Dishonored

So yes, there is a new game called Dishonored that probably none of you have heard about, as I have not seen a single thread relating to it.

There is not a single trailer on it and hardly any information has been revealed, but it's already one of my most anticipated games for 2012, just below Halo 4 and (possibly) Half-Life: Episode 3.

I found a good video from Gamespot, just recently uploaded, here:

‪Video Previews - Dishonored QuakeCon 2011‬‏ - YouTube

So yes, it is going to be very much like Thief and Deus Ex, maybe add a little Half-Life, Assassin's Creed, and The Elder Scrolls into the mix. I will most definitely be pre-ordering this game. How about you? Post your thoughts here.

Here is the 10-page cover story from Gameinformer. It's a long wall of text, so I decided to put it in a spoiler instead.

Spoiler

Page 53

The hero's name is immaterial next to the labels players earn for themselves. However you approach your desperate quest to topple the fascists who have wrongfully imprisoned you and wrung your dying city dry, you'll have to break a few eggs to make this omelet. Or will you?

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Dishonored is a first-person action game, but it couldn't be more different from Call of Duty or Halo. Developer Arkane Studios' mission is to create an immersive, visceral experience that lets players experiment and be creative in affecting the world around them. This philosophy revolves around what co-creative directors Harvey Smith (Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows) and Raf Colantonio (Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic) lovingly refer to as "the simulation." Against the backdrop of a revenge tale that pits the Empress' former bodyguard against the regime that convicted him for her murder, the simulation is a complex machine that the player can affect in dozens of interesting ways. The word simulation in this context is the difference between Minecraft and Animal Crossing. Smith and Colantonio live and breathe games that create experiences through the rich tapestry woven by layers of interacting systems, not guided tours through series of scripted events. Dishonored's stealthy assassination gameplay will be different for everyone; simply using a different combination of powers and tactics along a single path yields dramatically different results. Creating a playground that reacts to the player is a multifaceted challenge. The AI has to be robust, so that it responds to changes in the world believably and not because the player stepped on an invisible trigger placed by a designer. The environment must be stuffed full of interactive elements: ledges to mantle onto, vases to knock off of tables, fires to light or douse, tables to hide under, carpets to muffle your footsteps. The final piece of the puzzle - likely the most important one - is to ensure that players have a satisfying toolbox at their disposal. The player assumes the role of Corvo, a lethal assassin with unparalleled mobility, skillful fighting techniques, supernatural powers, and improvised-yet-powerful gadgets at his disposal. "The last thing we wanted to do is come up with a model where you're weak, and that's why you had to sneak." Smith says. "You're like a Ninja, but you can only last so long and there are many, many guards." Players have both a timing-based parry and a dedicated block button for defense, and lightning-fast dagger strikes complemented by crossbows and other weapons on offense. As in many stealth games, though, a stand-up fight is last resort. Corvo's quest for revenge is a bare skeleton that players flesh out with their own play styles and choices. Dishonored lets you own your actions and their consequences and take an active hand in crafting your own experience to an impressive degree. Arkane didn't quite confirm, but the team is trying hard to include non-lethal ways to remove every target from the equation. How's that for player freedom in a game starring an assassin? Though the protagonist has been touched by the supernatural Outsider and has uncanny powers from that enigmatic encounter, you won't find a healing spell or a magical sword in his arsenal. "We would never put a fireball in Dishonored. We have powers that affect the simulation, and we allow you to layer them." explains Smith. You have abilities like the power to bring forth a swarm of AI-driven rats that react naturally to their surroundings. They'll attack people (including you!) in sufficient numbers. They'll seek food, cleaning the bones of dead enemies for easier disposal. Another power allows you to posses one, giving you an easy escape through tunnels far too small for any human. This layering of effects lies at the heart of Dishonored. Arkane could have easily made the rat swarm a simple visual effect that distracted or killed a single enemy for a mana cost. That's what magic spells in most games do. Creating a group of AI-controlled beings that interact with other powers, the environment, and other entities in the world is vastly harder - but commensurately more rewarding. All of this has to be recognized and reacted to by the AI for hostile guards, neutral NPCs, animals, and any other ambulatory entity. Colantonio and Smith refer to their solution as an "analog AI" that has a number of characteristics which can be modified on the fly, rather than a simple "alert" or "passive" toggle based on whether an alarm has been set off. Two guards in conversation with each other, for instance, have narrower cones of vision and duller hearing than a single enemy on patrol. The effects of light, mental state, ambient noise, and more dynamically affect the perceptiveness of every active AI in the game. For this simulation-based design to work, players must not feel like the game cheats. What use is it to plan an infiltration if you're just going to be spotted by a guard walking into the room after magically spawning next door? Arkane's solution is to only rarely spawn in new enemies, and only in conjunction with alarms. Even then, they always enter the level from a believable location, like a reinforcing squad coming in through the back door of a mansion.

Page 55 Sidebar: Where The World Went Wrong

To understand Dishonored's unusual fantasy world, where a handful of cities cling to life on a small set of islands, Arkane walked us through how it devised the setting.

START WITH 17TH CENTURY LONDON. Burgeoning populations ensure the rise of a great city on the water's edge. Poverty and wealth rub shoulders in the cramped streets.

ISOLATE IT FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD. Some minor civilization exists on other islands in the same archipelago, but a deadly monster-infested ocean separates Dunwall from the Pandyssian continent. Only the bravest adventurers risk that distant land's infinite dangers - and few of them return.

ADD A VOLATILE, CHEAP ENERGY SOURCE. The real world had to wait for widespread exploitation of coal to start the Industrial Revolution. Dunwall's inhabitants built theirs on powerful oil harvested from monstrous whales of the deeps.

MIX IN POWERFUL BUT DANGEROUS MAGIC. The Outsider is neither god nor devil, but it inarguably walks in the world. A few lucky (cursed?) people have been touched by this unearthly being, and can affect the world for good or ill in fantastic ways.

BLOW IT ALL UP WITH A WORSE PLAGUE THAN WE'VE EVER SEEN. Half o Dunwall is daed, and yet more are still terminally infected, courtesy of a rat-born plague that has brought civilization to the edge of collapse.

KILL THE EMPRESS. The protagonist Corvo didn't do it, but everyone thinks he did. Either way, she's dead. Greedy, powerful men have stepped into the void her passing has left. Loudspeakers blare propaganda and the people live in as much fear of the Lord Regent's government as of the plague.

JOIN THE RESISTANCE. An underground opposition group opposes the evil regime. After wrongfully serving five years for the Empress' death, the movement has decided to seek your aid and offer you much in return.

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Aside from its effects on the environment and other characters, the complexity of a power like the rat swarm brings dangers with it for the player. You can make things worse by causing an NPC to freak out at being swarmed by rats and calling more guards to your location. You could even kill yourself with it by not ensuring the rats have a more appealing target than your wounded self. But that's okay with Arkane. "We like the opposite of protecting the player," Colantonio says. This means giving players enough rope to hang themselves with, but also giving exceptional freedom and agency. The simplest approach to disabling a watchtower in the middle of an open square you need to cross is avoiding its rotating beam by creeping from cover to cover and avoiding patrolling guards. That's the base level of gameplay that anyone would expect out of a stealth/action game, and there's nothing tactically wrong with it. In Dishonored, however, you could alternatively climb a building and use a combination of celerity (supernatural speed) and your natural double-jump, and blink (a short-ranged teleport) to cover a surprising distance in the air and land on top of the tower itself. Allowing players to combine their tools in whatever ways they can think of has hazards within development. Smith chuckles as he remembers the first time the celerity-double jump-blink combo came up. "When we first started seeing people do that, our lead designer said, 'Please turn this off! People are going to get out of the map!' And we said 'No, it's improvisational and that's the whole f---ing goal,'" he relates. "That's the point. People want to maximize the efficiency of those combinations," Colantonio adds. Despite the challenge they have set for their team, Colantonio and Smith are happy with the results so far. "I don't think there was at any point something cool that we had to back out of because it breaks the game," Colantonio proudly states. This mobility package is as crucial to Dishonored as the supernatural powers. Players can accomplish marvelous feats without touching their magical arsenal. In addition to a double-jump, players can sprint, slide, lean, and sneak. The levels are designed to encourage vertical experimentation; any surface at a 30-degree or shallower incline can be mantled onto, and chains and ropes can be climbed. By exploring the world, players may stumble upon the goodies and side missions sprinkled across all three dimensions.

Page 56 Sidebar

Dishonored is an action game first, but it has a significant amount of RPG depth under the hood. These three vectors allow you to customize your hero:

Powers

The supernatural powers at your disposal - Bend Time, Windblast, etc. - can be unlocked and upgraded by spending runes found in the world. Many powers have multiple upgrades to choose from, and you won't find nearly enough runes on a single playthrough to get everything. Even if you scour every inch of every level, you'll have to make hard choices.

Gadgets

Players have access to a number of fancy gadgets, such as spring razor traps, sticky grenades, and several types of ammunition like sleep darts. Appropriating wealth for your own use on your travels, from cutting a valuable painting out of its frame to stuffing your pockets with the nobility's jewelry, allows you to improve your loadout with upgraded tools or passive buffs like increased carrying capacity.

Charms

Many people in the world believe whalebone charms have mystical properties. In the player's case, the popular superstition is correct. Players can only find 12 or so out of the 40 total charms in a single playthrough, and each one is randomly selected from the master list. These minor buffs give you unusual powers like a mana refill when drinking from a fountain, or a health boost from eating certain colored rats.

Page 57 Sidebar

TWO HEADS THINK AS ONE

Dishonored's co-creative directors are wildly difference on the surface. Harvey Smith is an enthusiastic Texan several studios into his game development career. Smith has an undisputed classic (Deus Ex) and an ambitious and contentious follow-up (Deus Ex: Invisible War) both to his name, and a series of smaller projects that found varying degrees of success since. Raf Colantonio is a soft-spoken Frenchman who founded his own company and then moved to Austin simply because he wanted a bit of adventure beyond his native Lyon, France. Arkane's, and therefore Colantonio's, two big titles are a well-loved RPG that transcended a tiny budget and lack of marketing (Arx Fatalis) and a flawed title with unique, groundbreaking elements that suffered from a publisher that struggled to find a direction for the franchise (Dark Messiah of Might & Magic). When they start to talk about games, though, the kindred nature of their spirits is obvious.

If you take the successful games and the good bits from the less successful ones, it's easy to see what drives Colantonio and Smith both. The visceral, first-person melee in Dark Messiah was the highlight of that game, but a similarly excellent system is a small piece of Dishonored. The branching paths of Deus Ex are much loved, and Dishonored combines them with a mantling/sprinting/sliding/double-jumping/ mobility package that JC Denton could only dream of.

Put all of these elements together with the simulation elements of early PC games, and you can see the vision that drives Smith and Colantonio to create Dishonored. "All that stuff is magic to us, and the reason we're still in games," Smith says. "Both of us loved Dungeon Master in the late '80s, and we both loved Underworld and we both loved System Shock. That's the magic of those games - the developers went the extra mile."

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The one level we saw in action tasks the player with eliminating a corrupt magistrate. This male-factor is falsely accusing landowners of being infected with the plague in order to confiscate their property, and making an example of him will hopefully demonstrate the resistance movement's worth to the citizenry. This task requires getting past dozens of guards on the streets outside of the target's residence, then infiltrating the mansion before the final bit of grisly business. Several paths lead to the goal - through the streets, over the rooftops, etc. - but many stories play out alongside the main thrust of the scenario. Dishonored's world is largely defined by the interlocking systems of the simulation, but it's also stuffed full of designer-created content waiting to be discovered. Taking your time and listening to the conversations going on in the world can clue you into secondary bits along the way. Two thugs might be talking about a bureaucrat they're planning on robbing to get the key to a safe hidden on the second floor of a nearby building. All of that stuff in the world; the bureaucrat is following his own AI routine in another part of the level, the safe is sitting behind a painting, and the building is across the street. A vignette in our demo had a woman being accosted by a thug in a dark alleyway, crying out for help. Move in to rescue her and you'll find yourself ambushed by the two of them and their three skull-cracking friends hiding out in a nearby alcove. Since everything exists inside the simulation, you can find the ambushers first and deal with them separately. You could set a trap of your own, luring them into a battlefield more to your liking. You could use your powerful stealth capabilities to lead them toward a guard outpost and vanish into the night when the constabulary spots them and a melee ensues. You could skip dealing with them entirely and focus on your mission. However you choose to approach the obstacles and objectives in front of you, your actions have consequences. Arkane isn't using the traditional "A follows B" method of branching storytelling seen in, for example, Mass Effect. Instead, the studio is modeling morality along an axis common to assassins and spy fiction: the idea of being a butcher who cares little for collateral damage along the way, or a ghost who nobody knows was there until they realize the secret documents aren't in the safe where they're supposed to be. Stomping around Dunwall killing anyone in your way is a viable way to play Dishonored. It's also sloppy from the perspective of the insurgent group you're aiding as well as the rest of the city's residents. Unnecessary bloodshed and other displays of brutality increase the chaos in the world, destabilizing an already fragile society and breaking down the veneer of civilization over the increasingly desperate city. Chaos is a measured, aggregate value in Dishonored, but it's not a meter or score that players track. You'll be notified when your actions have raised or lowered the level of chaos, but it's an under-the-hood story mechanic rather than an explicit light/dark or paragon-renegade score with gameplay effects. "Things just happen. A character betrays you, or not," Smith explains. Arkane didn't go so far as to detail alternate endings (or much of anything else about the plot, for that matter), but the studio's goal is clear. "The fate of the world is not just lip service," Smith says. Though the team was reluctant to fill in the vague sketches they shared about Dishonored's plot, a sense of tragedy permeated every discussion on the subject. Not limited to the awful plague, this doom and gloom seemed to suggest that the exploitation of whale oil and general disregard for the natural order of things has brought the civilization to the brink of oblivion. The macabre sight of the rotting corpse of a once-vibrant whale being suspended over a polluted canal as plague victims are unceremoniously dumped into the water is not a subtle image. How the outsider is tied to the crisis looming on the horizon is a mystery as well, but unimaginably powerful extra-dimensional beings with no identifiable concept of morality generally don't take corporeal form to dispense puppies and rainbows. Whatever the specifics may be, the fate of the grim world is determined over a linear series of levels that largely revolve around eliminating one target or another within the Lord Regent's corrupt regime. This isn't an Elder Scrolls game that turns you loose to explore the world at your leisure, though everybody's experience will be different as they choose their path and affect the simulation in radically different ways based on gameplay choices. The Hound Pits pub serves as a hub between missions and a base for the resistance organization. Here you can upgrade powers and gadgets, get briefed on the state of the world, and receive your next task. Dishonored has dialogue options, but they're infrequent and only come up when you have a real choice to make. The vast majority of the conversations takes place without stopping the action, keeping you in the first-person perspective while delivering the exposition or background you need to put current events into context. Players are never bogged down in gossipy dialogue trees. We've only seen a fraction of Dishonored so far. We don't know how upgrades will improve your powers; the only variation we saw was a basic bend ability that slows time instead of stopping it. We know very little of the story or the supporting cast of characters; all Arkane has shared is the basic premise. The developers said the one level we saw may not even make it into the final game. And yet, Smith and Colantonio's vision for the game is a wonderful change of pace from the rank and file of modern mainstream action games. As Deus Ex and Thief proved, using a powerful set of tools in creative ways to solve problems is a proven approach to compelling game design, and Dishonored venerates that ideal beyond all others. Its mix of powers, mobility, environment, and AI goes so far beyond "use this piece of cover or another" and "use a machine gun or a sniper rifle." With Bethesda's creator-centric, vision-driven publishing model behind them, Arkane has a real chance to make something great. Many games that share design elements with Dishonored - including even great titles like the first Deus Ex - give the players a discrete set of choices to make when faced with a situation. You can take a stealth approach, or a combat approach, or maybe a third approach if you have the skill or power to unlock it. If Dishonored's simulation lives up to Colantonio and Smith's dreams, it will do more than give players a choice of three doors to walk through. It will put them in a crowded city, with as many paths to the goal as the players have ideas. "We always thought this type of game would eventually be dominant; that an RPG is not physical and not visceral enough for people, and that a shooter is not deep enough," Smith reveals. If Dishonored doesn't live up to its promise, it won't be for lack of enthusiasm.

Page 58 Sidebar

THE HEART

One particular item exists beyond the crossbow, pistol, grenades, and traps most reasonably prepared assassins carry. The so-called heart is a mystical object that beats faster as you pace your objectives, giving them some basic guidance to keep them on track in Dishonored's large levels. More disturbingly, it whispers directly into your mind, pulling secrets from the consciousness of others and sensing intersting things within the world that lie beyond mortal senses. You can learn something about every named character in the game with the heart, but allowing a barely-understood ancient artifact access to your mind may not be without consequences.

GOING OFF THE RAILS

"One of our philosophical points that Raf and I strongly believe is that modern game developers go way too far out of their way to protect the player from anything being broken or low drama. They try really hard to make sure everything is insulated and protected and you're only looking in this direction while this scripted thing happens and therefore get the maximum roller-coaster ride. Games can either be described as rollercoasters - which is all crafted and very high-drama - or that time when you were 16 and you and your friend broke into an abandoned house and you had the most intense moments waiting for the door to open, and there were moments where 'Ah, I expected something grand to happen but nothing happened; it was just an empty room.' But it was all your experience, right? So they can either be this crafted roller-coaster drama or they can be this 'explore an abandoned house with your friends [experience].' The latter is what we're going for.

Page 61 Sidebar

TRICKS OF THE ASSASSIN'S TRADE

Some of the creative combinations you can come up with using Dishonored's powers:

BEND TIME + POSSESSION: Save your own ammunition by freezing the flow of time just as an enemy opens fire, then possessing him and moving him into his own line of fire. All projectiles are fully physics modeled, so have some fun with it.

RAT SWARM + POSSESSION: Fashion it a quick escape by summoning a rat swarm and taking control of one of the little guys to slip out during the ensuing chaos. Just make sure not to get stepped on; dying while possessing something is a game over.

RAT SWARM + WIND BLAST: Crack a well-guarded, well-lit room by summoning a rat swarm and then using windblast to put out the fire illuminating the space. With no light to drive them away, the rats should go on the offensive, giving you the distraction you need.

I encourage you to read the entire thing through. I hope this gives you a positive first impression for this game. No release date is yet announced, but it should be coming to us sometime in 2012. It's looking to be good if this is truly only a fraction of what we will be looking forward to. I already see a game of the year worthy game here. Let's hope it does live up to the dreams of the studio, as well as the inevitable hype that is to come. I'll probably edit this when more information arrives. If I missed anything in the thread, tell me.

And yes, I actually had to write out that entire article. Please do read it.

Update: I found a video compiling most of the screenshots from the Gameinformer article.

‪First Look On Dishonored [HD]‬‏ - YouTube

This should give you a good idea of what it looks like, outside of what your imagination already showed you.

Update Extension: Added a new video. Modified the original thread post.

 

Updated OP. Added new videos, replaced one video, and modified the text of the original post. It should be much shorter now. Removed one unnecessary article and put the other one in a spoiler.

The video I replaced the old one with is much more informative than the previous one and should give you a general idea of what the game will be like. Try to read the entire thing through. If you can't do that, watch the two videos and read a little bit of the OP. This is a very long thread, so it's understandable if you don't have the time to read it.

Hey, if someone sees this thread, please give it a bump.