Dissecting Dishonored’s Heart

The folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have published a feature/interview on Dishonored’s heart, and quite literally, given that the feature focuses on the pulsing gadget in your supernatural arsenal.

Here’s a snippet:

(Initially, the Heart was conceived as a means of locating assassination targets using vibration and sound mechanics,) Smith and Colantonio say. (We thought about having it talk and feel alive, like it had its own agenda, similar to the Eye in Thief. So while planning for the Heart, we kicked around those concepts and a number of additional fictional ideas supporting it. But once we’d had enough people play the game, it was obvious that we needed something more direct in helping players find their way to the targets, so the team created a system for HUD markers that helped guide the player.)

Arkane found that the Heart’s role kept changing as they developed, but its narration was always there. (We went through many rounds of changes around navigation features,) Smith and Colantonio continue. (And once we decided to let the player use the Heart to find Runes and Bone Charms, even that changed repeatedly as we experimented with how obscure or overt we wanted it. All along, we were also writing lines for the Heart, based on its perception of specific or general-case characters in the world. It served as a great way to reinforce our themes and helped differentiate the social classes in the game.)

The developers’ comments certainly chime with my experience of playing Dishonored. The Heart does do a great job of differentiating between social classes and giving focus to related themes of justice, power and equality. One of the most striking examples of the way in which the Heart is able to do this is to be found in the stories which it tells regarding servants at the player’s base of operations. In keeping with the Victorian-like setting of Dishonored, the service staff will not offer much to their perceived social better in conversation, and generally limit themselves to polite trivialities. It’s logical, but it leaves these characters with little to make you feel that they are real people and means that they are perfectly placed to fade into obscurity. This is where the Heart comes in.