[HILO OFICIAL] Dishonored ~ Arkane y diseñadores de Thief y Half-Life

Game Informer’s gone up with the first details behind Arkane’s Dishonored, as well as the first screen of the game.

You’ll play the game as Corvo, a “legendary” bodyguard to the Empress who is falsely thrown into prison for her murder by the “corrupt” Lord Regent.

Corvo is not just skillful in not being seen, he also has supernatural powers that make him one of the deadliest persons in the planet when combined with his stealth skills and gadgets.

The game’s major elements – mobility, powers & gadgets, environment, and AI – will all combine together “create interesting effects.”

One example given by GI was to “stop time and knock a bunch of stuff off a table in one direction then book it in another, so the guards search for you in the wrong place.”

There’s more details here. Dishonored, announced last week, launches next year for PS3, 360 and PC.

Wrapping your brain around a new Halo or Mass Effect is easy enough. Understanding a new franchise like Dishonored is a little harder, and our cryptic cover probably didn’t help much. Read on to get a sense of what this stealth/action adventure from Arkane and Bethesda is about – and to see the first screenshot of the game.

Who are you?
Players take on the role of Corvo, the Empress’ legendary bodyguard. As the game starts, Corvo is falsely imprisoned for her murder. What the corrupt Lord Regent behind the coup didn’t realize is that Corvo is legendary for a reason. He’s not only a skilled combatant accomplished in the art of not being seen, but Corvo has a suite of supernatural powers that combine with his natural talents and unusual gadgets to make him one of the most lethal men in the known world.

Why should you care?
Even if you haven’t played them, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Thief and Deus Ex. One of the main minds behind those two games, Harvey Smith, is the co-creative director of Dishonored along with Raf Colantonio, the founder of developer Arkane Studios. The two share a vision of a game that gives players the power to be creative with their skills and tactics, and invites them to come up with interesting solutions to the obstacles in front of them. Arkane is known for its immersive first-person gaming (Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic), and the power of a talent-driven publisher in Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3) behind the team is promising.

How are they going to do that?
Dishonored has several major elements that combine to create its unique gameplay: mobility, powers & gadgets, environment, and AI. The trick is that a single power doesn’t just do damage or heal you. You can combine them organically to create interesting effects. Stop time and knock a bunch of stuff off a table in one direction then book it in another, so the guards search for you in the wrong place. Summon a swarm of rats to attack one guard, but possess one of the rats and escape in the chaos. Every problem has as many solutions as you want it to.

What’s the catch?
It’s an assassination game that reacts to how violent you are. An unusual “chaos” system tracks how much collateral damage you cause, and the game world changes as a result of your actions. Unlike a light/dark side meter, though, it’s a behind-the-scenes element that affects story decisions without punishing the player or pushing them to play one way or another.

When can I learn more?
Soon! You can get ten pages worth of details in the print magazine, and we’ll be dropping new online content, from video interviews to an interactive map of Dishonored’s world, throughout the month. We asked a lot of questions, and Smith and Colantonio had a lot to say. For starters, on Wednesday we’ll share a video that breaks down why you should be interested in the team at Arkane even if you haven’t played any of their previous games.

nasgul escribió:Me parece una medio copia del Bioshock, lo cuál no tiene que ser precisamente malo. Pero lo que me desconcierta es ver la imagen de la revista donde se ve todo futurista y en la imagen nueva parece que es como en la época colonial, me tiene un tanto desconcertado el juego, aunque habrá que seguirle la pista.

mangafan escribió:No veas como recuerdan los robots esos de las patas largas al Half Life :3

- The Outsider: "This supernatural being is the source of all magic in Dishonored's world, including the many powers at the player's disposal." It's described as being "part devil, part angel, and entirely ambiguous." They mention that you will meet the Outsider at some point.

- The Heart: "The so-called heart is a mystical object that beats faster as you face your objectives, giving the player some basic guidance to keep them on track in Dishonored's large levels. More disturbingly, it whispers directly into your mind, pulling secrets from the consciousness of others and sensing interesting things within the world that lie beyond mortal senses." They note that you can learn something about every named character in the game with it and that using it may come with consequences.

- The powers that you do have won't include stuff like fireballs. One of the powers gives you the ability to summon a swarm of AI controlled rats that react realistically in the world. They'll clean the bones of downed enemies which will make it easier for you to hide them. They point out that the swarm could cause trouble for the player if an NPC freaks out since that could cause more guards to come to the area. The rats can also attack the player if there isn't a more appealing target. You can also possess one of them in order to escape through tunnels

- You'll be able to possess animals or humans. Humans will have to be unaware of your presence in order to possess them

- Other powers will include Bend Time, Windblast ect.

- Powers can be upgraded with runes. They note that you won't find enough runes on a single playthrough to upgrade everything.

- Gadgets will include spring razor traps, sticky grenades, and different types of ammunition like sleep darts.

- You'll be able to collect whalebone charms that will give you certain buffs like mana refill or a health boost. You'll only be able to find "12 or so" of the 40 whalebone's in a single playthrough. They'll be selected randomly from a master list.

- They refer to the AI as "analog AI". They'll have a number of characteristics that are modified on the fly instead of having a simple alert or neutral as you find in most games. One example is that two guards talking to each other will have narrower "vision cones" and their hearing will be duller in comparison to a guard patrolling on his own. Light, mental state, ambient noise ect. will all impact how the AI reacts.

- They're trying to avoid having the player feel like the AI is cheating. One way they're doing that is by rarely spawning new enemies, and when they do it'll only be because an alarm went off. When they do spawn they'll try to make it realistic such as having reinforments come through the backdoor of a mansion instead of just magically having them pop up near the player.

- They talk about different ways to disable a watchtower. One is a traditional way of avoiding the spotlight and enemies while moving slowly. "In Dishonored, however, you could alternatively climb a building and use a combination of celerity (supernatural speed), your natural double-jump, and blink (a short-range teleport) to cover a surprising distance in the air and land on the top of the tower itself."

- Their lead level designer wanted them to remove celerity-double jump-blink combo once he saw it being used because of a fear that people would use it to get out of the map

- They note that the levels are designed to encourage a lot of vertical experimentation

- On the type of experience that they want to deliver "Games can either be described as rollercoasters - which is all crafted and very high-drama - or that time when you were 16 and you and your friend broke into an abandoned house and you had the most intense moments waiting for the door to open, and then there were moments where, 'Ah, I expected something grand to happen but nothing happened; it was just an empty room.'" He (Harvey Smith) said that they want the latter.

- Listening to random conversations going on in the world may give you hints on how to complete objectives differently

- At one point in their demo they were shown a thug going after a woman in an alley. If the player just went right in they'd be ambushed by the thugs friends. You have multiple ways to rescue her, one of which is to find and take out the ambushers before rescuing the woman

- You can go around causing a lot of bloodshed or you can go with a much more clean/stealthy route. Causing lots of bloodshed will cause chaos in the world. "You'll be notified when your actions have raised or lowered the level of chaos, but it's an under-the-hood story mechanics rather than an explicit light/dark or paragon/renegade score with gameplay effects."

- "Whatever the specifics may be, the fate of this grim world is determined over a linear series of levels that largely revolve around eliminating one target or another within the Lord Regent's corrupt regime. This isn't an Elder Scrolls game that turns you loose to explore the world at your leisure, though everyone's experience will be different as they choose their path and affect the simulation in radically different ways based on their gameplay choices."

- There are only a few dialogue choices in the game and they only come up when you need to make a real choice. Most of the cutscenes are handeled while you stay in first person.

Arkane Studios is drawing on its love of RPG elements and emergent gameplay for Dishonored.

“Dishonored is a game where the core stealth combat gameplay is complimented by all these powers that you have, and they layer together really well,” co-director Harvey Smith told GameInformer.

“It is one of our principal beliefs that you shouldn’t protect the player too much from seeing something awkward. Instead, it’s better to empower the player to do these things in a general purpose kind of way.

“Not at the right moment or in a particular scripted encounter, and so we don’t pre-plan some of the things that are the most fun in our games.”

Arkane’s fun-factor – the effects of player choice and customisation on gameplay – is something the studio is careful to nurture through its studio culture.

“We try to go out of our way to only hire people who understand and love the kind of games that we make,” Smith said.

“We aren’t just a game studio, we’re like very much focused on these immersive first person action games that have RPG features built into them.

“And by recruiting those kinds of people, and sharing that passion for those games, a lot of things immediately become easy, even across language barriers. Because you can point to something in Bioshock, or something in Far Cry 2, or something older in Underworld or System Shock. They love them for the same reasons and that immediately creates a bridge.”

RPG elements are becoming more prevalent through traditional vanilla genres, but Arkane doesn’t feel threatened by this trend.

“Hopefully people just keep on deepening the mechanics that are in those games,” Smith said.

“I think a synthesis is the ultimate experience for of us.”

Dishonored is due next year on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Arkane Studios’ latest, Dishonored, allows for entirely pacifist playthroughs – but the way you play the game changes the world around you, for good and ill.

“Our goal is to let you ghost the game,” co-creative director Harvey Smith told told IGN.

“No guard ever went ‘Hey, what’s that?’ because you snuck by behind him or you stopped time and no alarm was ever sounded. You can actually complete the game without killing anyone.

“For all the key targets, all the assassination targets, there are more thorough behind-the-scenes alternate ways to eliminate them.”

Smith described this path as an “extreme extreme”, adding that most players would fall somewhere between all-out action and pure stealth. The game measures players’ precision – or rampant lack of it – with a system called Chaos.

“Killing a guard is chaotic, but not very chaotic. Killing a maid, this creates more chaos. Ringing an alarm creates chaos. After some threshold we have consequences,” fellow co-creative director Raphael Colantonio explained.

Not all the consequences are necessarily bad, or even effective on gameplay.

“Some of them are more like atmospheric effects like there are more rats, for example. Some of them have gameplay consequences like there are more guards patrolling the area. And some of them are story consequences like this ally may now betray you or instead be very excited. It’s all linked to different effects all the way down to the endings,” he continued.

The rats are a particularly cool example, as they’re tied into the game’s plot, and lend some neat abilities to players – if you’ve been chaotic enough to bring them out of the woodwork.

“We talked about powers that made you a figure of darkness, and eventually we started calling the plague the rat plague,” Smith explained.

“Then we started wondering what we could do with rats dynamically. They avoid light, they’re attracted to bodies if you leave bodies out. If there are many of them they will veer off and attack somebody. If there are only a few they shy away. We don’t do many things that are just ambient, cosmetic things in the background. If we can turn those into gameplay, why wouldn’t we?”

Dishonored is due on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2012. Hit the link above for the full preview, including details of the game’s environments, combat system upgrades, and magic.

El principal responsable tras el prometedor Dishonored, Harvey Smith, ha declarado en el medio británico CVG que todavía cree que los jugadores buscan experiencias profundas del estilo Fallout o Skyrim, y no tanto proyectos simples como pretenden muchas distribuidoras.

“Hemos trabajado con muchas distribuidoras, y sin decir nombres diré que no quieren trabajar con juegos en primera persona. Ellos creen que no venderán”, asegura el creativo, que no ha dudado en destacar el éxito de títulos como Half Life, Halo o Call of Duty para contradecir dichas afirmaciones. Sin embargo, Harvey Smith no se queda ahí y también critica la falta de ambición de muchas distribuidoras, que llegan incluso a dudar del éxito cuando se aplican elementos del género rol en determinados juegos.

El creativo tras Dishonored se ha mostrado encantado con el trabajo realizado, por ejemplo, por Todd Howard y Bethesda Softworks con los juegos de Elder Scrolls y Fallout. “Son serios, interesantes, complejos, rápidos. Dicen que siendo simples se hace dinero, ¿verdad? Bien, puede que no sea así”, añade. Por eso, no ha dudado en lanzar una puyita a las distribuidoras al alegar que “los jugadores son más listos de lo que ellas creen”.

Al respecto, Smith considera que estos prejuicios parten del pasado, cuando hace diez años las desarrolladoras ponían trabas para este tipo de desarrollos; pero “ahora que muchas de estas distribuidoras han muerto, nosotros podemos hacer cosas como Dishonored. Es el juego que siempre hemos querido desarrollar.”

Tanto es así, continúa, que “los jugadores adultos como nosotros esperamos disfrutar de experiencias profundas como los de la década de los noventa, por eso lo estamos desarrollando así, porque además ha habido una sequía de lanzamientos de este estilo durante los últimos años”, ha añadido el co director creativo, Raphael Colantonio. En este punto, Smith ha destacado propuestas como Deus Ex, System Shock o Thief, que parten de la misma base conceptual.

Ambos han remarcado que tras el éxito de títulos como Fallout 3 y Bioshock, cada vez son más los juegos de este estilo que tienen éxito en el mercado, lo que resulta “alentador.”

labrys-y-dedalus escribió:Por fin uno que tiene un discurso sensato. Y que no ve solo vacas lecheras. Aleluya brother!

Espero ver que resultado saldrá de este proceso de creación. Si es tan bueno como Fallout o el más reciente Deus Ex es una compra segura.

Jolín, dónde vas a buscar tu información?

goldenaxeband escribió:Maldición, no me carga la página

goldenaxeband escribió:Y Deus Ex, Bioshock...

rezze escribió:Prereservado ya ^^