Dishonored - Previews @ Joystiq

Joystiq has a couple of pieces on Dishonored from QuakeCon. First, here's a sample from A Game of Murder, describing the same mission we've seen from the other QuakeCon previews:

But detailing all the different ways I solved each obstacle Dishonored threw at me would ruin a lot of the fun for anyone planing to play it themselves. As the game's co-creative director Harvey Smith said during one of the panels at QuakeCon, Dishonored is a game that focuses on improvisation. How you react to situations will ultimately define your experience in a lot of different ways, and the choices you may should be yours, not mine.

The options at your disposal are many and varied. Most seem to be interesting – but if you're a careless player who only wants to blaze through a game using physical force, Dishonored doesn't seem to be made for you. (Then again, who would really exclusively choose this path?)

In Dishonored's Chaos, Morality and Potentially Over-Powered Hero, the same author discusses some of the design elements with Raf Colantonio and Ricardo Bare:

Many elements of Dishonored – from its original setting and art style to the protagonist's arsenal of special powers – have made the game subject to a great deal of attention. But with great power comes a great fear: Will the game lack any sort of challenge? Where is the difficulty in being stealthy if you can teleport behind guards and stop time in order to get away?

"It was a hard paradox for us to get right in the game design," co-creative director Raphael Colantonio told Joystiq during QuakeCon 2012, "because we wanted to give you very strong powers, to make you really a badass, but at the same time we didn't want the game to be too easy. So it took awhile to get it right, and some of it is just obvious tuning. Every power has a duration, cost of mana, and some other tunable properties ... So even if your power is incredibly strong, you can mitigate it by saying 'Well, it only lasts three seconds.'"