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FEATURE
GAMES
Foresight, Displace, and Semblance. Foresight
allows you to leave your body in a kind of astral
projection and explore the area around you.
Displace is similar to Far Reach and Blink of the
older games, in that Billie drops a marker and
can teleport there later. And Semblance allows
you to take on the appearance of someone else
and walk around like them.
If these three aren’t enough for you, and
you find yourself missing Emily and Corvos’
abilities, finishing DOTO will open up what the
devs are calling “Old Game Plus”. Essentially,
you restart Death of the Outsider with older
powers.
“The deal is that, basically, those three new
powers you get with Billie are replaced by three
returning powers from
Dishonored 2
; I think
two from Emily, and one from Corvo, if I’m
not mistaken," said Bakaba, who also noted
the struggles with the new system in DOTO,
as Billie is not marked by the Outsider and her
powers work a little differently.
“There was a little bit of a thought that had
to go into it first to make the powers compliant
with the new energy system, and also the
upgrades to powers are a little bit different.
In general it was pretty straightforward, but
also pretty fun for us. There would be times in
DOTO when you find yourself missing being
able to use Blink or Domino, and you
wonder what you would be able to do
if you had those powers in the game, so we
made a mode for that.”
Of course, having these new powers in your
second run-through would make designing the
levels particularly interesting.
“There are two ways to look at it,"
offered Bakaba. "There is the normal
way, because you might think ‘oh, it makes
things more complicated because you have to
look at things like, what happens if they have
this power here?' and make sure the levels
are fun with both sets of powers. Then there
is the Arkane way to look at it, which is that
it’s always way easier than what we did on
Dishonored 2
, where we had tones of powers
for both characters.
"So, in a way, I would say it was totally
manageable because we were used to
something way more difficult. We just go about
it very pragmatically, and make sure that the
metrics for all the new powers are the same,
and that there isn’t a situation that you can
break a story scene or something if you use a
certain ability. It’s a mix of being careful from
the get go, plan for anything that might happen,
and also be reactive when something arrives,
because we’re not perfect, and we can’t
imagine everything. I have to say in general, it’s
a fun process; to work with a set of tools like
that that have the ability to surprise us every
now and then.”
There's two ways to look at
it – there's the normal way...
then there's the Arkane way
Who would you
want the next
spin-off to be
about?
“Because I worked on
Dishonored,
the character I would be most
interested in making a game
about would be Granny Rags. I
would absolutely love to play a
game as her, it’s my secret dream.
We’ve been talking a lot about it.
Obviously it’s not happening this
time, because, well, she’s dead
– that’s one of the reasons. I would
have loved to play that character.”
•
Dishonored
Death of the
Outsider
is out Sept 15
Who’s been cast?
“Rosario Dawson of course is back
as Billie, and we have Michael
Madsen returning as Daud, which
is pretty cool too. And then, we
have Robin LordTaylor back asThe
Outsider.We think we have a pretty
good voice cast for
Dishonored:
Death of the Outsider.
It’s really
cool to be able to give a little more
space to Rosario – and to Billie – in
this game.”