Interview: Looking Back On Dishonored With Its Creators

10 years on, Harvey Smith and Raph Colantonio talk about the creation and legacy of the first-person stealther.

When Dishonored descended from the rooftops in 2012, it felt like a game out of time - a deft blade in the neck of a medium that, at the first-person triple-A end, felt a bit stodgy. Amidst the games that were pushing towards graphical realism and linear storytelling, Dishonored was a flashback to the smart, systemic design of Looking Glass games like Thief and System Shock, or Ion Storm and Deus Ex. It also offered (like every good immersive sim does) an alternative path forward - one where games aren't checkpointed, prescriptive, or overly scripted, and created systems and mechanics that lift each other to inspire curiosity and creativity in the player.

10 years on, the first-person stealth-and-slash-em-up is yet to be truly superseded, and still feels singular and forward-thinking while remaining reverent to the past. To celebrate its anniversary, I caught up with two of Dishonored's creators from Arkane Studios, Harvey Smith and Raph Colantonio, to talk about its inception and legacy.

2009 was a difficult time for Arkane Studios after multiple projects with Valve fell through. These included Half-Life 2: Episode 3, a spin-off Half-Life game set in Ravenholm, and an altogether new IP called The Crossing (elements of which were eventually blended into Dishonored). Arkane founder Raph Colantonio was despondent, and candidly told the press at the time that the studio was mere weeks away from closing down.

While going public with news like that was bound to have caused anxious stirs at Arkane, it would also end up saving the company.

Off the back of one of these interviews, Raph was contacted by Todd Vaughn, a former games journalist and immersive sim enthusiast who was now a producer at Bethesda. Vaughn was a big fan of Arkane's work and was regarded by Raph and Smith as something of an unsung hero of Dishonored. "Going public with Arkane's problems saved us, because immediately Todd got in touch and said 'Hey, I have something for you if you want to talk,'" Raph tells me. "So I hopped on the phone, and he said 'Do you want to make the next Thief?'"

Bethesda didn't yet have the Thief IP, but Vaugn said it would soon be a done deal. Arkane got to work, and within a couple of months, Raph had written a full story for a new Thief game. While this was going on, another unexpected opportunity came up at Bethesda which caught Harvey Smith's attention. "We had the possibility of getting this work on two pitches at once, and then we'd see which one we get. Maybe we'll get both!" Smith recalls. "The other pitch was Blade Runner. At that point, I was like 'I'll slit my wrists if we don't get Blade Runner,' and Raph felt the same way about Thief, so we kept advancing the two ideas."

RELATED: The Door Is Open For A New 'Thief' Game, And The Time Is Right

With Bethesda's acquisition of both IPs in the air over the next few months, the focus kept shifting between Blade Runner and Thief. After a few months, however, in what seemed to be yet another example of Arkane's rotten luck in getting to complete their projects, Vaughn said that Bethesda couldn't get either IP. Raph thought that it was game over for the Bethesda collaboration, and quite possibly for Arkane.

But Vaughn had a plan. "He said to us 'we like who you are, we love your past games. Just do what you were doing with Thief and call it Dishonored." I suggest half-jokingly to Smith and Raph that it almost sounds like Vaughn was playing 5D chess, and even though he was uncertain about the Blade Runner or Thief IPs coming through, he just used them as an excuse to bring Arkane under Bethesda's umbrella. "Who knows, right?" Smith chuckles. "We've been wondering for the last 12 years whether Todd Vaughn is playing 5D chess."

For the first time in their history, it seemed that Arkane was working with a publisher who didn't want to tether them. With a strong team that included former Half-Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov, future Deathloop director Dinga Bakaba, and Arkane veterans Sebastien Mitton and Christophe Carrier, the team got to work in earnest. Naturally, Dishonored took on bits from the Thief game that Arkane had tentatively started on, while the early work for Blade Runner was scrapped because, according to Colantonio, it would've been "a little bit more of an RPG" than the action game they were looking to make.

The project began cautiously, as Arkane had their fingers burned too many times with past publishers when being too ambitious. The initial setting was a dark and dirty world redolent of England circa 1666. "We were going to be subdued in terms of like magic. Like we wanted sorcery, we wanted witchcraft in a very subtle way," Raph tells me. "You were a group of assassins that were living in some sort of farm, that's how it started."

Arkane was playing things safe - a little too safe - and it was a case of Todd Vaughn giving them assurance that they didn't need to hold back on their wilder ideas. He suggested that Arkane make the game darker, to 'up the powers and make it over-the-top,' to put it in a setting where there's more room for gadgets and other experimental peripherals. "We had the same instincts," says Raph. "But of course, it's scary because never before would a publisher encourage us to create things that are too bizarre. We were worried, you know?"

"I think we had trauma from our experience with publishers in the past," Smith adds. "I remember an executive meeting where we were showing these businessy guys these weird lamps and the whale oil, and we were like, 'we can remove some of it if needed,' but they were like 'no, the differentiating thing is what you want to lean into, you should trust your instincts.' We were shocked to hear that."

"I think we had trauma from our experience with publishers in the past."

The world Arkane created for Dishonored became one of the most unique in gaming. Dunwall was an inhumanely industrialised city, somewhat evoking a western European colonial power in the late 19th century. The city was powered by whale oil, had gross disparity between the working classes and the elites, and, while not strictly totalitarian, it was at the very least Foucauldian; the tendrils of the powers that be are felt through its various institutions like the City Watch and the Abbey of the Everyman, as well as watch towers, robotic 'Tallboy' walkers, and Walls of Light, which instantly evaporate anyone not authorised to pass through them (hacking these so that they kill guards instead of you is one of gaming's great perverse pleasures).

ALSO READ: Looking Back On BioShock With Its Creator, Ken Levine

Even though the plot is a relatively straightforward tale of revenge and assassination, the world that Dunwall is set in is remarkably fleshed out, with its own economy, traditions, superstitions, and maps depicting the world's many cities and continents. Information about the world isn't fed to you - you can treat Dishonored as a pure stealth/assassination game if you want. Instead, much of what you find out about the world is in what Harvey and Raph call the 'grey areas' of the game - the streets, shops, residencies, and other areas where people go about their daily lives, where you find recordings, letters, and stories told through the clutter (and sometimes dead bodies) of peoples' apartments.

By taking your time and delving into these entirely optional places, you'll uncover tragic stories of families ruined by the plague, or of whaleyard workers who are in fact qualified university professors, but need to go about their grim work to one day be reunited with their families. It's a rough, narratively rich world.

"One of my favourite missions in Dishonored is Lady Boyle's Last Party," says Smith. "The lead-up to it is really shitty, it's rundown, there are Weepers and threats everywhere, and you move from this darkness and grime where you can explore all the apartments to this opulent party with these crazy masks and weird food and mystery to solve. The 'grey space' is really important to me, because we're constantly looking for contrast - high-class, low-class, high action, low action, clean, dirty, brightly lit, dark."

"We're constantly looking for contrast - high-class, low-class, high action, low action, clean, dirty, brightly lit, dark."

Then, layered over this already evocative world is the netherrealm of the Void and The Outsider, the mysterious supernatural god who grants you the impressive powers you wield throughout the game. A popular reading of The Outsider among fans has been to see him as a 'trickster god,' but during the making of the game Ricardo Bare pointed out there was a little more to him than that, framing him as an 'Underworld god' with qualities that "represent the unconscious, mystery, secret or repressed desires, creativity, etc. The 'Shadow Self' from Jungian archetypes." Smith concurs, saying that "The Outsider is not a trickster god at all. That's a bad read on him, in my opinion."

The powers granted by The Outsider untethered the hero Corvo from the reality that most of his enemies were confined to. The teleport-like Blink would beam you effortlessly between rooftops, or behind enemies to disorient them. You could possess enemies, attack them with giant rat swarms, or even become a rat yourself and creep around inside walls to find hidden paths between areas (an inventive twist on the vent-crawling that games of this lineage are so enamoured with).

Many of the abilities in Dishonored make it irresistibly satisfying to take the violent approach; there's Windblast for sending enemies ragdolling off ledges, Shadow Kill which conveniently turns deceased enemies into ash, and even Blood Thirsty which builds up your adrenaline with sequential kills, allowing for some wildly vicious dismemberments. A common criticism of the game over the years has been that even though most abilities in the game lean towards 'High Chaos,' the good ending is achieved by abstaining from all that gory fun.

It seemed that Dishonored 2 addressed the Chaos issue by offering more non-lethal supernatural abilities, but Smith and Raph both stand by the original game's Chaos system. "Think about Kung Fu movies, where the hero is a badass, but they don't want to show off how much of a badass they are, right?" Raph begins. "It's like at first you're trying to be good and then when you get really pushed you start cutting off heads and stuff like that, so there's a little bit of that sensation. You got all the powers you wanted, but there are still consequences to the state of the world, and I don't think it's a bad thing, otherwise why does it matter? You know, because it is harder to be good. That's the point."

Whichever side of the Dishonored Chaos debate you fall on (which Raph points out can be easily resolved by quicksaving, going on a rampage, then quickloading), there's no question that the skill ceiling and flow of Dishonored's combat, which Harvey says was designed to be like a 'ballet,' remains incredible - especially as it's in the first-person genre, which so often struggled with compelling melee mechanics. There's a case to be made that later Bethesda-published shooters like the rebooted DOOM and Wolfenstein picked up a few pointers from Arkane's work.

YouTubers like StealthGamerBR showcased the combat system's capacity for creativity and experimentation, pushing the system beyond what even the Arkane developers admit they knew was possible. Of course, this was all by design. "We always had a rule of layering mechanics on top of each other as opposed to going modal - like now you are in shooting mode, now you are in jumping mode - and everything is protected when you're here," says Raph. "For us, it's the opposite. We always try to layer the systems with no limits, which is going to bring you gameplay and also a level of mastery for the crazy gamers." Today, the most watched StealthGamerBR Dishonored video has 12 million views and continues to attract dozens of comments each week.

Since the two Dishonored games and Arkane's 2017 version of Prey (an underappreciated gem if ever there was one), there seems to have been a shift both within Arkane and the industry at large away from these grand projects that transported that 'Looking Glass' spirit into the modern era.

The ideas showcased in these games - that commitment to systems, reactive worlds, and vast player freedom - have merged into other games both from the people who made them and from other developers.

We see that DNA in Arkane's own subsequent work, of course (Deathloop, Redfall), in Raph Colantonio's Weird West, made with his new studio WolfEye Studios. Games like the rebooted Hitman Trilogy and even the overlooked Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts take on those playful expressive elements, while at the indie end we finally got a very promising Early Access release of Gloomwood - probably the most explicit homage to Looking Glass Studios since Arkane's Dishonored and Prey.

"I think the values of immersive sims, even though they were founded in those very narrow first-person games that were delivering this pack of values, I think it's not so much of a genre anymore, it's going into many games," says Raph. "I'm just wondering why every game isn't an immersive sim, because player choice, uninterrupted narratives, branching narratives, or letting the simulation resolve everything - those are good values."

When I ask Smith and Raph whether they'd consider working on Dishonored should the opportunity arise, both are content with what they've achieved, and prefer to implement its ideas into new projects. It seems unlikely that we'll see a big-budget game quite as weird, original, or faithful to that immersive sim philosophy as Dishonored any time soon.

However, just as the Void encroaches into the reality of Dunwall in mysterious ways, you can sense that Dishonored presence in many games today - you just have to be attuned to those qualities that made it special.

NEXT: It's Time To Give Gaming's Most Misunderstood Genre a New Name

Robert is Lead Features Editor at DualShockers, arriving at the DS court after six years of freelancing for sites like PC Gamer, VG247, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, and more. Enjoys immersive sims and emergent stories, and has crowbarred more mods into games than Gordon Freeman has crowbarred headcrabs.