Corvo Attano is back to mantling eaves and possessing vermin in Dishonored 2. But he's been practicing in the 15 years since his blood-optional quest to clear his name of regicide. We've already seen what it's like if you take on the mantle of his royal charge / liege / not-so-secret-daughter Emily at the beginning of the game, but Bethesda and Arkane Studios showed what it's like to revisit the role of Corvo in an extended gameplay demo at QuakeCon.

Where Emily has become a master of otherworldy manipulation, Corvo plays much like you remember him from the first game: "blinking" past wary guards from one cover to the next, firing specialized crossbow bolts to kill or tranquilize, stabbing fools. But each of his abilities has been twisted a bit. Blink now works a bit more like Daud's teleportation ability (which froze time as he casted it) from Dishonored's DLC campaign, and Corvo can transition directly from teleportation into an attack - be it a simple slashed throat or a lucha-worthy dropkick.

The clear winner for Most Improved Ability, though, is Bend Time. Instead of just slowing or halting the passage of time, it looks like Corvo now has finer control to scrub around the timeline as he pleases. At one point in the demo infiltration he did the classic "shoot a bunch of people with crossbow bolts at once" routine. Later he grabbed the body of his target (I'm not sure if he was dead at this point), lobbed it over a railing, froze time, jumped down, dispatched a bunch of guards in slow-motion, then unfroze time and grabbed the body out of mid-air. Totally unnecessary but completely cool, just like the best moments from the original game.

In this case the soon-to-be-lifeless body belonged to Paolo, the leader of Karnaca's Howlers gang. Corvo dumped his body on the floor of the local Abbey Overseer's office, whereas Emily presented the Overseer's head to Paolo in the previous Dishonored 2 demo. They don't even have a particular allegiance to either party, they're just trying to earn some favors in this part of town.

You're free to support either the Overseer or the Howlers regardless of which player character you choose, and the city will have to live with the consequences. However many of them you let live, anyway. Dishonored 2 will hit PC, PS4, and Xbox One on November 11.