Dunwall runs on whale oil. Its ships hunt strange sea beasts and butcher them alive on deck; the oil lights its streets and powers its Walls of Light, crackling security barriers that the player can learn to turn against the guards. A plague carried by rats is emptying whole districts. Into this city Dishonored drops Corvo Attano, the empress’s trusted bodyguard, framed for her murder while her young daughter is carried off by the killers, and armed with supernatural powers to take his revenge. They come from the Outsider, a figure Harvey Smith described as “a cautionary figure talking about power and how you use it”. What made the game unusual was that it did not much mind how he took it. Every target could be killed in several ways, or removed without being killed at all, and the city kept count.
Fast facts
- Developer: Arkane Studios, with co-creative directors Raphaël Colantonio and Harvey Smith.
- Publisher: Bethesda Softworks.
- Released: October 2012, for Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Definitive Edition followed for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2015.
- Art: art director Sebastien Mitton, with Viktor Antonov, the art director of Half-Life 2.
Building Dunwall
Bethesda, Colantonio told Edge in 2011, wanted Arkane “to do something that was true to the kind of games that we always liked to do in the past”. He and Smith had both made such games: Smith on Deus Ex, Arkane on Arx Fatalis. They began with something “very malleable, London-inspired, old-Europe”, and brought in Antonov and Mitton to build it. Edge saw in the result a clash of 17th-century fashions and the architecture of London between the wars, with towering buildings and the spindly legs of the Tallboys, armoured guards riding on tall mechanical legs, that recalled the striders of Antonov’s Half-Life 2.
The team argued about what powered the city. “Should we have electricity?” Antonov remembered. “It’s: ‘No, that’s too modern,’ … and eventually we stuck to whale oil. You have a physical source — you actually have a tank that you carry with you.” Those tanks became part of the game: a player can pull one out of a Wall of Light and use it as a firebomb.
Powers and tools
Corvo has a sword, a flintlock pistol, a crossbow with sleeping darts, grenades and the Spring Razor, a mine packed with coiled wire. His powers come from runes found around the city. Edge’s review listed them:
- Blink, a short-range teleport that opens up rooftops, ledges and the space behind a guard.
- Dark Vision, which shows the outlines of nearby people through walls.
- Possession of animals, and with an upgrade of people.
- Bend Time, which slows and later stops time.
- Powers to summon a blast of wind and a swarm of rats.
The pieces were meant to combine in ways the designers had not planned. “We author the player power systems and AI in such a way that they deliberately interact — sometimes messily, sometimes sloppily — to produce results that we don’t even predict,” Smith told Edge. His example was to stop time just after a guard fired, possess him, and walk him in front of his own bullet. Randy Smith, who had worked on the first three Thief games, wrote in Edge that Blink and Bend Time together gave “a whole new vocabulary for stealth”, and that the game solved problems his team “never quite figured out in Thief”, such as making an escape fun instead of a reason to reload.
Chaos
Dishonored has no good and evil meter. “We never wanted to be judgemental — that’s why we didn’t model good and evil,” Harvey Smith explained. “We tried to model stability and instability with the ‘Chaos’ system.” The more Corvo kills and the more disturbance he causes, Colantonio said, the more likely the story is to branch towards a darker outcome: “If things are more chaotic, it makes you think like life is cheap, there are more betrayals and more bad outcomes.” Killing feeds the rats, and the rats spread the plague. Edge found that the game’s world “encourages a non-lethal approach, affecting the rat population, NPC reactions and the game’s ending”, and that each level ended with a scorecard recording how many people the player had killed and whether they had been seen.
Each target has a way out that does not involve killing. Smith gave two: branding the corrupt High Overseer Campbell as a heretic, and handing Lady Boyle over to the admirer who is obsessed with her. Supporting both kinds of play was expensive. “Basically you’re making two games at once,” Smith said; “Two or three, in fact,” Colantonio added.
Reviews
Edge gave it nine out of ten. It praised a city “drawn with breathtaking depth” and voice acting that included Susan Sarandon as the mad old Granny Rags and Brad Dourif as Piero, the “natural philosopher” who upgrades Corvo’s weapons. It thought Corvo “one of videogaming’s more capable aggressors, not least because his skills are deliciously fun to use”, and that the game’s quiet request to use them with restraint made it “a brave and interesting statement to make about responsibility and the nature of choice”. It found that the ending came “rather abruptly”. “In fact, choice is the core of Dishonored,” the review said.
In 2013 Edge counted it among the games reviving the tradition of Looking Glass Studios, alongside Irrational’s BioShock series, and noted that it had been “co-directed by Smith”, one of the Looking Glass alumni.
Afterwards
Arkane added two story chapters in 2013, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, which follow the assassin Daud, the man who killed the empress. Dishonored 2 (2016), set fifteen years later, let the player choose between Corvo and the empress’s daughter, Emily, now grown up and empress herself. A standalone follow-up, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, came out in 2017. Arkane’s Lyon studio went on to make Deathloop (2021); see the immersive sim entry for the rest of the studio’s history.
Sources
- Edge issue 231, September 2011, pp. 40–45: cover feature and interview with Raphaël Colantonio (publisher Bethesda Softworks; release 2012; Harvey Smith on systems and the possessed guard; whale oil, Antonov’s quotation and the Wall of Light; the Chaos system and Colantonio’s quotations; Bethesda’s brief; Antonov and Sebastien Mitton; Deus Ex and Arx Fatalis).
- Edge issue 231, September 2011, p. 39: Viktor Antonov’s influence; 17th-century fashion and inter-war London; the Tallboys and Half-Life 2’s striders.
- Edge issue 247, December 2012, pp. 90–92: review, nine out of ten (Dunwall, whale oil and the plague; the kidnapped daughter and the framing; the voice cast; weapons, runes and powers; non-lethal play and scorecards; the abrupt ending); p. 93: interview with Harvey Smith and Raphaël Colantonio (co-creative directors; the Chaos quotation; the Outsider; Campbell and Lady Boyle; “two games at once”).
- Randy Smith, “Dishonored is the new Thief”, Edge issue 250, February 2013, p. 140.
- Edge issue 253, May 2013, pp. 41–45: the return of Looking Glass-style games; Dishonored “co-directed by Smith”.
- Steam store page for Dishonored (web): release date 11 October 2012. https://store.steampowered.com/app/205100/Dishonored/
- “Dishonored”, Wikipedia (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): release dates; the Outsider’s mark and Corvo’s powers; the empress killed and Emily kidnapped by Daud’s assassins; The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches (2013); the Definitive Edition (2015). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonored
- “Dishonored 2”, Wikipedia (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): released 11 November 2016, fifteen years after the first game, with Emily or Corvo as the hero; Daud as the empress’s killer; Death of the Outsider, 15 September 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonored_2