14 DAY TRIAL // Dishonored, the new action game from Arkane Studios, allows players to complete its story without killing anyone, but this requires a lot of patience and thinking outside the box, according to one of its co-creators.
Arkane Studios is trying to deliver with Dishonored an old-school experience that encompasses many gameplay aspects and puts a focus on stealth, even if players can still complete their assassination missions by going in guns-blazing.
For those who are looking for a bigger challenge, however, Arkane has promised that the game can be completed without killing anyone.
While this is easy when dealing with regular individuals, eliminating actual targets is a much more difficult task, according to Dishonored’s co-creator, Harvey Smith.
“It’s pretty easy to avoid killing a standard guard. You just throw a bottle and when he goes to investigate you sneak by. But it gets much harder for the key targets. For example, there’s a mission where you get sent to kill two brothers who are corrupt members of parliaments. You can go straight ahead and kill them – they’re in a bathhouse – or you can do a side quest for a crime lord,” he said.
“If you do the right things for him he will have them captured, their tongues cut out, their heads shaved and then put to work in their own mines where nobody will know it’s them. It’s poetic justice. It’s dark, but not as dark as killing them. The two approaches are hard in different ways. The game gets very reactive if you just go in guns blazing – it fights back. But, on the other hand, stealth demands patience.”
Several Dishonored videos appeared recently that showed off the various ways players can eliminate their targets, so keeping from killing enemies will certainly be a hard task.
Players will put their skills to the test when the actual game is out on October 9, in North America, and October 12, in Europe, for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.