"Dishonored:" 20 Things the Creators Want You to Know Going In

Dishonored is one of our most-wanted games of the year, so we were more than happy to sit down for a chat with its co-creative directors, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio.

The two have an unusual shared past, being inspired by similar games but never actually making one together. Smith's most beloved work is almost certainly Deus Ex, and Colantonio's is Arx Fatalis, a similar first-person RPG from the early oughts.

Both have plenty of other great games under their belts, and with their combined track records, there's pretty much no way Dishonored can be bad. You'll feel the same way once you read what they have to say. Oh yeah, there's pretty pictures from the game to look at too.

How excited are you about Dishonored? What do you think about Smith and Colantonio's game design ideals? Let us know.

Follow @ComplexVG

Smith, on crafting environments:

"We deliberately don't make pathways, right?"

"If we make an environment, we try to make it as plausibly as possible. Like, where do people get to work? How do they get to work, down this street or that street? Where they take the garbage—you know, it's a very plausible environment. And then we put, you know, AIs in it or goals in it or whatever, and then we let the player move toward that however he wants."

Smith, on making Dishonored feel organic:

"We just go over the world and over the world trying to, like, make it rich with interactions and trying to provide some consequences for the reactions. And so what you end up with at the end of the day is this matrix of powers you've chosen, play style (combat vs. stealth), moral compass, you know, lethal or non-lethal, which pathway you take (over the rooftop or in the river, front door, back door). Plus the sort of analog nature of the AI where they're making decisions, fearing things, you know, they don't necessarily know where you're at. And all of that together creates a wide amount of variability, you know, so it just feels very organic."

Colantonio, on not restricting players' paths:

"For this type of game, that offers different approaches, it is true that most people will think in terms of the stealth path, and the action path. And that's really not what we're trying to do. It's just like every area that we have, they are places that are patches of darkness, or places that somehow you can hide and also provide some fun if you want to fight. And so really your path is whatever you want to make it, and your play style can match to any of that."

Smith, on fulfilling players' fantasies:

"A lot of our powers, like, they're mechanics that work in the game ecology, but they're also fantasy in a way that works in the player's head to fill in the gaps between—sort of like, you know, the way a reader reads comics, and between the panels, he's imagining some movement or whatever. Like, you know, if I stop time and some guards are complaining about being on duty too long, and I saunter through the room, eat an apple on the table on the way, and get to the other door just as the time resumes, my fantasy—not only mechanically did I bypass them, but my fantasy is, like, you know, those guys are standing there, and someone might have noticed a chill, like someone walking over his grave, but otherwise they literally never even perceived me."

Smith, on consolidating abilities:

"A lot of games come out and they have, like, choose between these five powers, and effectively, at an abstract level, what they all do is cause 10 damage over 'x' seconds at this distance, or whatever. We try to merge all those into one. Right? Like, if you're going to have a power that does that, just have one."

Smith, on ability variety:

"Each one is, like, really differentiated. Like, it's differentiated at right angles from another one. This one summons rats. This one stops time. This one teleports you through the world. This one lets you possess people. And that alone means that there's not a right way to clear rooms, so to speak, in our game. You don't get there and do the same actions over and over and over."

Colantonio, on his favorite ability, which lets players teleport short distances:

"I think Blink is just the bread and butter power of the game, because we give it very early in the game and everybody has it. And it really, really changes the way I think people will play. Because, like, with Blink, it's an awesome stealth tool, a movement tool to find new paths, but also evasion, and surprise, like, you can suddenly teleport in front of a guy, and surprise attack him."

Colantonio, on his second favorite ability:

"It's called Shadow Kill, and I like this one specifically because as you kill somebody that is surprised…he disappears. He vanishes into ash. And I think this is really, really—the idea is that this power really supports the perfect assassin play style, where, you know, I don't have to dispose of the body, I don't have to worry about [it being discovered]. Blink from guy to guy and kill them, and they disappear."

Smith, on the economy of unlocking abilities:

"A lot of [games] unlock things at certain stages because that makes it very easy for the developers. Like, if the team can know that no one can [use the Possession ability] before mission three, then they don't have to bullet proof against certain breakages or take into account some bizarre things that can happen in that circumstance. You know, if you're talking to someone and you possess them in the middle of a conversation or whatever. But in our case, we just turn it into an economy, where it's like, well, how many runes have you found?

"Well, all the powers have these costs. And you can buy zero powers, and like save up the runes and try to buy the most powerful one as early as you possibly can, or you can put one or two points into many different powers and have like a shallow overview of the lowest level of several powers. Or you can choose to put them all into the passive powers, the ones that don't cost any mana. Because that's your strategy, and therefore you're faster, and have more hit points or whatever, you know, you can approach it how you want, and some of those are not optimal, they don't make sense, but they like—but the fact is the player is making decisions."

Colantonio, on not being able to re-spec your abilities:

"In our case, we ruled that out very quickly, at the beginning of the production."

"We actually really like that you cannot, because it encourages replayability, and it also gives a lot more weight to your choices. Like, halfway through the game you can't say, 'Oh, you know what? I'm just going to get this power instead.' It's like, I don't know, I mean, we really like the symbology of: you make choices and then those have consequences later."

Colantonio, on a similarity between Dishonored and Arx Fatalis, one of his most beloved creations:

"There was a strong atmosphere, and I think that is something that the team, you know, hopefully there is the same strength with Dishonored."

Colantonio, on another similarity between Dishonored and Arx Fatalis:

"Most of the characters, specifically the assassination targets, you can actually [choose to] kill them or not. You can find other ways to eliminate them from the game. And the fact that you can do that, I think it's similar to Arx Fatalis. There were moments where, like—people did not want to kill the troll [in Arx Fatalis]. It was his birthday, and he looked nice, but he was, in a sense, a monster, and you needed something that he has. And so those interesting dilemmas that players will experience sometimes is something that I think we also have in Dishonored."

Smith, on his and Colantonio's shared desire to make the game world feel realistic:

"We both also try to create a world that is bigger than the game. So, you know, in one single play through you have this sense, because you could have made decision B instead of A, and because you opted not to go slow here and eavesdrop on these guys, and because you didn't find this one area, and because you didn't take power X instead of Y, and because you didn't take this approach, instead took the violent approach, or whatever…you didn't read this, or you didn't look at this graffiti, or you didn't eavesdrop on these people talking, you didn't know you could do this one thing yet—because of that, you pass through the game, and you feel like—just like with an Ultima game back in the day—you feel like you touched, you know, 30 percent of it or something.

"And therefore that leaves you feeling like you're not just in a series of rooms held together by scripting, with fairly obvious boundaries. Instead it leaves you feeling like you're exploring a world, you know? It's a virtual frontier."

Smith, on enemy A.I. in stealth games:

"Even if we weren't making a stealth game, we'd push for a stealth A.I., because it implies imperfect awareness on the part of the enemies, and that makes them a system, and they're more fun to play with then. And uncertainty is introduced into the system. That instantly means that your decisions have weight because the guys may have seen you or may not have seen you, or may have heard you break the windows, or he may not have heard you break the window."

Colantonio, on one of the challenges of developing modern games:

"Artistically, we can get way further than we've ever been before but the trade-off is that—there was such little of a distraction in the past. We could get away with less worrying about the fidelity, and the art, spending so much money on the art. So these games are actually harder to develop now in a way than they used to be."

Smith, on what he's most excited for players to experience in Dishonored:

"It's one word: improvisation."

"I had a moment where I mantled up onto a low wall, and I bumped a bottle and knocked it off. And I heard down the street, I heard a guard go, 'Hey! What was that? I'll check it out.' And like, you know, I was like, 'Oh, fuck.'"

"I look around frantically and I see a rat, and I possess the rat, and then I am able to fit under this little guard shack and walk under it and come out on the other side and de-incarnate from the rat, like, you know, closer to my goal anyway. And that is not a scripted moment, and that is not an encounter that we wanted you to have, that we set up, and you know, maybe no one else will ever have that encounter, or maybe one percent of people. It doesn't even matter. What matters is that the systems are fluid enough that I put that together on my own, and that's the emergent narrative that I have."

Colantonio, on the importance of art and graphics:

"We have to be visually compelling, and we have to have the most attractive—visually—game that we can. Otherwise, people just check out and they're not interested in your game. That's the very minimum, and then you can add some content and some depth to it. But if you start with the depth and you skip the visuals and all the lush that every game has today, you're just out of the loop, unfortunately. But that's what it is."

Colantonio, on a mechanic discovered by a new player:

"So there's this thing called a spring razor, which is some sort of a mine that can stick to any surface, but you cannot throw it. It just sticks. So however it works, what this guy did was he put the mine on a movable object, like a bottle, and so then he would use the bottle, which had the mine stuck to it, as a grenade. As a stealth grenade that he could throw far away and then it would shred NPCs from a distance, and that was actually pretty cool. That's exactly the kind of mechanic that people will keep on discovering more and more."

Smith, on being surprised by new players:

"We would see combinations that were just like 'Woah! We didn't even think of that.'"

"You've probably heard the convoluted ones, like stopping time, putting a spring razor [trip mine] on the back of a rat, possessing the rat, walking it up to a group of guards, and then ejecting out of it and the spring razor, you know, exploding on the rat and killing all the guards.

"But there are simple ones, too. Just, like, taking Super Jump, upgrading it, and then in the middle of the apex of the Super Jump—which allows you to cross quite a bit of distance—then using Blink, really just doubles—especially if Blink is upgraded—really just doubles the amount of distance that you can travel in a split second. And so suddenly we have people doing things like sprinting toward the edge of the roof, jumping, and then as they're sailing out over the street, Blinking to the roof on the other side of the courtyard. And we were just like, 'Woah!' You know?"

Smith, on what makes a game a game:

"Somebody's going to do something improvisational and it'll make them feel creative, and that's really, like, to us, it's really not a game if you can't do that. You know, if you can't exploit the systems, or put them together in a combination that feels novel to you. And that's probably the most powerful thing that we're looking for as players as well."