intent here was to hide but moving the chairs makes a noise?



RPS: The rats are an unusual motif: you’re kind of subverting something that games usually treat as throwaway enemies. Was that something you planned on?

 

Harvey Smith: No, it’s very organic actually. We started making the game, and the plague is a very bad thing in the game – it killed half the population, it’s tied to the story – and at some point we said ‘what can we do to symbolise the plague?’ There’s piles of dead bodies and some of the buildings on the lower floor are painted white with a big red X on them, they’re sealed off, and then our art director said ‘what if we multiply the number of rats?’ And we said ‘okay, that’s cool, it’s creepy.’ And then Raf and I look at it and say ‘what gameplay can we get out of the rats?’
We started negotiating with the lead programmer and the producer: ‘we’d like to be able to possess them’ and all this. At first people are like ‘well, these can’t all be AIs, right?’ but we’re ‘yeah, they all need to be AIs. We know we’re going to have to compromise here and there, and we’re going to have to some stuff swarms and streams of rats, but I need to be able to kill any individual rat, I need to be able to separate any individual rat out from the herd, I need to be able to possess them.’ We never would do something like a fake stream of rats running across the streets, because I need to be able to run down there and possess one of them.


So the team, all of us, had to be reminded constantly about what our goal was – to over-connect the systems, the rules and the mechanics. That’s the first time in a long time – the first time since Deus Ex 1 – that I’ve been in an environment where developer was fully aligned around the gameplay goal, publisher was fully supportive of it and all the pieces are there. It feels very gratifying, actually. Because it’s so often a struggle to convince people.



What Raf always says that I love, it’s language I’ve stolen from him, is the invisible values. So let’s say you have a game, there’s a building, and it’s a huge building, and there’s a guard patrolling in a big circle around it. What most games would do is stop the guy as soon as you’re outside his radius. What that means is if you teleport away or sprint away, he stops there. So let’s you say spend an hour [somewhere else], then you teleport, sprint, whatever and come back here, he’s still in that same spot, moving forward. He has not come across the body that’s over there or whatever. But even if it’s an abstraction, to us it’s important to keep that guy running – because if I come back and he’s in a different spot it feels a little more cohesive, a little more lived-in, a little more real.
Those are invisible values because they’re hard to communicate to people like publishers. Or even sometimes core technology people – they’re like ‘well, it’s an optimisation we can perform to cache that guy out and respawn him in later’. Then we’re ‘we understand that, but we want to allocate some of your time to make an abstraction of him. He doesn’t have to be fully-modelled if the player can’t see him, but where he’s at and what he’s doing in the world needs to be kept track of.’ And it’s not like we can do that perfectly, but at least we get closer to making a living, breathing environment, y’know? So things don’t just cache out or go to sleep around the corner.

 

RPS: 8 of 10 people will probably never notice, but for the two that do the caching guard might be what plunges them into the uncanny valley.

Harvey Smith: Right, and this is one of those things. I agree with that point, but I would invert it – this is one of those things where you have to remind yourself that you have to have this as a value and keep pushing it, because you can’t fight somebody who doesn’t believe in it and prove it to them, you just have to keep proselytising for it. But more of a concern than the 2/10 people who see the stalled version and it’s the uncanny valley or it breaks the immersion is the 2/10 people who have something magical happen as a result of the guy staying alive. What the really means is for every player who goes through the game, every hour will have some bit of that. 2/10 of them might have it in this difference, but in the next room it might be a different 2/10.



What this means is, over the course of a playthrough, what I always like to say is – and it’s long-winded but it’s very important – if you look at the mobility options we have, the mantling and the leaning and the sliding and the sprinting and the silence, the moving across different floor types… Which we don’t go deep on, but metal is louder, things like that… You have that, and the non-linear approach to level design: the levels do come in linear sequence, however inside a level there’s many tracks, many different approaches, there’s a rooftop path, there’s possess a fish and swim in the river, there’s go in the front door or the back door… That kind of thing. And then you have different powers, but you can’t have them all because they’re part of an economy. So early on you can save up your runes and buy the second level of a powerful power, or you can spread them out. You can upgrade your equipment differently, you can find different bone charms.


On top of that, there’s the high Chaos approach or the low Chaos approach – high action, high combat, sneak so no-one ever saw you, or some blend of those two. And you take all of those variables, all those things that might be different in your playthrough from mine, you mix them together, and the permutations explode. Often they’re subtle – often it’s not ‘well, I went to this map and you went to that map.’ We don’t do that so much. But within a given map, your experience subtly feels – and in some big ways feels too – crafted by you, authored by you. Maybe I never even went there, I went across the roofs and found a thief who had fallen and broken his leg, and I looted his body and then found his friends over here. Or I didn’t find that because I possessed a fish and swam in the river, and was never even seen by a guard.

RPS: So one item or one encounter that someone else doesn’t have can lead to a completely different internal narrative or even purpose for that player…

Harvey Smith: Yeah, or I took these two powers and they work in combination that was not planned, but I tried it and it just worked. All the time we saw testers do things we never planned. Like, the time stop power. A guy runs into a room, there are six guys – and six guys in our game is serious problem – so he stops time, then he puts an arrow in the air, an arrow in the air, an arrow in the air [air-draws a semi-circle in front of him]… Anything touching you moves at real-time, so if you bump a lamp it falls, but as soon as it’s half a second away from you it stops. So if you hit a guard, he animates but then stops. So the crossbow bolts leave you for half a second and stop, and then when time resumes all the guards die at once, they all get hit by crossbow bolts at once. And it was magical the first time we saw somebody do that. It’s just this general purpose approach to making game systems.



I can tell you crazy ones, like a guy stops time and as somebody shoots the bullet hangs in the air, then he possesses the guy, walks him around in front of the bullet, and then ejects and then when time resumes the bullet kills him. He suicided in this weird way. There’s all these crazy combinations that we had no plans for, but we trust that if we make things general purpose, the player can get creative. It’s super-cool. That’s our main thing about the game. On one level, you’re a supernatural assassin in a retro-future world, but on another level there’s a lot of variability in this game and it’s ultimately going to be your playthrough.

RPS: I guess it must be strangely sad that you do have to ensure some actions definitely do play out in a certain and known way, just so you know things aren’t breaking.

Harvey Smith: Yeah, there’s a lot of playtests. Because sometimes they do break, and sometimes they break in ways that we go fix, and sometimes they break in ways that we go in and make it bulletproof. Like ‘no, we want that weird thing to happen, but we’ll go in and bulletproof it.’ Once you educate the team that this is our vision, this is our philosophy, they all start doing it too.



So one of the team did this thing where they stopped time, quickly took this spring-razor mine, which throws blades and springs and wires and cuts people into places, and stuck it on the back of a rat. Then they possessed the rat, walked it into this group of guards, then ejected and walked away. When time resumes, the rat is sitting there with the thing on its back and the guards are all around it, frozen where they were, and it’s just [makes ninja throwing star noises]. It kills like five guards.

That did not work perfectly the first time we did it – attaching the spring-razor to the rat did something weird to it, possessing the rat meant you might have seen the spring-razor floating out in front because the attach point was somewhere weird… So it gets a bit like ‘do you guys want us to preclude this exploit, or do you want us to support this exploit?’ We’re ‘that was cool. Very few players are going to do it, but support it. Make sure that when you’re inside the rat’s perspective, the spring-razor is in a place that is camera-ready…’ All the technical bullshit that is behind the scenes, right, but we just find that when we’re playtesting we have to either bulletproof it or fix it.


It is exhilarating, because so few times in most games can something surprising happen. Usually it’s ‘well, I’m on this bridge. The city around me is beautiful, but I can’t leave the bridge, and then there’s a guy at the end of the bridge with a machine gun, behind a car, and I’ve got to slog from cover to cover and blow him up.’

 

RPS: Yeah, your choice is to kill him here, or here, and with a machinegun or a grenade.

Harvey Smith: Yeah, there’s not much variation other than that. But in our game, if you can’t jump off the bridge and swim in the water, if you can’t do a wide variety of creative improvisational solutions to this, this doesn’t feel like our type of game. We’re just hell-bent on those games and letting the player solves those problems. There’s some of it that requires a little hand-holding and a little massaging, like we decided where to put the rat-holes, for instance, but there’s some of it that just’s you in the simulation.



Like, there’s guys that jump, and at the apex of the supernatural jump because they’ve taken that power and upgraded the power, they Blink and have taken that power and upgraded it, so they make this arc and teleport to a roof. They can travel really far. At first we were like ‘oh my God, the sneaky player who hoards his mana and uses this power could probably go rooftop, rooftop, rooftop and be right near the end of the mission. What do we do about that?’ Then we were ‘well, most people probably aren’t going to figure out how to do that on the first playthrough, and it’s super-cool, it’s super-empowering.’ It’s one that doesn’t require any scripting or any placement on our part. We sometimes do that stuff, just to make stuff more lifelike, but that’s one that’s just totally general purpose.



RPS: You also need to cater quite a bit for the people who just don’t respond well to freedom, presumably?

Harvey Smith: That’s a thing we did with the Deus Ex games too. We always presumed that there had to be a front door and a big fight, y’know? Sometimes you just want to be that guy that starts running towards the door throwing grenades, right? That’s a totally valid playthrough style, and sometimes it’s a blast. We don’t punish you for that at all, but in Dishonored, if we get our way, the current plan in tuning is that it reacts very swiftly to that. So there is a benefit to sneaking, although it is possible if you’re a skilled player.


RPS: When you’ve made this world filled with all these variables and permutations, is there any level on which seeing someone ignoring half the detail and depth because they just want to headshot everyone or finish as quickly as possible gets you down?

Harvey Smith: No, I think we love all those players, and I think we like the possibility that that even exists. In the whole crafting worlds thing, so that players have their own experience, it’s so gratifying. I went into a comicbook store the other day, my favourite comicbook store in Austin, and there’s a Deus Ex: Human Revolution comic on the shelves. I didn’t even known about this, it just blew my mind, it was so freaky. So if you put together the world, no matter which world it is, and you facilitate the player having this incredible experience, it feels like he made the decisions to play it that way, it’s meaningful the way a great album is meaningful. So, no. The only thing that would ever offend me is if I saw someone playing with the sound off or something: that makes me mad. ‘What are you doing? You should be playing in the dark with headphones on!’


RPS: Thanks for your time.

Dishonored will probably be released next year. I can’t wait.

Source: Arkane’s Harvey & Raf Unravel Dishonored | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dishonored: Stealth, rats, plague and beheadings

Three names and three reasons why you should be interested in Dishonored: Raf Colantonio, Harvey Smith and Viktor Antonov.

 

Colantonio is known for his work on Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Smith is famed for his contributions to Thief: Deadly Shadows and the Deus Ex series, and Antonov is the chap that designed Half Life 2's City 17. So while Dishonored might be a new IP with a stupidly spelt name (where's the 'u' dammit!?), it's got a pedigree that will likely prick up a few ears.

You play a fellow that goes by the name of Corvo. He was the bodyguard to an Empress, but then she went and got herself murdered. The powers that be think it was him that gone and done it. After doing his time, he's released back into the big wide world, and there's one thing on his mind: finding the bastard that set him up. While Corvo is a silent protagonist, it's fair to say that all that time in the slammer has changed him somewhat. Once a respectable bodyguard, Corvo is now an employee of the shadows; an assassin.

His quest for revenge unfolds in the city of Dunwall. Despite the 17th century London vibe and steam punk technologies - cobbled streets juxtaposed with steam boats and dishevelled looking robots - the environment smacks of City 17. The art style is certainly similar, but the similarities are portrayed more in tone than anything else. During an industrial revolution fuelled by the discovery of whale oil, Dunwall has seen great technological advances. Poverty is still rife, however, and there's a great sense of oppression hanging over the city. Guards litter the streets and order is enforced with a heavy hand.

What's worse, half the population has fallen victim to the plague, with rats still scuttling about the streets, spreading their vile diseases. Like the plague, the gamescom demo begins life in the sewers. Our mute hero is given a mission to assassinate a corrupt lawyer, who is scamming the denizens of Dunwall of their hard-earned coin.

 

As he emerges from the dank underbelly of the city, a tanker sails past along the river, a dead whale hanging from its deck. It's an impressive scene, and a great tone-setter. The whale oil is what fuels the city. One of the first portions of gameplay we see revolves around something called a Wall of Light, which - powered by whale oil - stops rodents (and other street-rats) making their way into the city. Unless you're sporting the correct key of sorts, the gate will electrocute anybody that passes through it. To get the lawyer, Corvo needs to pass through just such an obstacle. Suffice to say, he doesn't have a key.

Colantonio was keen to stress the notion of choice. "We want to give you the tools to be creative." He explained. "It's your style". To that end, the player can approach the mission in one of several ways. In terms of this Wall of Light, players could choose to hack the thing, turning the technology against the guards. This requires design blueprints, however, so was a no-go in this case. The option that played out in the demonstration saw Corvo simply yank out the whale oil fuelling the thing, allowing a horde of rats safe passage into the city.

The mission as a whole can play out in numerous ways depending on your preferred style of play. You could choose to kick up as much fuss as possible, storming through the city to the aristocrat's mansion, and killing anything that stands between you and the lawyer. Or - and for my money this is the much more interesting option - you could choose a more quiet option. Although you won't see the deliciously brutal assassinations, a stealthy approach appears to be far more satisfying.

As well as the usual sneaking about in the shadows malarkey, there are several more interesting mechanics that tie into the stealth side of the game. Rats, for example, are more than just a plot device; they're intrinsic to the very way the game plays. At one point, Corvo finds a woman being mugged by three burly men. After slicing off their heads with an expert flick of his knife, the ungrateful woman runs off screaming. This attracts the attention of nearby rodents, who engulf her in seconds. In a haze of blood and screams, she's quite literally eaten alive. This could happen to Corvo too, of course, but only in the shadows. Stay in the light if you don't want to be eaten.

 

Rats can do more than just eat enemies (and helpless women) alive, however; Corvo can possess the buggers, too. Indeed, Corvo isn't just a plain ol' assassin - he's a super-natural assassin. In the demo, Corvo gained entrance to the lawyer's mansion by shifting into the body of a rat. He scrabbled his way through a few tunnels under the house, and then returned to human form once safely inside. Quite what else Corvo can do in rat-form remains to be seen.

Once in the mansion, Corvo goes all out on the stealth-front. He memorises the movements of guards, planning his movements from room to room accordingly. He silently stalks guards, pick-pocketing their keys and eventually granting himself access to the lawyer's room. After peering through the key-hole and confirming that he was indeed as corrupt as his sources lead him to believe, he bursts through the door, grabs the bloke and plunges his trusty knife into his neck. After a prolonged period of calm creeping about corridors, the madness that follows the assassination is rather welcome.

It might look a little rough around the edges at this stage in development, but there were several flashes of brilliance during the twenty minute demo. The options available to Corvo at any one time are vast, and the open-world nature of the game compliments this nicely. I didn't get to see all too much of the skill system underpinning the game, but a familiar looking ability-wheel frequently graced the screen. It's an ambitious title, but if stealth and combat - the bread and butter of the experience - are of a high enough calibre to match the scope of the game, Dishonored could be one of the best new IPs of 2012.

Dishonored is due for release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in 2012

With thanks: Dishonored Preview for PC - Page 2 - VideoGamer.com

"Dishonored" (publisher: Bethesda Softworks; developer: Arkane Studios; Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, 2012)

From the creators of "Thief" and "Deus Ex" comes a brand new open-world adventure game. Players assume the role of the empress's bodyguard, Corvo, who's been falsely accused of murdering her.

The game is set within the steampunk city of Dunwall, which is fully populated with virtual characters (both good and bad) that gamers can interact with in unique ways.

Unlike many games, every NPC (nonplayable character) in this world has its own agenda. This opens up interesting interactions.

The first-person shooter action game allows gamers to use guns and gadgets, as well as stealth and supernatural powers, to progress on a journey that will be unique for each player.

Source: Gamescom 2011: Five upcoming games that stand out - CNN.com

While inching through a bleak, watercolor world with a blade in hand, a swarm of rats streams through a security door. It seems like nothing more than a random environmental detail at first. They attack if you do, but otherwise the rodents leave you alone. Soon you find a woman being accosted by thugs. After the fight to save her, the woman flees into the shadows and is promptly overwhelmed by the very same rats that bring her down in grisly fashion.

 

It turns out the rats in Arkane's Dishonored serve a much larger purpose than you might initially expect. When the appropriate powers are acquired it's possible to spawn rats into a fight to distract and even strip the skin from aggressors. You can possess them as well, taking the form of a rat to slip through small sewer grates and around enemies to reach a destination in safety.


If the idea of utilizing rats as a method of attack and exploration is entirely unpalatable, it seems you can ignore it entirely in Dishonored. It's a stealth action game that blends the multi-path exploration elements of Deus Ex with the combat variety of BioShock, all set in a fictional world designed by Viktor Antonov of Half-Life 2 fame. The mission-based excursions are isolated – this isn't an open world game – but within each space it's apparent there's plenty to do aside from the main quest. You can explore to find items, coins and more to power up your character and select skills, get side quests from NPCs and pick up blueprints to more skillfully interact with pieces of technology. All your actions of senseless violence or deadly precision are fed into a chaos system that will eventually affect how the game progresses. Arkane stresses this isn't a system of good or evil – the game isn't morally judging you for what you do – but the chaos rating will stick with you throughout the play experience and potentially alter the path of the story.

You play as a bodyguard, Corvo, wrongfully accused of murdering the Empress he was supposed to protect. Eventually Dishonored shifts to years after the accusation, and though many story details aren't yet available, it's clear things haven't exactly gone well. The city in which you operate, an industrial fishing town filled with tightly packed corridors of peeling apartment complexes and stretches of murky water, is suffering from the effects of a plague. There's a wealth gap along with a health gap, as the upper classes and their guards tend to hoard the elixirs that stave off the illnesses' effects.

 

The world is a mix of old-fashioned and futuristic elements. A simple pistol, for instance, bears an antiquated, matchlock look, but a band of blue energy ripples along the barrel. City streets bear similarities to a London of a past age, but streets are separated with gates of rippling energy and security turrets that sweep areas of importance with floodlights. To bypass these obstacles it's possible to fight your way through, or you can sneak through patches of darkness, teleport short distances and climb up to rooftops or take advantage of your technical knowledge. By discovering blue prints scattered around the world it's possible to flip the charge on energy doors so you can pass safely but hostiles are fried. Or you can remove the whale oil batteries and disable the doors entirely.

At times Dishonored's gameplay has a Thief-like feel. With a knife in hand you can slink by in the shadows, observing enemies from afar and listening to their conversations to pick up additional bits of story. They'll have patrol routes around streets and through interiors, though sometimes the exact routes aren't entirely predictable. Enemies may stop to observe a piece of art in a hallway, or warm their hands on a fire, which can potentially ruin your plans to sneak up behind and pluck a key from their belt or to choke them into submission without creating any noise.

When entering new rooms it's possible to peek through keyholes to observe the interior. If it's a full of enemies and you're tired of stealth, you can ditch the quiet routine entirely and use a magic wind blast to shatter the door. Then a time-stop can be initiated that freezes all onscreen but you, letting you dart between enemies and slice them up with your knife before they even have a chance to react.

The mission shown in the demo was broken into two parts. Infiltration was first, winding through city streets and across rooftops. Then, once the target was taken down – an aristocrat smoking a long cigarette in an opulent apartment complex – alarms buzzed on all sides and guards, turrets and streamed to the scene. This included mechanical bipedal walkers numerous meters high capable of firing explosive bolts. Though their attack power was significant, their turning speed wasn't fast, meaning a circle-strafe was an effective way to create an opening to take a few shots. Again using the time-stop ability lets you stop the explosive projectiles in midair, and it's even possible to bat them back at the walkers.

 

Though the area wasn't shown, between all missions you'll have access to a wide variety of upgrades in a central hub world. You can acquire new weapons, like one-handed crossbows, along with new skills. It's up to you whether you want to save up for a high-level skill early on, or use resources more freely to acquire a number of lower level abilities. This factors into how Arkane wants to reward exploration. If you look in every corner you'll bring back more resources that can lead to unlocking a much more versatile set of powers and weapons. Or you can blaze through, ignore many of the alternate paths, and concentrate on brute force and main quest goals. Choosing this path can have violent results, as special slow-motion knife kills can be initiated to decapitate foes and dispatch them in several other gruesome ways.

With plenty of style and gameplay mechanics that should appeal to fans of BioShock, Thief and Deus Ex, Dishonored so far looks great. It's scheduled to be released in 2012 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC platforms.

Source: Slicing Through Dishonored - PC Preview at IGN

Wrapping your brain around a new Halo or Mass Effect is easy enough. Understanding a new franchise like Dishonored is a little harder, and our cryptic cover probably didn’t help much. Read on to get a sense of what this stealth/action adventure from Arkane and Bethesda is about – and to see the first screenshot of the game.

 

Who are you?
Players take on the role of Corvo, the Empress’ legendary bodyguard. As the game starts, Corvo is falsely imprisoned for her murder. What the corrupt Lord Regent behind the coup didn’t realize is that Corvo is legendary for a reason. He’s not only a skilled combatant accomplished in the art of not being seen, but Corvo has a suite of supernatural powers that combine with his natural talents and unusual gadgets to make him one of the most lethal men in the known world.

Why should you care?
Even if you haven’t played them, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Thief and Deus Ex. One of the main minds behind those two games, Harvey Smith, is the co-creative director of Dishonored along with Raf Colantonio, the founder of developer Arkane Studios. The two share a vision of a game that gives players the power to be creative with their skills and tactics, and invites them to come up with interesting solutions to the obstacles in front of them. Arkane is known for its immersive first-person gaming (Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic), and the power of a talent-driven publisher in Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3) behind the team is promising.

How are they going to do that?
Dishonored has several major elements that combine to create its unique gameplay: mobility, powers & gadgets, environment, and AI. The trick is that a single power doesn’t just do damage or heal you. You can combine them organically to create interesting effects. Stop time and knock a bunch of stuff off a table in one direction then book it in another, so the guards search for you in the wrong place. Summon a swarm of rats to attack one guard, but possess one of the rats and escape in the chaos. Every problem has as many solutions as you want it to.

 

What’s the catch?
It’s an assassination game that reacts to how violent you are. An unusual “chaos” system tracks how much collateral damage you cause, and the game world changes as a result of your actions. Unlike a light/dark side meter, though, it’s a behind-the-scenes element that affects story decisions without punishing the player or pushing them to play one way or another.

When can I learn more?
Soon! You can get ten pages worth of details in the print magazine, and we’ll be dropping new online content, from video interviews to an interactive map of Dishonored’s world, throughout the month. We asked a lot of questions, and Smith and Colantonio had a lot to say. For starters, on Wednesday we’ll share a video that breaks down why you should be interested in the team at Arkane even if you haven’t played any of their previous games.

Source: http://www.gameinformer.com/games/di...ishonored.aspx