Dishonored - Preview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Pondering Dishonored with Raf Colantonio is a preview at Rock, Paper, Shotgun with input from Arkane's co-lead. Topics covered include some corrections to first impressions (not really "Thief with a knife"), whether the character is overpowered, designing the powers and more:

Fresh from my experiences with infiltrating the aristocratic household, and having played with some of the possibilities, I suggested to Colantonio that for him as a designer, there must be deep rewards inherent in watching players learn and master the systems he imagined: “Yes. For us the satisfaction is to see players do things that we have never seen before. We are still seeing that now. In fact I just saw something like that a few moments ago out there [in the GamesCom press booth where journalists are playing the game] and I was like “okay, wow.”" He continued: “This was one of the objectives of the project: to engage player creativity, to allow them to develop their own play style. When we see that happening for real, it feels really good.”

The consequence of this overall approach is that Dishonored is not as predictable as so many other games seems to be, and this seems to extend to the fiction and the level design. I felt that one of the more stinging criticisms of Dishonored cyberpunk cousin, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, was that the level design was too contrived, too predictable: there was always an alternate route through air ducts, behind those boxes. Was this something that Arkane worried about? “Yes, totally,” says Colantonio. “I mean we didn’t want to be too formulaic, we want to make sure that we broke the pattern. We’ve shown three different demos so far, and each one of these has a very different feel. They’re not the same kind of mission, sometimes it’s an abduction, sometimes you don’t know who the target is.” And you can see this in the environments that the team are creating: while each one is a small, self-contained videogame level, there are secrets, and there are asides. Things that might happen, or could be ignored. Colantonio stresses again: “We want to break up the patterns.”