Victory Game Center

Walt Williams wrote: We believe that the player is the ultimate power and guiding force in these worlds. Which is interesting, because no other art does that.

Alec Meer wrote: For me, Dishonored was a deliciously long game, clocking in at about 25 hours even without the total replay I intend on having very soon. For someone else – someone who has a lot of numbers in the name they use when playing Halo 4, say – it will be insultingly short. It may not even make a double figures quantity of hours. That’s not the game’s fault, it’s theirs (or, perhaps, the fault of the marketeers who sold the game as an action opus). They gobbled the onion up whole, too greedy or too lazy or too accustomed to inflexible fare to peel apart its layers.

Joe Houston wrote: As a member of the core Dishonored team from the beginning, and after slitting virtual throats 2 to 3 times a minute for 3 and a half years, I’m probably the single person most desensitized to the violence in that particular game. And yet that doesn’t mean I can’t find Dishonored’s violence uncomfortable; it just means I need a little additional context beyond the plain old cold steel and choke hold.

For example, after the game’s release I felt just a bit queasy the first time I saw a player go through the party at the Boyle Estate. For those that haven’t played it already, it’s a map filled with nuance and mystery, in which Corvo (the main character) must infiltrate a masquerade ball and discover the identity of his assassination target. This is done by talking to guests, sneaking into forbidden areas, pilfering private journals, and engaging other tactics of subtlety.

Or it’s done by walking in the front door and shooting the first guard you see in the face. This is the approach I first saw a player try without receiving additional prompting. The ensuing battle was chaos, but it was the aftermath that really made it a story worth telling. Following the onslaught, each room of the manor was filled with cowering, begging civilians, their bodyguards all cut down moments before. This is the part of this particular strategy where the player began methodically cutting people down.

Servants and aristocrats, men and women alike. The red splashes of color and truncated screams settled into a steady rhythm, like the grimmest game ever of Dance Dance Revolution. At one point the text “objective completed” flashed across the screen (when the player’s target fell by happenstance), which didn’t even prompt a pause or hesitation in the killing. This player had his own objectives now, spoken by a mad voice in his head: “kill them all, leave no survivors, and then go upstairs and pocket the faberge eggs”.

Joe Houston wrote: I think the key to my uneasiness is the context of choice here. In this mission more than in any other the player is not only given alternatives to bloodshed, but alternatives that seem like better options to me in every way: sparing lives in this level is more fun, it creates more gameplay, it presents more to see and do, etc. And yet the player is choosing, above all other options, to kill everybody anyway. In this light that string of workmanlike, grim-faced civilian murders is as intentional as is possible in the game, and to me a disquieting conclusion.