Dishonored Interview
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Here's a snip:
One of the things I really like about Dishonored is its designers' willingness - desire, even - to talk about the messiness of the creative process. As modern video games have shaken off the image of the flabby, antisocial misfit lurking on the fringes of pop culture in recent years, so the language adopted by the modern critic has changed too. Games are now "lean", "chiselled", "taut" and "muscular". From Deus Ex to Halo 4, every ounce of fat has been scraped away by hard-earned understanding of the hardware, intense focus-grouping and ceaseless iteration. Even our 'beta' versions - once a term for bug-ridden but feature-complete test software - are now flashy demos in all but name, and the term 'beta' is merely co-opted to enhance the player's sense of importance and inclusion. Publishers want us to look up to and worship games as these powerful and robust entities that emerge fully formed from the godlike minds of developer titans. This is total bollocks.
"Whenever we talk about things like this it's really hard to remember the exact details of these things, because it's such a gradual, iterative process," says Smith. "Raph and I share an office, and we talk for half the day, then we talk to our level designer, then we talk to our art director, and somebody would throw out some little idea that we would then spin out into something else."
Led by Smith and Colantonio, Arkane hasn't just alluded to the messiness of the creative process though - it has hung its hat on it, talking about how the serendipitous clashes of unfinished systems would lead to gameplay ideas that made Dishonored a better game. All the talk of turning bugs into features feels practically counter-cultural, and even if it is partly a marketing gimmick, you can feel how deeply rooted it is into the way Arkane works every time you speak to the developers or play the game. They talk about how the fiction of old High Overseers dying is an allusion to the BioShock team, or how the assassin tutorial in Daud's base is using the dialogue from Thief.
"We talked a lot about how before science was really a known thing, it seemed magical in some ways," says Smith. "We were influenced by Tesla a little bit - he had these various devices and some of them had outlandish names, so when we came up with the Wall of Light it was part science... It was the version of science at the time, natural philosophy, and in part this thing of beauty. If you look at some of those old images from Tesla's lab they're just hauntingly beautiful. And I'm sure part of that is the black-and-white photography and all, but imagine being a person in the 1800s seeing for the first time gas lamps or electricity or hearing a radio for the first time with all the crackle and then a voice out of the dark coming out of it. That would just have been freaky in a way that saying the word 'magic' can't really convey."
