Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Fifteen years ago, the assassin Billie Lurk betrayed her friend and mentor, Daud. For all that time she has sought solace and redemption. Having aided Emily Kaldwin regain her throne, Billie now goes in search of the long-missing Daud, tracking him down to an unsavoury district of Karnaca. But the reunion does not go smoothly, and Billie is left with a daunting task: to eliminate the Outsider, the god-like being who dwells in the Void and whose influence has shifted the course of history for more than four thousand years.

Dishonored 2 is one of the greatest games of the 2010s, a triumph of atmosphere and outstanding game design that even goes beyond its excellent predecessor. Its brilliance was marred by a technically-compromised launch which took months to resolve, which put off buyers. The game sold, at best, mediocrely and well below Bethesda's expectations. Arkane Lyon started work on a new game, Deathloop (due out next month) but were able to sneak in an expansion to Dishonored 2, which became the stand-alone game Death of the Outsider.

Death of the Outsider is a mixed bag. For those who enjoy Dishonored rich, unusual atmosphere and its focus on stealth, the game continues to deliver those aspects in spades. However, it does feel cut-down. It is only half the length of Dishonored 2 itself and does re-use one level twice and repurposes another from Dishonored 2. Time and budget constraints feel apparent in the game as it bumps up against those limits constantly. Billie only has three Void powers and a limited set of equipment compared to the previous arsenals wielded by Corvo, Daud and Emily, which leaves her feeling underpowered compared to the other protagonists. However, she can use her powers much more often as her mana bar refills to maximum automatically (a great idea that should be backported to the older games, frankly) and there's no need to hunt for mana potions. Her powers are also extremely impressive, especially Semblance which allows her to take on another character's appearance (even a major NPC) to pass through secure areas, and a drone-like ability to astrally scout out levels for routes and hidden passages.

Level design is as formidably excellent as always, with the bank heist making up the central setpiece of the game being particularly brilliant, especially if you decide to put the entire bank to sleep by poisoning the airducts. Unlike other parts of the series where people are knocked out for the duration of the level, here they can be woken up by loud noises or you accidentally bumping them, adding a lot of complexity to how you traverse the area (you can knock people out properly, but there's an achievement for doing the level without resorting to that). It's not quite as good as the Clockwork Mansion or the time-travel manor house from Dishonored 2, or the Boyle Mansion from the first game, but it's pretty damn good.

Unfortunately, the area surrounding the level is less well-designed. The game has the absolute nadir quest moment of the franchise when either a bug or a poorly-thought-out bit of design prevents you from carrying unconscious bodies through a level transition zone, forcing you to fight your way through a building to the front door with almost no capacity for stealth. It's easily the most disappointing moment of the whole series in denying you a choice in how to proceed and forcing you to resort to violence.

The game's plot builds satisfyingly as it goes along and the ending is unexpectedly thoughtful and interesting, with the ultimate resolution of the story (and the entire series to date) resting on a meaningful decision you have to make. It wraps up the story that began in the first game quite well, and sees Arkane putting a line under the franchise for now. I hope they return to this world, but if they do it'll apparently be a completely different location and in a different time period.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (****) gives you more Dishonored to play, which is always a good thing, but time and budget pressures mean a somewhat less-polished experience than the previous games in the series, with a few cut corners. But the bank heist mission is up there with the best levels in the franchise and the story and character arcs develop and end well. Disappointing when compared to the greatness of what came before, but on its own terms still a very well-designed game. The game is available now on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

RUMOUR: Netflix developing a DISHONORED TV series

File this under "fairly tenuous" at the moment, but a report is floating around that Netflix has put a TV show based on the Dishonored video game series into development.

The news comes from the geek site Giant Freakin Robot, who have a patchy record when it comes to rumours. However, it also comes eighteen months after writer Gennifer Hutchison tweeted that she was a huge fan of the video game series and wanted to write a TV show based on the books.

Hutchison has serious credibility, having been a writer on Breaking Bad (for which she won an Emmy, with the rest of the writing staff) and Better Call Saul as well as Amazon's Lord of the Rings prequel series (she also started her career as an assistant on The X-Files). Rumour has it that she's been courted for a showrunner position on several projects in the past but has stayed loyal to Vince Gilligan and the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul team, but with that franchise wrapping its last season (at least until it was delayed by a medical complaint for star Bob Odenkirk), she appears to be free to take on bigger commitments.

Whether Hutchison is involved in this Netflix project - which may or may not even exist - is unknown, but it'd be a bit odd for a writer of her calibre to not be involved after expressing interest. Also, whilst Dishonored is well-regarded critically, it was not a top-tier, mega-selling video game franchise, and wouldn't be at #1 (or even in the top ten) on the list of video game properties to be turned into a TV show unless a major creative talent wanted to do it.

The Dishonored video game series consists of two mainline entries and three expansions: Dishonored (2012), The Knife of Dunwall (2013), The Brigmore Witches (2013), Dishonored 2 (2016) and Death of the Outsider (2017). Set in a fictional world reminiscent of 18th/19th Century Europe, fusing sorcery and steampunk, the story in the games beings with the assassination of the ruler of the Empire of the Isles. Her bodyguard Corvo is framed for the murder by the new Lord Regent, who embarks on a reign of terror whilst keeping the Empress's daughter, Emily, and heir out of sight. Aided by a group of government and military insiders who want to restore Emily to the throne, Corvo breaks out of Coldwine Prison and embarks on a series of daring raids and infiltration missions in the city of Dunwall designed to expose the Lord Regent's conspiracy and track down the man who murdered the Empress. However, Corvo is also marked by the Outsider, a strange being who lives in the Void beyond the material world. This grants Corvo amazing powers, but at a dubious cost to his soul and sanity. Later games in the series, spanning a period of more than fifteen years, feature other characters such as the assassins Daud and Billie Lurk, and a grown-up Emily.

As well as the video games, the series has also spawned a trilogy of novels, a comic book series and a tabletop roleplaying game. The creators of the game, Arkane, a subsidiary of Bethesda, have indicated they would like to return to the world in the future, but in the meantime are focusing on two other games in new universes, Deathloop and Redfall.

Whether this is a real project or not remains to be seen, but I have to say it's one of the few game series that absolutely would make a great TV show, with a cast of excellent characters and a solid story set in a fascinating and very different kind of fantasy world with some great worldbuilding.

Wertzone Classics: Dishonored 2

Fifteen years have passed since the assassination of Empress Jessamine, the tyrannical six-month rule of the Lord Ruler and the restoration of Princess Emily Kaldwin to the throne. Under the guidance of her rescuer, bodyguard and (eventually-admitted, scandalously) father, Corvo Attano, Emily has tried to guide the Empire of the Isles as best she can. When a coup takes place led by the witch Delilah and her father is neutralised, Emily is imprisoned, but her captors are unaware that her father has been teaching her his infamous skills of stealth and deception. Emily flees to the southern city of Karnaca and prepares to retake her throne, no matter the cost.

Dishonored, released back in 2012, was a breath of fresh air. Building on the groundwork established by the earlier Thief, Deus Ex and System Shock series in offering the player tremendous freedom in how they approached their objective, with a more modern user interface and better AI, it was a solid success both critically and commercially. It spawned two excellent expansions, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, and, four years later, a full sequel (which yes, I've been extremely tardy in getting to).

Dishonored 2 is very much an evolution rather than a revolution. The same structure as the earlier game applies, with the game again using a recurring hub - in this case a ship - as a base of operations for Emily and her slowly growing number of allies to plot their next move. Once the next objective has been set, Emily travels to a new part of the city of Karnaca and is left to it. You can choose which option to take, whether to to engage in an all-out, frontal assault with a high casualty rate or a stealthier approach, using a combination of magical powers and the intricacies of the outstanding level design to find a way of sneaking up on your objective. You can also choose to exactingly explore every level for the optional objectives of stealing every single penny, object d'art and magical rune and bone charm, or simply proceed straight to your goal. You can choose to kill the primary target of the mission or find a way of removing them nonlethally from play, or in a few cases finding a way of converting them to your cause.

These decisions have a dramatic effect on the game's length, which can range from under ten hours for a confrontational, all-out violent approach to more than double that for a more exacting, stealth-based run-through, and also its tone. A violent approach which leaves the streets littered with corpses impacts on the game's "chaos" rating, with the city becoming more violent and unstable with later levels seeing more guards deployed and Emily's allies becoming less optimistic and even starting to fear her. A peaceful, stealth-based option sees Emily learning to become a better ruler, engaging more with the plight of the poor people on the streets and finding ways of turning her destructive enemies into more positive forces for later reconstruction. Even choosing a more positive approach can be more complicated than it first appears, with sometimes what appears to be a good choice having negative consequences and vice versa, which only becomes clear through exacting research of the various documents and audio files littering each level. The game has a large number of different endings based on your moral choices through the game, greatly rewarding replayability. The game also gives you the chance to replay it as Corvo (the protagonist of the first game), with a different skill set, though it has to be said this narratively doesn't make anywhere near as much sense as playing as Emily. The game also gives you the choice to play through it without using any magical powers at all, which is a formidable challenge should you also try to go for a stealth run on a higher difficulty level.

The game's story unfolds intriguingly, with Emily learning more about her enemy Delilah through written records, other characters' accounts and, in one dramatic moment, a temporally-warped ability to view her rise to power. The game takes into account that not everyone played the original game's expansions (which introduced Delilah and saw her go up against the arch-assassin Daud), so uses Emily's ignorance of those events as a way to get everyone up to speed on the plot.

Dishonored 2 takes advantage of sister studio id's formidable graphics tech (used to develop the Doom reboot) to deliver a stunning visual experience. The original Dishonored had impressive lighting and environments for its time, but its character models were underwhelming. The sequel has no such trouble, with fantastic, detailed visuals throughout. If anything, the graphics might be too good, with it sometimes hard to distinguish between collectables and background bits of scenery. In particular, it's sometimes impossible to work out when a piece of paper stuck to a wall is a bit of flavour or an actual letter with in-game information critical to the mission, which does mean a fair bit more random clicking on everything in sight than should really be the case. The atmosphere of the game is also a nice contrast with the original game, with the foggy, London-influenced metropolis of Dunwall giving way (mostly) to the tropical, sun-drenched, Mediterranean-ish city of Karnaca.

The level design is also gorgeous. It's not exaggeration to say that Dishonored 2 has some of the best level design in recent gaming history, with logically-constructed areas which pack secrets, hidden rooms, black market shops and alternate routes into often constrained spaces. Although Dishonored 2 was developed with the more powerful PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in mind, meaning the memory-mandated small levels of the original game are no longer an issue, the designers admirably resist going for the easy option of making each level as huge as possible, preferring to retain the tightly-curated design of the first game. They do let some missions sprawl a bit more though, with sometimes an entire elaborate urban level (most of it purely optional) surrounding the mansion or palace which is the primary objective of the mission at hand.

Particular mention, redundant at this point though it is, must be made of the game's two stand-out pieces of level design. The Clockwork Mansion is the ultimate express of Dishonored's steampunk ethos, an entire building whose internal walls, rooms and furniture can move around, rotate and switch places based on levers the player pulls. The first time you see the entire level around you transform into something else is quite something, and the fact that Arkane play fair and don't use magic to explain this, with instead each part of the transformation worked out in exacting and realistic detail, is all the more stunning. Even more remarkable is that you can skip the entire transforming aspect of the mission if you want to do a stealth run, instead finding your way "backstage" behind the walls and making your way to the mission objective without alerting anyone. You can also do both, doing a stealth run at first and then backtracking through the mansion, triggering its transformations, to find all its secrets and hidden objectives.

A later mission, "Crack in the Slab", takes the player to a mansion which has become unstuck in time. By using a special device, the player can "see" what is going on inside the mansion on the other side of the temporal barrier and then transport themselves back to that period. So for example, you find a destroyed room in the present day, position yourself correctly, and use the temporal device to check for guards in the previous timeline. Once sure they are not present, you can warp back to the previous time period, clear the obstacle and then return to the present again. The attention to detail here is jaw-dropping: some characters are present in both timelines and by killing their past selves, their present-day incarnations abruptly vanish. Similarly, you can change events in the past which also change the present-day version of the mansion, which can abruptly shift from ruin to fully-functioning home to a boarded-up-but-intact version. The ripples in time extend outwards: leave the mansion and you might find previously-maimed allies are now fully intact, and the feuding warzone you previously passed through is now a peaceful, well-ordered district under just rule. It's easily the most brain-meltingly impressive implementation of time travel in a video game to date.

Even the "ordinary" missions are a delight. The spooky Addemire Institute you visit early on is a masterclass in packing a lot of detail and player options into a small space, whilst the Grand Palace is a terrific, expectation-defying piece of design, more like a 1970s Bond villain's headquarters then yet another medieval edifice.

It's hard to find fault with Dishonored 2. The thematic idea of Emily learning how to become a better ruler or a tyrant based on player choices is well-implemented, the level design is among the very best in class and, even five years after release, it's a gorgeous game with an even better soundtrack than its predecessor. Perhaps the story premise - oh no, Emily's been deposed again! - could have been a bit more original. The original release was a bit buggy, but those issues have long since been fixed. The new ship base of operations is a bit less interesting than the pub in the original game, maybe. Beyond that there's no complaints to be had here.

Dishonored 2 (*****) is a fantastic game that takes everything good about its predecessor and improves on it, sometimes dramatically so. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. A self-contained expansion, Death of the Outsider, was later released to middling reviews (and I'll be getting to that shortly).

Cities of Fantasy: Dunwall

Dunwall is a sprawling, industrial city located on the south coast of the island of Gristol. Dunwall has existed for centuries, dominating the whale oil trade around the Isles, but in recent decades it has grown in importance and become the capital city of the Empire of the Isles, spanning the major islands of Tyvia, Morley, Gristol and Serkonos. It is a city riven by internal strife between the aristocratic class and the workers, which has led to violence and, occasionally, outright rebellions.

Location
Dunwall is located on the south coast of Gristol, at the mouth of the enormous River Wrenhaven as it twists and turns before meeting the Ocean. The city commands the head of a wide bay opening out into a gulf formed by Gristol to the north and the island of Serkonos to the south. Regular ferry services run across to the city of Bastillan a few dozen miles to the south-west on the north coast of Serkonos.

Physical Description
Dunwall sprawls across approximately twenty square miles. The city is cut in two by the Wrenhaven. There are three significant bridges in the western part of the city, but in the east there is only Kaldwin's Bridge, which is tall enough to allow large ships to pass underneath it. Frequent ferry services run between the north and south sides of the river in the eastern part of the city.

Draper's Ward, the Clock Tower, the Boyle Mansion, the Estate District, the Old Waterfront, Tower District, Dunwall Tower and Coldridge Prison are located in the northern part of the city. The High Overseer's Office, Slaughterhouse Row, the Legal District, the Golden Cat, the Distillery District, the Hound Pits Pub, the Old Port District, the Chamber of Commerce and the Rudshore Financial District (aka the "Flooded District") are located in the southern. Also significant is Kingsparrow Island, topped by an enormous lighthouse, located several miles out into the bay.

Other locations include the Civil Service District, Tailors' District, Dunwall Water District, the Rust District,

The Mutcherhaven District is located to the north of the city, outside the old city walls on the river. The infamous Brigmore Manor is located here. The New Mercantile District is also located in this region.

History

An ancient civilisation once existed on Gristol, more than four thousand years ago. The fate of this civilisation is unknown (but may be linked to the Great Burning, an ancient cataclysm which marked the beginning of the modern calendar), although it is known to have practiced black magic. One of the consequences of this magic was the apotheosis of a young man to become the Outsider, a trickster being of formidable power. Three thousand years later another kingdom or empire arose on Gristol which worshipped the Outsider as a god and created numerous magical trinkets or artifacts. The destruction of this empire saw many of these artifacts thrown into the sea. Over centuries, many of these totemic items have washed back up in Dunwall.

Modern Dunwall began as a small whaling village. It rapidly grew in size and prestige, it's strategic location seeing it attract huge amounts of traffic from passing ships. The town's centralised location behind sturdy walls and located on bluffs towering some 125 feet above the surrounding territory meant it was very difficult to attack, and it slowly began to expand in military power and prestige.

Within a few centuries Dunwall had come to conquer all of the island of Gristol. Its economic power became indomitable and it came to command all trade on the southern seas, to the irritation of some of the other cities. The sea lanes to the north are harder to traverse and downright dangerous in winter, when icebergs can threaten ships, so Dunwall's dominance of the southern sealanes became a major problem. Finally, approximately 1,620 years after the Great Burning, the four islands fell into warfare. Gristol's economic and military might, not to mention its huge population, saw it win the War of the Four Crowns in 1625; Tyvia, Morley and Serkonos surrendered and accepted Gristol's rule. Finlay Morgengaard I was duly crowned Emperor of the Empire of the Isles in 1626.

The Empire's power was further consolidated by the rise of a state religon, the Abbey of the Everyman, which was founded in Dunwall in 1701. Dunwall had formerly been a religiously tolerant city, but the Abbey brooked no opposition, deeming all followers of other gods and creeds as heretics (and reserving a special hatred for the Outsider). Under the leadership of the first High Overseer, John Clavering, the Abbey led the Rectification War, cleansing the cities of Gristol of heresy. The war ended in 1708 with the Siege of Whitecliff. In 1711 Emperor Yefim Olaskir decreed that the Abbey was now the State Religion of the Empire.

By the end of the century the Empire had further consolidated its power and began the widespread exploitation of Morley, particularly its mines and its fertile fields. The people of Morley came to feel mistreated by the Gristolians, and were particularly resentful of the Abbey forcing their beliefs on them. In 1801, enraged by religious strife, famine and oppression, the people of Morley rose up in rebellion. They launched a military uprising which caught the imperial forces by surprise and secured territory on Morley before launching attacks on Gristol. Rebels from Morley managed to infiltrate Dunwall and assassinated Empress Larisa Olaskir in a surprise attack; the reprisals by the Empire were swift and terrifying.

The rebellion ended after two years, the Empire proving victorious due to its superior navy and vastly superior resources. Several cities in Morley were destroyed and there were widespread atrocities. Famine swept the island and thousands died, hundreds of thousands more fleeing to other islands. It would be generations before Morley would begin recovering from the rebellion, and the lesson of what happened to those who defied the Empire was not lost on the other islands and cities.

By 1810 the Empire had begun explorations of the vast Pandyssian supercontinent located several months' travel to the east of the Empire of the Isles. Exploitation of that landmass proved impractical due to both the vast travel times and also to the continent's own hostility, particularly down to the plagues which seemed widespread there. In addition, the Outsider, relatively quiet for centuries, took a sudden interest in those who had travelled to Pandyssia and returned.

In 1825 Jessamine Kaldwin became Empress of the Isles. A trusting and honourable ruler, Jessamine was concerned with justice, fairness and ruling for all of the citizens of the Isles, not just the aristocracy and merchants. Her willingness to stand up for the poor and to try to improve their lot, as well as an apparent coolness to the ruthlessness of the Abbey of the Everyman, soon won her a lot of enemies in the Empire. Kaldwin was protected by a bodyguard, Corvo Attano, a warrior without compare, and advised by Hiram Burrows, the Royal Spymaster, whose ability to root out plots against her was legendary.

Eventually, Burrows turned against the Empress, apparently distraught by her trusting nature, her refusal to take a husband, and the fact that the Empire seemed destined to pass to Jessamine's daughter Emily, a bastard born of unknown parentage. In 1835 the Rat Plague struck Dunwall, killing thousands, and Jessamine's response to the crisis was insufficient; in 1837 Burrows commissioned the assassin Daud to kill the Empress and frame her Royal Protector, Corvo Attano for the deed. Attano was imprisoned in Coldridge Prison whilst Burrows assumed the mantle of Lord Regent and imprisoned Emily Kaldwin.

In events that are now well-known, there was a popular uprising against the Lord Regent, Burrows was killed (betrayed, in part by Daud, who came to bitterly resent what he had done) and Corvo Attano, aided by the Outsider, rescued Emily and restored her to the rule of the Empire. Fifteen years later, in 1852, the now-adult Emily was deposed by the Brigmore Witches. Aided by Corvo Attano, now confirmed to be her father, Emily escaped to the southern city of Karnaca, gathered resources and allies and then retook her throne.

Origin and Influences
Dunwall is the primary location of the 2012 video game Dishonored and its expansions, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches (both 2013). It also appears at the start and end of Dishonored 2 (2016) and in its stand-alone expansion Dishonored: The Death of the Outsider(2017)

Arkane Studios created the Dishonored franchise for their new owners Bethesda, wanting to create and develop a new video game series in which players were given objectives but also total freedom on how to achieve those objectives, either with blood and violence or stealth. They were heavily inspired in structure by both the Deus Ex and Thief video game series, which had been dormant for many years when development began. New instalments in both series surprisingly arrived during and after development of Dishonored.

The visual design of the city of Dunwall was led by Viktor Antonov, who had created the starkly beautiful City 17 for the classic 2004 video game Half-Life 2. Whilst City 17 was inspired by crumbling post-Soviet Eastern European and Russian cities, Dunwall was inspired by Victorian London. Indeed, the first design document for Dishonored had it set in the real London of 1666, the last year of the plague and on the eve of the Great Fire. This shifted when the designers decided to incorporate elements of magic and steampunk design, but not before Antonov had visited London and Edinburgh and taken substantial amounts of photographs to help inform the later design of the game.

During development, the city of New Crobuzon (from China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, most notably Perdido Street Station) was cited as a strong inspiration. The City, the steampunk setting for the Thief trilogy of video games, was also an influence on both the design of Dunwall and the gameplay. Although the game originally had a historical setting, the decision to move to a fictional one resulted in the designers creating a substantial amount of lore and worldbuilding for the game.

Dishonored was released in 2012 to immense critical acclaim, which only continued with its expansions and sequel, the latter set in the more Mediterranean-influenced city of Karnaca. It is assumed that Arkane will return to the setting with more games.

See also: Dunwall at Dishonored Wiki.

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