Continuing the Tale: In Conversation with 'Dishonored 2' Director Harvey Smith

Presented by Dishonored 2.

The first Dishonored, released back in 2012, was a hit beyond the expectations of its makers, Arkane Studios – it was the second-best-selling original game of that year, and peaked at number one on Steam. As a result, the team decided to pursue a sequel – and potentially more beyond a second game. Dishonored 2 was confirmed in the summer of 2015, and here we speak to the director of both Dishonored titles so far, Harvey Smith, about how the studio approached another slice of sneaking and stabbing.

Why did you go for a new city – we're now in the more Mediterranean Karnaca, not the London analogue of Dunwall – and what creative challenges have come from that?
In [the original] Dishonored, we were originally talking about setting it in a very realistic London in 1666, the last year of the Great Plague and the year of the Great Fire, and over time it slowly became a fantasy world. So we drew a map, came up with a calendar and our own metaphysical universe based on an understanding of the cosmos at an earlier time, and the whole thing was set in Dunwall.

Dishonored 2 begins and ends in Dunwall – but for the bulk of the game it goes to Karnaca. The was that my plan all along, to leave and come back to Dunwall, especially for an empress who has a certain prominence. My thought was also to go to [The Isle of] Morley.

Morley always has a King and a Queen. If there's a Queen, there's a King appointed with equal power, and they often have opposing agendas. Sometimes they're in lockstep, and they work as a partnership, and sometimes they're opposing each other. Over all of these four political systems, there's an emperor or empress, and so my thought was Morley sounds really interesting to me because of that dynamic between the King and the Queen, and I can imagine the King giving you missions and the Queen is giving you counter-missions in the background.

We all came together at some point, and we integrated all of our mission ideas, and all of our character ideas, and one of the ideas that Sébastien [Mitton, art director] had spent the most time on was the idea of the Southern Island. He described people who love to dance, and drink, and spicy foods and slightly warmer climate – we saw it as Southern Europe, you know, Italy, Spain, parts of France.

Do you find your ideas being led by leaps in technology, or new trends in the media?
For sure – whenever there's a cultural trend or player reaction or new technology or even a big film or book, we are influenced by all of those things.

Early on when [co-director] Raphael Colantonio and I were talking about the combat for Dishonored, and how to use slow motion to add drama without annoying the player, we were definitely looking at techniques that cinematographers use, that editors use.

[In particular], Gangs of New York – the costumes of that, and the dirty feel of New York, you know. People forget that that was high-tech at the time, those were some of the most urban, cosmopolitan, highly advanced cities of their time. Even though our view of them through history is dirty, dated, antiquated.

There are all of these inventions and fashion trends and ways to prepare food and all of that just happening in cities all over the place, and you can kind of feel that when you watch a really good historical period piece.

In the Clockwork Mansion, since it's all about configuring the house, it's not just a gameplay space. There's literally a kitchen where servants are cooking, and there's a dining table in the room next to them, which looks very odd, right, because it's a very dirty kitchen, and then next to it is a super posh dining table – but then you throw the lever, and the floor under the dining table raises up until it reaches Kirin Jindosh's dining area. It's basically the Dishonored version of the dumbwaiter.

'Dishonored 2', live-action trailer: "Take Back What's Yours"

How do you decide what goes into the written narrative and what becomes environmental storytelling?
Part of it is that we do believe in this concept of allowing the player to pull narrative to them when they want it, if they want it, and not pushing it on them constantly.

That's one reason we do smaller bits like notes, and audiographs and information in paintings, but also information embedded in the walls of the rooms themselves, so you look around at the room and you're like, "Oh, I can tell what's happening here." You're piecing together how the set elements are laid out, and they tell a story unto themselves. And then on top of that, we do it not only for the pull narrative and the interpretation of visual storytelling, we also do it to fill in the cracks.

The first Dishonored didn't finish with any indication of there being a sequel. How did the second game come about?
When we were working on the first game, we were not thinking "series". And in fact, even if we knew from day one that what we were gonna work on was gonna be very popular, we tend not to think like that.

And that extends to what carries over, game to game. The (item tracking) heart in Dishonored was far more popular than we ever expected it to be. We were honestly considering dropping it for Dishonored 2, and so we shipped the first game, and somehow in the intervening months as people played it and talked about it and wrote deeper critiques of it as a narrative design tool, we realised, holy cow, this device does some new stuff that people actually like!

It feels a little more exciting to get to the edge of the next project before you figure out how you're gonna jump across the canyon.

That sounds terrifying! Do you have any kind of back-up plan for the games, or do you jump into development without much of an idea where it's going to go?
A term we use a lot is "fall back". Just to pick one example, Dinga Bakaba (interviewed here) is the lead designer, and he worked a lot on the powers and the player mobility, and we'll go into a meeting and have this crazy idea. But before we even start trying to develop it, or detail it out on a whiteboard, mine the idea for all the cool parts, the valuable bits – before we even go there, we say, "What's the fall back here?"

We usually have two or three levels of fall back [for each idea]. If we had zero time for one particular feature and had to do the lamest thing possible, then the total fall back here is that we throw up an effect on the screen, we add a sound effect, and we trigger this AI feature where all the AIs are deaf and dumb, and they go into their slack position where their arms are at their sides, and they just stand there. You can pass by them all while they're zombified, because they're unaware.

And then there's another fall back, where it's like: and we could add a special animation for them, where they all fall to their knees. And then there's the high-end version: here's the crazy idea that we really want to do.

If this idea doesn't work, if this idea gets killed, if this proves too problematic, we can always fall back to that simpler thing. And then we threaten people – if you don't get it together around that, we'll fall back to the lame thing if we have to! People tend to get really motivated then, because mostly the team is working on this because it's totally a labour of love and they're in a contract with the player, we're gonna take you to a cool place and show you some cool stuff. Nobody wants to fall back the whole way.

Dishonored 2 is released on November 11th for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. For more information and to order the game, visit its official website.