DANNY: In 2020, we traveled to
Lyon, France and Austin, Texas to talk to both Arkane Studios about the
20 year history of the company. In those videos, we explored the
many games they released over two decades and even
uncovered three projects that never saw the light of day, The Crossing, LMNO, and an unreleased
Half-Life game known as Ravenholm. If you'd like to see exclusive
insight into those projects, we recommend you check out that video. But such is the quality of Arkane's
games that we couldn't just stop at one documentary. So at Arkane Austin, we filmed
a documentary on Prey, while in Lyon, we focused on the studio's
most beloved series: Dishonored. In this video we're going to explore
several aspects of the series: how its unique blend of
stealth and action is created, the challenges that emergent
gameplay presents for designers, the various methods the
team utilized to tell a story, the design of some of gaming's
most memorable levels, the abilities that made the cut,
and others that didn't. We have a lot to cover here. So please
sit down, relax, and let us take you on a journey through Dunwall,
Karnaca, and beyond. - Yes. We were thinking about several things. And Todd Vaughn came to see us
to talk about a project, to work together on a project. He had this idea of a game like Thief,
but medieval Japanese. And I've talked about it before in talks. I was saying to Raf and Harvey:
"Japan isn't my culture, it’s going to be cliche, it's going to be hard to make something
if it's not your own nationality, your own culture. What about Europe?" And with Victor [Antonov], we thought about it
and said yes, we should do it in Europe. London is practically not used in video games
or cinema, but it's known by everyone. The American market knows London and it was
very important for us, on the business side to make sure the game is attractive and accessible.
Especially with a publisher from North America. So we said, "Okay, London is a melting pot,
there is so many things to do there... Let’s try to do something with London”. DANNY: Sebastien told me of the team's
travels around the British Isles. He was joined by lead concept
artist Jean-Luc Monnet and Viktor Antonov, famous for his
art direction on Half-Life 2. The three would spend weeks exploring
the depths of cities like London and Edinburgh. Careful to avoid tourist traps,
the group would walk and talk and take notice of faces and structures.
This would be the basis of their city, Dunwall, a name chosen to echo the claustrophobic
oppression of their new world. Sebastien comes from a family of
tailors and dressmakers and so has an almost instinctual knowledge of the
proper cut and trim of clothing. This skill helped him create a unique
tapestry of fashion for the citizens of Dunwall, from the beautiful
to the grotesque, a variety he also ensured was in the faces
of the people who wore them. The look of their world was coming together,
but how would this new game play? Well, it's a good thing they had developers
on both sides of the Atlantic trying to figure that out. - So usually systems were either
owned here or in Austin. And every now and then there is something
that requires someone from both ends. And we had daily syncs in those cases
with the video conference. We had like a mobile video conference cart.
Sometimes when we needed to do a desk meeting, or there was also a
window, we called it. Which when you arrive in the morning, you switch
it on, and it's on all the time. You know, so you can just say,
"hey hey, is who, so and so here?" "Hey, we're having this bug."
And then you come the next morning, it's fixed. Or on the contrary, the flip side, "Oh, we need this information.
They are all home sleeping now." - There was a moment, like
pretty far into development, when I realized. I was sitting there,
and I thought about it for a while. And I looked up at Raf and I was like,
you know, because of the heavy stealth component here, you never
actually have to kill a guard. Which means that we really have about ten, I think it was nine or ten
assassination targets for the missions. And if we could find a way to eliminate
each of those without killing them, then we could literally make this
whole alternate system where this is, this game can be played non lethally.
And Raf was like, wow, that would be cool. But it would be really, really hard
given all the scripting involved. And how do you not assassinate an
assassination target? And I was like, give me like half a day, and
then we'll have a meeting. And so I sat down and I just--
And it was very simple. I just wrote down the nine or ten
names of the assassination targets. And I just wrote out to the
side of it, like, you know, one of them, taken away to prison, you know, another one stripped of his title
and position. After half a day of us thinking about it and kicking it
around, we had a list of at least half of them were good. And immediately somebody looked
down, I don't remember who it was, Wilson, or Ricardo Bare, or one of
them, but they looked down and said, in the religious case, what if there was a brand that the
religious guys had, that if you were marked with it, you were an untouchable.
No one was allowed to speak to you, or shelter you, or give you
food, or employ you, or whatever. The Heretic's Brand, we eventually
called it. And it was like, that is so much better than
the idea that I jotted down. Let's immediately embrace that one. And just over time for
Dishonored 1 and Dishonored 2, we came up with all of
these somewhat perverse alternate resolutions. Like the two guys who would indenture
people and put them to work in their mines, the two aristocrats.
You can have them like taken away, their heads are shaved, their tongues are cut out, and they're
put to work in their own mines. And no one believes that they're the
Pendleton brothers, you know. That was like one of them. And that
one is one that resonated with people. You know, I mean, I still hear
people talking about it. Some of them were pretty trivial
to pull off as alternate outcomes. Some of them were a lot harder. And that was an example of the
kind of feature you could pitch at Arkane that was like pretty wild, giving
the player a little more in control of their moral compass, you know? And so that's a good example of like a
feature that I don't think would happen at most games. DANNY: Rare is it that any game comes
fully realized in a design document, but the systemic nature of Arkane games
means that they go through a constant process of iteration and implementation
in which ideas are born, killed, modified, and even brought back from
the dead. When talking to the team, it's often hard to get them to
recollect when ideas started exactly. So to help them explain their
dynamic design environment, we ask them to focus on a single element
and show how small changes can have large consequences. So let's talk about rats. - On Dishonored 1, the challenges were...
at the beginning we started with the idea that we have a city with a plague . So not many people, not NPCs, no crowds.
And then someone said, "What about rats? Rat swarms".
With three different races, with not much time. So we needed to find technology to be
able to simulate all of that, and to make it really cool. And that kind of feature,every time
designers come with an idea for one thing specifically, but we need to develop
an entire module for that. - Yeah. When you add any kind
of systemic feature to the game, it can spill over into other areas.
And there are super simple examples. Like we wanted to make a non-lethal game
where you could sleep dart people and put them up on a bed or in the rafters,
and then they would wake up later. Theoretically, you haven't killed anyone. But we also had these plague rates that
would sometimes find the bodies and consume them because they were sleeping.
And that wasn't initially an intention, you know? And so then we had to try to figure out
how to turn that off to not invalidate the player's non-lethal path, you know,
or does the player bear culpability. - Then suddenly you're like, okay,
so we have all those things. They are expansive. They are like a
bridge, et cetera. Oh, wait a minute, we have a wind blast power. Oh, I kind
of forgot about that. What do we do? So of course, first instinct was you
wind blast them, they just explode. Not satisfying. I want to see some rats fly. So of course we had to implement
like a rat ragdoll thing. That was like a no-no in the beginning. But in the end we do like
kill a proportion of them. Have some of them go into death
animation? That is not true. Ragdoll is just death animation that
looks like ragdoll. And then very, very, very few of them would actually ragdoll.
It's funny how those pieces come together progressively based on,
it's probably not possible. And then when you get somewhere
like, oh, so maybe we can push it a little bit further, then a little bit further,
then a little bit further. HUGUES: In general, we work incrementally.
So we have a concept, a small concept, for example, to possess a human NPC. It's not very complicated at the
beginning of it. It's pretty easy, it's a character that's going to walk. So the
player will simply be replaced by another body. And typically at Arkane, we don't stop there.
A designer will say, "what about rats"? And so now we need to be able to go
under tables, go through holes. So we need to prepare the technology to
make a new path find that will work for players. But also players
when they're rats. And there's always someone to say,
"Okay, but what about fish?" HARVEY: One of the most frustrating things
is that people will look at this giant tableau of options, and I'm
the same way, by the way. And they'll find two or three
that they really like, like I'll blink up behind
the guy and stab him. And they'll just do that over and over. And you're constantly looking for
ways to shake them out of that. It's like, oh, this person is up high.
You can't just do that. You have to figure out a way to get
up high. Or this one is not stackable. It's made of metal, or it's up against a wall, and it's
a range attack or whatever. So you're constantly looking for ways
to shake them out of their patterns. Otherwise they just absorb the world
and move through it and doing the same three actions over and over. We found that, over and over.
And you can do all kinds of old tricks. Like this is the moment in the game
where all your stuff gets taken away from you and you have to start over. Here's an enemy with mechanics that don't
facilitate your way of playing. All the way down to like require the
way like some games would say, you can't leave this room until you've
done it this other way, you know. Simultaneously it's totally human.
It's what we all do. We get lazy. We find the thing that we like.
We feel powerful for doing it. And you can just cater that. You can say, okay,
you do the same thing over and over, but now you have to do it against three people.
Now you have to do it against five people. Now you have to do it and the
building's on fire, you know, whatever. But honestly the more
we can shake it up and make you try different
tools and approaches, and then you master those, that's,
you'd see more of the game, actually. Some of the options are different train
tracks through the level, for sure, or through the environment. But others
are much more analog than that. And often we didn't anticipate what
would happen, and they feel very improvisational for players. Like the
possession power in Dishonored 1 where you can possess a guard and
walk around in his or her skin. And other guards will just say hi to you. And you can walk into their secret
areas or whatever. That's so analog. And you can use that in so many different ways that we didn't initially predict
all the ways you could use it. And every experience feels different
when you're using powers like that. It's not just about a finite number
of pathways. It's where the guard was, whether it was around other people, how you decide to leave him when you
eject out of his body. Or, you know, you possess a guard, and you approach some of the gang members and
they just start shooting at you. The game doesn't always have to let you win. If it acknowledges your agency
in interesting ways, that can be just as gratifying, like,
whoa, they thought of that, or, whoa, I tried that and it didn't work. DANNY: Creating a game that
acknowledges player choice is no easy task, but the team went to great lengths
to ensure that levels reacted to the decisions players made, to allow the
player to go where they wanted to go, kill who they wanted to kill,
spare who they wanted to spare, and to make sure that no matter
what they do, the show goes on. No small task, as the team
learned on that first game. - So you've got the poisoning.
It happens on, there's a table, there's a wine bottle, there's
some goblets or whatever. These two characters are going to come
in and they're going to have wine. And then one of them has
poisoned the other, right? The player can come in, and they're behind
the locked door preparing to come in to the, to the meeting. So you
can hear them mumbling about while you plan what you
want to do. And so you can, you can interact with the
glasses to like switch them. so the other one gets poisoned or whatever.
But the thing about Arkane, this is the whole saying yes to the
player, is these things are glasses. This is a glass bottle. Everywhere
else in the whole game, you can just smash the things, right? So we had this sort of
crossroads of like, well, okay, the player can come in here
and just smash these bottles. What do we do, right? Other studios
would probably just say, these are static meshes. These are
inviolate. These are, you know, plot bottles or whatever. You can't
do anything. But that's not what we do. - I owe you an apology, Captain.
This is hardly the hospitality I'd planned for you. - Well, time to do this the hard way. - What was that, Campbell? - Never mind. RICH: I ended up making this entire branch
of the whole scene where they come in and then the guy that wants to poison the
other guy sees that they are broken and he's like, oh, well, and he has a plan B where he leads the
guy downstairs into his basement to try to like stab them in the back while
he looks at a painting or whatever. - I like a good battle scene. [STAB] Campbell, you snake! I'll see you dead. RICH: So that's the kind of things that
they spiral out, but they end up being really rewarding for players
to kind of find that path. They're like, I wonder if this will
actually respect my, you know, my verbs or my actions. And then it does,
and they're like whoa, look, this whole thing just diverted
off into another track. - I got the map no one else wanted. DANNY: Which was? - The flooded district. DANNY: Okay. - And on paper, it was
little more than a cut scene. It was a very detailed explanation of your encounter with
Daud, and what happens, and what happens next and like,
okay, find a level out of this. Initially, I wanted you to spend
much less time in the water. I love the verticality aspect of
the Thief maps, of course. I learned level design from
making Thief maps. I had a like the floor is lava but with
water attitude towards it. And then when I got a little
bit better at my work, I realized that it's really interesting
to show the player danger, let them avoid the danger, and then
eventually no longer let them avoid the danger. That's been a
useful rhythm in the design. So let them see the place they don't
want to go and then go, it's okay, you don't have to go there.
Oh, okay, now you do. - Boyle costume ball, eh? Well, that'll
be fun, but not for everybody. Ready? ANTHONY HUSO: So when we
started Dishonored, basically the thing that we did was we just
brainstormed a bunch of like, what would be a bunch of cool
assassination type missions. And a masquerade party was one of the
ones that made the cut, and the notion was immediately from the
get-go that you're at a party where everybody's wearing a mask. There are three sisters and you
don't know which one of them it is. Everything is randomized from
the beginning when it loads. So you never know which one,
which one it's going to be, because the names are also
scrambled with the colors. And each one of the sisters has
their own proclivities, right? So one likes music and so on. Even the non-lethal version
for each of those women is different. The scripting for the randomization,
and where they all went, and what they all did, and how they all reacted,
that was, that was a giant mess. And the pistol duel was also difficult
because it had to account for every conceivable action
that the player might do, including ignoring all of the
prompts that the NPCs gave and things like a tranq dart, using
a power, all of those things. But there was also so many different
ways to get into the party. You could go to the gate, for
example, and you could talk to the guy at the gate. Or you might have an invitation
from a previous mission, in which case he would let you in.
You know, or you could attack, or you could, you know, lure him out. Most games would probably just
have him be there behind the bars. And he would say this thing, and it's
either you, it's either yes or no whether you get through But at
Arkane it's, it's foggy, right? You can do anything you want. - The player should always feel like they
are the author of their own experience. You do your best to give them the
tools and the scenarios to bring that out as much as possible. You need to give them problems
that they feel like they can solve on their own terms. What that means is that
they have to be able to understand the problem before it's a problem, which is constantly the pattern
of the first phase of the mission. Give the player a chance to size up what
they're up against so they can make a plan. If they've made a plan, then they feel like they have
authorship of their situation. Even if the plan goes haywire, if it went haywire because they made
a mistake or they encountered a game system acting in a way they didn't anticipate, then that's a cool part of their
experience. But if it's just the game says, no, it actually
works this way. Sorry, but you can't do that because it's
designed this way. And that, that will apply to all the phases
of the level design process. It's like the, why do we let the
player exfiltrate the map? Because the player is deciding
when their experience is over. The player is choosing to complete their
objectives in that moment, but they might not befinished with the map. They might want to go check
out this thing. You know, we make the maps filled
with secrets and content and environmental storytelling, and
narrative, and things to discover. The player is letting us know when
they're done, at their pace, on their terms. It's quite important to us to let
the player opt in to these moments, say, this is what I want to do now. HARVEY: You've hit the high point, and
now you're feeling good about what you've done, or you're questioning what
you've done, but you're leaving. You're going home. And we feel like
that's an important part of it, instead of fading to black or whatever.
But also as level designers, like, you know, guys like me and Ricardo both worked for years as level
designers before taking on bigger roles. Like a lot of my work on Deus Ex, I worked on
I think over half the levels on Deus Ex. And a lot of it was realizing
that from my tastes, the action sphere is not the most interesting part.
That is super interesting, but the, the boring part leading up to
it is more fascinating to me. Like being able to observe, poke
around, what's in that trash can, what's that guy over on the dock doing,
you know, if I jump in the water, is there anything under the water by the dock? That stuff is as fascinating
to me, and now I want to, now I want to get down with the
plan and finish the mission. So I'll go into the action sphere.
And even if you look in Dishonored 1, Anthony Huso's mission, Lady Boyle's
Last Party, the masquerade ball, like there are a couple of streets,
city blocks before you get to this lavish apartment, that are
just dark, quiet, abandoned, where you can screw around and experiment. And part of it is our belief that you
should constantly be working for contrast. Like it's not just the art part,
but it's also like contrast of pace, contrast of space, contrast of activity, contrast of economics. But some
of my most fun as a level designer then playing the things that I made,
were there's an area of interest, but we don't just start you
in the area of interest. We start you a couple of blocks
before that, you know? DANNY: The first Dishonored was designed
by both Arkane Lyon and Austin, but for their next projects, the teams
would split. Austin focusing on Prey, we'll cover that in an upcoming doc. While Lyon returned once more to Dunwall, though they also had their eyes
set on more distant shores. DINGA: Our biggest enemy, our biggest
competitor, was Dishonored 1. That's something like that clicked
during pre-production like, wow, how are we going to top this?
How are we going to expand on this? How are we even going to
match this? So that's why the Dishonored 1 team, I had
to be of two minds. There was the Dinga in the moment,
working on Dishonored 2. And I would dissociate myself from
Dinga working on Dishonored 1, because that guy is my enemy.
He's the competitor. He's the real competition. We need
to be better than those folks, even though it was a lot of the same people.
Arkane had never done a sequel. DANNY: Yeah? DINGA: Never. So it was new for us. Of course, Harvey, who was the creative
director of Dishonored 2, had worked on Deus Ex too. So he had like, of course,
a valued takeaway from it, as you can imagine. - Yeah, Dishonored 2 was interesting for
me because Raf and I were going to do separate games, and we were going to do
separate games with the two studios. So he stayed in Austin, and I
moved to Lyon where he's from. And, I worked with the Lyon team.
So on many levels, it was just a personal experience.
But I would say creatively, we wanted to refine all the stuff
that we had done in Dishonored 1. We wanted a chance to make it
bigger and richer, deeper. We wanted to see some
other place besides Dunwall, but then come back to Dunwall.
And so we did all of that, even though it was a Herculean effort. SEBASTIEN: I was happy with Dunwall from
Dishonored 1, it was very satisfying to make. But Karnaca was even better,
we started from scratch. Even though we know our game,
our IP, it was a big challenge. But it was great to create everything like
if it was in a forest, with huge trees, etc. So we worked again with Laurent Gapaillard,
who did some sketches on a table cloths for The Crossing few years before. And for
movies, he did sketches of weird planets and environments. I told him, “This planet is funny, it looks like
a broccoli. Could you do something like that around Karnaca?” And he did huge trees that look
like cauliflower, it’s impressive. He works with a pencil and he makes
these big drawings that are incredible. He drew the edge of the city.
And after that we thought, okay, if they have trees then there's wood. So people who are living there are
going to build everything out of wood. In Dunwall it was grey and cold,
like the Lord Regent. But here in Karnaca everything is made
out of wood: all the tools, street blockers, giant windmills, etc. And I thought it would be fun for the city
to be really old, with a wind corridor... It was interesting to imagine how the
people of Karnaca would live with that. In the end it became a sort of criticism
of the society, about the overexploitation of nature and the impact this has on people. The idea is that rich people from Karnaca
want to dig the mountain to extract resources. The hole is progressively growing, the wind
rushes in, and it’s affecting the whole area. Workers who are digging the mountain for the
rich are the same who live near the mountain. They’re progressively exposed to
dust storms and so on. That was a cool idea, at first it was just
an idea illustrated with few drawings, but it helped a lot to create the atmosphere
of the different districts and the story. Harvey (Smith) gave regular feedback,
system designers were playing with the windmills to make something
with the electricity, It was great. It was a great production.
We had fun. DANNY: There's a lot going on in
a level in Dishonored 2, but I'm not just talking from a game
development perspective. For the player, there's a lot going on too.
There's a level to navigate, powers to learn, weapons to use, and different types
of NPCs to avoid or engage in combat. Adding narrative to this mix is difficult.
With so much happening. the last thing players want is to
be forced to sit through dialogue, reading a lot of mission text,
or worse, an unskippable cut scene. So to add narrative to this world, the team at Arkane employed a variety
of tools with the hope that players could choose in gameplay
how much story they had. Rosa Dachtler joined the writing team
to work on Deathloop and was delighted to talk to us about her love of
storytelling in Dishonored 2. ROSA: Because so much of the game is about
action and affordance and giving you the chance to do whatever you want in
order to solve a problem or resolve a situation, it can't afford to
spoonfeed your story all the time. Because you need to have that time to
have the freedom to look around and just be. And some games would decide in that case,
we're going to take away as much story as possible during the action moments.
We'll give it to you in a cinematic, and then we'll set you back down, and
now you can play more of the game, which is cool. And I love games
that do that. They're a lot of fun, but there are two very distinct experiences.
There's I'm watching the story, and now I'm playing the game.
In Dishonored, you are in the story, and there is so much attention to
detail to making sure that you feel like you're in the story. It comes through in
the art. It comes through in the audio. It comes through in some of the mechanics. And it gives you a chance to take
or leave as much of the story as you want. You could just stroll right through
those levels without thinking about it. But also to kind of let the
story steep like a teabag in between those moments of big
set pieces, or cinematics, or whatever. So I think that what they
do is they take the constraint of we can't throw story at you all the time,
and they use it to distribute it across everything else in the game so that
whilst you're doing all that action, you're still feeling like you're part of it. And it's not something every
game does. You know, and for me, that downtime in between, where I could
just sit there and listen to NPCs talk, or, you know, get into somebody's
house and read their letters. For me, that was a chance to be in the place,
and spend that time, and develop an emotional connection to the
world and the characters, which no amount of cinematics and
affecting plot points can make you do. - If you found this place, I'll trade with you. HARVEY: Yeah, voice actors are really
interesting because the best of them bring a sort of gravity to the characters, or
playfulness that you wouldn't get otherwise. And it's funny because the celebrities
are fun, and they get a lot of attention. But then there are people whose real
talent is voice work, not acting, but voice work. It's a
combination of both, right? And April Stewart does
Cartman's mom on South park. And she's the most brilliant voice actor. She did Jessamine Kaldwin in
Dishonored, the empress, and she does the Heart also, this feature that we came up
with that uses the spirit of the dead Empress. THE HEART: I knew this world 15 years ago.
Some part of me remains. But the world seems strange. ROSA: The heart is one of my favorite subjects
because I would happily play a game that was only that. But I also like the fact that it was
optional because totally subverted my expectations of a game that
is all about important named characters doing important named things. It's about these big players who are saving
the world, or trying to destroy it, or trying to control it, you know, murder, and family, and monarchy,
and all these big things. And then you have the Heart, and you can
click on that character in the corner, and you can find out something about
their life that you never knew. Or you can click on the villain and find
out something about his life that you never knew, and maybe start to understand
why these people are the way they are. THE HEART: She feeds scraps to
the cats that live under the bridge. She hates to think of them starving. ROSA: Games are better at guilt than any
other medium at making you feel responsible for your actions. And she did that because she gave
you information that set you up to either be more compassionate or more lethal, and then feel like you've made
that decision based on ethics, not based on gameplay. You know, I chose to kill this person
because they need to die. Or I chose to spare this person
because they deserve to live. And it made my gameplay harder,
you know, but I made that choice, even though I'm not getting any
meaningful reward out of it except how I feel. It would have been
so easy to just make all of these characters plot functions, window
dressing, you know, they're just NPCs. They're just people. They're not named.
They don't, they're not important. But no, they're people. And they have, it's amazing how little detail is
needed to make you care about someone. STREET SPEAKER: Attention, all members of
the city watch. A dangerous intruder has been spotted on Kaldwin's Bridge,
near the home of Anton Sokolov. HARVEY: We worked with Carrie Fisher.
You know, we had this idea that in Dunwall, there were always these authoritative
street speaker announcements, just telling you very much that
the Lord Regent was in control. And then when you take down
this autocratic tyrant, we want it to feel like the
communist party has fallen in a way. And now it's like that person's secretary's
running the country or something. You know, and it's like scary in that way. And so there's a moment in Dishonored 1
where you can go kill the street speaker guy. He's in his
like office, you know, making announcements that he's been handed.
And after that you need street speakers. So we had an alternate street speaker, and we, we got to work with Carrie
Fisher and we told her, you know, this is supposed to sound like the wheels
have come off, and you don't know what you're doing, but you're trying to hold
it together and put on a brave face. And so it's, it's a subtle detail. But if you go out of your way and you kill that guy,
it's not a mission or whatever. But you can go do it. Then the next series of street speakers
have done with her voice. And the people who got it, it was
really, it was really great, you know. CARRIE FISHER (ON STREET SPEAKERS):
Attention, any disturbance in the region of Dunwall Tower this evening has been the
result of a previously scheduled training exercise. HARVEY: I don't know, it's still arguable
how much name celebrities add to the game versus-- 'Cause they're really solid, and they
bring some additional excitement. But they're more expensive, and
they're harder to schedule. And the, sometimes the stage actors and the cartoon
actors are way more flexible, and they can do more voices. And, but they
don't bring the name recognition. You know? So it's a really interesting
decision for every team to make. And of course, in Arkane's case, it's
not just recording the main script. It's recording thousands of alternates for
AI barks and little weird alternate scenes. If you found this place and
somebody needs to comment on it, or you killed this thing in
a crazy way, the clockwork, you destroyed the clockwork soldier
in a way that nobody expected, but we kind of thought something
like that might happen. So we recorded a line for it.
It adds a lot to the game, I think. - Shame on you. - I will stand against you. [SCREAMING] DANNY: There are many reasons players love
Dishonored 2: the story, the stealth, the characters, how the world reacts
to your decisions, take your pick. But there was one area of the game that
I personally was very excited to talk about, the level design. Dishonored 2
features a selection of great levels, but there are two in particular
which will go down as classics. The Clockwork Mansion and Crack in the
Slab are like two parts of a watch, one concerning itself with the
mechanics of the moving hand and the other with time itself. NARRATOR: Kirin Jindosh is not only a
brilliant Grand Inventor, but also the creator of
the Clockwork Assessments. The mansion he built is a projection
of his own twisted, ingenious mind. It is a moving prototype. His home
works like a Rubik's cube. The setting and position of rooms can be
reconfigured by using any of the levers that can be found throughout the mansion. Each room's movement is based on real
functioning mechanisms. Nothing is fake. You can gain access to the space behind
the walls and discover the mechanisms that bring life to each
moving part of the mansion. Certain areas inside the mansion have
very specific behaviors and functions creating the right auditory mood for each
area was a challenge, as each mood had to fit each possible configuration. Each moving part behaves realistically.
We did a lot of research on existing mechanisms. Some are based on small Japanese apartments
that can be reconfigured to make use of the available space. Our goal has
always been the creation of believable environments in which each detail
works within all given constraints. And in the case of the Clockwork Mansion,
also fit inside the mansion's outer walls. We've designed plausible and meaningful
environments and configurations within the narrative constraints, given while avoiding any geometry
overlap or using visual cheats. The laboratory has five differently themed platforms. - Termination of search. NARRATOR: which can be configured
by the player to solve puzzles. - I went from working on five
maps in Dishonored 1 to just one map in Dishonored 2, but it was absolutely necessary. DANNY: Yeah, absolutely. - For that map, the beats were
always, you come in, it looks like a strange tiny room. This is weird. The building with cubes on
the outside with no doors. Oh, what's this button do? And then...
[IMITATES MACHINERY NOISE] It all opens up. The you meet Jindosh on the other side
of a non gameplay barrier, unbreakable glass usually. So you can have some,
you can meet the character early, and then you had to make the
big loop around. So that basic setup stayed the same, pretty much, through all of it. The lower reaches were initially much more
of a dungeon than the final version is, with like spike traps, and things smashing you,
and like elevators going up into spikes. It was just utter nonsense. But I figured if
I'm going to do a super cheesy mechanized dungeon, I'm just going to go all out. One of my big inspirations for
Clockwork Mansion was actually the old Doom games and the old Doom
engine games like Heretic and Hexen. Because in those games you can find a
button, and you don't know what's going to happen when you push it.
Everything around you can change. Things are moving up and down.
The entire layout of the room changes. It's opening a secret passage. It's, the
walls open up, the floor goes up. It seemed to like, there seemed to be no
limit of how the level geometry could change. And I wasn't seeing that
being done in games anymore. DINGA: Even that first room, he's going
to be showing off to every single one of his guests, how smart, and how brilliant,
and how, you know, better than Sokolov he is. DANIEL: The determination was that
if no other transformation in the entire map is as
impressive as this, that's okay. EMILY KALDWIN: Who would build
something like this, and why? JINDOSH (RECORDING): Ah, someone's
activated one of the mechanisms in my house. EMILY: Jindosh. JINDOSH: My home is always open. It's one
of my great curiosities seeing how the common mind navigates
these shifting rooms. DANIEL: You have the key frame
animation, so there's the pivot, and is everything is kind of
parented to that pivot. So you might have another moving part,
but it's just going to move like this. And other parts attach to that there.
So that moves like that. And altogether the movement is complicated,
but it's really just a couple of things moving. But when you're making the stairs,
every piece just has to move individually. Nothing is parented. Anything
else, credit where it's due, I'm pretty sure it was François Delnord,
the animator who worked on that to make sure that that motion wasn't just, it had to look like each piece had
weight and gravity, and the gears affecting it. So each piece is
going up with its own motion and gracefully coming up within the
banister coming up beside it. So there's the first room, the atrium. You go up the stairs, and the second
room is where the clockwork soldiers come up from the floor. The ceiling pieces
are just going out into the sky. If you, if the windows would let you see them, then they would just be clipping
outside of the building. It's the only place we
cheated. Everywhere else, it's actually compacting
into spaces in the walls. We don't just delete anything. We don't
let it clip through the geometry. Everything in that map, there
were gameplay issues with. The simplest one is just this doorway
vanishes into the floor. Okay. The player was standing in the doorway.
They're not crushed. That's not fair. There has to be a little button
inside to bring them back up. Okay. What happens if it's an NPC?
What do they do? Does their AI crash? Does it start giving an error flood
because they can't path find? No, we have to script a scenario
for that. We called it the Travolta 'cause they start to look around like
I don't know where I am. DANNY: Let's talk about his bedroom. DANIEL: Ah, yeah. DANNY: Like research room, the whole
thing, like that whole section. That might've been my favorite from
like a world-building perspective, 'cause it's just so funny that this guy
couldn't just fucking walk into a different room.
[LAUGHING] DANIEL: That that room was
one of my babies. Yeah. I, it was quite, quite fun. And the idea exactly how you just
described it, just it's so pointless, but it's exactly what he would do.
He doesn't feel like walking three meters. He just like,
[IMITATES MACHINERY NOISE] and it comes to him. That actually was a nightmare
technically because of the angles. Things are no longer on a grid. So a lot of, a lot of tech doesn't like interesting
angles, especially when it can move. DANNY: Can tell us about the different
configurations that are there? DANIEL: There's always only two. It was
an early constraint that we set. Some of the prototypes there were
way more, but we settled on just two. And you can't interrupt them. They have to complete with
the exception of the maze. I broke the rule for that.
And the exception of the lab, but we also broke the only two
configurations rule for that. So we just make the rules
to be broken, obviously. But for the bedroom and the dining room,
arc pylon, atrium, two configurations. But that room is three rooms, and each
room has two configurations. So it feels like there's a lot more
variations than it actually is. You can travel through the entire map
without triggering any of the mechanisms. That's how you reach Jindosh
without him knowing you were there. You need blink to do it, but you
can blink through the skylight. And then you're behind the scenes
already, and you can move through the whole map, eventually reaching Jindosh,
and he's just working at his desk, none the wiser, but yeah. DANNY: Was that a consideration
that you made as well? - That was part of the design from
the beginning that the player should be able to do that. EMILY: Goodbye, Grand Inventor. DANIEL: The player could go to the behind
the scenes zones as a sort of a safe zone, but they had to have already mastered the
level by that point to even realize that it was a safe zone. So I feel like that gave it a
big depth of what the player can get out of it, based on
their understanding of the map. - We needed a special enemy also. So we have the clockwork soldiers
that should also reflect how complex. Like we could, you could easily remove
two arms and he would be just as efficient, but that's not who Jindosh is. He would
have four arms because he can, you know? - Like the same way I pitch the sun and
moon move through the sky, and day changes to night, and weather patterns. Every project I pitch that, and every project
it gets cut, you know. And every, every game Christophe would pitch the house
with moving walls, floor, and ceiling. He was fascinated by that idea. And so he and Dan and his team
worked on the Clockwork Mansion. And then we came up with like character
mechanics and enemies to go in there, like the clockwork soldier, you know,
narrative around Kirin Jindosh. and there was an actor in Dishonored, one that we ended up cutting because
we replaced him with celebrity, But I always loved him, and I missed his voice.
And I thought he was just so brilliant. And he does the voice of Captain Crunch
of all things on that commercials. But we went and grabbed him for Kirin Jindosh,
and he just knocked it out of the park. - Until either comes to pass,
your secret is safe with me. EMILY: I'll see you soon, Jindosh. - Until then. HARVEY: Sachka and I had this idea to
have him recording almost like programmer notes in the clockwork soldiers.
"If the machine plays this, it means it's encountered an explosive."
You know, things like that. And we did as many as we could to
compensate for all the crazy things that players could do. JINDOSH (RECORDING): Playback for
unambiguous enemy. Entering combat state. This plays if
someone eludes the machine. Unauthorized-- overheating. Overheating. Playback for combat protocols. EMILY: Goodbye, Grand Inventor. DANNY: What was the most complex part of that
whole level, the whole Clockwork Mansion? - There were two most complicated
parts, which is not a fair answer, but I'm going to tell you both. DANNY: Better answer, I like that. - How do, how do the enemies
navigate this moving map? They have to have a map in their
head of how the level looks. We call it the nav mesh. The nav mesh
has to be able to update in real time. And it has to stitch it back together.
That went on for maybe a year, getting time with the coders who were
working on that whenever they had time to work on it with me, and just doing it one
piece at a time. Like, okay, now we can cut holes in nav mesh. Now we can
create a mobile piece of nav mesh. Now we can glue that mobile nav
mesh to the moving geometry. Now when it's in place, we can
stitch it back together. So now you've got a piece and it
starts to move. Okay, now we cut it. And now it's a nav mesh island, and it's moving. And now it's glued to it 'cause if
there's a character standing on it, they still have to be able to have a
nav mesh out under them. Otherwise, the game's rules that determine what
to do with the character who's off the nav mesh will kick in, and they could
be teleported or deleted or killed. So we had to keep the nav mesh there.
It's an amazing part of the map, but their number one priority
is the players core experience. So you take time when you
can to do the crazy stuff. The second one is audio propagation, and that's much more for the player's
experience because you're hearing music playing in this room, and the wall moves. And that closes, you expect for the audiograph
to now sound like it's behind a wall. JINDOSH (RECORDING): So many events in
motion, each exerting subtle gravity. With Delilah, a new empire could be drawn,
and all the old barriers... [RECORDING GETS MUFFLED AS WALLS CLOSE] DANIEL: And none of that can be done systemically or dynamically or procedurally.
That all has to be done by hand. And just like there's keys
for all the main animation. There had to be keys for all the audio
to say, okay, now this is closed. Trigger the audio to fade out. Again, just a little by little. You make
that work over how much time you have. [MACHINERY MOVING] DANNY: The Clockwork Mansion is a
technical marvel that you can see unfolding in front of you, while the other
level we're about to talk about keeps most of its secrets hidden.
Crack in the Slab features a mind-bending time mechanic that took series
players by surprise. And the only thing that's more impressive
than seeing it in action is learning how they pulled it off. HUGUES: So, A Crack in the Slab.
This mission is based on a feature that was originally created
for something else, something that wasn’t
included in the final game. It’s not specific to Arkane, but we
regularly have ideas that we implement, test and realize that it’s not fun enough.
And we eventually decide to get rid of it. At the time we had developed a whole system
enabling you to have two positions in the world, with the possibility to go from
one to the other with a sort of portal. And at some point, I think it was
Christophe Carrier, who said, “We're going to work on a level
with two different timelines. We can go from one to the other.” And since he had seen that portal feature
I was referring to before, he had imagined that we could simply
reuse that for the new functionality. So that's how it was born. And the good news was that we had
spent a lot of time on the portal feature, so we were able to recycle it
and everyone was happy. EMILY: Why the void? DISTANT VOICE: Your guests are waiting in the study. The Duke is demanding refreshments and
I can't get in without the combination. - But it was a real challenge honestly,
because we had to manage two maps at the same time, and half everything to
make sure the framerate was good enough. So less geometry per map, less NPCs, etc. Well, we trust the level designers. We tell them the idea is great,
and at the same time they are warned that they will have the resources of
one map to create two maps. And then it's up to them. We give them a lot of tools so
they can make interesting choices, intelligent choices, high concepts,
use a lot of scripting. So we trust them. If I remember correctly, technically speaking,
there are only two maps. But in terms of level design, they had to hack
things to have different consequences and give the illusion that
there's more than that. But in terms of technology,
there's only two maps. At the beginning, the first version,
the maps where next to each other. But in computer science, when you
move away from the origin of the world, it generates precision problems. That's why we placed the maps
on the top of each other, especially because the maps were pretty long. I don't know if that's understandable,
but there was one under the other and the two cameras moved together. DANNY: Okay, so you just change the Z axis? HUGUES: Yep. DANNY: So the Y and X axis are the same? HUGUES: That was exactly it. Yeah.
We had the same map duplicated. The only difference was a delta on the Z axis. There are always two cameras following
the player. If I remember correctly. And apart from that in terms of gameplay,
if the player is there we use this camera. That was a challenge. Both were scripted
the same way. Both lived at the same time. And in terms of render, we had a couple of things
that we didn't do in the portal version. But the idea was that everything should
be there. We should be able to see the NPCs go by. Everything was there.
That's why the budget was halved for one level. DANNY: Because there was no way to cheat. - No. DANNY: You had to make both. Wow. Was the portal, we heard about something
called void house. Was that what that was? - Yes. That was it. The portal was developed
for the Void House to access it. If you heard about it, the idea was to have
a room that could appear anywhere and we could go into it and check the inventory. Everything was functional, but game designers
thought it was too slow and not sexy enough. And so we’ve removed this feature,
which had required a lot of energy. DANNY: We've almost come to the end of
our story, but there's one more thing I want to show you. From talking to
the team at Arkane, it seems that for every good idea, there were five
or six that didn't exactly work. So while we've had a lot of fun talking
to them about the ideas that did, it's important to show one that didn't
and how the team came to that conclusion. DINGA: The intro was originally much longer, the beginning of the game. Like there
was a much longer part in Dunwall. Emily would be...
crestening, you say? A ship. DANNY: Christening. DINGA: Yeah. And then on the way back,
things would go wrong, and she would get attacked.
You would get your tutorial. Then you'd get back into the cable car
into some kind of weird elevator that would put you in the tower
and everything. It was much longer. Same thing, it didn't work. It was painful because it was the tutorial
of the game that we had to completely move into the tower and the
streets, like the escape, the whole thing. And we also had this
tutorial level that we also added so we could also flesh out
Corvo and Emily's relationship. Again, it's for the best, but
those were difficult cuts. The game is big and ambitious, but I can tell you what remains on the
cutting board is probably even bigger than the game. That's the crazy part.
Like even what made it in and what we had, like big fights
about some of the things. Okay. Void house. Void house was a power
where you could like open the door on any wall in the world. And you could open that door, and you
would step into your own particular house, private house in the void. And it was
kind of an HQ, kind of a living space. And there was like a little bit of narration,
like we had like some kind of weird bird that would comment on what you did,
you know, as a kind of moral compass. And we had, things like a strange
room with, you know, food that would respawn every mission so that
you could sometimes go there for just a quick I need health right now. And then
exit the house. There was like, that's where you would craft your
bone charms, like fictionally. And there was a number of
things there. And it was really cool. It was a huge technological thing because
we basically need to have this level everywhere in the game.
Everywhere in the game. We wanted it to have like a training
room where you could basically you know, summon people. And the
fiction was cool. It was like, when those people would arrive
in the room, in the training room, they would be like, am
I in a dream? I guess. So you would basically rip people
off of their nightmares to basically experiment on cutting their head. So it
was cool. That was a cool feature on paper. And when it got to implementation,
the prototypes were canonized, but somehow that's one of those where I don't think cutting it was a problem.
It wasn't needed. That's the point. It was cool but not needed. And it did even have, like, we
even had like our own skepticism about it. We still pushed
the idea to the point. That's the thing. You still need to push the idea to the
point where you are able to make this decision in all fairness with yourself. We've, it's not, it's never completely a
tranquil part, but at least you're convinced that it's better for the game. And I think we were, at the time
when we decided to cut it, we were perfectly comfortable that the
game will be better without it actually, for a number of reasons.
We wanted to have a living space, but then this living space became
the boat. We do have a living space. That's the point. Like as the game evolves, you're like even the reason for it to
exist might not be as relevant in the end. DANNY: There's no shortage of talking
points when it comes to Dishonored. Both games are filled to the
brim with memorable levels, powers, and story elements, all wrapped up in a
systemic package which delivers dynamic, emergent moments. There's so much to talk about,
we didn't even cover the expansion packs. But we hope you enjoyed this journey into
the creation of these games and a window into the unique design philosophy of
Arkane Studios. If you'd like more on Arkane, please check out our full doc on the history
of the studio, and make sure to subscribe to get notified about our Prey documentary
whenever that comes out of orbit. [MUSIC PLAYING]
The Dishonored saga is one of my favorite in all of gaming, just deep games with their own style and amazing level design, all 3 of them are underrated but especially feel for the Death of the Outsider standalone expansion since the bank level has to be one of the best in the series
I respect the audacity to get a name as big as Carrie Fisher in the game and make her so missable. Literally never tried killing that guy!
It really is a miracle to me that games can get made with the countless moving parts and teams. It’s magical.
This Daniel Todd guy is a genius. Clockwork Mansion is one of those things that would probably get cut down by 50-60% in scope if any other studio was involved.
Arkane studios currently are the kings of immersive sims, i heard they were stepping away from it cause of the low sales and i think that was mostly because of poor marketing, hopefully microsoft treats them right so we get a dishonored trilogy
I feel like the world needs more of the Dishonored universe. It feels so freaking unique and is sorely missed.
My favorite game of all time, bar none. The gameplay, story and world seamlessly compliment each other in such a perfect way, it is truly immersive. There are just so many ways to approach each objective, and that coupled with the RPG mechanics make it endlessly replayable as well. One aspect of the game that I rarely see mentioned is its large cast of really interesting supporting characters, the Hound Pits is one of my favorite hub locations in any game.
I’ve really liked all the sequels too but the first game, and its DLC, is still steps above the rest for me. Can’t wait to check the doc out, and can’t wait for Deathloop.
Interesting that from it's original concept it started out set in Japan. I'm kinda glad they ended up with steampunk/whalepunk Britain instead, I prefer that over Japan.
How is this video spoiler-wise? I recently played Dishonored 1+DLC and loved it, but haven't started 2 yet.
I have Dishonored 2 on my shelf and i'm kinda wondering if I should boot it up and finish it?