Dishonored’s DLC and Future Interview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently published an interesting interview with Arkane’s Raphael Colantonio who actes as co-creative director on Dishonored, in which they discussed the recently released Daud-focused DLCs for the title and the future of the franchise. Here’s a snippet:

RPS: Back to Dishonored, then. When I play, I’m pretty non-lethal. But honestly, that path ended up being kind of a letdown for me in your game. Many powers whether Corvo’s or Daud’s felt like they only reached their full potential when used for maniacally creative murderkilling. Is that an area you’d like to expand in future games?

Colantonio: Yeah. I mean, you know, to be fair, the non-lethal thing in Dishonored 1 started as an easter egg almost. It was a mandate that both Harvey and I had that was not so exposed initially. We wanted to find a way to complete the game without killing anyone and make it super hard, but we wanted to stick to it. This survived all along throughout the design process, but it didn’t become a big deal until our second E3 when everyone got to play. Then we realized that everyone was super excited about the fact that you could finish the game without killing anyone.

But it was more inside for us than a true mandate. Harvey and I committed to it, but the rest of the team only started to embrace it later. So it was not as supported as we would’ve liked it to have been. In the DLC, we tried to support it a little better and build chaos in from the beginning, etc. For future games, we’ll definitely make sure we try to support it better.

RPS: Did you have any early ideas for the DLC that were even more out-there than exploring Daud’s perspective? More far-flung locations? Characters? A day in the life of The Outsider, just running around messing with people? Recording pranks and tossing them up on YouTube?

Colantonio: Yeah, I mean, you know there are The Isles, and we were like, (What if we play this on a different Isle?) But Daud came up pretty early in the conversation, and everyone was in agreement on it. Everyone was excited. So it pretty quickly became apparent that it would be our DLC.

RPS: Are there any places in particular that you’d like to visit in the next game? Or even time periods? I mean, I loved reading books in Dishonored. Are there any topics you explored in the lore where you were like, (Wait, why don’t we just make a game about this?)

Colantonio: Yeah, that’s actually how we designed Dishonored from the beginning. The lore is actually way bigger than the game itself. There are a few places we could go and explore given the opportunity. Definitely the islands around, but also all the big continents. Anything is possible.