Video Game / Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Do the Impossible...Kill a God

Daud: You up for one last job, Billie?
Billie: Who's the mark?
Daud: The black-eyed bastard who's responsible for all the chaos.
Billie: We're gonna kill the Outsider.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is the 2017 standalone entry in the Dishonored series and the fourth entry in the franchise (following Dishonored 2).

Set several months after the events of Dishonored 2, Billie Lurk resurfaces in Karnaca, burdened by strange dreams. She tracks down her old mentor and boss, Daud in Karnaca. Daud reveals that he has spent decades plotting the Death of the Outsider and wants Billie to aid him in his quest. Yet, the Outsider pays Billie Lurk a visit too, allowing her to converse with him, and leaving her trapped in a curious condition: without being marked by the Outsider, she gains access to Void-based powers and a slew of mysterious artifacts, albeit at the cost of her hand and one of her eyes which has been replaced by strange appendages.

Gameplay takes a turn away from standard Dishonored fare in a number of notable areas. The Chaos System from the previous titles is completely absent, meaning Billie is not punished for killing people as much as Corvo or Emily were. Billie's powers are three completely new ones- the first is Displace, which allows her to mark a place for teleportation and then move there as long as she has direct line of sight with her destination. The second is Foresight, which allows Billie to stop time and scout out the area ahead. The final power she gets is Semblance, which allows Billie to take the shape of any person who is still alive and speak with their voice. The game also includes a contract system for Side Quests, adding optional objectives in exchange for tangible rewards upon completion.

Death of the Outsider was released on September 15, 2017 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The trailer can be seen here: (major Dishonored 2 spoilers)

SPOILER WARNING: As it's a direct sequel to the game and entire pages cannot be whited out, spoilers for Dishonored 2 will be unmarked on this page.

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Dishonored: Death of the Outsider contains examples of:

• Aerith and Bob: English and Romance-Latinate sounding names mix but Death of the Outsider also has Chinese names like Shan Yun and some other Japanese sounding names alongside Sister Lena Rosewyn, Dolores Michaels, and Eleuterio Cienfuegos.
• And I Must Scream: It's revealed that the Outsider has been lying on the altar in the Hold for 4,000 years, frozen in agony at the moment of his death.
• Antagonist Title: The Outsider is in the main subtitle of this game, and likewise it seems he's the one who is "dishonored" in the eyes of his former disciple Daud.
• Bank Robbery: The third mission. The Eyeless are discovered to be stashing the Twin-bladed Knife within a special vault inside the Dolores Michaels Deposit & Loan Bank, forcing Billie and Daud to plot a heist.
• Book Burning: The Abbey of the Everyman are burning many heretical artifacts in the Royal Conservatory after Delilah's coup.
• Call-Back: one of the contracts has you steal a painting by Duke Luca Abele - namely, this◊ one, first seen in Dishonored 2. A note with it refuses to believe that it's really by the Duke, because other paintings by him - really his body double - are much better.
• Changing of the Guard: The game confirms Emily is the canonical hero of Dishonored 2, and also has a pretty permanent Passing the Torch from Daud to Billie given that Daud dies due to his body being worn down from his hard life. This strongly cements Emily and Billie as the "next generation" of Dishonored heroes, in keeping with the Nothing Is the Same Anymore intention of the game.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Billie's Displace power allows her to teleport by imagining herself in a different place.
• Concealing Canvas: There is a safe behind a painting in Ivan Jacobi's office, and another plot-relevant stash in Dolores Michaels' office in the bank.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Since this is a sequel to Dishonored 2 rather than Another Side, Another Story (unlike the Daud DLC), certain parts of the previous game are confirmed to be canon:
  • The game affirms that Low-Chaos is canon, and that it was Emily you played in the previous game.
  • We know for sure that Emily Kaldwin spared Billie in her choices in that game and she did survive to the end, likewise the fact that Billie is whole and uncrippled at the start of the game affirms that Emily saved Aramis Stilton in A Crack in the Slab and altered history.
  • When you begin the game, you can read articles establishing Emily has having returned to the throne as a benevolent ruler and Sokolov returned to Tyvia peacefully.
  • Posters confirm Dr. Hypatia was cured and continues her work.
  • Several of the female Eyeless are witches who lost their powers while serving Breanna Ashworth at the Conservatory, which means that Emily canonically sabotaged the oraculum. However, the game doesn't specify Ashworth's ultimate fate beyond mentioning that the Conservatory's former curator is "gone."
• Cutting the Knot: Normally, the bank mission requires you to use an intercom to speak to a guard behind a locked door — which requires knowledge of the security codes, and ruins a laudanum run of the mission since it wakes up the guards — in order to access the security room that contains the vault controls. However, it's possible to skip this step without alerting anyone by going around to the opposite entrance of the security room and shooting a hagpearl through an open shutter window to remotely activate the vault controls.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you kill Shan Yun but let his lover live, you can find her in the next mission having committed suicide.
  • If you use Semblance to attend the auction in mission 3 as Teresia Cienfuegos, the auctioneer will have unique dialogue acknowledging that Teresia seems to be reclaiming her father's possessions.
• Eldritch Location: Shindaerey Mines is located high in the mountains of Karnaca and its caves contain the Eye of the Dead God, the previous God of the Void, which is larger than Billie's upper body. Going up further to the area of the Ritual Hold reveals the Envisioned, strange void-like beings who are the remnants of the original cult that sacrificed the Boy who became the Outsider, and much like Aramis Stilton's bunker, there is weird time dilation that causes environmental objects and people to warp in and out, such as a statue shimmering in-an-out from pristine to decrepit.
• Elevator Failure: One of many ways to rob Dolores Michael's Bank is to disable the brakes on the elevator vault, sending it crashing through the floor.
• Everyone Hates Mimes: One of the optional contracts in the second mission tasks Billie with killing a mime for the terrible crime of being a mime.
• Face Stealer: Billie can disguise herself by ripping off the faces (or rather their Void semblance) of NPCs and wearing them as a mask.
• Foreshadowing: The Significant Anagram of the Dreadful Wale Farewell Daud, makes it all the more fitting when Daud dies, of old age, on board that ship, and Billie burns his body and the ship down with it, in an epic Viking Funeral.
• Forgiveness: The Central Theme of this game. Billie reflects on the mercy Daud gave her after betraying him, Daud on Corvo's, and in the end Billie has to decide if the Outsider deserves forgiveness when he is culpable for so much harm by his benign negligence and amorality.
  Daud: Forgiveness is a rare thing in this world. You're better than I was.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • It's quite hard to obtain the "Voices" achievement without help, as it requires you to figure out that it's tied to just one specific location (the room containing the Oraculum in the Conservatory gallery) and what the objects you're supposed to interact with look like. Even then, though the achievement's description calls for "breaking" the censers, you don't so much break them as just knock them over.
  • Trying to collect all the paintings can become a problem as early as the first mission, which gives no warning about the fact that if you fail to collect the Outsider painting before freeing Daud, it'll be destroyed and thus unobtainable. Hope you kept an earlier save! (fortunately, this painting is by Sokolov rather than Cienfuegos and does not count toward the related achievement)
• Humanoid Abomination: The game reveals that humans who stay in the void for prolonged periods eventually become Envisioned. The Eyeless Cult considers it an honor for members to be chosen to meet this fate.
• I Know Your True Name: The Outsider can be returned to mortality if a spirit speaks his true name.
• In Spite of a Nail: No matter what happens, Daud was destined for a Viking Funeral with Billie Lurk overseeing his pyre, the difference is that High Chaos!Daud from Dishonored's DLC met this fate years before Prime!Daud did.
• Invisible to Normals: Civilians will comment that it looks like something horrible has happened to Billie but won't notice the obviously heretical void relics attached to her arm and face. This seems to be a similar effect to the Heart in earlier games in that only people close to the void can see them properly.
• Incurable Cough of Death: Daud is constantly coughing due to his age and his injuries from the time he spent as the Eyeless's prisoner. It eventually kills him.
• Kill the God: What Daud and Billie want to do, kill the Outsider. Considering that one of the artifacts she uses as a tool, the red eye that is literally called "the eye of the dead God" was formed from the earlier God of the Void, it appears to be possible. Ultimately, players are given the options of either returning the Outsider to mortality as a normal human or outright killing him. Either way, the Outsider as we know him will cease to exist.
• Laser Hallway: A variation is found in the fourth mission, where an entire apartment is booby-trapped, floor to ceiling, with grenades and tripwires. Setting off one of these will set off several more tripwires. Curiously, this same apartment was owned by a nest keeper in Dishonored 2.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The entire premise gives away the twist that Meagan Foster is Billie Lurk, Daud's former lieutenant, and that Daud was spared by Corvo at the end of Dishonored.
• Liminal Being: Billie Lurk partly exists in the real world and partly in the Void as a result of the protagonist's time travel in A Crack in the Slab. This allows the Outsider to make her into a paradox person with powers, without being connected to the Void, and it allows Billie to be the only one capable of killing and/or depowering the Outsider.
• Lovecraft Lite: The Outsider's predicament is more or less Cthulhu-lite complete with cultists obsessing over lost relics and strange languages, being a God imprisoned under the waves in a Leng-like Eldritch Location, whose Mark is in fact his true name that cannot be spoken by mortals and is not comprehensible by humans. The difference is that the Outsider was a human made into a god and releasing him from the Void doesn't herald the apocalypse but merely brings about the end of an age where a deity is looking over and observing humanity, leaving behind a world and cosmos that is godless until the Void arranges for one to take his place, like the previous one was replaced by the current Outsider.
• Merging the Branches: Due to the three outcomes of the mission A Crack In The Slab and how they can affect Billie in the present, she has taken on an almost Schrödinger-like state, meaning she both has and lacks her arm and eye through them being void material.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: Unlike the previous game, there are no "boss-like" unique enemies with special powers, with all assassination targets being regular civilians. Billie even notes at the end of the game that the Outsider's true form isn't even a powerful Eldritch Abomination she'll need to fight, but rather a rather pitiful petrified corpse frozen in a scream for all eternity, completely at her mercy.
• Multiple Endings: Since Billie is not marked by the Outsider, there's no Chaos System tied to her actions, and as such the game only has two binary endings. You can either kill the Outsider or you can make him a mortal but in either case there is no longer a god in charge of the Void overseeing the world. The only question about the ending is on a character level. If Billie spares the Outsider, she feels at peace with her past, but if she does kill him, she feels that she's Trapped in Villainy.
• New Game Plus: As with the previous entry, save files can be overwritten to play again with the same items, as well as the option to unlock both Corvo's and Emily's powers. Note: Unlike its predecessor's New Game+, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider only gives you three old powers: Blink, Domino, and Dark Vision.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The developers state that in both plot and gameplay this is the game that breaks the mold for the franchise, changing everything that came before:
  • There is no chaos system, i.e. if you kill more or spare more NPC, it won't affect the levels or make it harder than before.
  • Billie Lurk doesn't need Mana to charge up her powers, and instead the energy to use the power is on a rechargeable timer, effectively allowing for unlimited ammo. This is a boon to those who otherwise carefully hoard their mana potions. There are also no runes in the game- Billie can only alter the way her powers work with bonecharms.
  • On a plot level, the Outsider notes that Billie is the first to wield the powers of the Void without gaining his mark, and likewise unlike the other magic users, the Outsider converses with Billie, conducting actual dialogue when before he would speak to his initiates at the altar and only allow them to speak back when he let them.
  • The end of the game is not narrated by the Outsider and there's no hint about the future or what it might and might not contain.
  • On the plot side, the consequences of this game are colossal. By the end of the game, the Outsider is either dead or alive, but depowered. The results: 1, nobody knows what will happen to the Void without a god, but 2, there will likely wind up being a replacement sometime soon, 3, nobody can predict who gets new Void powers until that replacement turns up, and 4, the Abbey of the Everyman has lost its purpose entirely, which is a whole other set of repercussions. And even disregarding the Outsider's fate, it's noted throughout the game that the Void is physically bleeding into the world in a lot of places, which could have some interesting consequences...
• Nuns Are Spooky: The Oracular Sisters appear and they are women in Ethereal White Dresses wearing red blindfolds.
• The Pen Is Mightier: An achievement exists for using the voltaic gun's "makeshift bolt" upgrade to headshot a guard with a fountain pen.
• The Purge: When Billie heads for the Royal Conservatory, she receives an optional contract to kill every single Overseer and Oracular Sister in and around the building. Fulfilling the contract requires murdering 53 people, read: every single NPC in the entire level except for a random civilian, the black market merchant, and a stray ex-witch imprisoned in the basement.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Daud has finally become fed up with the Outsider and his constant meddling and empowering of dangerous beings for his own curiosity and amusement.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Billie Lurk sports an appendage with a red iris and she's undertaking the most audacious mission in all the Dishonored-verse. The eye is in fact an artifact called "Eye of the Dead God", it belonged to the God of the Void that preceded the Outsider.
• Regenerating Mana: Unlike previous games there are no mana potions and all of your mana regenerates when not in use.
• The Reveal: The Outsider that we see in the main game is merely an apparition of the real one's dreamlike state. The real Outsider is still the boy trapped in the altar where he was sacrificed frozen in suspended animation at the top of the mountains in Karnaca. The Eyeless is a successor of the Cult that imprisoned the Outsider and have known this truth all along. At the end, Billie Lurk reaches the place and has the choice to either kill him or release him.
• Running Gag:
  • The code to the first safe you encounter is, as in every previous Dishonored game and many Immersive Sim games before it, 451.
  • The player can rob Dr. Galvani yet again, this time by breaking into his lockbox at the bank. And yes, he still uses the same combination.
  • One locker in the game contains an empty whiskey bottle and two cigars, a reference to the infamous "Shall we gather for whiskey and cigars tonight?"/"Yes, I believe so" dialogue from the first game.
• Sequel Hook: In her final monologue in both endings, Billie notes that with the Outsider out of the picture, the Void is changed forever, but it might continue to bestow magic to mortals at random.
• Sequence Breaking: If Billie finds both keys in the second mission - "Follow the Ink" without first investigating The Red Camellia, Billie will note to herself that she needs to "find that second key" as the quest has not yet updated.
• Shout-Out:
  • On the roof of the bank, the guards have apparently set up a small, smoldering bonfire. The bonfire has a sword sticking out of it.
  • One of the bank safeboxes is owned by Morgan Yu, the protagonist of Prey (2017), which Arkane also developed.
  • The final level of the game is set in an Eldritch Location deep beneath a dilapidated mine, and seems to have more than a few parallels to Dunwich Borers.
• Sliding Scale of Animal Communication: Billie Lurk has the ability to listen to the rats and understand their speech. She cannot talk back to them or converse to them, but rather eavesdrop on their conversation and find hints and information about the world. The rat speech is rendered in a kind of Gollum-esque cadence.
• Soul Jar: Much like the Heart for Jessamine, the charm that lets Billie listen to rats seems to be one for Deirdre.
• Starfish Language: The Mark of the Outsider is revealed to be a runic alphabet that conveys his true name in the language of the dead. Only those who have died and are trapped in the Void can read the alphabet and decipher it. The linguist Malchiodi of the Order of the Eyeless states that its heavy in diphthongs (i.e. compound vowels like coin, loud, side, usually ae sounds) and not easily pronounced, and he leaves behind an alphabet breakdown that separates the Mark's rune into three components arranged diagonally.
• Tailor-Made Prison: Early on, Billie finds Daud imprisoned by the Eyeless in a power-dampening chamber that keeps him weak enough to avoid escaping. Once the power dampener is turned off, however, all hell breaks loose.
• Tele-Frag: The Displace ability will inflict every possible dismemberment on NPCs if there are any in the targeted location when Billie is teleported there, However, it also damages her during the process. One of the corrupted bone charms has a drawback that discourages this technique, by making the interpolation lethal to the player as well.
• Thanatos Gambit: The Outsider appeared to Billie and made her into a liminal being whose powers are untouched by him, precisely so she could find a way to release him from the Void. The only choices Billie has are to spare him and make him a human, and a mortal, or to kill him once and for all.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: It's extremely easy to screw up a Poppy Tincture-based run of the bank mission where you're trying to keep everyone knocked out by failing to realize that disabling the Wall of Light on the ground floor of the vault area will quickly be noticed by the patrolling Clockwork Sentinel, which will result in all the guards in the area being roused from sleep. An alternative method would be to instead use a rewire tool (the Sentinel's patrol route keeps it just outside of the wall's effective zone) or just avoid the wall area altogether and travel between the ground floor and the balconies above using powers.
• The Un-Reveal:
  • In Daud's final audiograph to Billie, he mentions how he never told Billie the story of how he got the Outsider's Mark, but he decides not to tell her, since he believes that his final words to Billie should be about her, not him.
  • Billie Lurk notes that the Mark of the Outsider is in fact his real true name, which can only be deciphered by the dead. When she reaches the Altar, Daud's spirit is revealed to have reached there, and Billie convinces him to release the Outsider to mortal life. Daud agrees and whispers the Outsider's real name to his frozen form, but we aren't told what it is.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: This one zigzag a lot and starts with the given definition of how heroic or villainous you play the Royal Family and Dunwall's criminal classes. The goals of Corvo and Emily in their respective games is either recover lost honor or take back their throne, while the goal of Billie and Daud is an active goal, find the means and then use them to destroy the Outsider. Then again, this either for revenge or to stop the Outsider from empowering dangerous people.
• Viking Funeral: When Daud dies of old age on board the Dreadful Wale, Billie Lurk burns the entire ship down with his body in it, and sets it afloat. All Billie mutters is Farewell Daud. Incidentally this is how the post-game cutscene for High Chaos Daud in The Brigmore Witches DLC ends.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The Twin-bladed Knife, a blade that was used in the ritual that created the Outsider. Once Billie gets it, she can fire off Sword Beams with it.
• What If God Was One of Us?: The Outsider is a suffering dreamlike being trapped in an inter-dimensional prison and he wants either death or the remainder of the mortal life that was stolen from him. If Billie spares him, she notes that for all the bad things that the Outsider did, and all that he is guilty of by negligence or indifference, he didn't ask for his condition or state and he gave people his mark in the hope that some day one of them could come and free him.
• What the Hell, Player?: Considering that Billie can hear the thoughts of rats, they're never hostile, and in fact can provide useful hints, there is no reason to ever attack them. You'll hear them screaming in fear if you do anyway, and if you make it a habit eventually the only thing you can hear from them is how they think you're disgusting.
  • If you kill every gang member and guard in the first level without getting spotted, but leave the bodies to be found, the papers in the second mission will be horrified and baffled by the remnants of a total slaughter that shows no apparent motive.
• Wham Line: The Outsider's monologue when Billie gets hold of the Twin-Bladed Knife, when he tells her that Daud is dead while she was on the mission you were on.
  • Softened somewhat since Daud himself tells Billie that he will probably not live long enough to see her come back from the bank.

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