In recent, short interview with PlayStation.Blog, Dishonored’s Co-Creative Director Harvey Smith talks about the design decisions that went into the game’s core stealth mechanic, and how the genre is rebooted by “falling back on values.”
“We generally like the first person perspective – to give you that ‘you are there’ thing. We like RPG upgrade systems. We like analog AI, so enemies are not necessarily aware of you or unaware of you – they’re uncertain. They may have heard you, but they’re not sure, so they go and investigate. Surfing the edge of awareness, basically. We love highly mobile games; we don’t like games where you’re heavy and stuck on the ground and you have big weapons and you can’t get on top of buildings as they’re just props. We really want you to be able to flit up there like a flea,” Smith explains.
Smith also goes into detail on some of the added challenges of a having a “reactive” AI system in a stealth-based games, answering,
“We tried the ‘pool of shadow’ model, but modern players would say the AI looks bad if I’m in a shadow and an enemy walks right by me. That looks dumb. They want a more reactive system. And that makes it a little more hardcore. To sneak, you really have to stay behind cover, lean out behind walls. It requires you to really know where an enemy is looking and avoid that range.”
You can take a look at the rest of the interview here. Dishonored comes out on PS3 on October 9 in North America.