Dishonored - Interview @ OXCGN

OXCGN interviewed Arkane Studios’ Executive Producer Julien Roby about Dishonored. The first part of this interview can be read here.

Arthur: So basically there’s going to be a lot of variety of gamers playing Dishonored; the video diaries obviously demonstrate the game can be approached in a variety of ways.
Do you think that most gamers will find this sense of choice coming naturally to them or will they be confused by the fact that they aren’t actually being shuffled along in a corridor and told exactly what to do?
Julien: Yeah that’s a good point actually we ah…we kind of came up with this problem when we play-tested the game a few months ago: players were not expecting to be able to do 10 different things in the same area because there was just one path on the street and they didn’t think of looking at the rooftop.
So what we tried to do was at the beginning of the game show the different options and teach the player about these options initially and then let them try to explore and experiment with things.
We didn’t want to fall in the pitfall where we’re just drawing the player by the nose because then that defeats the point of letting them find their own way, so yeah just trying to strike a nice balance between teaching the player what they can do and then letting them actually do things.

Click to expand...

More information.

I wish they would stop focus testing an audiance that is never going to buy a game like this.

Ashbery76 said:

I wish they would stop focus testing an audiance that is never going to buy a game like this.

Click to expand...

Not entirely sure what makes you think they are doing that. The article did not mention "focus testing" (perhaps you mean "focus groups" which it also didn't mention.) Play testing a game is part of the fine tuning and QA process and a pretty damn necessary one.

The problem they are discussing - of making sure that it is apparent that there are options besides the obvious without making all individual options obvious themselves- is an important and difficult one. Many games don't get it right at all and its good that they approached it thoughtfully. So it is understandable they want to make it clear to players that they can experiment and that other paths exist without carving them out as obvious alternate routes; the desire is to keep exploration and experimentation exciting and rewarding while not having their efforts to develop the off-the-beaten path content wasted.