By Adam Smith on September 27th, 2012.
By Jim Rossignol on September 6th, 2012.
Dishonored hardly needs a bigger sell from Bethesda, but this dev diary, featuring Raf Colantonio, Harvey Smith, Viktor Antonov and others, is certainly convincing. They talk about all the aspects we’ve heard before – the complex mechanics, the exquisite world design, the fiction – but more than the words are the in-game scenes that go with it, showing some aspects of the game we’ve not seen much of before, such as you interaction with numerous NPCs, and your escape from prison at the start of the game. I’m fairly certain this is going to be breath-taking, and roll on October. (Not that I don’t have enough to play in the meantime.)
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By Jim Rossignol on August 23rd, 2012.
I know there’s an entire army of your screwing up your eyes and refusing to look at another jot of Dishonored coverage until it arrives in October, but for those not yet convinced there’s still more to be seen. The latest game footage trailer (below) lays out a chunk of stealth business, which is something trailers seem to ignore when they are dealing with stealth games. Not so here, as you can observe from this. And that bit with the candle at 0.58 is really neat. I had not seen that before.
Yesterday we published my chat with the game’s co-lead, Raf Colantonio. So have a read of that. If you want. No one’s forcing you. Not yet, anyway.
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None shall die this day
By Alec Meer on July 20th, 2012.
I am a creature of mercy. No, no, ignore any apparent evidence to the contrary – I do not seek to take life, even virtual life, unless absolutely necessary. So it was that, when my time finally came to play a level of Arkane’s upcoming Dishonored, I was resolute in my intention to spill not even a drop of blood, innocent or otherwise. But would such quasi-pacifism even be possible in a game nominally billed as an assassination sim? I stole into the shadows to find out. If you are mad you might decide to think that some of this constitutes spoilers. It doesn’t, but if you are mad don’t read on.
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By Jim Rossignol on June 1st, 2012.
Good morning! And it is a good morning, because the first of the great wave of E3 trailers are starting to arrive. Let’s kick off the day with the one trailer we probably all want to take a look at – Arkane’s tale of a supernatural assassin in an alternative world. Yes, the Dishonored trailer is quite the thing, with whales, plague, children, and lots and lots of slow-motion evisceration.
Oh my. You’re going to want to watch this one.
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A rush and a push and the land is his
By Alec Meer on April 26th, 2012.
Linear – the devil word. Scourge of freedom, the antithesis of PC gaming, the ancient enemy of anyone who’s ever roamed the Zone or steered a Dragonborn across the mountains. Or so the purist spirit often believes. Is, the question hangs so very heavily, Dishonored a linear game?
Yes. At least in the sense that it is not an open world. It is a series of missions in a linear order, most if not all of which require you to eliminate a specific target or targets. That’s okay, though, because my understanding of the game – having seen it in action – has morphed from something like ‘steampunk Deus Ex’ to ‘magic Hitman’. In what I’ve just been shown of the game, the same mission is tackled in two very different ways, with yet more described. And yes, I thought it looked amazing.
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By Alec Meer on April 17th, 2012.
Possibly the game we’re most excited about in 2012, Arkane’s immersive sim has just broken cover after a few months of silence. This first full-length trailer is, alas, entirely pre-rendered, but it does show off the rather tasty world-design, the parkour element, the plot set-up and some of protagonist Corvo’s primary abilities. Killing me won’t solve anything, so have a watch of this instead.
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After the Revolution
By Alec Meer on August 22nd, 2011.
Following a demo showing of Arkane’s remarkable retro-future, supernatural stealth/action immersive sim Dishonored (as described here), I roped co-creative directors Harvey Smith (one of the minds behind Deus Ex and System Shock) and Raphael Colantonio (co-creator of Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah) into a chat.
A chat about what? About choice, about avoiding compromise, about making rats believable, about possessing fish, about how they’re “hell bent” on creating first-person games with depth, about building a developer supergroup to make this, about arguing with art directors about chairs, about why publishers are getting behind immersive sims again, about how to make sure mainstream audiences play them, about Deus Ex, and why this is the most liberating project Harvey’s worked on since that game…
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A dark project
By Alec Meer on August 22nd, 2011.
Arkane co-founder Raf Colantonio is playing his new game all wrong. This is the first time I’ve had a first-hand look at Dishonored, the immersive sim from folk who’ve worked on the likes of Deus Ex, Half-Life 2 and Dark Messiah: Might & Magic, but I can tell you, right now, that one of its creators is playing it wrong. At least, that’s what my brain’s screaming at me. And I, too, am wrong.
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By Alec Meer on July 11th, 2011.
Dishonored being, you might recall, the next game from Arkane (now augmented with Deus Ex mega-brain Harvey Smith), and one with a very pleasant whiff of the immersive sim about it. Meaty facts are reserved for the latest dead tree edition of Game Informer, but a new overview gives us the first screenshot and a better sense of what’s going on in this world of optional assassination and rodent-bothering.
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By Alec Meer on July 7th, 2011.
New IPs? Nah, we don’t do that anymore, sunshine. Too risky, see. People only want to buy things they’ve already heard of. Or is it that publishers are only prepared to invest enormous marketing budgets in what they consider surefire hits already, thereby damning their less-established names to relative obscurity even before they make it out the starting gate? I forget. Bethesda’s one of few big publishers still prepared to take a risk. Granted, Hunted was a bit of a misfire and Brink didn’t quite scale the heights we were hoping, but that makes it doubly pleasing that Beth are continuing to push new names.
Just as excitingly, this is the highly mysterious new game from Arkane -they of Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Bonus – they recruited Deus Ex veteran Harvey Smith as co-creative director. Bonus bonus: they also recruited the visual architect of Half-Life 2′s City 17, Viktor Antonov. It’s called Dishonored. We barely know anything at all about it. We’re really very excited.
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