Dishonored developers Arkane Studios have tantalised us with screenshots, gameplay and a near constant stream of information about their upcoming Steampunk stabbing simulator – but as an often disgruntled PC player, their recent announcement is arguably the most exciting.
In an interview with AusGamers, the studios co-creative director Harvey Smith insisted that each version of the game will have optimised controls, feedback and configuration options in order to ensure that it feels like it is on the lead platform:
“One of the great things about Arkane, is that we have different factions on the team that represent each of the platforms,”
“So we have fanatical Xbox guys that want to make sure their Achievements are handled correctly; we have a lot of old-school PC guys that want to make sure that there’s no mouse-acceleration forced on you, and you can turn off parts of the HUD, and that the key-bindings are right. And also on the PC of course, you can run at 60 frames a second, which is pretty sweet.”
“And then we have PS3 guys as well that are, like, fanatical for their platform and make sure the trophies are handled correctly and it performs well on the PS3 and all that. So that’s one of the good things about the team.”
Not only have the game’s systems been specifically designed around the platform, but Harvey Smith went on to reiterate that the game has been designed with emergent gameplay in mind. As a player we will apparently be able to do things that the developer never intended, purely due to how many mechanics are at play. He even gave a few examples:
“We jumped off the building and on the way down, before hitting the ground, possessed this woman standing down there, which broke the fall by moving into her body. So that’s a good example, and we didn’t plan for that either.”
“But we have recently seen people doing things where: the Tallboys are the guards on stilts that are the city watch and dealing with the infected — they’re walking around on stilts — and we’ve seen people blink-teleport into the air over them, and then as they fall onto the tallboy, initiate the drop assassination. So you can actually drop assassinate the tallboys, which is fantastic.”
Victorian London is looking almost irresistible at this point. Sanitation may have been poor and the giant, stilted robot guards may have been somewhat oppressive, but Dishonored seems to be presenting a past well worth playing.
Source: VG247
