You are Lady Emily Kaldwin – Empress of the Isles, or maybe you’re Corvo Attano – protector to the Empress. A rather sudden coup d’état just sent you fleeing the Royal Palace into the grimy streets of Dunwall. You’re not intending to stay, however, and you see your means of escape at Dunwall Docks. There, under way but not making way, in some extremely constricted waters between two marker buoys, sits the Dreadful Wale. You board, and sail aboard her to the exotic city of Karanca in the island of Serkonos. With her drifting at the harbour entrance, you wake to find yourself with the opportunity to look around the ship properly for the first time. At first glance all is well, but closer inspection reveals that this ship doesn’t quite make sense. You’d notice more, but this is the introduction and it needs to be brief…

I’m not sure how many fans of the Dishonored series are also interested in Naval Architecture, navigation and seamanship. I suspect it’s probably not a lot. I am acutely aware that, as a Warfare Officer (Royal Navy) of several years, I am in a position to know a bit more than the average player about ships. I find the depictions of ships in games largely to be terrible. I do not find the Dreadful Wale terrible. I want to state that here at the outset because it is going to get in-depth. Know now, then, that I wouldn’t make the effort to talk about it if it wasn’t one of the best attempts at a ship in a game I’ve seen. Know also that I appreciate that it is not really a ship. It is the facsimile of a ship that has to act as a flowing game space, a quest hub, and dump of environmental storytelling, character exposition and world-building. Had the team at Arkane wanted to build a 3D model of a ship that was perfectly accurate with an accurate interior, I am of no doubt they could have done so.

Why write this piece at all? If I know it’s not meant to be a real ship, and it isn’t a real ship and it’s in a fictional universe, what is there to say? Well, think of it this way: every location in the game is space that has been designed. There a few spaces in Dishonored 2 that are not man-made, and man-made spaces reveal to us what the people of that world find truly important. How a space is designed reveals to us how it is used. Ships embody this notion taken to its logical extreme, as ships are designed to be used in isolation, remote. Everything a person needs to live should be evident on a ship. An archaeologist that studies an ocean-going ship, her books and fittings would be able to learn all about the society that created it: The cutting edge of technology and science; the advances in medicine; the racial, social, sexual and religious observances of her ship’s company; what they did for fun; what they ate; the value of things and the drivers of the economy; martial practices; where they went and the extent of the known world. Ship’s Logs are some of the most important historical documents on record, and ships have for centuries been the vehicles by which the world has been connected. So, a ship is an ideal in-game location if you want to achieve a lot of world-building in a densely-packed space. This is something the Dreadful Wale mostly does well. Where she slips up occasionally, however, is when the function (over form) of the ship violates the internal logic of the world.

These pieces are not about nit-picking. I want to discuss how the internal logic of a game space can have a significant impact on the strength of the narrative it supports. I just happen to know about ships, so this is a subject I’m qualified to talk about. You could try this on the Shalebridge Cradle from Thief: Deadly Shadows, if you knew a lot about orphanages that were also sanitariums.

I’ll endeavour to explain the nautical terms as we go, and limit my use of Royal Navy “Jackspeak” to a minimum. With that in mind, grab your port and starboard scran spanners, and come with me…

First thing’s first, the Dreadful Wale is a ship, not a boat. There are two ways of defining this, one involves hydrodynamics and which way the ship leans as she moves through a turn. The other is far simpler: she has a sea boat. Ships can carry boats, boats can’t carry ships.

I included these diagrams because we’ll be talking about various locations on the ship and it’ll remove ambiguity if you can see to what I am referring exactly. The naming conventions of ship parts is a bit of a black art because the parts are named almost relative to each other with reference to the size of the vessel, and no two ships on which I have served have had all the parts you’d expect. For instance, I have labelled the area of deck at the stern the Poop. It is not raised, as a Poop Deck is normally, but it’s not a Quarterdeck either. Similarly, I have named the main deck area the Weather Deck over the several other names available for a Main Deck as it seemed the most appropriate. We’ll get more into this as I discuss the ship’s interior, which in turn raises a lot of questions of its own.

The first bit of insight we can glean from this diagram is that naming the parts wasn’t too difficult. It sounds obvious, but it means the ship is based in reality. It isn’t some outrageous shape, it doesn’t use some bizarre quantum mechanics to suspend itself above the water, nor is the bridge below the waterline and the rudders aloft or anything unconventional like that. It is a traditional monohull vessel (though catamarans are common in the world of Dishonored) and the only truly egregious thing is its means of propulsion, which we’ll get into later. Furthermore, in keeping with the prevalent theme of whaling in the world of Dishonored, the Dreadful Wale is based in part on the design of steam-powered whale-catchers from around the 1930s/40s:

This is the Empire Unitas V. She was a German whaler, built in 1937. The Kriegsmarine requisitioned her into wartime service in 1940, but in 1945 the British Ministry of Transport for War took her. She was scrapped in 1955. Notice the high bow common to trawlers, the two masts and where they are located, and the enclosed bridge with the funnel immediately aft.

I like this for two reasons. Firstly, it automatically makes the Dreadful Wale a viable platform for whaling, in terms of its hull shape. Whether or not the team at Arkane knew the Dreadful Wale would want a high freeboard at the bows is immaterial, because by imitating the hull shape of this real whaler (or trawler for that matter), that element of the design has taken care of itself. It is logical, and upholds the logic of the world. Secondly, the Dreadful Wale has deviated from this design in a couple of key ways: the removal of the harpoon gun on the bow, and any whaling equipment. It tells the story of the ship, that it looks like a whaler but has no whaling equipment on her. We know that the ship is a bit different, a bit unusual. We learn that her master then isn’t a whaler, or the master of a regular passenger ship. This is an advantage the ship has simply by being based on the hull shape of an existing type of vessel. Here are a couple more examples that indicate it’s not a one-off:

With this, Arkane are off to a strong start. The basic appearance of the Dreadful Wale is thematically appropriate, and she looks seaworthy at first glance (though in future parts we’ll see how this is up for debate). There is more to discuss when it comes to her rather unconventional hull shape, and in the next part of this piece I’ll talk about how one would conduct the evolutions required by the ordinary practice of seamen regarding her Upper Deck fittings. I’m a big fan of the Dreadful Wale because she’s giving us a lot to talk about. As we go on, we’ll be discussing why some of the less believable bits of naval architecture may have come about.