Describe Dishonored with any one element of the game and you’re immediately doing it a disservice. It’s a stealth game; it’s assassination with pistols and magic; it’s Victorian oppression mixed with steampunk sensibilities; it’s a step forward in directed storytelling; it’s an attempt to give you the freedom of games like Thief and Hitman with the rich history and sense of place of Bioshock and Deus Ex; it’s the architecture of Half Life 2 seen through the lens of a world from nearly two hundred years ago; It’s Dark Messiah without the boot. Dishonored is all of these things, and a whole lot else. Arkane has made a game whose influences are bursting out of its seams.
Dishonored is the culmination of all these ideas. It’s a joy to play, from the very first mission trudging through the stained sludge of the sewer systems right through to its impressive final act. It provides you with a choice of playstyles, and executes each of them with competence that would seem impossibly unrealistic were it not directly in front of you. In short, Dishonored is one of the best games of this year, and easily sits among the best of the past ten.
But it’s the way in which the other best games of the past decade have influenced and informed Dishonored that is most notable. Everything about it has been smartly designed to take advantage of thirty years’ worth of game development learning, while at the same time bringing originality and creativity into the mix.
Dishonored’s influences ebb and flow depending on how you play the game. Blast through to the objective cutting a bloody swathe behind you and the game you’re playing is most influenced by Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Arkane’s previous first person hack and slash. The combat mechanics and raw brutality of stabbing a dude with a sword in the side of his head before sending him tumbling to his death off the side of a very tall cliff is recognisably an iteration on the developer’s previous work.
Everything about Dishonored has been smartly designed to take advantage of thirty years’ worth of game development learning, while at the same time bringing originality and creativity into the mix.
However, if you eschew combat for the most part, favouring subterfuge and stealth instead, you’re playing something much closer to Thief, sticking to the shadows and knocking out lights when and where you can before ransacking the city. Even your perspective on the city will change, as you naturally seek out high places so you’re above sight lines. Your pockets will be full, your conscience mostly clear, and Dishonored will be a quiet and tense game for you. You’ll be able to spend much more time observing, which makes it a very good thing there’s so much to observe.
Dunwall, Dishonored’s city, rests somewhere between London, Edinburgh and HG Well’s opium-addled imagination. As detailed in Arkane’s shorts, Dunwall is a city defined by its technology, the discovery of whale oil as a volatile and highly powerful source of energy. It’s that technology that gives away Dishonored’s most obvious influence: Half Life 2. The Combine’s stark panels, along with the omnipresence of forcefields and railways, is present here in full force. Both Dunwall and City 17 come from the mind of Viktor Antonov, and they share a visual ancestry: there’s a sense of massive, overwhelming height to the buildings as they bear over and down upon you.
Like City 17’s, Dunwall’s environmental storytelling leaps from every stone of its buildings. Valve has often espoused the practice of garnishing environments with details that tell a story simply by being there; it carries through from Half-Life to Left 4 Dead’s safehouse graffiti. It means that cutscene-style story exposition doesn’t need to be relied upon nearly so heavily, and long speeches about the history of City 17 were entirely unnecessary. You could infer the history just by looking at the state of the place, and that initial run through the tenement block as Freeman escapes from Combine forces tells you everything you ever need to know about what it’s like to live there.
Dunwall is similarly drenched in environmental history. Slogans are daubed on the wall in lurid red paint, and everywhere is lit by an oppressive light, always coming down or thrust forward. It casts long, hard shadows that give an impression halfway between noir and gothic. Rats are everywhere, a constant reminder of the state of plague. There’s also the prevalence of the neon blue whale oil, powering so much of the weapons and equipment of the authoritative state, and so little of anything the civilians own. It’s a statement of how vastly separated the social classes are in the game, and testament to how extensively, and more importantly intelligently, Arkane has learned from the most vivid worlds gaming has managed to offer us so far.
Each mechanic that works together to create the complicated machinery of Dishonored’s missions makes little effort to hide its roots, but it all becomes unique in the implementation.
In the assassination missions themselves, Arkane’s biggest influences show their colours. Each mechanic that works together to create the complicated machinery of Dishonored’s missions makes little effort to hide its roots, but it all becomes unique in the implementation.
Bioshock’s Plasmids are superficially recognisable in the powers that Corvo receives – abilities like a short range teleport, possession of creatures great and small and freezing time. But Bioshock was focused around combat, where having bees fly from your fists was beneficial. Dishonored uses its powers in ways that are only indirectly related to murder, such as stealth or movement, as well as killing.
Instead, it’s Deus Ex that seems to beat closest to Dishonored’s heart. There’s always that one mission objective with branching paths, which themselves have branching paths, which all feed into one giant decision over the future of the world. The actual levels themselves are powerfully reminiscent of Ion Storms’ opus, splintering constantly into alternate avenues and secret entrances. Even the incidental details, such as your cadre commenting on whether you’re the bloodthirsty or merciful type, and whether you complete any sidequests that you might have been tasked with, all point to that single common ancestry - which is hardly surprising with Harvey Smith on the development team, a man who worked on both Deus Ex and System Shock.
There’s also a Hitman influence: every level has a huge amount of complex systems underpinning it, and you can sit back and observe them, playing fly on the wall (sometimes literally perched on a wall). It’s only once you actually become the aggressor, kill a few guards or head into a restricted area that things become seriously dangerous for you. Indeed, Arkane has actually attempted to implement one of Blood Money’s more interesting but sadly failed features: originally IO was going to have your performance in each mission impact the security in future levels, meaning that if you leave a lot of witnesses it’s easier to spot you, and security becomes tighter the more people you kill. This is the inspiration for Dishonored’s Chaos system, only here it looks like it actually works, and affects more than just a post-mission tabloid headline.
Mix all these influences together and you’d think you’d end up with some lurching Frankenstein’s Monster of a game, attempting too much and falling flat on almost all fronts. But instead they cohere into something greater than the sum of all those great parts. Every single one of these elements hasn’t just been lifted wholesale; instead, Arkane has observed some of the past twenty year’s most influential and intelligent games and taken the time to understand them.
Source : ign[dot]com
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