QuakeCon has become a bit of a proving ground for developer Arkane Studios. After debuting a vertical slice of Dishonored's gameplay at last year's even, co-creative director Harvey Smith and the developers at Arkane returned to this year's show with the intent to hand over the controller and let the public make up their own mind about the game. Part stealth game, part RPG, and part first-person shooter, Dishonored's influences pull from many games such as System Shock, Thief, Arx Fatalis, and Deus Ex, and the studio is open about where it's found inspiration. 

Though it may pull from older titles, both the aesthetic design and technology on display in Dishonored compose the most complex project the developer has taken on to date. We spoke to Smith about the development hurdles of the game since its unveiling at last year's show and what the title's success could mean for the studio in the future.

1UP: To focus on the development of Dishonored, what's been the ability that's given you the most trouble in development that you've constantly had to go back to and think about the level design and re-evaluate "do we need to tone this back or re-balance this?" Where do you draw the line and stop?

HS: If you would have asked me on day one I would have said "Blink" (instantly teleport to a designated destination), or "Freeze Time," because believe it not to make a power like "Stop Time" work, you have to make sure that everything stops in a syncronized way and also states are preserved that normally you wouldn't have to track. So that's a complicated power. Our programmers pulled their hair out to make all that work. But Possession is the one that was just a killer. You wouldn't have thought, but holy cow! Did you do the duel with Lord Shaw (a side-quest character in the demo)?

1UP: I did, but I didn't think to possess him.

HS: Yeah, I did a thing the other day. If you do anything before the count down (to the duel, Shaw and his henchmen) think you're cheating and freak out on you. If you wait till they count down, I did a thing where Lord Shaw fires his gun, I could hear it, I turned as he fired his gun and I stopped time. Then I blinked over to him, possessed him and then walked him in front of his own bullet and then blinked back to the circle. So he killed himself with his own bullet, I walked him in front of it. When we started describing all those kind of things to our programmers they were just like "Oh my god" because they were just like -- I won't bore you with the details, but in terms of his AI awareness, what it was before and after, and how we tweak it for the duel to make him more effective, it's a lot of technical shit.

1UP: On Dishonored's title screen, I saw an indicator for DLC. Is that something you guys want to talk about yet?

HS: You know, right now we're focused on finishing the game. Anything that we do will be added, there's nothing in the game that's cut or withheld. Obviously we're thinking about some stuff in the future we'd like to do. Now that we know what the game is, there are things that we'd like to do and offer to players that we think would be fun and cool...DLC is tricky, though. One of the things about this whole thing is that it sounds crazy, but we didn't really know what Dishonored was until half-way through the project. Like, we knew it was a stealth game, we knew it was an assassination game, we knew the basics of the story, but it didn't gel until later on. (We knew) the world is not Earth, we knew it was going to be non-linear map spaces in the style of Arx Fatlis or Deus Ex, games Ralph (Colantonio, Dishonored's other Creative Director) and I worked on. But there was some point half way through (development) where "ah-ha, this is what we're doing!" happened.

1UP: What have been some of the biggest hurdles since you showed Dishonored off last year at QuakeCon?

HS: That's an interesting question because last year we showed what we call the "QuakeCon" demo, which isn't actually in the game. Since then we've gone through lots of bringing in friends to play the game and getting their commentary, finding things that didn't make sense to them, things that were too hard, or things they didn't understand well enough. We've spent a lot of time trying to get feedback and trying to tweak things so that players could act strategically, look ahead, formulate a plan, and act on that plan and understand why everything works the way it does, why they failed or successed because the rules are very consistant. So I'd say (the QuakeCon Demo) was our last moment we could get away with showing what the game could be, kind of a vertical slice like attitude, and from that point forward it was like, "No, put it in the hands of players and see how they react to it."

1UP: How has the studio handled the pressure of the positive momentum that has been building with this project? Has it surprised you? Why is Dishonored the title that could finally open doors with Arkane?

HS: I don't know, I think it's always both a surprise and not a surprise. Like on one hand when it happened for Deus Ex it was like a total shock. But at the same time, it also feels like something that should be, because nobody wants "room hallway, room hallway" scripted games, no player creativity, no improvisation, nothing ever to surprises you. They're all either medieval fantasy or it's modern real-world stuff, like cops and gang members, or it's science fiction with glowly blue shit. "Why wouldn't it be a breath of fresh air for people," I guess is the other response? So I'm always of two minds of things. It's like on one hand, "Oh my god, it's a surprise and it's gratifying and I'm so happy people seem to be digging what we're doing and I hope they like the game." Ralph feels the same, we're just excited about the reaction people have, specially the people who really like this kind of games, the Bioshocks, Theifs, System Shock, Underworld.

1UP: Dishonored definitely has the feel of those games too, a lot of it through its interface and how players interact with the world, particularly BioShock. The powers too feel more streamlined, you don't have to focus on using them as much, you just pull a trigger and it'll work. Like the "whirlwind" ability (an ability that knocks a series of enemies off their feet) feels like something you'd have to be very specific with in a game like BioShock, but a lot of the aim-assist in Dishonored helps with that, making it feel a faster playing game.

HS: Yeah, we spent a lot of time making sure -- well, what we do (at Arkane) is not quite an RPG and not quite a shooter, it's hard to describe. We always used to call it "immersive sims." We want the action and first-person perspective of a shooter, sort of the "you-are-there-ness" and we wanted the adventure game layer. If you ease drop and look at visual story telling cues in the environment and all, you can absorb a great deal more about the game and play it for many, many more hours than the direct player. We always wanted some RPG features, too. You choose your powers in the order you want them, So if you want to save up all your runes and buy the possession power half-way through the game, where as other people buy the cheaper stuff, or stealth focus stuff, there's a powerful feeling to that ownership, which is what we love as gamers. We try to make that experience for other players. Then there's of course the stealth elements. It wouldn't be enough for us to just say "it's part shooter, part RPG." 

1UP: It feels like this could be a really big deal for Arkane. If all goes according to plan, what does that mean for Arkane? Are there any dream projects that could now be put in production with this?

HS: There's an ongoing argument around games and the participants in the argument are on all sides, right? The players, the developers, the publishers and different publishers have different views, different players have different views, different developers have different views about how interactive the world should be and how much creativity and thinking it should require on the part of the player. Our game, I've said before, doesn't play itself, You have to play it. And you have people coming down on all sides of that argument. You have on one hand, games that have sort of been "Disney-fied" so that you can't go off the rails, and then on the other hand you have crazy cool experiences that are harder to get into, but they're very rewarding when you do. You can probably name the games just as well as I can that are the opposite of that. I don't know exactly where we come down in that, but we like games that are interactive, games that require the gamer to take a stand one way or the other or do something for the cool stuff to happen. But no one wants you to just walk forward and hit an invisible sphere and when you do, a plane crashes on your head or whatever.

1UP: Yeah, the choices you make in the demo seemed to have consequences.

HS: And some of them are subtle consequences, but others are really meaningful. There's also the fact that there is the embedded story and then there's the emergent story. There's the moment-to-moment "I climbed up to this wall and knocked the bottle over and he had to come over and investigate and it made me feel weird because this guy was mumbling at one point about getting off work and going to dinner and then to avoid getting busted I murdered him and left his body in a dumpster." That kind of thing that happens when you play a game like "Thief" or any number of games, it's meaningful to us. 

So your question, what does it mean to Arkane? The fact that people are interesting is validating in a way because we've choosen a novel setting, and a novel art style that's not photorealistic, we have none standard gameplay forms, we ask a lot of the player. You can play it in 12-14 hours or you can play in 24-26 hours depending on whether you play it directly or very slowly. You can play through the game and sort of get the basics, or you can play through it and absorb a great deal about the world and the history and what happened right when you got there, who the characters are. We've put it back on the player because it's just our deepest philosophy that's where it ought to be.

1UP: That's another reason why we have another play session set up.

HS: Yeah, try a different path, a different set of powers, try to play a different moral compass. Try and get on the rooftops, possess people, ease drop if you didn't do that stuff the first time. There's a thing that happens in this game that once you get fluent with the system and the controls and you understand the world and what's going on, suddenly you're free to improvise more and start experimenting. Like, "Would it be possible one-on-one to choke each one of these guards in the entire are and not kill them, but no one ever sounded an alarm, no one ever knew I was here?"

I think you can have fun regardless of your play style in Dishonored, but I've found that gamers, if they play on the hard difficulty and have some self imposed goals like "I'm going to try and ghost the game," or "I'm going to try and not kill anyone," all this additional stuff starts happening. Constraints breed interesting results. So if you're literally trying to do the none lethal resolutions for the key targets, or I'm going to kill all the targets in the brutalist way possible, whatever your self impossed restraints are, that starts to breed more gameplay that's not gameplay we imposed upon you. I just love we've created an environment where that's possible.

1UP: So last question, and it's more of a personal question, but as a leader of your team, what does it take to be a great creative director to lead a studio like Arkane?

HS: Ahh, well. Without asserting I am a "great" creative director, Rapheal and I, this is the very first time we've done it as a co-direction unit and it's been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. Our values in games, our tastes overlap about 85%. Our skills overlap some percentage as well, and where we're both weak we've learned a lot and made up for things. It's a weird combination of really, really knowing what you want and yet giving in at times when the player, or the team, or the technology, or the schedule, needs you to bend a little. If you go too dictatorial in one direction, you break everything. If you go too diplomatic, compromising, you water everything down and the game has no vision, no identity. So that is the most fascinating thing about it. If anybody was going to take this job for the first time, I'd be like "you'd have to really know what you want, but you have to know when to bend also" and that's a hard balance. So that's my answer.

1UP: Thanks, Harvey. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

HS: I have been telling people, it's important to get the word out because you've played, but you might be able to dedicate this part to what you're doing. Obviously, early on people thought that the game was in London, it's not on Earth. They thought it was open-world, it's not. It's very non-linear within the missions. In a similar way, I think some people are going to assume this is a light and shadow stealth game, and it's much more of a "view cone and and occlusion" stealth game. It's faster and more realistic I think and that's what we've gone for. So, beyond 50-yards or so, shadows do matter. Guards ability to see you drops off rapidly if you're in shadows. But up close, like in this room, it's more about am I looking in her [points to Bethesda PR rep sitting beside us] direction and is she behind the chair or not, that kind of thing. So that's a technical detail about the game's system that I think is worth expectation setting.

1UP: Alright, well thank you for your time!

HS: Yeah, thank you I'm glad you came and played.