Henriquejr spotted this Dishonored 2 preview:

Dishonored 2: creative killing in Karnaca

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The success of the first game means that Arkane has the freedom, with Dishonored 2, to double-down on its strengths. There’s no pressure to make a simpler or more traditionally marketable offering, as has happened with games like this in the past. “When we made Dishonored we weren’t really sure how it’d be received,” Bakaba says. “It’s weird when you say it now, but I can tell you that until the very end, when the first reviews came, we were thinking ‘maybe this industry doesn’t want this type of game’. That is now in the past, that fear. This time we approached it like ‘OK, they like what we’re doing, what we’re passionate about, how can we improve.’” 

The team are also guided by their success, particularly when it came in forms that they didn’t expect. “For whatever reason, we have a wider range of demographics who like our game than is traditionally true and I love that,” Harvey Smith says. Dishonored 2’s two protagonists represent one way that the sequel celebrates this diversity, and the cast of principal characters is another. “I love writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates who talk about how important it is to have a representational avatar for a comic or a game,” Smith says. “Not just a grizzled white dude. That’s an easy trap to fall into. We found that the more we include other types of people in the world, the more it resonates with a wider range of people and it doesn’t hurt the core audience at all. It doesn’t hurt the core fantasy at all.”

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