Dishonored - Preview, Interview @ RPS

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a preview and then an interview on Arkane's Dishonored. From their preview piece:

Colantonio is playing Dishonored for a convention crowd, 20 compressed minutes imbued with maximum flash to ensnare the attention of exhausted and jaded hacks who’ve been shown game after game and are already thinking of their next appointment. It’s also, of course, for watchers and commentors for whom Calls of Duty and Gearses of War are their bread and butter: they wouldn’t pay attention to a stealth game, so the sound and fury of all-out action must be there too. So he’s playing it with bloodshed and drama, with stabbings and desperate escapes amidst a hail of gunfire. He’s playing it wrong, whispers that dumb brain of mine – he could have hidden there, climbed that, pickpocketed rather than killed and looted that guard… It’s all wrong, not at all what I’d do.

Oddly, this only makes me lean closer, my excitement grow. I’m not being shown the game as I would approach it, but Colantonio is carefully to hint at how that would be done, to sneak in sneaking alongside the killing. So I extrapolate and deduce, plot and wonder. The sense of possibility, of mind-mapping what I might have done, is that much richer than actually watching a guy hide behind walls and wait for guards’ backs to turn would ever be. With all the powers, all the openness, all the aesthetic strangeness on show here – well, the thought of how I might go at it once I have the chance to instantly makes Dishonored the most promising and exciting thing I saw at Gamescom by a country mile.

...and from the interview with Harvey Smith and Raf Colantonio:

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.