User blog:TheCrabShack/We may never see Corvo Attano again.



I find it quite difficult to imagine that the world of Dishonored as we know it, the plight of Dunwall and all of its glorious inhabitants will make it into Dishonored 2. Why? Well, I’ll explain.

The reason Dishonored was considered a “breath of fresh air,” and one of its most grandiose endorsements delivered to the gaming world, was, simply, choice.

A. Freedom. Of. Choice.

It was an attractive proposition and kick-started my interest in Dishonored. Smack-bang in the middle of this freedom of choice is Corvo Attano. Corvo, to me, is a blank canvas; you, the gamer, are the artist and you are the author; “the birth of the [gamer] must be at the cost of the death of the [developer].” Arkane have—in a Barthian sense at least—selflessly removed themselves from the creative process giving the gamer the reins. YOU are in control. This is why Corvo is left purposefully blank; you become the medium by which meaning is established and developed within the game.

Not only this (after all blank characters aren’t a brand-new concept) but, the choices you make as the artist running around as Corvo-the-blank-canvas are also largely propelled by you; think, how to get to a target, what to do with that target, chaos levels, etc. There was just enough information regarding Corvo, though, to provide sufficient grounding without alienating the character completely, everything else, to reinforce the point, is up to you.

So what? Well just imagine you played the game once, thoroughly, the experience was immersive, compelling and engaging… but… you had no intention of playing the game again. That experience concludes your visit to Dunwall. That gamer, whoever she/he may be, has carved their own path through Dunwall, and the events that transpired have been dictated by their hands alone.

The point is—and this is what I’m getting at—if they re-use Corvo; if Emily survives and begins a reign of Orwellian-terror; if you assassinated High Overseer Campbell; if Sokolov is dead or Piero is alive, IF—and so many other if’s—none of this happens in your play through, yet Dishonored 2, in its prelude or main campaign suggests that it did, then the element of choice—YOUR choice—becomes completely and utterly redundant. The antecedent and the consequent, the choice and the outcome, the pillar to the world of Dishonored loses a great deal of its value; the choices YOU made have no consequence on the events of Dishonored 2. The 'freedom-of-choice' element which so much of the games' strength is based-on, becomes totally irrelevent!

This is why I feel that anything encompassed by, or related to ‘chaos’ in Dishonored 1 will not or should not appear in dishonoured 2. Therefore Dishonored 2 may be a game that’s hiding from its own history, either that or Dishonored 2 will be somewhere else, with a host of characters the gamer has never been introduced to before. It may, in other words, become a spiritual successor to Dishonored 1.