Dishonored 2 hasn’t been formally announced yet, but that isn’t stopping Arkane’s co-creative director Raphael Colantonio from discussing what his team is hoping to accomplish with the as-yet officially unannounced next-gen sequel to 2012’s surprise hit.
“The next generation is mostly going to be about memory,” Colantonio told PC blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “More memory means more entities, more density, more AI with more variations in their animations, bigger levels with less loading.
“But the values we hold will remain the same. It’s all about interactivity and choices, consequences to your choices, many ways to do things, exploration, verticality, and all kinds of player tools. The more kinds of tools we can give to the player in a very simulated environment, the better the experience is.”
Colantonio mentions that the dev team is interested in adding a multiplayer mode to Dishonored, but he’s not sure if they’ll actually go through with it, as they’re more interested in telling stories through the Dishonored games than providing a multiplayer experience. Dishonored, he says, is a game about progressing forward at your own pace, a feature he thinks would be disrupted in a multiplayer setting. “In multiplayer, there’s a group, so everyone has to worry about going forward or being shot at. But we’re also keeping an eye out for ways to do multiplayer the right way,” Colantonio said, adding that if they do end up adding a multiplayer mode to Dishonored, it won’t be a simple deathmatch.
While Colantonio discussed his ideas for a Dishonored sequel, he says that Dishonored 2 might not necessarily be the next game to come out of Arkane. “I can’t say exactly what we’re working on yet, but I can say that it’s definitely going to be a similar type of game,” Colantonio said. “Choices, multiple objectives, branching paths, and things like that. Those are our core values and they will stay that way.”
Dishonored was released last year to rave reviews and strong sales. Publisher Bethesda says that the game has exceeded their sales expectations, so it’s safe to assume that a sequel has already been green-lit. Dishonored’s final DLC expansion, the Brigmore Witches, was released earlier this month.