Dishonored 2 – violence is not the only option

GameCentral speaks to the co-director of Dishonored 2 about the importance of exploration and discovery, and the difficulties of writing a female lead.

As useful as it may be for big announcements, and meeting and interviewing the industry’s most important figures, E3 is really not a very suitable venue for playing video game. Especially not something as involved and atmospheric as Dishonored 2. Not that Bethesda was offering the option, but they did give us the chance to speak to Harvey Smith – co-creator of the series and well known for his work on ‘90s classics such as System Shock and the original Deus Ex.



We spoke to him last year as well, when Dishonored 2 was first announced and very little information had been revealed about it. At this E3 though the first gameplay video was released and it was possible to get a clearer idea of how the game is being pitched, and how its two different characters – original protagonist Corvo and former empress Emily Kaldwin – will work.

One of the most successful new franchises of the last few years, Dishonored offers complex storytelling, entirely non-linear gameplay, and full freedom to play the games and characters however you want. And if Smith’s description of the new features and systems are accurate then the sequel should prove a more than worthy follow-up…


Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Publisher: Bethesda

Developer: Arkane Studios

Release Date: 11th November 2016

GC: It’s a relief to sit down and talk about a single-player game, as I’ve just come from the four-player demo of Ghost Recon. The game looks great, but when you’re paired with three knuckleheads that don’t want to play it properly….

HS: [laughs] Although, I have to say I love co-op. I don’t like competitive multiplayer, it’s very stressful for me, but one of my favourite game moments ever is I used to love Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. And I popped into a match on my Xbox one day, and I was paired with three people. One was an expert elite 20-year-old badass that had a sniper name or whatever.

GC: Was that SniperGodXXX?

HS: [laughs] Yeah, that guy! And the other two were, like, probably 10 and 12-year-old boys that only spoke Spanish. So they were like little Mexican kids and we were all playing. And they would chatter back and forth to each other in Spanish and the other guy would try and tell us what to do, and he’d curse them for not listening. And it was just such a dysfunctional squad! And it was me, the old guy, and it felt like this is what it would be like in a zombie apocalypse. There’d be two kids who don’t speak your language and one mean guy, and you’re just trying to keep up with them. [laughs]



GC: Did you get far?

HS: We played, like, three or four maps and it was fun. The guy carried us basically, he did a lot of the shooting.

GC: That reminds me of Sea Of Thieves on the Xbox One, which is all about communicating with the other players. It’s like a free form co-operative where you have to operate a pirate ship together. It’s almost more of a social experiment than a game.

HS: Interesting.

GC: Has making that sort of game ever interested you?

HS: I worked on a multiplayer-only game called Fireteam [released in 1998 – GC], that was one of the first games with voice. It was just before Deus Ex and it was really interesting, so many interesting dynamics that we couldn’t possibly cover them all today.

I mean, because we were one of the first games with voice we were discovering a lot of things. Like, as soon as you had a squad-mate that was a woman it changed the way everyone else played. Some people harassed her, some people hit on her, some people made assumptions about her – and it was obvious because she spoke. And Fireteam was a game you pretty much had to use voice to play.

GC: We had some readers discussing that recently. Where they would pretend to be a woman, just from the name or avatar, and they got to see how everyone’s attitude instantly changed towards them.

HS: Yes, it’s fascinating.

GC: Anyway: Dishonored 2.


HS: [laughs] Yes!

Dishonored 2 – not a linear game

GC: I saw it at the Bethesda conference, of course. But the thing that struck me the most is that it had a bad case of what I call E3 trailer syndrome. Where even though it’s a complex, thoughtful single-player game, where you don’t have to kill anyone, the trailer was just incredibly violent.

HS: [laughs] Yeah, it’s a common problem we have, because if you show a playthrough where the player is ghosting… the AI never even became aware that I was there, never even tripped into, ‘Hey, what was that?’ So I’m hiding, crouching, I’m leaning around things, I’m sneaking, I’m taking the key off the guard’s belt… you can do the entire thing like that, right?

And if you do a trailer like that it’s very slow and it’s very low drama. And guys like me love it, there’s a sublime tension to it. But the average consumer, I think, is probably more excited by seeing the explosions and the heads flying and things like that. So how do you market it?

GC: Marketing in general still remains one of the most infantile things about gaming. Trailers and posters just try to look like movies, and no matter what the game is they’re advertising they’re always aimed solely at 14-year-old boys.

HS: What’s the best movie you’ve seen in the last couple of years?

GC: Oh, I watched loads on the plane over. Sicario was good.


HS: I’ve heard it’s really good.

GC: It is… well, I had some issues with it but it’s certainly very well made.

HS: I don’t see so many movies nowadays, but…

GC: I tell you what else is good: Zootropolis. That’s one of the most intelligent films I’ve seen in a long time.

HS: What’s it called?

GC: Zootropolis. It’s a Disney film about talking animals… but it’s really about racial and gender prejudice in the workplace.

HS: Oh, right yeah.

GC: Actually, I think it’s called something else here. Zootopia? But it’s like The Lego Movie before that, where because they couldn’t be violent or vulgar they had to be clever. Much more so than many adult movies.

Dishonored 2 – stealth is always rewarded

HS: Yep, yep. It’s interesting because I don’t see so many movies now, because I hope to catch up, but I loved Boyhood. Not this year, but last year I guess? And when I think about how Civil War and Boyhood are marketed – both good movies – and how many people they want it to appeal to versus the other. And which demographic it is, it’s interesting to think about games because I think the subject matter is what leads to one type of marketing or the other.

Myst, obviously, would be marketed very differently to Dishonored. And Dishonored is a game that tries to have it both ways. We do have the high drama, over-the-top you’re a soldier killing people action. But we really do put a lot of work into that sublime tension of sneaking and not being caught, and allowing you to play not only without killing but without killing.

You can get from the beginning of the game to the end without violence, and it’s one of the things we’re really happy with. It’s one of the reasons that we put so much into the world. There’s that layer of the world that’s an adventure game layer, where you’re just looking at this alternate reality… it’s the art sure, but it’s also the narrative layer and the lore. And the way the Empire seems to function.

I have this friend whose mother is like 68, and she finished Dishonored 1. She put it on the easiest difficulty and she wanted to see the whole world, so she walked through it. Every time she got into combat she basically reloaded. And she had commentary on the final level, so I know she finished the game. And it was really amazing, and made me wonder how much she would want to invest in just a tourist version. So someone could just wander through the world. So it’s an interesting problem.

GC: Wow, her Let’s Play video would be really interesting.

HS: [laughs]

GC: So she was working through it by only making the non-violent decisions?

HS: Yes, she snuck as much as she could. She Blinked and stopped time and used possession to avoid conflict. She hacked things to get past them.

GC: That always fascinates me. My mum never really approved of gaming at all until I gave her my old DS. Then she went from Brain Training to touchscreen Zelda, and now to basically anything on the 3DS. And her whole opinion on games has changed through simply playing them herself. So it’s always frustrating to me that the industry only ever targets its core audience, when clearly it could be much more encompassing even with the same games.

HS: Yeah, I agree.

Harvey Smith – he hasn’t seen Zootropolis yet

GC: But to go back to your example. The trailer for Boyhood makes it clear what the tone of the film is, what the real appeal of the film is. It doesn’t pretend it’s an action film. As far as I’m concerned, and I assume most people agree with this, the real appeal of Dishonored is the quiet bits and the options. And although the violence is entertaining it’s more because it’s there as a back-up.

HS: It’s there as a constant consequence for not doing this other thing… It’s funny, when people ask me to sum up Dishonored, or at least what I love, it’s two words really. It’s ‘exploration’ and ‘improvisation’. And those aren’t just jargon-y terms. Exploration, in terms of both the geographical terrain and the systems.

Because most games just give you a path. You’re at the beginning of this bridge, you have to get to the end of the bridge, there’s seven turrets you have to blow and some monsters… go! And there’s literally only one thing you can do: move forward and shoot the right targets. And that’s it. And in fact you’ll probably have to shoot them in the right order. And that is not a game to me. I don’t even want to do that.

Once in a while there is a game like that. I remember the old coin-op Star Wars game where you’re flying an X-wing Fighter, with the pillars rising… once in a while there’s something like that that I like. But anyway… exploration. You can play at a very slow pace or a very fast past, you take this path or that one or that one. You can buy this power or that one, you can upgrade this power or have no powers. You can play this style or this style, this character or this character. So we just give you a dizzying array of options.

There’s no way you could possibly see, like, 25% of the content in one playthrough. Because just by definition, you’re choosing either Corvo or Emily. You can only afford so many powers and you can either do a high chaos or a low chaos playthrough, but then there’s also which paths to take and who to side with in various missions.

And so there’s this sense that it’s much larger and you’re exploring it. And that’s what makes it different. And also the improvisation part. You can literally do things that we didn’t plan. Like, the story from when everybody visited was we had the Overseers, as a firing squad, about to execute some heretics. And we had done playthroughs many different ways, but we used Emily’s Far Reach power to pull the guy out of the scene and choke him out, so that he didn’t kill the poor guy for crimes of heresy.

But on a whim, Dinga Bakaba – our lead designer, said, ‘What if I Domino those two guys together?’ Because we have this power that links people, and whatever you do to one of them they all suffer. So if you link four of them together and hit one of them with a sleep dart they all drop. And so he Domino-ed the two guys, the Overseeer about to pull the trigger and his victim, just to see what would happen. Because we work in a very systemic way, so we shouldn’t have to plan these things. We’d never thought of it. And as the guy shot the heretic he dropped down dead too, his own bullet killed him because they were Domino-ed together. And it was mind-blowing for us.

GC: You must’ve been relieved it worked!

HS: Yes, exactly! Because we did it live in front of some people. He just on a whim did it, but it’s the thing we live for. It’s the thing we wake up for. People find all these combinations, and the point is they can play improvisationally.

Dishonored 2 – it’s up to you how you treat the guards

GC: I always feel that one of the most interesting things about games is discovering things and the feeling that you’re the only one that’s ever done it. Even though you know that’s probably not true.

HS: Yes, yeah. It’s theoretically not true, right? Your path through Dishonored is unique, it’s mathematically possible that someone else followed it but it’s hugely unlikely. It’s a dizzying array of possibilities, I guess. Bone charm crafting is something we’ve added to the game, and because we did it procedurally there’s 400,000 combinations of Bone charms. We can’t test them all. We haven’t seen them all. We can test each trait individually, but you have four slots for traits and when you multiply them you can put together some combinations that do things that we never thought of.

And that thing you said about discovery, I want to harp on that for a second. Because for me, playing games, that sense of discovery, what’s around the next corner, is incredibly powerful. That’s one of the reasons I love games like Red Dead Redemption or even Far Cry 2, is that I can just explore this place. But discovery is one word, the other one is mystery.

Games are made by programmers, by engineers, and they’re systems. And so therefore the temptation is to make them, ‘Here is how this works and here is how that works’. But computers aren’t capable of uncertainty. The point is I guess at least it exceeds the capacity of the human mind to hold it all together. Like, if you were smart enough you would look at a system, even a procedural system with emergent results, and you’d go, ‘Ah, all of these things are possible’. And that’s interesting, but we’re not smart enough for that so it exceeds our ability to hold it together.

Somebody took Domino and the power Doppelganger, and Doppelganger lets you summon a copy of yourself that can then sneak around and distract the guards, or it can be upgraded to fight them for you. It’s just a copy of you, right? It’s a shade of you. But it just stands there next to you, unless it has something to do. And then they used Domino. They were looking down on a difficult room, there were like three elite guards and some other guards. The elite guards are very hard, they have pistols.

And so they summoned a doppelganer and then they Domino-ed together with the three elite guards and then they just stabbed it and killed it. Because the doppelganer isn’t resisting you it can just be executed it, and when they did it all three of the elite guards died instantly. And it was like, ‘Wow, that feels like an exploit but it’s brilliant!’ So we left it in the game.

GC: I remember a moment of epiphany with my nephew. He’s like nine or something, and his dad and I were trying to get him to watch Star Wars for the first time and he didn’t like it.

HS: [laughs] Speaking of heretics!

(The PR guy appears and warns us we’ve only got a few minutes left)

GC: He won’t play classic games either, it’s just really difficult to condition him to have the opinions we want. [laughs]

HS: [laughs]

GC: And then one day I found him playing Goat Simulator and I asked him why he’s playing it. And he said it was because he likes exploring and finding new things he hasn’t seen before. And I found that fascinating, that even in such a terrible game that appeal was strong enough to forgive everything else.

HS: You can imagine the power of Minecraft.

GC: Oh, he and his friends are obsessed by that. Which is much easier to approve of.

HS: When you can literally tear down the mountain and rebuild it into something else, and dig under and see, ‘Oh there’s a cavern here!’ It’s very powerful.

GC: Watching kids play together, you’re almost seeing some sort of gestalt intelligence emerging as they co-operate.

HS: [laughs] But there are some moments… take Fallout 3, a game this company [Bethesda] publishes. There are moments I don’t like in the game and there are moments I absolutely will never forget. There was moment I came over a hill and I saw a large parking lot, with shopping carts and such in it, and a couple of cars and a grocery store that was all locked down.

And I just had this ‘media migration moment’, we used to call it. Where your love of something in one medium transfers over into a new medium. Like, the fact that the players of the game Aliens asked for Hicks’ shotgun, even though it’s a less powerful weapon. That’s kind of a media migration moment, they want that experience.

And I looked down at that parking lot and it was such a Dawn of the Dead moment. And I know somebody hand-placed every single thing in there and hand-scripted every encounter. But to me, I still feel like I’m discovering it. And that I might find a way through it that no one anticipated. And that is so powerful, I don’t know why.

Dishonored 2 – the art design remains a key highlight

GC: We touched on it earlier but now you have a female character, I wonder how you’re handling the contrast with Corvo? A common approach is for a developer to proudly state that the character is the same, whether they’re male or female – they have the same dialogue, Mass Effect even had the same animation. But of course men and women are different, and yet the more you emphasise those differences the more difficulty you find yourself in. It’s just a maze of potential sexism, and the lack of personal insight for a male creator.

HS: It’s a minefield. Our narrative designer is a woman, and one of our writers is a woman. But it’s a good point nonetheless, because the temptation is either to make her a man with a woman’s body… like, ‘We wrote this character, he’s a badass – well, let’s swap him out with a female body’.

GC: That’s right, but they’re always badasses. It’s very rare to have a female character that’s anything else.

HS: It’s a narrow range, right? So there’s the female Corvo we could’ve done. And then you can also take the approach of making a super gender neutral person, where it doesn’t matter. Or you could, like, highly sexualise the character, which is the character as seen from the male point of view. The male gaze. And those are all mistakes, those are all traps.

And so what we asked ourselves constantly was… the same way as a boy growing up, if I looked at Luke Skywalker and said, ‘Oh, this is the kind of a guy I would like to be. He’s going to be powerful someday; he’s special, they’re training him. He lost his family, so he’s a figure of sympathy’. These are all things that are aspirational for me. But I could just as easily say that about, say, Batman. He’s a badass, everyone’s afraid of him. There are many different ways you could be aspirational about these characters.

So what we did constantly, was ask ourselves: ‘If I were a young girl and I was looking at the media landscape, would I be proud of being this character? Would I want to be this character?’ We’re not talking to the heterosexual men now, we don’t want to know whether you’d like to f*** this girl. What we’re saying is you, over there – 15-year-old female gamer – is this a hero figure you would like to be; the way Hermione in Harry Potter was aspirational to many people. And so that was our North Star.

GC: This is such an obscure reference, unless you happen to be a fan of Inspector Morse?

HS: Never heard of it.

GC: The context is actually completely irrelevant. But there was just this scene that always stuck with me, where he’s talking to a female detective. He’s an older guy and he’s talking about the difference between men and women and he mentions the slower propensity towards violence, the greater capacity for empathy. And the character gets really angry with him, she thinks he’s being patronising and that that’s why women are so discriminated against. And I never knew how to respond to that, because I could kind of understand her anger but on the other hand his comments seemed to speak to a general truth, and they also seemed to me to be very positive and desirable traits. And I can imagine in your situation, a 15-year-old female gamer probably does want to be a badass, but as you say that is such a narrow portrayal…

HS: I spend a lot of time talking to our fans and I can tell you that it might lean in directions, by gender, but it’s not defined. Because we have many men who kind of love the emo undertones of our game and they love the lore and the RPG alt-world stuff.

And we have many women who do as well, they love the Victorianism, etc. But we have just as many women who say, ‘I find it cathartic to cut men’s heads off in the game’. And so we have a mix on both side, but there may be more women, I don’t know, who appreciate the art and the lore of the game.

GC: But that’s it, you assume there probably are. But then you ask yourself whether you’re stereotyping women by thinking that.

HS: Maybe I am. And in fact I’ve spoken to plenty of women who love the stealth and love the combat. And like I said they’re really grisly, because they don’t get to be this way in our society all the time. Like, if you irritate a man he can tell you to f*** off. It’s less easy for a woman to do that, from systemic sexism. But in the game she can chop the dude’s head off or put a grenade on him or whatever. But I agree with you, it’s super fascinating just to analyse it. Just to think about it.

GC: And it’s been going on for so long now, the standards are so entranced as a societal norm, I wonder whether we will ever escape from them.

HS: Maybe when we’re post-human.

GC: [laughs]

HS: I keep wondering someday, are we gonna have artificial bodies that look aesthetically pleasing but are very powerful. And at that point we’d equally be able to lift cars, women and men. And at that point everything’s gonna change, so… I don’t know.

GC: I’d want to be the car. My robot body would have to be a Transformer.

(The PR guy reappears, urging us to finish)

HS: [laughs] That’s an appropriately sci-fi ending to a fascinating conversation.

GC: Well thank you very much, that was very interesting.

HS: Not at all, good to see you again.

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