Dishonored

• 1. Introduction

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  Dishonored, a 2012 action-adventure game from Arkane Studios, begins with a murder its hero cannot prevent. Corvo Attano is bodyguard to the Empress of the Isles. Assassins restrain him by magic and kill her. Corvo is framed for the crime and pushed into a life as an assassin, seeking revenge on the people who conspired against him. Bethesda Softworks published the game.

  A revenge story is easy to picture, but this one keeps asking what revenge should cost. How does a story bend around the way someone plays it? Why did the designers abandon two earlier settings before choosing the world players know? And what became of Corvo's story once the game was finished?

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• 2. Dunwall's Rot

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  Dunwall, the capital of the Empire of the Isles, runs on whale oil. The city is a center for fishing and whaling, and the oil is valuable because it powers nearly everything. A natural philosopher discovered that it could serve as fuel. The government then used it to build powerful weaponry, and that new strength bred corruption.

  The weepers of Dunwall cry blood, and some of them turn violent. They are the infected victims of a plague that spreads by rats. The disease kills the poor and isolates the rich. The authorities treat it as a convenient excuse, taking or purging citizens whenever they like.

  The Tallboys keep order in the city. They are heavily armored officers who walk on tall mechanical legs. Districts are divided by Walls of Light, barriers made of energy that disintegrate any unauthorized person who tries to cross. Technology and otherworldly forces coexist in the streets.

  Against all this, a covert group of activists called the Loyalists plans to overthrow the government. Their goal is to install the Empress's daughter as the new Empress.

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• 3. The Chaos System

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  The chaos system in Dishonored keeps a running tally of friendly fire, violence and deaths. It does not label the player good or evil. Instead, the tally reshapes the world without punishing anyone directly or forcing one style of play. A character who dislikes violence may withhold support or even betray the player. Dialogue changes in scripted ways. Rats and plagued citizens grow more common in dynamic ways, and new scenes appear. These shifts can reach the current mission and the ones that follow.

  Violence carries a cost in resources too. Killing finishes a mission faster than stealth does. But direct combat drains health and mana potions more often.

  Harvey Smith, one of the game's creative directors, offered an example of a non-lethal path. A player completes a side mission for a character. In return, that character has two of Corvo's targets kidnapped and enslaved. In another mission, the color of a target's clothing and mask is randomized, so the player must search the area on every playthrough.

  Developer Joe Houston once watched a tester play the mission set at a masquerade ball. Houston saw that sparing the characters there opened up more objectives and interactions. The tester instead killed every character in the level. Houston found this disconcerting.

  Samuel's betrayal nearly left the game. The team came under pressure to cut a late scene in which Samuel, reacting to a player who has killed indiscriminately, alerts enemies to Corvo's presence. Smith pushed back. In his words, "Everybody just wants to be told in a video game that you're great, no matter what you do." Handing a hero's medal to someone who killed maids, old people and beggars, he said, "sounds psychotic." He described the betrayal and its flare as something the team "had to fight for."

  The same tally also decides which of the game's two endings arrives, and the details shift with whom Corvo leaves alive.

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• 4. Powers And Stealth

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  Six active powers, four passive enhancements and 40 bone charms make up Corvo's supernatural arsenal. The charms grant perks such as a longer rat possession. Only three can be active at first, and optional upgrades raise that limit to six. Smith and designer Raphaël Colantonio said no player can collect every power and ability in a single playthrough.

  The main powers are bought with runes, artifacts carved from whale bone, and each can be upgraded. Dark Vision lets the player see enemies through walls, along with their field of view. Blink is a short-distance teleport. Possession lets the player temporarily inhabit another character. Devouring Swarm summons deadly rats, and Bend Time slows or freezes time. Wind Blast knocks enemies down. Shadow Kill turns dead enemies to ash so opposing forces cannot find them.

  Mana pays for all of this. It partially regenerates, which keeps Blink and Dark Vision available. Costlier powers such as Possession and Bend Time demand mana potions. Magic and ranged weapons sit on the left hand control and a sword on the right. Beyond the sword, the player can use grenades, a crossbow and pistols, and coins buy upgrades for weapons and gadgets.

  A high jump paired with teleportation carried testers farther than either power could alone. The team had researched such combinations on purpose. Rather than restrict them, the designers rebuilt levels to accommodate them. Some ideas never survived. One was a power that let the player become a shadow moving along walls.

  Other powers went through revisions. A version of Bend Time unfroze enemies whenever the player touched them. Possession once let the player control a victim remotely without inhabiting the body, but that offered less challenge. Colantonio described the balancing problem. The team wanted "very strong powers" without making the game "too easy." So each power received a duration, a mana cost and other variable properties. That let the team scale even the most destructive ability by making it expensive to use often or brief in effect.

  The Thief series supplied the first model for stealth, in which level lighting and shadows decide whether an enemy notices the player. The designers dropped it for two reasons. It seemed unrealistic that a guard could stand directly in front of a player hiding in shadow and notice nothing. Dark areas also hid the designers' work and clashed with well-lit ones.

  Through a keyhole, Corvo can see into a closed room. Hiding behind objects lets him lean out to watch and eavesdrop. Sneaking up on an enemy allows a silent takedown, and bodies can be moved and hidden. Guards react to sound and can be lured away by it. A guard who loses the player drops to "aware" but never returns to normal during that mission. Guards also pass their alertness to their allies, so one mistake can raise suspicion across a whole level.

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• 5. Conspirators And Betrayal

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  Admiral Farley Havelock, voiced by John Slattery, leads the Loyalists who smuggle a letter and a means of escape to Corvo on the day before his execution. By then the Empress's former spymaster, Hiram Burrows, has seized Dunwall as Lord Regent. During an interrogation, he confesses to the whole scheme. Samuel, a commoner, ferries Corvo to the Hound Pits pub, the Loyalists' base.

  While Corvo rests at the pub, he is pulled into a dream world to meet the Outsider, voiced by Billy Lush. The Outsider is described as a mixture of God and the Devil. He brands Corvo with his mark, grants him magical abilities and gives him a mechanically altered human heart that tells secrets. Smith called the Outsider an amoral figure who grants abilities but leaves the choice of how to use them to the recipient.

  High Overseer Thaddeus Campbell, leader of the city's religious order, is the first name on Corvo's list. The player may kill or otherwise neutralize each target. Campbell's removal reveals that the Empress's daughter Emily is held in a brothel called the Golden Cat, under the twins Custis and Morgan Pendleton. Corvo rescues Emily and eliminates the brothers. Callista Curnow then takes Emily in to prepare her to become Empress.

  Anton Sokolov is next. He is a genius inventor responsible for the Lord Regent's advanced technologies, including the Wall of Light. Corvo abducts him, and under interrogation Sokolov names Lady Boyle as the financier. Corvo infiltrates her masquerade ball and disposes of her. Havelock then judges that enough damage has been done, and Corvo infiltrates the tower of Dunwall to remove the Lord Regent. He learns that Burrows imported the plague on purpose to decimate the lower classes, and that it escalated beyond his control.

  A shared drink at the Hound Pits pub ends the Loyalists' celebration. Corvo collapses in his room. Upon waking, he learns that Samuel poisoned the drink at the request of Havelock and two Loyalist allies, Treavor Pendleton and Teague Martin. They wanted to stop Corvo from interfering with their plan to install Emily as Empress and rule through her. Samuel stayed loyal and secretly gave a non-lethal dose, then set Corvo adrift on the river.

  Daud and his men take the drifting Corvo prisoner, intending to collect the bounty that the now Lord Regent Havelock has placed on his head. Corvo overcomes them, defeats Daud and goes through the sewers. Back at the pub, he finds it overrun with guards and many Loyalists dead at Havelock's hands. Samuel ferries him to Havelock's lighthouse. There Corvo subdues Pendleton and Martin, or finds that Havelock has already killed them. Havelock's journal reveals that he suspected Emily is Corvo's daughter.

  Empress Emily Kaldwin I the Wise buries Corvo beside Empress Jessamine in the game's brightest ending. That version requires Corvo to save Emily and keep chaos minimal, which brings a golden age in which the plague is overcome. Corvo then dies of natural causes after many decades. If much chaos is caused, the city stays in turmoil and is overrun with the plague. If Corvo fails to save Emily, Dunwall crumbles and he flees the city by ship.

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• 6. Designing Dunwall

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  In May 2009, art director Sebastien Mitton contacted Viktor Antonov, who had designed City 17 for Half-Life 2, and asked for help giving a new property an artistic identity. Bethesda had asked Arkane to make a new game and a new intellectual property. Arkane had ideas for a similar game but nothing specific until then. Raphaël Colantonio, Arkane's founder, and Harvey Smith, a Deus Ex developer, were the creative directors. Ricardo Bare, a Deus Ex designer, was lead technical designer. Smith, Colantonio, Antonov and Mitton spent three years in pre-production.

  Bethesda's parent company, ZeniMax Media, bought Arkane in August 2010. Dishonored became the first Arkane game that Bethesda published. Bethesda announced it on the 7th of July 2011 for Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The whole Arkane team worked on it, including its offices in Lyon, France, and Austin, Texas.

  Medieval Japan was the game's first setting, and the idea was dropped early. Marketing it looked difficult, and no one on the design team knew much about the culture. Arkane moved the story to London in 1666, a city that Europeans and Americans would recognize. Later additions such as floodlights, electrified barriers and 20th-century technology made it stop resembling London. Arkane then chose to invent a city.

  Smith explained why 1666 mattered. It was the last year of the plague and the year of the great fire of London, which ended the plague by burning the slums. A plague also made the world more perilous and explained why markets had no giant crowds. Swarms of rats followed, then the idea of possessing them, and then rats that could clean up corpses. The finished Dunwall was meant to be a "contemporary and cool" period piece, inspired by London and Edinburgh in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

  Antonov called London "a big metropolis, it's messy, it's chaotic and intense." He said Edinburgh added a sense of containment and a variety of architecture. He described the futuristic vision as not comparable to the brass, rivets and steam of steampunk. He and Mitton traveled to both cities, photographing people, places and objects. They avoided busy streets in favor of side streets and alleyways. Mitton recalled the goal this way: "We were trying to design the game from a rat's viewpoint." The painters Canaletto, John Atkinson Grimshaw and Gustave Doré also inspired the look.

  The illustrated adventure story Captain Blood, from 1922, and the work of Charles Dana Gibson inspired the characters. So did mugshots from Edwardian London and Australia. An anatomy expert helped make the faces represent Great Britain. Mitton set up groups such as rich, poor and hostile, each with its own anatomy and posture. The city guards have small heads, low shoulders and big hands, and their animation blends human and monkey movement. A textile carpet designer in Russia painted some of the in-game art.

  The Tallboys began as town criers. Mitton later noticed someone cleaning an office façade while wearing stilts, and the stilts stayed. Loudspeakers replaced the criers across Dunwall. The Tallboy then became a lamplighter carrying whale oil tanks. Further thought showed that tall mechanical legs would let them burn the dead and handle the infected while staying above them. That led to the final design, a guard armed with a bow. Mitton suggested a phosphorus canister for their backs, Smith suggested whale oil, and the whaling ships followed so that whales had a visible presence in the city.

  The Heart began as a way to identify assassination targets through vibration and sound. It grew into a voice with its own agenda, then gave way partly to a more direct navigation aid after player testing. It kept narrating its perceptions of characters, which separated the social classes more subtly than expository dialogue could. Colantonio and Smith worried that some players would skip it, but accepted that as part of the player's freedom.

  The Hound Pits pub started as a larger building. Its interior needed too many stairs and rooms, and all the climbing made navigation confusing. The exterior shrank to resemble an Edwardian building, but the inside stayed labyrinthine. Colantonio required a chain outside Corvo's bedroom so he could reach the roof quickly. Frustrated, the designers closed off the third floor entirely.

  Early levels offered little directional information, to emphasize free traversal. In testing, players got lost, or obeyed NPC commands not to enter an area and could not proceed. The developers added visual cues and verbal hints. A mental institution, where Corvo would have faced sound-sensitive patients, was cut. Ambient dialogue was written long to entertain stealth players lingering in one place. Main story dialogue was kept short, because the player can interrupt or kill whoever is speaking.

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• 7. Voices, Music And Marketing

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  Susan Sarandon voiced Granny Rags, a former aristocrat now blind and deranged after years on the streets. Michael Madsen played Daud, and Brad Dourif played the inventor Piero Joplin. Lena Headey voiced Callista Curnow, while Chloë Grace Moretz voiced Emily. Carrie Fisher and Gregg Berger provided the loudspeakers that relay government propaganda throughout the city. Corvo himself stays silent, a choice the designers made so players could project themselves onto him.

  Daniel Licht composed an ambient, violin-heavy score meant to evoke 19th-century London. He described the music as an "evil fog" that drifts in and out without any scripted trigger or warning of danger. The effect was a constant impression of threat. The game has few cinematic scenes with long interactions, so Licht could write few character themes. Samples of his ambient themes appear in those scenes, though he did not score them. He mixed older period music with 20th-century techniques such as reversed sounds. The credit song, "Honor for All", was written by Licht and his nephew Jon, who sang it as a reward for players who finished the game.

  On the 30th of August 2012, Bethesda released a free iOS spin-off called Dishonored: Rat Assassin. Players use a knife and crossbow to kill rats while avoiding bombs. It earned praise for the variety and amount it offered, and criticism for dark visuals that hid the rats. Many compared it to Fruit Ninja.

  For the game's trailer, Bethesda hired COPILOT Music and Sound to produce "The Drunken Whaler", a modified version of the sea shanty "Drunken Sailor". The team wanted ordinary children to sing it, for a dark and haunting quality, rather than a professional youth choir. Recruiting local schoolchildren to sing about slit throats and hungry rats proved difficult. They used child actors, adult singers who could imitate children, and the children of friends. Violins, detuned guitars and a "whaler stomp" of stamping on wooden boards filled out the sound.

  The song drew a positive reception at the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo. The trailer was later watched over 850,000 times on YouTube and won the Machinima Best Trailer award.

  Three animated videos titled Tales from Dunwall arrived in September 2012 as a prequel. They show the discovery of whale-oil fuel, the Outsider granting his mark to a small boy in search of revenge, and Piero making Corvo's mask. Psyop and Rokkan created them, Moretz narrated, and Licht scored them. Each episode won a gold Clio Award. That same month, the game inspired prosthetic makeup effects on the television reality show Face Off.

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• 8. Reception And Legacy

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  Metacritic gave the Windows version 91 out of 100 from 29 critics. The PlayStation 3 version scored 89 from 35 critics, and the Xbox 360 version 88 from 56. Reviewers likened Dishonored to early-2000s favorites such as Deus Ex and the Thief series. Tom Hoggins of The Telegraph compared it to the "thinking man's games" of the turn of the century. Jason Schreier of Kotaku said it "feels like entering a designer's playpen."

  The story split critics. Many praised the standalone tales driving each mission but faulted the overarching plot. Cam Shea of IGN called it "a shame that Dishonored's story isn't greater than the sum of its decidedly memorable parts." Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer, Arthur Gies of The Verge and Patrick Klepek of Giant Bomb criticized the generic late missions and abrupt ending. Susan Arendt of The Escapist, by contrast, found the story well paced. Reviewers also called enemy AI inconsistent, and Chris Watters of GameSpot called the game "compulsively replayable."

  In the week before release, pre-orders made Dishonored the third best-selling game on Steam. In its first week in the United Kingdom it ranked second across all formats, behind FIFA 13, and was the biggest launch of an original game in 2012. It beat Sleeping Dogs. In North America it sold 460,200 physical units in October 2012, the fourth best of the month. Over the Thanksgiving weekend of 23-the 25th of November it was the top game on Steam.

  The 2012 Spike Video Game Awards named it Best Action Adventure Game. At the 2013 BAFTA awards it won Best Game. It also won the Audience Choice award at the 2013 Game Developers Choice Awards. Golden Joystick nominations included Best Gaming Moment for "Lady Boyle's Last Party". Ars Technica, CBS News, CNET, CNN, Edge, the Daily Mirror and Forbes each placed it first among the best games of 2012. In 2019, IGN ranked it the 97th-best video game of all time.

  Dishonored went on sale for PlayStation 3, Windows and Xbox 360 on the 9th of October 2012 in North America and France, after going to manufacturing on the 28th of September. Australia followed on the 11th of October, and the rest of Europe on the 12th. "Dunwall City Trials", with 10 challenge maps, arrived on the 11th of December 2012. A Game of the Year edition followed in October 2013. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One received the Definitive Edition in August 2015.

  The Knife of Dunwall, released on the 16th of April, lets the player take control of Daud, again voiced by Madsen, as he seeks redemption. It introduces Void Gaze, a blink that pauses time, and the ability to summon his assassin followers. Ricardo Bare served as its creative director. The Brigmore Witches followed on the 13th of August. In it Daud tries to stop the witches' ritual, which would doom Emily. Critics praised the levels of both expansions but found their stories weaker.

  Bethesda said sales exceeded expectations and planned a franchise. Dishonored 2 arrived on the 11th of November 2016, set 15 years later, after a coup by the witch Delilah and the Duke of Serkonos removes Emily. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider followed on the 15th of September 2017 and follows Billie Lurk, Daud's former second-in-command. Deathloop, released in 2021, takes place in the far future of the same universe. On the 29th of September 2020, Modiphius Entertainment released a tabletop role-playing game with a 300-page corebook, letting players take the roles of criminals, assassins, explorers and loyalists.

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