STACK #155 Sep 2017

FEATURE GAMES

Foresight, Displace, and Semblance. Foresight allows you to leave your body in a kind of astral projection and explore the area around you. Displace is similar to Far Reach and Blink of the older games, in that Billie drops a marker and can teleport there later. And Semblance allows you to take on the appearance of someone else and walk around like them. If these three aren’t enough for you, and you find yourself missing Emily and Corvos’ abilities, finishing DOTO will open up what the devs are calling “Old Game Plus”. Essentially, you restart Death of the Outsider with older powers.

Who would you want the next spin-off to be about? “Because I worked on Dishonored, the character I would be most interested in making a game about would be Granny Rags. I would absolutely love to play a game as her, it’s my secret dream. We’ve been talking a lot about it. Obviously it’s not happening this time, because, well, she’s dead – that’s one of the reasons. I would have loved to play that character.”

way, because you might think ‘oh, it makes things more complicated because you have to look at things like, what happens if they have this power here?' and make sure the levels are fun with both sets of powers. Then there is the Arkane way to look at it, which is that it’s always way easier than what we did on Dishonored 2 , where we had tones of powers for both characters. "So, in a way, I would say it was totally manageable because we were used to something way more difficult. We just go about it very pragmatically, and make sure that the metrics for all the new powers are the same, and that there isn’t a situation that you can break a story scene or something if you use a certain ability. It’s a mix of being careful from the get go, plan for anything that might happen, and also be reactive when something arrives, because we’re not perfect, and we can’t imagine everything. I have to say in general, it’s a fun process; to work with a set of tools like that that have the ability to surprise us every now and then.”

There's two ways to look at it – there's the normal way... then there's the Arkane way

“The deal is that, basically, those three new powers you get with Billie are replaced by three returning powers from Dishonored 2 ; I think two from Emily, and one from Corvo, if I’m not mistaken," said Bakaba, who also noted the struggles with the new system in DOTO, as Billie is not marked by the Outsider and her powers work a little differently. “There was a little bit of a thought that had to go into it first to make the powers compliant with the new energy system, and also the upgrades to powers are a little bit different. In general it was pretty straightforward, but also pretty fun for us. There would be times in DOTO when you find yourself missing being

if you had those powers in the game, so we made a mode for that.” Of course, having these new powers in your second run-through would make designing the levels particularly interesting.

“There are two ways to look at it," offered Bakaba. "There is the normal

able to use Blink or Domino, and you wonder what you would be able to do

• Dishonored Death of the Outsider is out Sept 15

Who’s been cast? “Rosario Dawson of course is back as Billie, and we have Michael Madsen returning as Daud, which is pretty cool too. And then, we have Robin LordTaylor back asThe Outsider.We think we have a pretty good voice cast for Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. It’s really cool to be able to give a little more space to Rosario – and to Billie – in this game.”

013