Dishonored 2 Almost had Emily Walking on Walls

It was cut for technical reasons.

By Tom Marks

At QuakeCon last week, I caught up with Dishonored’s Creative Director Harvey Smith to talk about Dishonored: Death of the Outsider and the series as a whole.

After discussing Billie Lurk’s new abilities in the upcoming game (you can see them in the video below) I asked Smith if there were any crazy abilities they had tested that ended up on the cutting room floor. Smith revealed that early in development they had planned to let Emily Kaldwin defy gravity.

“In Dishonored 2 we talked about letting Emily walk on walls and ceilings,” Smith told me, “but our version of that was going to be literally changing the way gravity works.”

Smith said the ability would to turn Emily into a 2D shadow that could stick to walls. Objects would behave normally until she interacted with them, and then they would follow her own rules of gravity. “Anything she drops would behave according to her gravity for a minute, and then normal gravity would assert itself when she got far enough away,” Smith explained.

But the wall walking idea was cut because of the technical challenge it posed. “Early on, the Tech Director Hugues Tardif was just like ‘Dude, I’ve worked on a game that did this before and trust me it f***s everything up. Let’s not do it.’”

Smith continued by saying that it was a matter of balancing their efforts. They could have made the ability work, but it would have taken too much time and work away from other things. “As a result you’re going to lose tons of s**t,” Smith said. “So if you made a game where that was the only power then you could probably do that, but the amount of time to refine it and fix bugs and constrain it and all is just so much.”

Smith said “the wisdom and experience” of Tardif helped them avoid getting too far down that path, and the idea was abandoned “pretty early.” Over time, it was changed and reworked until it eventually became Emily’s Shadow Walk as we know it in the final game.

Tom Marks is an Associate Editor focusing on PC gaming at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Let's block ads! (Why?)