“People tend to think the outsider is god, and that the end of god is the end of everything”, says Christophe Carrier, Level Design Director on Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. “But the outsider is more like a god, and there was other gods before him and maybe there will be others after him, we don’t know.”

It’s not the end of the world, in other words. If Arkane wants to continue the Dishonored series it can. “There will always be a void in some way, and the end of the outsider is not the end of the void. It’s ending the existence of the void as it is.”

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However, it is the end of this world. As I speak with Carrier and Lead Game Designer Dinga Bakaba at this year’s Gamescom, it becomes clear that Death of the Outsider will definitely shut the door on the era that began when Jessamine Kaldwin was slain by Daud in the original Dishonored.“It’s the last chapter of what we call the Kaldwin era,” says Bakaba. “The era that revolves around the assassination of Jessamine, and what happens to Corvo after that, Daud having remorse about that and trying to redeem himself...this game is the end of that. Corvo and Emily’s stories are wrapped up by the end of Dishonored 2 Certainly, the absence of the usual Dishonored tropes in Death of the Outsider suggests the end is already in sight. Protagonist Billie Lurk isn’t marked by the outsider, so she’s not part of his game which sees him testing his subjects and judging them for it. In other words, the broader world of Death of the Outsider won’t change depending on your actions as it has in other games.“What if there is no chaos system, and we just focused on the direct consequences of your actions?” says Bakaba. “It was interesting for us to explore what a Dishonored game is without it. This time around, you can still go non lethal, lethal, as you always do. The difference is there is no-one who is going to tell you this is good, this is bad.”It suits Billie’s character, continues Bakaba. As someone who experienced her redemption arc - a central theme of the Dishonored series - in Dishonored 2, it’s not about what’s right or wrong for her. “she’s paid her debts. So we steered away from the chaos system.”

There is no traditional mana system in Death of the Outsider, either. With no mark to call her own, Billie gets her powers from tapping directly into the Void’s energy. This means her energy doesn’t get reduced each time she uses her powers, rather it just has to cool down before it’s ready to go again.“It’s a very interesting system, you don’t have to run around and find all the bottles of elixirs to keep your power up,” says Bakaba. This drives incentive to experiment with Billie’s full set of powers from the get go. “If we took a traditional character like an Emily or Corvo there would have less of a reason to experiment.”

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Level design will reflect the fact Billie has access to a full suite of powers from the beginning. Although Death of the Outsider’s chapters won’t be themed like they were in Dishonored 2 (“there simply wasn’t time”, says Carrier), levels have been crafted with a sense of on-the-fly playfulness. “We know exactly what the player could do at any any point of the game,” says Carrier. “It was very liberating for us. So we crafted every level so that sometimes you have to use one of your abilities more than the others, then switch it up.”This is a Dishonored game, however, so some things will remain the same. When I ask Carrier if you can 'kill' the Outsider non-lethally?“Yes. Of course.”Though the end of this era presents Arkane with an exciting blank slate for future chapters in the series, Carrier and Bakaba aren’t sure what the future holds for Dishonored.“If we do [another one]”, says Carrier, “there will always be the core values of Dishonored and Arkane. If there is one. We’re not going to betray what we did in Dishonored. We don’t want to go too far away from the Dishonored series if we do something new. We will keep the core values”‘Dishonored has been more than 8 years of our lives,” says Bakaba. “It’s been a huge chunk of one’s life. Some of us got married since then, had kids. I think we want to experiment with some stuff, while keeping our values, what’s core, while building these complex interesting multilayered games that allow you to play the way you want.“We might direct our exploration more on one side, more on the other side, move the sliders around. There are other areas I can think of in game design, narrative design, I’d like to explore. And it will be fun. We have a great team at Arkane. It’s nice to be able to make these games, when you ship a game and still play it at home. When you are making games that you love to play, it gives you a great ground for experimentation. We don’t want to be restrained and say this is the framework that we have to work within and have to do that for 10 more years. But we’re Arkane, we’ll stay Arkane.”

Lucy O'Brien is Games and Entertainment Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her on Twitter.