Dishonored Golden Cat E3 Gameplay Walkthrough -- Part 1

This is the stealth playthrough of the Golden Cat mission from Dishonored.
Here to walk you through it are Co-Creative Directors Raphaël Colantonio and Harvey Smith.
Hello, I'm Harvey Smith and I'm with Raphaël Colantonio
and we are the Co-Creative Directors of Dishonored.
Dishonored is a first person action game where you play the role of a supernatural assassin.
You play Corvo Attano who is the bodyguard of the empress, the royal protector,
and he is at the beginning of the game falsely accused of her murder.
There are many ways to play the game. This is one of the premises of the game.
We provide a set of tools to the player. We provide an environment which is open
and with various ways to get inside the buildings.
The simulation is here to allow the player to explore and to experiment with the mechanics.
It is up to the player to play their own way and
it's up to the systems to resolve the player's intention.
The mission in Dishonored we are showing you today takes place in a bathhouse called The Golden Cat.
Even in the middle of the terrible plague that is gripping the city of Dunwall
the corrupt aristocrats are partying like there is no tomorrow.
In the mission today you have to track down the Pendletons.
Lords Custis and Morgan Pendleton who are corrupt members of parliament.
We are going to play this demo twice.
The first playthrough is going to be stealthy, as non-lethal as possible.
One of the things about Dishonored is the player is highly mobile.
So it's not only sprint and slide and climb and lean,
things like that as you would expect in a first person action game with a stealth component.
But we also have supernatural powers like blink,
which he was using to make a short range teleport across the balcony.
Here we see the player collecting a rune. He is using the heart to locate those runes.
Those runes are used to upgrade your powers.
There are multiple ways to infiltrate a building.
In this case we believe there are eight or nine ways in.
You could go through the main door or through one of the open windows,
or break a window, or behind the building.
There are also various conduits.
If you possess a rat or you possess a fish you can go through the water.
In this case, in this playthrough, we are going to show how
we infiltrate the building by possessing a fish.
You can pick up lots of little story bits by watching the characters and eavesdropping.
But here the player is looking for a way inside The Golden Cat.
So now we are inside the building.
Eavesdropping and overhearing conversations is a very important thing in Dishonored.
In this case overhearing the conversation between those two women
gives us the location of the targets.
And you can see the target markers are actually being updated
based on the conversation we heard.
Whenever you enter this mission the position of the Pendleton Lords is dynamic,
so there are several different places they can be.
You can see the level of alertness of the AI.
In this case there were those two little indicators
on the head of the woman because she almost saw you.
This is feedback so that the player can know if he is
currently well hidden or if he is going to be detected.
Here is another note in the world that also duplicates
the information the player gained by eavesdropping earlier.
He now knows where each of the two Lords Pendleton are.
Here the player is peeking through a keyhole and eavesdropping on
a guard and the madam of the Golden Cat.
You can notice that the sound is muffled behind closed doors.
The sound propagates based on the geometry which is really interesting for stealth gameplay
because it helps you locate very well where the NPCs are around you.
Here the player is choking Madame Prudence
and taking her key which is the master key to the Golden Cat.
He could have just taken the key and left but instead he wanted to loot the room.
So he left her unconscious.
He could have sneaked by without alerting her. He could have killed her.
Or he could leave her choked out on the floor. It's all options.
Given the fact that the player can approach the game in a variety of different ways,
very violently or stealthy, killing everyone or literally killing no-one as they play through,
it feels very different when you play the game each time.
It feels like you are authoring your own path.
Not only are there these different stylistic ways to approach the game
but there are many different powers you can buy
and no player can have them all.
And then there are also different pathways running through the map as we mentioned.
Here the player has learned that one of the Pendleton Lords is in the steam room downstairs.
He is descending into the hammam area.
For this playthrough he is going to attempt to take out the
corrupt members of parliament without sounding any alarms.
So he doesn't want these guards to see him or fire their guns or yell for help.
There are several ways to access the target.
One would be to find the key for this door because it is an unbreakable door.
Another one would be to use one of the fish from the pond and to infiltrate this way.
The other way is to make it look like an accident and this is what we are going to do here.
As Raf said, we made this look like an accident.
The target has been assassinated but it looks like an accident.
However, there is also a completely non-lethal way to do this.
Custis and Morgan Pendleton are slave owners who run a mine.
By doing a side-quest for a crime boss named Slackjaw, he will take them for you,
shave their heads, obscure their identities and put them to work for years in their own mines.
It's a way to accomplish the mission and neutralize the targets
without actually killing them.
Across the game all the targets can be dealt with this way
for the very thorough player who doesn't want to kill them.
Here the player is sneaking in stealth mode
and he is using his Dark Vision power
to see through walls and see the view cones of the characters,
the guards, and he is moving up on the second target.
Many people ask us: can you possess anything, even the target?
The answer is yes, you can possess the target which is what we are going to demonstrate here.
Because these things can happen dynamically almost anywhere
the lines are unscripted for characters commenting on
whether you look sickly or not when you are possessing someone.
Here the player shoots the sleep dart to knock out this courtesan.
Here we are going to demonstrate one of the ways we can combine powers.
In this case the player jumped off the building and would have killed himself normally.
Instead what he did is that he used the possession power on this woman
and therefore projected himself into her body and then could walk around this way without dying.
Those are things which when we designed the powers
we did not know the extent of the possibilities.
Now looking at players finding them out is really satisfying for us.
This is the end of our stealth playthrough.
Thank you for watching.
For an alternate approach check out youtube.com/Dishonored or dishonored.com