Set in the fictional industrial city of Dunwall, modeled after Victorian London, Dishonored follows Corvo Attano, a legendary bodyguard to the Empress who is framed for her murder and forced to become an assassin to seek revenge on those who conspired against him. Attano is aided in his quest by the Outsider, a powerful being who imbues him with magical abilities. Several actors provide voice work for the game, including Susan Sarandon, Brad Dourif, Carrie Fisher, and Chloë Grace Moretz.
The game is played from a first-person perspective and allows the player to tackle a series of assassination missions in a variety of ways, with an emphasis on player choice. Missions can be tackled by stealth, combat or a combination of both. Exploring levels opens new paths and alternatives for accomplishing mission goals, and it is possible to complete all missions and eliminate all of Attano's targets in a non-lethal manner. The story and missions are modified based on violent actions, or lack thereof, committed by the player. Magical abilities and equipment are designed to be combined to create new and varied effects.
Features and abilities
The main supernatural powers are unlocked and purchased using runes, and each can be upgraded. Announced powers include: "Dark Vision", which allows the player to see enemies through walls, their field of view and an abstract representation of sound made by the player; "Blink", a short-distance teleportation ability; "Possession", that allows the player to inhabit and possess other characters from rats and fish to humans temporarily; "Devouring Swarm", which summons a swarm of deadly rats; "Bend Time", that slows or freezes time; "Wind Blast", a gust of wind; and "Shadow Kill" that turns dead enemies to ash preventing their discovery. The player also has access to weaponry including a sword, grenades and pistols. Coins must be collected to upgrade weapons and gadgets.
Stealth is based on occlusion, hiding behind objects and architecture and avoiding the enemies' cone of vision, with lighting also a factor in player visibility. When hiding behind an object, the player can lean around the sides to view the immediate area and eavesdrop, and as long as Corvo's body remains hidden, enemies will not see him. The player can also look through keyholes to gain insight into closed rooms. Enemy AI will respond to sound and can be distracted by the player creating a sound in one place to lure a guard away from their position.
Guards have several states of alertness ranging from normal, to suspicious, aware of the players presence and then actively searching for the player. Remaining concealed from guards eventually reduces the alertness to aware, but it will not return to normal in that particular mission. Enemies communicate their alertness state to their allies, in turn increasing their alertness lev
Design
Seventeenth century London, afflicted by the Great Plague and the Great
Fire, served as inspiration for the fictional city of Dunwall.
Because it was the last year of the plague, and the year of the great fire of London, which of course ended the plague by burning the slums down... In this kind of game you’re always looking for a way to up the tension and frankly make the world a little more perilous, and justify why there aren’t giant crowds of people at the market. Then people had the idea for swarms of rats, and we were talking independently about possession, and we wondered if you should be able to possess rats and if they could clean up corpses so you don’t have to hide them. All these pieces just worked together.Antonov described his inspiration from London as "a big metropolis, it's messy, it's chaotic and intense...and it's both exotic and familiar to Americans and to Europeans". Antonov highlighted the importance of that familiarity to different cultures because "you want to communicate to a lot of people when you make a new piece of fiction". He explained that Edinburgh alternatively provided a sense of containment and variety of architectural designs. These historical designs were then combined with a futuristic vision which Antonov clarified was not comparable to the brass, rivets and steam of steampunk design. Some elements of the world design are derived from the fictional alternate industrial revolution in the game, and others are deliberately impressionistic. Antonov and Mitton traveled to London and Edinburgh as part of their research, taking photos of people, places and objects. The pair chose to avoid the busier streets and focus on side streets and alleyways to better suit the gameworld. Mitton stated: "We were trying to design the game from a rat's viewpoint...if we have a small city, from a constrained viewpoint, what are all the different angles that we can explore?". The world map was designed in as a single piece of art and then sectioned so that the designers were clear on where each mission took place.
The missions were designed based on an initial interesting idea which was then populated with interesting things for the player to do. Paths are defined to access the target areas and ideal paths developed and then expanded. The area was then populated with NPCs which are assigned to patrol routes and functions. The designers would then observe how players interacted with the level using their abilities and powers to test if the area provided a challenge or a suitable challenge for the available powers, and then redesigned the level as needed. The levels initially featured little directional information to emphasize the player's ability to move through the level as they choose, but testing showed that players would become lost or obey NPC commands to not enter an area, leaving them unable to proceed. This resulted in the introduction of more visual cues and verbal hints to direct players.
In-game characters were stylized in a manner inspired by illustrations from old adventure and pirate stories such as Captain Blood (1922), but maintaining a sense of realism and political incorrectness. An anatomy expert helped ensure the morphology of character faces represented Great Britain. Antonov and Mitton employed a textile carpet designer in Russia to design and paint some of the in-game art.
Balancing the effectiveness of the player's powers was considered difficult, with Colantonio stating "we wanted to give [the player] very strong powers, to make [the player] really a badass, but at the same time we didn't want the game to be too easy." Each power is given a duration, mana cost, and other tunable properties that allowed the team to effectively scale even the most destructive of abilities by making it too costly to frequently use or limiting how long it remains active.
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