I've learned that our choices always matter to someone, somewhere. And sooner or later, in ways we can't always fathom, the consequences come back to us.
— Daud
One of the secrets to the worlds we build is that they’re messy...There isn’t ‘the stealth corridor’ and ‘the hacking hallway’. Instead, we try to blend these things naturally into the environment. And it helps that European cities, which inspired Dunwall, are inherently more organic than grid-like American ones.
We want to avoid ‘poor people are good and rich people are evil’, but it’s true that power tends to make people grotesque, or it puts people in situations that are hard to resist...Rich families profited from selling chemicals to the Nazis. People are making money from housing projects in Detroit. It’s a tone-deafness to human suffering in exchange for personal profit that some of the upper class citizens in Dunwall are guilty of.
"And similarly with Dishonored, [Raphael Colantonio] and I made the decision...if you played very, very darkly — you not only killed to get to your goal, but you also went out of your way to kill the maids and everybody else, then at the very end of the game, Samuel Beechworth, the old man who’s been driving your boat around, he basically says, ‘I despise you for what you’ve become...That’s why I’m warning them that you’re coming.' He betrays you. And we got so much pressure to cut that from the game. Because people are not used to video game characters being mean to them, or telling them you’re not a hero, you’re a bad guy. Everybody just wants to be told in a video game that you’re great, no matter what you do. If you slaughter everybody — you killed the maids, you killed the old people, you killed the beggars — you’re great, here’s a medal, you’re a hero. We decided that sounds psychotic. It doesn’t match our values, it doesn’t match the way the world works, it doesn’t match the way any other fiction — imagine a novel where a guy wakes up in the morning, kills everybody in the house, goes down the street, kills everybody on the way to work, kills everybody in the office, and then at the very end of the novel, there is a scene where he is given a medal and made some sort of hero and anointed in some way. It doesn’t make any sense. What we wanted was to let you express yourself in the game, but to have the world react to that, at least in some way. Samuel Beechworth, betraying you and firing off that flare, was something we had to fight for."
— Harvey Smith, developer of Dishonored, defending Video Game Cruelty Punishment.
