“Dishonored 2 is going to be a very special game.”
Harvey Smith, co-creative director at Arkane Studios took the stage tonight to detail new information on Dishonored 2 as well as give us our first look at actual gameplay.
Returning to the Empire of the Isles, while the story starts and ends in Dunwall, we’ll be in Carnaka, a whole new area to the Dishonored story.
Using a ‘The Void Engine,’ a custom game engine made to support their art direction and gameplay design, Arkane has taken Dishonored to the next level. They use The Void to make the world seem real. How do employees get to work, where do they stop for lunch? Take their breaks?
Arkane is looking to make every area tell a story, not just through beautiful graphics – which they certainly have plenty of – but by putting a novel in to every space. Torn posters tell mini stories and water marks on the wall show previous floods.
Set 15 years after the first Dishonored, “when an other-worldly usurper take the throne,” you’re given the choice to play as Emily Caldwin or our original hero, Corvo Attano.
Both characters are fully voiced this time around, quite a feat considering the unscripted nature of Dishonored’s storytelling and branching pathways.
Our gameplay preview showed Emily Caldwin trying to reach her target undetected. Harvey Smith tells us they’ve made much better use of vertical space, and it shows. Dynamic weather changes visibility for both you and your enemies.
As Emily peeks around the corner she’s able to use her memorize powder to temporarily incapacitate her enemy and sneak by them fully undetected. We’re given a look at Emily’s shadow walk ability, the attack that was shown in the
The gameplay Arkane showed was very attractive, but animations certainly seemed clunky and ‘snapped’, much like they did in the original.
The second piece of gameplay we saw relied heavily on the Outsider’s Timepiece, a new tech that lets you jump between the destroyed past and regular present of the world, allowing you to set up new types of attacks.
Dishonored 2 releases November 11th, 2016. You can preorder it on Amazon now.
