‘Dishonored 2’: Assassin Abilities And Characters Discussed For Upcoming Sequel


Fans of the Dishonored series are anticipating the sequel. Luckily, more news has surfaced to quench the thirst for information.

Developer Arkane Studios has been hard at work with Dishonored 2. Following the story of main character Corvo Attano and Emily Kaldwin from the first Dishonored, players will be introduced to a new city in which they will run, jump, and combat the forces that oppose them. The game takes place in the Empire of the Isles, a fictional location where the protagonists will embark on their journey through Karnaca.

The bottom line of Dishonored 2 is the reclaiming of the throne, and it’s up to the player on how they want to approach the game’s story. Both stealth and aggression have their own rewards. In a report by Gamespot, creative director Harvey Smith goes into details about the game and the assassin abilities that will be coming to Dishonored 2.

Smith touches on Emily Kaldwin, specifically their reason to bring her into the game.

“Those two decisions were separate, though. We knew we wanted to make Emily no matter what, and then we were like, ‘God, we really feel nostalgic about Corvo. Let’s do both of them.’ At first, we were thinking, ‘Let’s just throw all the powers into one big pool.’ Then it became more and more interesting to us to say, ‘No, the powers reflect their lives or their time in the world.’ Corvo has Rat Swarm because he got his powers during the Rat Plague. You can look at Emily: she’s a ruler, so of course she has Mesmerize.”

It’s clear that Arkane wanted to make Emily a totally separate character. Smith went on to discuss the similarities between her and Corvo, namely their collective abilities.

“Corvo has exactly the same powers as last time but with all these upgrades–three to five upgrades for each power,” Smith began. “Emily has all-new powers. Then we have enhancements, which are the passive powers–your jump distance or your agility. There are some interesting ones, like Shadow Kill, where people turn to ash when they die. Corvo and Emily share those.”

Through what we’ve seen of Dishonored 2, Emily’s power revolves around the ability to make use of supernatural elements to dispose of her enemies. She’s able to scale buildings and manipulate the concept of time. She’s also able to mesmerize and mentally destroy her foes, giving the name of her powers an accurate description of what she’s capable of.

“Just to give you a couple of examples: Let’s say there are three super difficult guys to fight in one room, and then there’s a servant cleaning a tray in the other room. I link these three super-difficult-to-fight guys with the servant (using Domino), and I just walk over to the servant, hit and choke him out. He can’t even fight. He goes down instantly, and they go down. That’s a good example of an emergent effect for Domino that we didn’t anticipate, but people have started doing that.”

Players will be urged to make use of these abilities, but choosing between murder and mercy is not as simple as it was in the previous Dishonored. Harvey mentions that life and death in the game are consequential to the point that the world around them will change.

“Killing people contributes to chaos; it destabilizes the world around you. But killing a sympathetic person is worse in terms of weighting than killing a murderous person. That’s a concession we made to the more nuanced desire that players had. Also, it solved a problem, because players were like, ‘Oh, it just comes down to killing fewer than 20 percent of the people.’ Not anymore. The weighting is different character to character.”

In terms of missions, it seems that players will have to decide on what character they’ll be using through the game. A report by iDigitalTimes states that the game’s story will hold different paths for Emily and Corvo. Smith states that this is a permanent decision, suggesting that players will experience a set of events unique to each protagonist.

Dishonored 2 is set to be released on PlayStation 4, XBox One, and PC on November 11 of this year.

[Image via Arkane Studios]

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