Dishonored - Peeling back the layers @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer speaks with Harvey Smith and Raph Colantonio about the missing third floor of the Hound Pit Pub and their iterative design process for Dishonored:

Led by Smith and Colantonio, Arkane hasn't just alluded to the messiness of the creative process though - it has hung its hat on it, talking about how the serendipitous clashes of unfinished systems would lead to gameplay ideas that made Dishonored a better game. All the talk of turning bugs into features feels practically counter-cultural, and even if it is partly a marketing gimmick, you can feel how deeply rooted it is into the way Arkane works every time you speak to the developers or play the game. They talk about how the fiction of old High Overseers dying is an allusion to the BioShock team, or how the assassin tutorial in Daud's base is using the dialogue from Thief.

"We talked a lot about how before science was really a known thing, it seemed magical in some ways," says Smith. "We were influenced by Tesla a little bit - he had these various devices and some of them had outlandish names, so when we came up with the Wall of Light it was part science... It was the version of science at the time, natural philosophy, and in part this thing of beauty. If you look at some of those old images from Tesla's lab they're just hauntingly beautiful. And I'm sure part of that is the black-and-white photography and all, but imagine being a person in the 1800s seeing for the first time gas lamps or electricity or hearing a radio for the first time with all the crackle and then a voice out of the dark coming out of it. That would just have been freaky in a way that saying the word 'magic' can't really convey."