STACK #145 Nov 2016

FEATURE GAMES

We just wanted to make the game richer and wider as a whole

make the game richer and wider as a whole.” This also meant taking the story further than simply throwing players back into the same world a year later, with a bigger, badder boss to fight. “One day I thought to myself, ’What if it was 15 years later, and Emily was privileged, well educated, had the best clothes, ate the best food, learned from the best tutors, and then there’s this punctuating event of total f–ing darkness when she watches a parent die in front of her, which is what we saw from Corvo’s perspective in the first game. Soon enough, it’s like nothing’s changed; she’s back in the palace, but now she’s had all this battle training from her father, and she morphs into this otherworldly assassin. She changes completely. “In the original Dishonored, Emily was this little girl that the dads of the gaming industry wanted to protect. We had so many people come up to us and say, ‘I was playing Corvo and absolutely butchering everyone, then I got back and I saw these really disturbing drawings Emily had done. She was saying awful things as a result of the graphic way I was playing. It made me change the way I played.’ It’s very powerful. We make fun of it, but it’s very powerful.” • Dishonored 2 is out Nov 10

Our conversation progresses to an interesting issue about female representation in popular media, and how there’s the potential for more females to be drawn to playing video games if they can see themselves reflected in them. “I read something, and I can’t remember who it was by, but he was talking about growing up on comic books and loving Spider- Man, and how, as an African-American, Peter Parker was his hero. However, he knew he wasn’t quite like him. But then when he had his own child, Miles Morales is now Spider-Man, and he saw his son respond to Miles Morales because he saw a similarity in appearance and he could relate to that.” This is how the inclusion of Corvo’s daughter, Emily, as a playable character came about. “In that same way, if Emily was a badass assassin that appealed more to the stealthier players, or even to women in general, we had the chance to broaden our audience. We just wanted to

Smith reflects on the amount of outreach and feedback they had from the Dishonored community after the release of the first game – especially women, who were sick of seeing continual gender stereotypes. “To be clear, we don’t only hear from women that they want a certain thing. I hear from women who say, ‘I’m deep into the lore; I love the Victorian stuff; I love the costumes; I love the characters’, but I also hear from women that say, ‘I like chopping dudes’ heads off, because I don’t get to do that at work. I have to listen to the guys mansplaining sh-t to me and I just want to cut guys’ heads off.’ “But in Dishonored , we did kind of fall into the trap a little bit where women had five jobs: maid, prostitute, queen, little girl, and a witch. That was pretty much it. As a result of that, for the Dishonored DLC and now for 2, we have lawyers and union leaders and guard captains. The women we heard from definitely drove that.”

We spoke with Professor David Reilly about Dishonored 2 ’sTimepiece – a device that allows you to access the same point in a world at different points in time – and if it’s actually grounded in the realm of quantum physics.

“It definitely takes inspiration from physics on which we are on the brink of understanding, if a little further down the track. There are some theories

that describe time itself as not so much a linear function, but a circular one, but that still doesn’t validate the existence of time travel. The jury’s still out. There is, of

course, reason to believe it’s not possible, but there’s also reason to believe that it is possible. It may just have a whole new set of physics. It is pretty cool, though, for a

game to do it in a way that isn’t crass; it’s subtle, and done with a nod to the basics of physics. It extends what we know, without completely ruining it.“

15