STACK #145 Nov 2016

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GAMES FEATURE

It’s been four years since the launch of Dishonored – STACK ’s 2012 game of the year. Now, the team at Arkane are back and ready to release a sequel. At this year’s QuakeCon in Dallas, Texas, we caught up with game director Harvey Smith to chat about how the sequel came about, how fond he is of his team, the influence women are having on the development of Arkane titles, and what we can expect to see from Emily in Dishonored 2 . Words Alesha Kolbe Arkane Masteries

he original Dishonored seemingly came out of nowhere. Developed by a comparatively small studio, the game's aesthetic and gameplay mechanics were innovative. Nobody, not even its creators,

I like chopping dudes’ heads off, because I don’t get to do that at work

expected it to take off the way that it did. The game’s directors, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantio, still consider it a "cult hit". "Everyone who’s really in on it loves it, but the mainstream kind of ignored it," offers Smith, leaving us not entirely sure he knows just how successful the Dishonored franchise has become. “We always wanted more success, because it means better jobs for everybody," he says. “Honestly, I’ve worked with so many developers who just hunkered down for years and never had anything go well, and they just hate life because they poured themselves into [their games], and for whatever reason it didn’t work. “People change; you see them change when they end up creating something that everyone loves, regardless of what it is – a pop song, a film... I wanted that for my team. But it’s not like we had to go to a mountain to find it, the mountain came to us.” As far as development of Dishonored 2 is

genre almost stopped existing. ”I remember there was a period of time where executives said, ‘These games don’t sell well.’ We were stunned: ‘What are you talking about? Everybody I know wants to play an RPG.’ Then companies like BioWare took advantage of that. You look at these big, deep games like Fallout and Mass Effect – they prove that there’s totally an audience there. An increasingly sophisticated audience.”

concerned, they wanted to keep it intrinsically similar to the first, but Smith is aware of how much the industry has evolved since the original. “We just decided to keep making the same kind of game, but the game industry grew up; there are way more women who speak out to us, and say what they like, and there are way more ‘thinking’ stealth gamers, and people who like RPG features.” The director recalls a time when RPGs as a

NOVEMBER 2016

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