Carving a Path: In Conversation with 'Dishonored 2' Designer Dinga Bakaba

Presented by Dishonored 2.

We speak to Dishonored 2 designer Dinga Bakaba about allowing the player the flexibility to approach the new action-stealth game how they see fit.

How do you design open gameplay that pulls players into wanting to discover the different ways they can approach each situation, each mission?
It's a mix of expertise and a lot of experimentation, because on one hand, what you want to do is create a world that feels coherent enough that the player is invited to try things.

If you create a world that has coherent rules, and it has good affordance, when you see something and it triggers an idea in your mind and you try it, we want the world to respond to that. It's not possible on everything, of course, and doing a total simulation would be completely overkill for a video game – and impossible, by the way! But still, we try to do as much as possible.

The other part is to provide tools – and by tools I mean actions, or powers, or moves, that are broad enough or open enough that you can use them for different reasons.

We have a main character (two, in fact – Corvo and Emily) that is very mobile – you can climb, slide, lean to peek around corners – and all this mobility can be used for combat, or to escape, or to avoid enemies, or to explore. We give you a tool, in that case, that allows you to do various things, but it doesn't only allow you to do things, it's also pleasant to use.

How did you decide to tell these characters' stories as much through environmental storytelling?
I think the best answer to that is that I grew up with video games, and I'm part of this generation where, with the graphics at a really low fidelity, a lot of the game took place in my head. Like when you're reading a book, almost. When I was playing Another World, for instance, which was a game that has nice graphics and even cutscenes, or Prince of Persia, games like that. A lot of those stories happened in my head. It's a thing that you figure out now when you go back and play these games again.

Those games, for me, have very strong worlds, and sometimes not a single word of dialogue exists in the game – like in Another World, there is not a single word of dialogue. Somehow that story stayed with me after all these years, though. The player's imagination is really powerful. Even if you have the means to show everything, we think here that you shouldn't. And also that, sometimes, it's more powerful to talk about something and make the player do part of the rendering job!

I find when I'm playing games like the Dishonored ones, which give you choices as to how to play, usually stealth is the more difficult option, versus killing. As you play, you receive better tools for killing people – and while you do get powers that make stealth easier or more interesting, it's still harder to get right. How do you balance the difficulty with making the stealth route compelling, so that people want to do it?
There are several things – and a few of them, I have to say, happen in the player's mind, and you have to ensure that you don't break that.

It is satisfying to play cat-and-mouse with the enemies, it makes you feel powerful, it makes you feel smart, and it makes you feel slick, elegant.

I like the idea of the panther, for instance – you know that it can be very violent, that it's very lethal, but also very silent, and that's what's scary about it. To make the character feel like a feline involves a number of things – animation, the level design, having enough spaces for the player to have fun with. You have to make sure that you don't break that by making your character too heavy, or too slow.

I think one of the important things is for the player to feel that by sneaking around they see more of the world. You hear more of the conversations, you observe the NPCs. You see them living their little lives. That's very satisfying, and you have to support that – the amount of idle animations there are in Dishonored 2 is crazy compared to the first game!

Have you ever put a preview build in the hands of the player, seen them do something you didn't expect, and then that's gone on to become a part of the finished game?
Yes, it happens very often! It's not only something that happens randomly, it's our goal.

We never say, hey, this is a stealth game, explicitly – because that would already orient their play style way too much.

We try to take people who have played the original Dishonored, and people who haven't. Sometimes, when they approach the game candidly, they do try things that you don't expect, and then one of two things happens: either the game, the simulation, can take it, whether we planned for it or we didn't; or we see that there is no way to do that thing they want to do, or that it's possible, but it creates a bug, and it doesn't have the polish that you would expect from a triple-A game. And then we look at it and we ask ourselves: is this fun? Does it break the game? Does it work with the existing creative pillars of the game. And if the answers are affirmative, we try to support it – if we have time, of course!

'Dishonored 2', "Daring Escapes" gameplay trailer

Do you have a favourite moment of unexpected player creativity?
After E3, we had a few judges playing the game for evaluation, and I was there to help them with the build, and it's a case of wait a minute, what is he trying? I don't know if we planned for it!

One person used the "Domino" power, which is where you can link several people together, and whatever happens to one happens to the others. He was high above the ground and he combined it with the "Far Reach" power of Emily, which is basically her equivalent of (Corvo's teleport-like) "Blink", she shoots a kind of shadowy tendril through the world and then pulls herself like a slingshot at amazing speed. But it can also be upgraded to pull people toward you, so you can assassinate them.

He linked four enemies with "Domino" and then he pulled one of them towards him, three stories about the ground, and four enemies were propelled in the air. It was really cool to see, but it was also very satisfying to see that it worked, because we hadn't planned anything for that, and he wasn't even surprised! I was very surprised that it worked!

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.