Dishonored 2 – a tale of two protagonists

GameCentral speaks to the co-director of Dishonored about the new sequel, as well as The Thing and the inferiority of American chocolate…

It was a big E3 for Bethesda last week, with public reveals for Fallout 4, the Doom reboot, and several other new games. But although Dishonored 2 was amongst them very little information was offered, or at least not beyond what could be gleaned from the pre-rendered trailer you see below.

There was certainly nothing playable, even though the game’s due out early next year, but we did manage to talk to Harvey Smith – who as well as directing the first game also famously worked as lead designer on the original Deus Ex and its sequel.



We were able to squeeze a few more details about Dishonored 2 out of him, but we also discussed everything from the current renaissance in genre movie making to the near impossibility of making timeless video games. We thoroughly enjoyed the chat and were very glad to find that developer Arkane Studios seems to have almost carte blanche to make whatever kind of game they want.


Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Publisher: Bethesda

Developer: Arkane Studios

Release Date: spring 2016

GC: Umfghahm!

PR Guy: Helping yourself, eh?

GC: Sorry, I didn’t realise you were going to be that quick. These Milk Ways are horrible though, they must be the American version.

HS: You know, when I’m back home in Austin the candy bars that I buy are, like, the right company and ingredients, but they’re just not the same…

GC: I don’t understand American chocolate. You have something like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which is amazing, but your sweets are all just cheaply made rubbish. There’s no comparison to ours, let alone somewhere like Belgium.

HS: I think the key to understanding America, because I live in France right now and I have to explain this all the time, is two-fold. One, it’s getting the French that I work with to see it not as a country but as a giant union of countries. That blows their mind. It’s really like saying, ‘The Scottish and the Italians, why aren’t they more similar…? Number two, America, because of its bulls*** economics, is a land of fast lane/slow lane. So there’s the worst food in the world and some of the best.

GC: It does only ever seem to be one or the other.

HS: That’s it, and it’s about 80 per cent the other!

Dishonored 2 – daughter of the mask

GC: Anyway, we better discuss the game! At what point did you realise the original Dishonored was a success and you were going to get a sequel? Because it was by no means a guaranteed hit, and yet I think it was the best-selling new IP in the UK that year. [Actually it was second, after Sleeping Dogs – GC]



HS: It was a big risk. The sales people track all that, we don’t so much. We get reports every now and then, but it’s indirectly filtered. But it was a big risk and lots of people, even internal to the company, didn’t quite understand it. The sort of Victorian setting, but it wasn’t even that – it was an alternate reality, adding supernatural to it and the steampunk kind of story… it was hard to explain.

And then toward the end, right before we shipped it, it was not in great shape. We had to stop at two or three months and really pound on it hard to get it to where we wanted it. But then as soon as we shipped it was averaging 90 per cent, people who liked it were liking it a lot. It’s one of those games where maybe not everyone in the world likes it, but the people that do like it like it a lot.

And people were spending much more time on it than expected, many different people were playing it different ways, and pretty quickly it was obvious it was gonna greatly exceed its sales forecast. And so we knew pretty quick that we were gonna do what the company hoped we would do, which is be excited about the sequel.

Almost immediately we were like, ‘You know, the most exciting thing here is Emily’. For us this goes back to the fact that you have this young girl in the game who reflects your actions. So if you go out and you’re very non-violent – a game about an assassin where you don’t have to kill anyone – and you come back and she has drawings of Daddy on the wall.


On the other hand, if you chop a bunch of heads off and you murder 80 per cent of the people in the world you come back and she’s got a black crayon and she’s like… disturbed. And the player sees this and realises someone is paying attention to their actions, and they often change the way they play at that point.

So naturally this feels like this is the second half of the story. The first half was this political assassination happened, so this privileged girl, whose life is more and more about tragedy, is taken away and used like a pawn, but then Corvo gets her back and raises her. So the second half of the story is about what she’s like as an adult. What’s she like as an Empress? What’s she like as an outlaw? Because she’s on the run again.

Harvey Smith excited about a sequel, or possibly Mad Max

GC: I think it’s that level of interaction, that feedback from the world, that appeals to people. I was always shocked Skyrim was the second biggest seller of its year, behind only Call Of Duty, but I hear so much from people who talk about just exploring the world, places they’ve found, characters they’ve met, or secrets they’ve discovered…

HS: What you’re describing is some sort of sea change that caught me by surprise. Someone told me the other day that they really liked my panel and it was their favourite of the day. And I was like, ‘Really? Why?’ I want to know why you think that. And they said because I did this deep dive into all this nerdy background stuff.


And I realised that what used to isolate me and make me less popular than the reductionist, sexy, quick kind of game… now is an asset. Because people are tired of being hand-held in games. They want to make decisions, they want consequences, they want this game to not be generic… what it is about this world that is interesting?

GC: But what has been the catalyst for that? Is it just good marketing? Was Skyrim really the first and if so how did it get so big so quickly?

HS: I mean, the Tolkien movies were the biggest movies in the world at the time. And Avengers is the biggest movie at the moment. It’s mind-blowing…

GC: The geek have inherited the Earth.

HS: [laughs] We can do a deep dive into this subject and talk about it all day, but I remember when I was a child the cartoons aimed at fantasy, escapism, or superhero fiction were rubbish. They were universally terrible. Superfriends and c*** like that. And then in my young adulthood we had things like Watchmen, I remember thinking at the time… this is brilliant literature. This stands shoulder to shoulder with established classics. And what happened? The people that liked that stuff grew up and started making it, whereas maybe the people before that were making it, they grew up on Bugs Bunny or something. Something changed.

GC: I always like to think that as long as you can get a good game in front of people there’s a reasonable chance they’ll enjoy it, no matter what it is.

HS: Don’t assume the audience is stupid. Give them something deep and immediate and they will respond.

Dishonored 2 – the sequel that might not have been

GC: So who is it that wants to assume they’re stupid? Is that marketing? Is it publishers?

HS: I think in every capitalist business there is a component of it that has masturbatory dreams about people just mindlessly consuming. The product that is the easiest and cheapest to make. We’re weirdly incentivised to think like that, if we’re not careful in the system. And the creator, of course, is thinking, ‘Someday I’ll make my Watchmen’.

GC: Indie developers are often like that, I find. They’ll have been sitting there making ports or boring sequels and dreaming of something completely different.

HS: Dishonored kind of is that for us, because early in my career I got to work on Deus Ex and we largely got to do that because nobody was paying attention to us. The publisher was so busy focused on Ion Storm in Dallas that we were an afterthought. So we just laboured for three years on this game that we wanted to make. And we didn’t insult the intelligence of the player.

And so we are in a weird spot where we have the power of a triple-A publisher, in Zenimax/Bethesda, but we’re all making these games that are exactly what we wanted to do anyway. The new Doom is actually like the Doom you want to play, it’s not the monster closet Doom that frankly I didn’t like very much. It’s…

GC: Proper Doom.

HS: Proper Doom, yes! [laughs] That’s very British. But you have Dark Souls out there, right? You have No Man’s Sky, you have XCOM back… Or the new Road Warrior movie [Mad Max: Fury Road, The Road Warrior was the US name for Mad Max 2 – GC], that was just so layered…

GC: It’s great, but it’s a shame it didn’t do that well.

HS: Oh really? That’s too bad. I didn’t know that.

GC: It’s done okay, but nowhere near what it deserves. So actually you might say that more experimental games seem to have a better chance now than equivalent movies.

HS: One of my favourite films is The Thing by John Carpenter, and I read this deep dive from the producer.

GC: I think I read that.

HS: You did?! He’s got a Tumblr where he describes when the film wasn’t working, what Carpenter did…

GC: Yeah, yeah. They saved the whole thing through editing and last minute changes. [We think this is what he’s talking about, or at least it’s what we were referring to – GC]

HS: Oh my god, yeah. And they focused on MacReady, but anyway… when someone does something like that it doesn’t matter if it looks dated later, it just works forever. And I feel like Fury Road is gonna be one of those films.

GC: Definitely.

Dishonored 2 – the streets of Karnaca are no safer than Dunwall

HS: If games had regenerative graphics, so that when the hardware goes up the graphics go up with it, we would end up with classics like that too. Like, 20 years from now we’d be playing Fallout, or whatever. But they don’t, they get dated very quickly.

GC: It is a shame, and I don’t see anyway round it. I don’t think I want to encourage three years of remakes at the start of every new generation.

HS: I don’t see a way round it either. Warren Spector asked me one time why I thought films got dated and books didn’t, and I said, ‘It’s the visuals!’ You look at the costumes and the way actors talk, whereas you pick up a book and you’re providing all the visuals and update them automatically without even thinking about it. And games suffer from that, really badly.

GC: Film does date, but if you’re invested in them it doesn’t matter. I was watching the original Star Wars trilogy again recently, for the first time in a while, and the effects are obviously old but they don’t break the immersion. But what really keeps you watching is just the basic storytelling, the characters. The fundamental problem with the prequels, and many modern films, is you just don’t care about the characters or what they’re doing.

HS: That analysis by the critic who said, ‘Who is the protagonist in Episode I?’ was great.

GC: Oh, RedLetterMedia, I love their stuff.

HS: Yeah! I wouldn’t have realised that on my own, but he was exactly right. There’s no clear protagonist.

GC: Tsk. You’re being too interesting, we need to get back on track.

HS: Right, sorry.

GC: So where you implying you had plans for the sequel while making Dishonored 1?

HS: No, no. You always hope, but it was really only when the game started to be well reviewed that we knew we were going to get a shot at making the second one. And then it was, ‘Well, what would we do?’

GC: What was the shopping list of things you wanted to do? Especially given it would be on a new generation of consoles?

HS: We wanted to get away from the rat plague, that was one period in our history, and we wanted to move to a new city. So Karnaca is called the Jewel of the South, it’s the southern capital down in the land of Serkonos. It’s more like Italy or Spain or Greece. We wanted to tell Emily’s story. We wanted to provide the player with the option of playing Emily or Corvo.

If you play Emily you have all-new supernatural powers, if you play Corvo you have the classics – rats, swarm, Blink, possession, etc. But we also wanted to deepen those systems, so before it was power and upgrade, and now it’s power and an upgrade tree. So all of Corvo’s powers can be extended in all of these interesting ways now.

Before we had this bone charm system where you found bone charms and they gave you a little perk. Now Emily has the power to craft them, so she can break them apart and recombine them, make combinations we never even dreamed about. There’s something like 400,000 combinations of bone charms that we can’t even predict. So there was a list of things that immediately came to mind that we were excited about.

Dishonored 2 – no rat plagues, but public health is still an issue

GC: And what about the open world and character interaction? It’s sometimes hard to see how that changes much with a new generation but I always imagine in years to come that these games will be inhabited by very complex AI, and it worries me that single-player only games won’t last long enough for that to be possible. Is that something you’re actually working towards?

HS: We feel the same, we feel the same. The experience that we are going for is I can crawl through this world at my own pace; I can study the books and the world, listen to the people having conversations, I can go up on the roof and see what’s up there, I can go at my own pace. And if that’s very slow that’s fine.

But what I don’t want is some 15-year-old kid jumping up and down, yelling curse words at me. I want to be immersed. And so I don’t think those single-player experiences will ever go away. I see this as nature, right?

Every animal is competing for resources, and if everybody begins to do one thing – which is like fighting for resources – then somebody is going to do the sneaky thing. There’s always going to be a niche opening up because of that. So if everybody starts making competitive online games or MMOs or free-to-play games it’s going to open up a niche for people like us who want to play this type of game. There’ll always be a BioShock, or a Deus Ex, or a Arx Fatalis, or a Dishonored.

GC: I hope so. Although, the only problem I have with all this is I can never do the evil stuff, so I’m always missing out on half the game.

HS: [laughs] People say that all the time. They say it not just about Dishonored but the BioWare games.

GC: Definitely, I’m always nice in those.

HS: I set out to be the Dark Jedi, then she told me the story about how her sister died and I felt so bad that I couldn’t do it…

Both: [laughs]

HS: I look back and I think, ‘Well, I guess my inner self wants to do the right thing’.

GC: Maybe it’s not a good comparison but playing as two characters in the same game I can’t help but think of Resident Evil 2. Is that how it’s set-up?

HS: In our case we have two characters and you either choose one or the other and you play through it all like that.

GC: So you would play the game twice, as each different one, and it would be completely different?

HS: Well, it’s the same series of missions but they have a different commentary. They’re fully voiced this time, so they’ll do the same sequence of missions but the missions are so sandbox-y that you’ll probably take a different path each time. But they have their own perspective on the story.

GC: Sadly, I have to go. But that was fascinating, thank you.

HS: That was good, thank you.

Dishonored 2 – the thinking man’s action sequel

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