Tag: arkane studios

Feature

The secrets of Dishonored 2’s mongrel city

I first noticed it in the windows: their subtle, curving mullions that rise and fall like waves. Those curves lend a romantic lightness to the architecture they are set into. You might not notice them when you first set foot in Dishonored 2’s Karnaca, but you’ll surely feel them. Like a thousand other details that litter the streets of this imagined city, Karnaca’s arches, windows, and alcoves conspire to create a distinct sense of place. They gather to form a visual map imprinted piece-by-piece in the player’s mind, as they turn the camera this way and that, down back alleys…
Dishonored
Feature

Knotting into Dishonored’s decaying city

Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by artist and writer Gareth Damian Martin. /// There is no such thing as a total vision of a city. Statistics, guidebooks, politicians, newspapers, tourists, maps, and surveys like to suggest otherwise, but theirs is a constricted world, an incomplete image. Those of us who live in cities know very well of their tendency to conceal and reveal themselves with unexpected rhythms, as if at random—surprising us with new configurations and revelations, shifting prism-like with the passing of time or the changing of the light. Perhaps that’s why the most…
Prey
News

Don’t care about the new Prey? That’s a mistake

Everyone seems to be a bit confused. Prey, the non-numbered reboot of the single-game “series” Prey (2006), has nothing to do with its own franchise. “Prey is not a sequel, it’s not a remake, it has no tie with the original,” confirmed director Raphael Colantonio, a week or so ago, in a video called “What is Prey?”. The video itself even has a miasma of confusion around it, with most commenters trying to understand the non-existent connections that might be in place. “Prey is what predator eat,” offers HearMeSoar, an answer that seems at least more logical than publisher Bethesda’s retooling of…
Dishonored 2
News

Dishonored 2’s main attraction is still its arcane artistry

It was there, in the very first shot of Dishonored 2’s gameplay debut. Shown off by director Harvey Smith at publisher Bethesda’s E3 press conference earlier this week, the game’s first true appearance opened with slatted light falling across an unfinished sculpture, the chisel marks visible in the aging hardwood, depicting some tentacled monstrosity, some creature of the deep. Beside it a painting of a knight or soldier, hunched in the shadow of a tree, atop a huge boulder and surrounded by fireflies, or perhaps hidden, glinting eyes. Both were set in a series of rich apartments, filled with entomology…