Dishonored 2 Previews Showcase New Information: Emily’s Powers, Combat And More

Recently, Arkane Studios and Bethesda Softworks invited a couple of people, IGN, Gamespot and PC Gamer, to showcase a mission from their upcoming game, Dishonored 2. In addition to this post, we went over a bit more of the game’s new details in a separate article.

In order to make this easy for you all, we decided to read them ourselves and make a shorter version of all the brand new information we were able to find out about our female protagonist Emily Kaldwin, her unique powers, the beautifully built city of Karnaca as well as newly added gameplay mechanics.

The skills system has been changed from a normal upgrading system to a skill tree that you can carve out depending on your style of gameplay and the way you want to approach and complete the objective, which allows for far more diversity each time you play a mission.

First off let’s begin with Emily and her powers, we already know that she has a similar version of last year’s “Blink” ability, this time it’s called “Far Reach,” and it allows her to grapple onto buildings, people and even objects. She can either pull herself in and move with ease across Karnaca’s rooftops, or she can pull her targets towards her for an easy kill.

The new powers that were showcased were:

• Dark Vision: allows Emily to locate all enemies in her surrounding area.
• Shadow Walk: turns her into smoke so she can squeeze into tight places and can be used in assassinations.
• Mesmerise: puts enemies in a deep trance state.
• Domino: used to link multiple enemies’ fates together, for example if you use it and tag three guards, if you successfully kill one of them, the other two drop dead.
• Doppelganger: enables Emily to summon a clone of herself. (wasn’t showcased but was mentioned by the developers.)

 

Gameplay also got its fair share of additions and improvements, and during the showcase, some of these enhancements were showcased. The developer was able to implement all of these thanks to The Void, which is the new engine used to build Dishonored 2. It allows for better shaders, better textures, upgraded lighting, more fluid animation and higher post-processing quality overall.

Now, let’s list all the newly-added gameplay bits:

• Ledge and window assassinations have been added, which was requested heavily after the first game.
• Combat choke, which neutralizes enemies without killing them, allowing for a more non-lethal approach.
• Crossbow with flashbang arrows.

Finally, the developer revealed that Dishonored 2 will feature more than two endings. Dishonored’s Co-Creative Director Harvey Smith explained briefly how and why you can come to a different ending each time you complete the game.

“We have many more than just two endings this time, so it was a very ambitious undertaking to update that level of the game. There’s more than just a background kill-count gating two different endings,”

“In Dishonored 2, we weight people differently. You can find a person in the world who might be sympathetic, and someone who is guilty, and someone who is murderous. And those people contribute differently to the end outcome. So right off the bat there’s a subtler approach to that.”

Dishonored 2 releases on November 11 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.