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Dishonored 2 was one of my most anticipated games of last year, but like most other games
I was excited for, it disappointedly launched with severe performance issues that pushed
away a lot of potential customers.
But after almost an entire year and a multitude of patches, it finally works and I can conclusively
say: it’s pretty good.
The original Dishonored was one of the best stealth games to come out in a long time,
and whether you were a fan or not, its sequel is something that I almost feel inclined to
recommend to fans of great level design.
From Lady Boyle’s Last Party and The Flooded District in the first game to A Crack in the
Slab and The Edge of the World, the team at Arkane has only gotten better and better,
but there’s one level in the second game that goes above and beyond.
One that I think captures the essence of the Dishonored games, a level called: The Clockwork
Mansion.
[Title]
Dishonored 2’s level design, in general, emphasizes three basic components: player
expression, environmental storytelling, and emergent gameplay.
Most areas are designed to allow the player to approach problems as they see fit, they’re
setup to balance out interactions between systems (so you don’t get ridiculous scenarios
when some bloodflies come out of nowhere), and in the background there’s a story that
the level and it’s smaller spaces are trying to tell.
Whether it’s the home of the Duke or the streets of Karnaca, these three principles
are paramount, and The Clockwork Mansion is a sort of microcosm of them, giving a succinct
and comprehensive example of each, so let’s look at how.
The main objective for this mission is to disable Kirin Jindosh, master inventor of
Karnaca, before he can complete his army of clockwork soldiers.
There’s also another objective but I don’t want to spoil it.
In order to do either of these things, you’ll need to traverse through Jindosh’s Clockwork
Mansion.
This labyrinth of gears, pulleys, shifting walls and disappearing floors is an absolute
marvel of animation and architectural design.
Apart from just being a cool spectacle watching the walls and floors retract and move to reveal
an entirely different room, this entire concept actually makes sense.
You can see how it would work, you can see how the ceiling comes out and forms, you can
see where the walls collapse into and how they come out.
And if you happen to get stuck inside of a wall, there’s always a button smartly placed
that allows you to re-do the transformation, and free yourself.
A big part of why this level is so amazing comes down to just how tricky it is to get
something like this right.
In an interview Christophe Carrier, one of the level designers at Arkane, even stated
that the challenge of properly animating this house required the team to create specific
tools that didn’t exist yet just for this level.
Ensuring that the AI didn’t break when they became trapped in the walls on top of making
sure components moved at the same speed, time, and in the correct order without clipping
through other surfaces and objects, was incredibly difficult.
But on top of the technical challenge, there were the architectural challenges.
As much as this had to be a cool level, the house also had to function as an actual house.
Wouldn’t be much of a house if it was just walls moving around.
So to combat this, every part of the house, whether it was an area that transforms or
not, has a specific function that is some way controlled by the unique characteristics
of the Clockwork Mansion.
Jindosh’s bedroom can spin around to reveal a secret room; entire rooms can be raised
or lowered like luxurious elevators; and this one’s my favourite, Jindosh’s servants
can set the dinner table in the lower floor, and then raise it up to the billiard room
for him and his guests.
That’s so cool.
And even further still, the spaces between these fantastical contraptions, the spaces
where servants clean and rest and store things (kinda like the Ratman caves in Portal), had
to be accounted for and make sense.
To avoid these spaces being too confusing and detracting from the player’s spatial
understanding of the house, each space supplies you with a new vantage point of a larger area,
so you can connect the space between the walls with the walls themselves.
But The Clockwork Mansion doesn’t just make sense from an architectural or technical standpoint,
it’s also just a masterfully designed level.
In a GDC talk, Arkane Studios’ Steve Lee spoke about some of the principles of design
in their games, specifically Dishonored 2.
During his talk he mentions the idea of creating a consistent visual language throughout the
game.
Doors that can be opened look one way, and ones that can’t look another, and those
two meshes are never allowed to overlap.
Same goes for windows, surfaces that can or cannot be vaulted over, and most notably,
electrical hazards.
When you see something like a Wall of Light, you know that it’s running on electricity,
either from a whale oil tank or a windmill, and that if you can disable its energy source,
you can disable the wall.
This consistent language means that level designers can hide these energy sources from
the player in interesting ways, knowing that they’ll eventually find it (with or without
the bright orange cable), because they’ve been made aware that there has to be one somewhere.
So right around the start of The Clockwork Mansion when you’re presented with a Wall
of Light, you see the cable go into the ground, with no obvious path to follow it.
Until you transform the room and slip into the space between the floors, and voila, the
whale oil tank.
The Clockwork Mansion has loads of these sorts of gameplay ideas, hiding things in spaces
that require a bit of clever problem solving by moving the walls, like this hidden bone
charm in this secret pantry, or this neat corpse in between an elevating room.
Probably the best example of this, though, is this Guest area.
There’s an elevator at the end of the room, and an arc pylon in the middle that’s revealed
by one of the guards.
If you’re fast enough, you can stop that from happening and this area becomes a lot
easier.
But if you aren’t fast enough, the language of the level and the game so far do give you
some opportunities to get around this.
Because you know that the arc pylon is running on electricity, you know there must be a whale
oil tank somewhere, and if you slip through the space between the walls, you can find
it.
Or you can just make your way around that space, using the elevator shaft without even
entering the room.
Or, you can be petty and sneak underneath the arc pylon, pressing the button because
remember each of these things has a button connected to that lets you redo the animation
without needing to be outside of the place, and flip it over without even needing to hit
any of the levers in the room.
That one section I think shows off so much of what makes The Clockwork Mansion such a
marvel.
It gives the player the opportunity to approach the problems it presents in interesting ways
using its incredibly unique approach to level design.
It touches on the power of the consistent language used throughout the game, and how
the different designers can use it in interesting ways.
Its sheer existence influenced the creation of the tools that allowed for the rail carriages
and secret doors to operate, and is a testament to why taking a risk on a technically challenging
idea can be worthwhile.
Few levels capture the essence of a game this well, and fewer still could be the perfect
match for this insanely ingenious inhabitant.