The gameplay is what really… stay positive!… intrigues, though. In short, it’s sort of everything ever, a million gameplay ideas cribbed from every first-person game of the last decade. There is magic that affects time. There are ranged weapons and melee attacks. There is an ability to summon a rat which you can incarnate, run through drainage pipes up into a home, and then swap places with. (It makes sense as a gameplay mechanism more than it does a practical ability.)
The idea, as I can reckon, is to create a palette of gameplay options, rather than strongly try to denote clear pathways or archetypes for the player. Someone had an interview with Harvey Smith that I can’t find at the moment — I think it might have been Rock, Paper, Shotgun? — in which he described a test player stopping time, firing six arrows toward six targets (the arrows hung in place), then starting time to watch all six enemies eat serious fletching. That wasn’t a planned or taught attack from the designers, just something that sprang organically as the player assembled his attack from the tools at hand.
It’s gameplay as a modular system, a sort of interactive scripting language for action. (Hey, they should call it Actionscript!) That’s compelling, but it has the whiff of “Our gameplay has more widgets than your gameplay”, which may appeal to our neckbeardy tendencies, but won’t necessarily sell the average player who doesn’t have time or patience to discover emergent play. The closer Dishonored gets to a kitchen sink simulation, the more challenging it will be for Arkane to make the game approachable.
