20 minutes with Harvey Smith

Co-creative director Harvey Smith details the Gamescom experience with Dishonored and talks at length about the development of the game in this must see interview.

On the setting and atmosphere:

"Dishonored takes place in a grim world I have to say. It's beautiful at times, but its dark. It's like a moving painting at times you go across the river and you see the moon and a tower in the distance. It's really really pretty, but it's also grim. And there's definitely a feeling of exploitation and every man for himself. And the plague bringing out the worst in people."

On how moral and kills will affect your experience:

"The way it works is, the more people you kill especially innocents, the higher your chaos score. So the when you start a new mission we check the chaos score and there are more rats, more people infected with the plague, darker lines of dialogue. And eventually the end games are gated on how high the chaos score was as well."

On the work they've put into design designing the world and surrounding universe:

"We talk about things like the Fugue Feast. When we designed the calendar, I had no idea there were so many types of calendars by the way, I would have thought there are 3 or 4... there are tons of calendars. Our calendar has 13 months, each with 28 days, but cosmologically at the end of the year that leaves a period of, you know the calendar is not exactly right, it has to be adjusted. The way they do it in our world is that the High Overseer, the religious leader, declares the Fugue Feast, which lasts for a few days until he says it stops. And at that point the calendar is reset. Whatever happens, because the Fugue Feast is an event that happens outside the calendar it doesn't count against your sins, right? And so people go crazy."

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