As you'd know if you were reading Fine Art last week, Dishonored was originally intended to be a game set in 17th century London, rather than the whalepunk fictional universe it ended up creating for itself.

The decision to switch settings wasn't made instantly; there had been time for some art to be drawn up imagining a stealthy 1666 London, and the fact the period's garb makes hero Corvo so much like the star of the Thief series might explain why things moved on.

That said, there's a Brotherhood of the Wolf vibe coming from those sketches that would have been nice to see in the final version.

These pieces are the work of Wes Burt, a super-talented artist we've featured a few times here before. You can, and should, check out more of his stuff on his CGHub page.

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they're big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

It's tough to get really excited about Minecraft mods these days, but I have to admit this one got me.

You can get the mod right here. And the map here.

Minecraft - Dishonored Mod [YouTube via PC Gamer]

I know, we've looked at Dishonored once already here on Fine Art, but today is a little different, because we not only have some images from quite literally the game's drawing board stage, but also some commentary on them from Sebastien Mitton, Arkane's art director.

Did you know, for example, that the game's "Tallboy" units were once envisaged as town criers? Or that the game was originally intended to feature a level set in an insane asylum? Or that it was first envisaged as being set in 17th century London? Well, now you do. And you've got some nice images to go with the knowledge.

Below you'll find ten images, most of them from very early in the game's development. Accompanying them is Mitton's commentary. Note that most of the pics are comfortably within the realms of wallpaper-sized, but also constrained by our site's 16:9 aspect ratio lock, so to see them at their full size (or read obscured text), just click on them!

This is the very first pencil drawing we did when the game was set in London, in 1666. I'm a bit nostalgic when it comes to this one, but in a positive way. This is the piece of art that triggered lots of excellent work in terms of architecture - all the landmarks…there were more than 80 cathedrals in the skyline by that time. There is this very specific skeleton aspect to the facades, there is a canyon feeling in the streets, there are strong shadows.

The plague plays an important role in our game. After many hours of research exploring narratives from the Black Plague period, we used some testimonies as a starting point for visual expression. The purpose of this exploration was to give the player a great visual impact by increasing this dystopia feeling in the city. The inspiration from this specific example (cut for gameplay consistency) came from the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who mixed with the lime wash used in mass graves.

As a visual designer, it is a fun experience and a great challenge to align visual appeal, engineering and functionality, nice animations, and a sense of power with a handcrafted weapon that you can upgrade in different ways!

I really love this ship, with its moving nose that can trap whales when harpooned. The story of its inception started one day when I was visiting our office in Austin.

I noticed a guy on stilts cleaning the building façade and told Harvey (co-creative director) we could put stilts on our town crier (loud speakers replaced this guy). He agreed, and the guy instantly became a Tallboy. Then slowly, game designers modified his original purpose, and the Tallboy became a guard, armed with its bow.

I then proposed to place a canister on his back, full of phosphorus, to get nice visual effects when he shoots arrows. Harvey preferred to use whale oil. Ok, but now we need Whales right? Hard to see Whales if you don't swim in the middle of the ocean, so it was time to design a whaling ship. Here's the result!

I then realized that the game universe was autonomous, no need to add anything from our real world. This world had its own needs and its own solutions as its own universe.

This one is a close-up. It's the "Regent" painting done by the artist Sergey Kolesov, who is one of the most talented painter/illustrators worldwide in my opinion. This painting won the 2012 into the pixel at E3. It has everything I love in paintings. It has that second layer of visual storytelling when you look at the bodyguard. It's not in your face at first sight, but it's there when you take the time to really look at it. It is the role of a bodyguard to stay discreet, you'd say!

It is always sad when you have to cut features, ideas, concepts. But that's the nature of our role in this industry. As an artist you have to stay really agile and react positively for the sake of the project.

In this case, we had to cut a mental institution which was haunted by some locals called Lunatics. I really liked the mechanics of those non-fighting guys who are really sensitive to sounds, and who drive the player into a corner, hooting when they've detected you.

After a long phase of gathering really good references from museums and libraries, it's time to throw ideas on paper, and align them with the bullet points and visual filters we've decided upon.

I like this board because it shows how crazy we go sometimes during our concept session. Jean-Luc, my assistant, not only takes notes during our brainstorms, he draws pages and pages.

One of my main goals during the creation of Dishonored was to bring iconic characters to life. This girl is the result of intense research during photo trips to London and Edinburgh, analysis of mug-shots and studies of typical English traits we found in books and pulp illustration. By drawing on those known characteristics, your characters convey emotion before they talk or move. This is visual storytelling.

This screenshot shows, if not the first, at least one of the early integrations of one of our characters in game. This is a moment of joy, when you feel everything is in place. You're heading in the right direction, and you suddenly don't care about the hard days ahead.

I talked previously about visual storytelling. Here's a perfect example of what we love at Arkane: creating a dense and visceral universe!

This fall, we've been getting the best sort of déja vu. From Dishonored to XCOM, many of the best games of the fall have learned from past classics and reworked them into smart, satisfying, fresh-feeling games. Is this new appreciation for 90's classics a trend, or an anomaly? What exactly does "old-school" mean? Does the future of gaming depend on this current crop selling well? Is Mitt Romney actually a giant spider?

My oh my, those sure are some... Burning Questions.

Kirk: Hello Jasonbro! It has been a little while since we did one of these. I guess we've both been busy playing lots of video games, huh?

Jason: I fucking hate video games.

Jason: just kidding

Kirk: This time of year, it can be easy to start feeling that way. Especially if you're, say, reviewing Resident Evil 6. Heyo! (Too Easy? Low-hanging fruit?)

Jason: Low-hanging fruit that pops back up every time you try to take it and says "YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST OF ME YET!" Yeah, I'm lucky enough to have spent my time with a ton of great games over the past few weeks. Dishonored, XCOM, Virtue's Last Reward...

Kirk: As well as Torchlight II, Borderlands 2... the list goes on and on. Honestly, there's been some grumping from people I know about how 2012 has been a bad year for video games, but I think they're tripping. Skyrim may not have come out again this year, but 2012 has been fantastic. Fantastic, and super interesting.

Jason: Fantastic, super interesting, and old-school.

Kirk: Yeah! Which is our topic du jour—how all of these old-school ideas and philosophies are showing up in modern games, and how for the most part, they're working.

Jason: We sure are enjoying them, aren't we? Maybe it's because of nostalgia; maybe it's because design was actually much sharper 10 or 15 years ago. I don't know. But you're right — it's 2012 and here we are raving about games like Dishonored, which is basically Deus Ex, and XCOM which is basically... XCOM.

Kirk: I think you make the delineation thusly: X-Com for the old game and XCOM for the new one.

Jason: Dashes and lower-case letters are so 1994. The future is all CAPITAL LETTERS.

Kirk: AND THANK GOD, REALLY. But yeah, as you say: It's important to plumb why, exactly, we like these games so much. Is it nostalgia, or is it because they're good games? Though actually, let's deal with that one swiftly, because it feels like a less-interesting digression. Dishonored, XCOM... these are effin good games by any metric. Nostalgia, shmostalgia.

Jason: Right — I mentioned to you while we were playing Dishonored that this is a game I would want to show someone as an example of what video games can do. Like, here you are in this situation, and you have to figure out how to accomplish your goals, and the story is what you do along the way. Emergent narrative, and all that jazz. I usually prefer a more linear, tighter story, but it's hard not to be impressed at just how empowering a game like Dishonored can be.

Kirk: And there really is something classic-feeling about it; the way that it works, that flexibility. The fact that you can lean. It feels like Thief, like Deus Ex. But it's also just a smart, cerebral video game. In an era where AAA console gaming is largely defined by Call of Duty (which series, when writing about Dishonored, our friend Tom Bissell awesomely referred to as "digital Pirates of the Caribbean log-flume rides"), something like Dishonored inspires a sort of terrified hope. Could it be that the types of games we fell in love with as kids are actually going to be popular again?

Jason: Were they ever unpopular? We don't know how well Dishonored is doing, but it's been getting rave reviews from both critics and gamers all over the place. There's this general consensus that Dishonored is the type of game people have been craving for a very long time. EA or Activision might not have been able to fit it into their crowded lineups of intense military shooters and free-to-play mobile games, but I think a game like this would have been critically acclaimed whether it was released in 2012 or 2005.

Kirk: Yeah, that's kind of the question here. I'm not sure these types of games ever went out of style, but it sure did feel for a little while like no one was making them. Like you just said—there is a hunger for this game, and you don't get hungry if you've been eating well. There's a reason that both Dishonored and XCOM have felt like an oasis in the desert. Looking back at 2008-2012, it feels like we were stuck in this big-budget, consolized rut. But was that actually the case, or does that diagnosis overlook a bunch of games?

Jason: Well! Let's not generalize too much. Like 2012, the past few years have been full of all sorts of games, both indie and big-budget, both PC and console, both crazy-linear and stupid-emergent. Both good and bad. But you're right in that I can't think of any games like Dishonored—maybe Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes the closest?—or XCOM—Fire Emblem? Valkyria Chronicles?—that have been released during this current console generation. They both feel very old-school. So let me turn that point around: what exactly makes a game "old-school"?

Kirk: Right—and actually, Human Revolution felt much the same to me as Dishonored did this year, though in the end Dishonored focuses on a couple fewer things and as a result is more flexible, empowering and polished. But yeah, that question: "What the hell does 'Old-School' mean?" Does it mean more difficult? More complex? Less approachable? More tweakable? I liked Jason Killingsworth's article over at EDGE that discussed that topic as it pertains to Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall's "Old-School RPG" Kickstarter. Jason summed it up well: "To label one's project Old School RPG seems to just draw attention to this appeal to nostalgia in such an obvious way that it comes off feeling a little crass, perhaps too forward." Maybe, though, the answer is that "old-school" is more than just a nostalgic ideal; it's shorthand for "Longstanding design ideas that seem to work well."

Jason: And it is perhaps not a coincidence that Brathwaite and Hall's Old-School RPG seems like it will miss its funding goal. I'm glad you brought that up, because on one hand you have that project (which has since been updated and named, but was rather generic when it first launched) and on the other hand you have Project Eternity, Obsidian's old-school RPG. The big difference? With Project Eternity, all they had to do was namedrop: "Hey, this is going to be like Planescape: Torment meets Baldur's Gate meets Icewind Dale." Boom. Instant gushing from anyone who grew up with those specific games and misses the way that they played. Not so surprising that Project Eternity raised almost $4 million—a new record for a Kickstarted video game—in just over a month.

Kirk: And there, you have to think that while Obsidian will use those games as inspirations, their game will surely be updated for modern times. (And if and when Brathwaite and Hall make their game, it's a safe bet they'll do the same.) It's easy to forget that a lot of things about those older games just weren't very fun—I love Planescape Torment, but replaying it earlier this year, I was struck by just how fiddly and unsatisfying everything is. Ditto X-Com—that game is a seriously dense, not-that-fun-to-handle thing. What's been remarkable is how these successful games we're talking about, particularly the smart yet streamlined XCOM, take "old-school" design ideals and make them work better, and smoother, than ever.

Jason: Good point! As our expectations get higher and higher, and as video games start offering more and more polish, it's really tough to go back and play some of those old games. Which makes us crave the "old-school" even more: if I'm looking for, say, a great sci-fi tactical isometric RPG-strategy game with base-building and character customization, my options are kind of limited.

Kirk: We kinda want it all. The feeling those games gave us, but updated for our more sophisticated palate. (And here I'm going to go ahead and say that "complex micro-management" and "sophistication" are not necessarily the same thing.) I'm sure there are people who legitimately would be happy playing crusty action-point-based isometric RPGs forever, but once you play something like XCOM, it's hard to go back. I'm not sure I'd say that Dishonored pulls such a leap over Deus Ex or Thief, but then again, it's certainly a hell of a lot more user-friendly without sacrificing any vital levels of complexity.

But you know, I think that part of the reason we're all so enamored of these two games in particular is that, for one reason or another... they just feel unlikely. You know? We're so used to publishers cramming shit like Medal of Duty 3: Modern Ops down our throat that it feels somehow insane that we'd get a game like Dishonored, with its single-player-only campaign and brand-new, non-derivative world. Are we really all so jaded?

Jason: We are. I mean, you were at E3. We both were. Dubstep, shooters, neon, war, you know the rest. I welcome the unlikely.

Kirk: A couple years ago, I would have told you that dubstep + Far Cry seemed pretty unlikely, but yeah, I take your point.

Jason: Speaking of unlikely games, let's talk about the game I can't stop playing. Virtue's Last Reward. Yesterday you promised me you'd check it out—did you? Or are you going to break my heart?

Kirk: I did! I played a little bit before I fell asleep. What the hell is this game, Jason.

Jason: hahahahaha ok. hahahahahaha.

Kirk: I mean. Seriously.

Jason: Tell me your first thoughts. First impressions. Go.

Kirk: First impressions? I like the idea behind the story. There are a lot of words. The acting seems weird. It feels like an iPhone game. I'm intrigued, but more because you say it's good than because I've been sucked in.

Jason: Okay. Let me give readers some context, here. Virtue's Last Reward is the sequel to 999, one of my favorite games of 2010 and one of the best adventure games I've ever played. Like 999, VLR is a cross between a visual novel and a point-n-click adventure. It's a big interactive story. To get through, you read, make choices, and solve puzzles as you try to figure out where the hell you are.

Kirk: So yeah, speaking of unlikely games...

Jason: Hahaha! It's very Japanese. You've grasped the basics of the story, yes? Nine people are trapped in this facility by some crazy character named Zero (who speaks through a bunny rabbit avatar). They're forced to play this twisted game. Or die.

Kirk: Right. It's like that movie Cube! Sort of. I need to play more.

Jason: You have to read a lot, and think a lot, and once it grasps you, you won't be able to stop. All of the characters have their own hidden secrets, and there are tons of other mysteries to find (and try to solve) in this facility. Also, there are like 24 endings. 24!

Kirk: So, to attempt to wheel our careening locomotive back onto something resembling "the tracks" of our previous discussion—this does feel like an unlikely game. And while it's not really AAA (It's on 3DS and Vita, right?), it is a good example of another unlikely, old-school feeling (puzzles + interactive fiction) game hitting the market. Telltale's The Walking Dead is another good example of this—people are actually coming up with interesting things to do with the "old-school" adventure game, breathing life into it in ways that feel fresh, approachable, smart, etc.

Jason: Right, I was getting there! People loved 999 (and will love Virtue's Last Reward even more) not just because it's well-written and engaging, but because it reaches back to the fundamentals. It was made by Japanese developers, but those developers are clearly fans of Western games like Zork and Monkey Island and Myst. Old-school games. You can see a great deal of all of those games in Virtue's Last Reward.

Kirk: Right. And on that tip, I've been seeing some really interesting stuff come out of the interactive fiction scene. I feel like you probably didn't check out Emily Short and Liza Daly's First Draft Of The Revolution, but that game was almost effortlessly unlike anything else I've ever played. It asked questions and explored spaces that I've literally never seen a game explore. And it does it with text. All of this really just makes me think that for all the hand-wringing we do about how much everything sucks now, the truth of the matter is that we are still just barely exploring video games and all of the different things they could be.

Oh boy, I'm starting to get pret-ty broad here. Um... quick, make a joke or something.

Jason: Umm... I guess you could say we have a binder full of video game possibilities?

Kirk: Nice! Topical! Honestly, I was expecting a joke about Mitt Romney turning into a giant spider.

Jason: Nothing funny about that. I'm just surprised more people aren't bringing it up. I mean... he turned into a spider! On national television!

Kirk: Yeah, though fortunately not a nano-tech video game spider. Just a regular old giant spider.

Jason: Still terrifying. So anyway, we've talked a lot about the new games we're playing that feel old, but hey, that's old news! Let's talk about the future. Are there any genres or systems or types of games you'd like to see resurrected in the next few years?

Kirk: You know, I'm pretty stoked about how good developers are get at making complex games work on controllers. Not just from a technical standpoint, but also in the very core of the game's design. We're finally seeing games that have all the depth of an "old-school" PC game but are playable while sitting in front of your TV. I'm excited to see how much better game-makers can get at that. I'm also hopeful that both Dishonored and XCOM will convince more AAA publishers to support more games like those two. Though really, fuck 'em—if there's anything we've learned from the past year, it's that where there's a consumer desire, there's a way! And often, a Kickstarter. How about you? Sensing any trends this fall?

Jason: Bro. You didn't answer the question.

Kirk: I've been watching too many presidential debates.

Jason: OK brobama.

Kirk: Okay, okay. Hmm. I truly think that XCOM has awoken in me a real thirst for good turn-based strategy games. As much as I like FF Tactics and Tactics Ogre, I get the sense that developers could do a lot more with the turn-based idea. Furthermore, turn-based games can work well on a controller, since you don't have to do complex actions quickly. So, that's my answer: More big-budget turn-based strategy games! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, MR MODERATOR

Jason: That's good! What about on a Wii U controller? I have spent many-a-night fantasizing about a potential Final Fantasy Tactics sequel—a true sequel, not one of those Advance spinoffs—that uses the Wii U controller for grid-based battling.

Kirk: Haaa I like that you spend your nights fantasizing about Final Fantasy Tactics on the Wii U. But yes—I bet that controller could be fabulous for just that kind of game. Maybe a Wii U Fire Emblem sequel... hey maybe you should ask Reggie about that the next time you two are hanging out.

Jason: hohohoho. He does love telling me about Fire Emblem. Okay, so I guess it's my turn to resurrect a genre?

Kirk: That it is.

Jason: Dungeon Keeper. Enough said.

Kirk: Nice.

Jason: So to summarize this whole conversation, everything old is new again. But when will it become old again? When will we start wistfully remembering the days of military first-person shooters and dubstep?

Kirk: Heh, I'm sure it will. I mean, there was a time not so long ago when we were SO SICK of World War II shooters. And Modern Warfare came out and everyone was like, "Finally! Something new and different!" And... well, now look at us. When I played Company of Heroes 2 at PAX, the whole time I was thinking, "Man, it's so nice to be playing a World War II game again." Aah, the circle of life. Its radius stretches over eons, but all things must return from whence they came.

Jason: Yes. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shooters to consoles.

Kirk: So it is written, so it is known.

Jason: Amen. Praise Tebow.

I really want to keep playing Dishonored.

I have a digital copy, all neatly installed via Steam. It works perfectly well. I've loaded it and started playing, more than once. The controls are nothing I can't handle, and I have the long patience for a game full of stealth. I play nearly every game slowly and stealthily! This one was practically made for me, and I've been dying to get my hands on it for months.

But Dishonored, sadly, makes me sick.

It's not the swarms of man-eating plague rats that do me in (although writing that, maybe it should be). It's something far more fundamental: the first-person perspective. I, it turns out, am prone to motion sickness while gaming, as are many others.

The first time a video game ever made me ill, I was a teenager, babysitting. My young charge, with whom I had played Nintendo games in the past, excitedly showed me his brand new Nintendo 64 and Super Mario 64. The wavering camera, meandering through the 3D world, turned my stomach embarrassingly quickly. I buried my nose in a book to avoid looking at the screen while the kid bounced his way through the game.

In the years since I have learned the hard way that while I can play Mario Kart on the DS, I can't do it in a moving car or train, and that Mirror's Edge is a story I will simply never be able to experience. The demo of that one did enough damage.

After gaming successes in 2007, though, I started to get cocky. For whatever reason, I was able to manage most of Portal, although I still had to pause the game and take some long breaks during particularly twisty levels. BioShock, too, I could handle in 1-2 hour chunks. As the years went on, I played hundreds of hours of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, in first-person view probably 90% of the time.

I thought that my susceptibility to motion in games was a thing of the past, and that I could move on with a happy, well-rounded gaming future. I was wrong. I had to hand the controls over to my spouse when it came time to drive the Mako in the original Mass Effect, by the time I finally got around to trying the game. Shooting and dialogue I could handle, but a space dune buggy, peacefully bouncing among the craters? Not a chance.

Portal 2 came and went without incident and I hoped, once again, that I might be safe. Then came Starhawk, which I had to see through for review. For a week, I lived on Bonine tablets and scheduled myself an hour of lying down with a pillow over my head for every hour of play. Never has ten hours of playing what's actually a pretty good game felt so hellish.

And now, Dishonored.

I want to love it. But before I can decide how I feel about Dishonored, I have to play it—and I was barely even able to scratch the barest surface of the tutorial and introductory level before I had to walk away and go sit quietly with my head between my knees. My second attempt ended the same way as my first, and I haven't yet been brave enough to sit down for a lengthy empirical session with the thousand different settings to see if I can make it less stomach-churning.

It seems that perhaps my fondness for 2D and third-person games is as much a matter of self-preservation as anything else. Still, I have high hopes for Dishonored. It does have so very many settings to change that I hope, eventually, I can tweak it to the place where I can play for an hour or two at a time.

And if not, well, at least I'll always have XCOM.

There are voices
that want to be heard;
so much to mention
but you can't find the words.
The scent of magic,
the beauty that's been,
When Dunwall wasn't
a stinking deathtrap!

Those aren't just (slightly modified) lyrics to Roxette's 1988 hit "Listen to Your Heart," they're also words of advice for anyone who wants to get the most out of Dishonored.

Are you as taken with the diseased, disgusting whaling city of Dunwall as I was? Well then, you're going to want to listen to your heart. Early in the game, the mysterious stranger gives you some magical powers, as well as a mechanized human heart. Ew. But also, cool. Equipping the heart points you to all manner of runes and bone charms, both of which enhance your magical powers.

It's certainly worth taking the time to track down each of the power-ups, partly because a full complement of powers makes the game more exciting, but also because each one is located in an off-the-beaten-path room that tells a little story of its own. Truly, the heart is a gateway to a richer, deeper Dishonored experience.

But the heart does something else, too—it talks. Every time you point it at anything and activate the heart, it tells you an enigmatic story about the place or person you're observing. It's amazing just how much the heart has to say; every major character, every location, the hearts has something to share about them all.

I took my time on my first time through the game, but I still managed to regularly forget that the heart was there, waiting to tell me dark secrets. I'm now on my second playthrough, and I'm really focusing on taking my time and regularly squeezing the heart at every opportunity. Coolest of all is that, well, there are some other secrets about the heart, and its identity, that become clear if you use it enough and pay attention.

Dishonored is littered with books and notes, each of which provide interesting and mysterious backstory to Dunwall and the surrounding isles. But as much as I'd love to get involved in the books, eventually I just stop caring—I file away each book in my in-game notebook, thinking maybe I'll read them someday but knowing that I really never will.

The heart, however, provides backstory and fleshes out the world in a much more organic—literally!—way. Like Poe's heart, buried beneath the floorboards, Corvo's heart has a tale to tell. Look at those gears, spinning around in its center—it's in there, thinking, waiting to speak. Don't forget to listen.

Arkane Studios' acclaimed new game lets players mix up an impressive suite of abilities to eliminate your foes' in incredibly inventive ways. But, for all the magic at Corvo's disposal, there are still times that the master assassin needs to hide in the nooks and crannies of Dunwall's massive steampunk architecture. Dishonored lets you lean, though, and elevates the act of tilting your body around corners into a nigh-omnipotent power.

At least it seems that way sometimes, right?

Want to see more of Zac's work? Head over to his personal blog and game-themed site Magical Game Time. If you're feeling commercial, you can buy prints and shirts here. He'll be back on Kotaku with a new comic same time next month!

In a season of outstanding PC ports, each new game has begun to arrive accompanied by the same question: Will this one kick ass on PC, as well?

Arkane's Dishonored is fantastic. It's also rooted in what some would call a holy triumvirate of of PC gaming: Deus Ex, Thief and Half-Life 2. It stands to reason, then, that the people making it wouldn't skimp on the PC features.

And, unsurprisingly, they haven't, and the PC version is terrific. That said, what is surprising here is the the console version matches the PC for almost every feature, and feels more "PC-ish" than most other games. The PC version itself isn't superior in some room-clearing, floor-mopping way; I played through the entire game on Xbox 360 before starting on PC, and found the game to be thrilling, deep, complex, nuanced.

That said, if you're planning to pick up the game and have your choice of platforms, the PC is still the way to go. Here's why:

Mouse Precision

Some of Dishonored's abilities, notably the quick-teleport "Blink" ability, just work better with the precision granted with a mouse. Aiming your blinks can feel a bit lugubrious and imprecise with a controller, particularly when under duress. There are few more enjoyable moves than to warp to behind an attacking enemy and then slit his throat, but with a controller, I too-often warped right into my assailant. With a mouse, I feel much more in command of my blinks.

Quick Power Select

Picking up from the precision of the mouse, the keyboard also gives a welcome degree of control when compared to the controller. Again, that's not to say the controller implementation is bad, just that the keyboard is better. If you've grown comfortable with all of Corvo's many deadly moves, switching between them using the number keys on a keyboard allows you to quickly chain combo moves in a way that the console's radial dial, no matter how elegant its construction, could.

Lean-to

I've already extolled the merits of leaning in games, specifically voicing my pleasure that the lean had returned to Dishonored . And while the implementation on the controller—hold "Y" and then move the thumbstick—is quite smart and works well once you get the hang of it, it's still no match for the Q and E keys on the keyboard.

Thief and Deus Ex players will be right at home playing Dishonored, and when I play using a keyboard I find myself leaning much more than I did while using a controller. A lean should be a natural extension of your movement, and without dedicated buttons, there's no way to make it perfectly smooth.

Quick Save, Quicker Load

This might be the biggest difference, for me—I'm playing the game on hard, and as a result get spotted more and die more. It's a real boon that the PC version has a dedicated quicksave button. I appreciated being able to save at any point on the Xbox 360 version, but navigating a few menus would necessarily remove me from the action. Particularly with a game like Dishonored, repurposing the "back" button to trigger a quicksave would have been fantastic.

Better still, the PC version has scary fast load times, usually a matter of a couple of seconds. (I'm playing on a fairly run-of-the mill, non-SSD hard drive.) It's not the kind of thing you'd even notice unless you'd already sunk a dozen hours into the console version—suddenly, quickly saving, trying something, dying, and reloading takes about 20 fewer seconds each time. That adds up.

I Like The Way You Move

Dishonored has lovely visuals, but not because of a high polygon count or detailed textures—the game derives its visual splendor almost entirely from Viktor Antonov's art design. Dishonored does look better on PC running at true 1080p than it does on the Xbox—my graphics card's superior antialiasing, in particular, strengthens the lines and clarifies the draw distance. But really, the game ha a softness to the big ol' Unreal-engine textures that makes everything look soft and warm, and both PC and console versions have it. Like Borderlands 2, Dishonored isn't a game that needs eye-cuttingly sharp textures to look good.

Where the PC surpasses the console version is in clarity of motion—the framerate and the animations. This game looks fabulous running at 60 frames per second, particularly once action heats up. I'm not sure by what alchemy Arkane managed to design such a fluid and enjoyable first-person swashbuckling system, but I'm loving how much clearer the action looks now that I can see it running at a more consistent, higher framerate. (Luke brings up something worth mentioning here—sometimes, the PC version can hang on scenes as it loads them, starting with the opening camera-cut in the first menu. This actually happened to me as well, when I was using an AMD card. I recently upgraded to a GeForce, and it's gone away, but still worth noting.) The quick stabs, the brutal, matter-of-fact decapitations, even the hilariously varied expressions on enemies' faces, all come across much more clearly at a high framerate. On console, action felt more chaotic and jumbled—part of this, surely, is because I'm just better at the game now than I was when I played on console, but the framerate factors as well. The PC version lets you really see Dishonored moving at its best.

None of this is to say that the console versions of the game are lacking—whichever version you pick, you'll be getting a hell of a good game. But if you've got the option and want to see Dishonored at its best, opt for PC.

Dishonored spoilers follow in video.

Ok ok, I know earlier today I said I love to play games stealthy. And then I showed you guys a video of Corvo showing the guards of Dunwall who makes the decisions around here. Forceful decisions. Ones that result in many deaths.

But this sequence of deaths might be even more exciting than the last. Once you rack up enough powers, you can combine them to delightful results, like the one you see in kekkoSoNicSyNdIcAtE's video above.

I still play Dishonored stealthy, but every once in a while I'll allow myself to go all murderous just because it's too fun not to.

Dishonored super attacco poteri combinati [YouTube, thanks Cactuscat222!]

What do people really know about how video games get made? Sure, today's players know that games get designed, drawn, produced and tested. That's more than their forebears. Still, the idea of what drives people to make games—other than the fact that it seems like a fun thing to do—remains one that continues to feel frustratingly out of reach. We generally understand how performers' personalities inform their film-making, writing and music creation. But what part of a person's soul goes into a video game?

There have been books like Masters of Doom, Smartbomb and Extra Lives, which all chart the arcs of careers and histories inside the video game industry. But, Austin Grossman's new novel might be the most illuminating effort at answering that question yet. That's because Grossman writes from his own personal experience of having helped build the worlds of games like Ultima Underworld II, Thief: Deadly Shadows and Dishonored.

"YOU is a novel about games and game development," Grossman told me during a phone conversation two weeks ago. "The central characters met each other in an Intro to Programming class in 1983 in high school. One night, they had a long, rambling conversation about Tron and virtual reality and it winds up with them collectively asking ‘Will we ever be able to make the ultimate game?' "

"That's what I thought about constantly in 1983," Grossman confessed. "I saw Tron. I thought to myself, ‘Is there going to be a game that's going to be like D&D but where we get to go inside it, and it's just all real and we can do whatever we want?' And I would think to myself, " ‘Is that going to be possible one day?' " In the book, they decide to do it."

"They decide, " ‘OK, we're going to take a vow that our lives are going to be about getting to this ideal.' Which is a nonsense ideal. Four of them continue on with this and start a new game company. And the fifth guy graduates from high school and breaks away, thinking like, ‘Why do I need that stuff?' The novel actually starts in 1998, where the fifth guy who broke away and went to law school comes back, and says, ‘Hi, I want to work at your game company.' He finds out what happened to them, as they decided to push as far as they could toward making the perfect ultimate game. He gets a job there as a designer, discovers a weird bug and starts to dig into the past while learning the trade of game design. The main character learns about one of the original four friends' death and gets caught up in a mystery around a hidden technology that one of them made before he died, which might be the key to the holodeck technology. But, really, it comes to grips with what the real passion of game development is."

Grossman thinks that there's more than a desire for money or relative amounts of fame in the hearts of the people who become game designers. "The big question is, ‘What are we all trying to do when we make games?' What is the animating vision that's pushing us so hard to push the technology forward every year to create this medium? If you go to E3 every year, the technology leaps forward at a frightening rate. This novel is set in 1998 which is right around when graphics and accelerator cards are taking over the look of games. It was one of those scary jumps."

"I remember Doom," Grossman reminisced. "Suddenly everything had sort of bloom lighting on it. Everything had levels of detail. Everything got specular. I thought to myself, ‘Man, this is about as real as games could possibly get.' " But it keeps jumping forward. And it makes me wonder why are we trying to make another world that we can go into? So, as the main character finds out what happened to his friends and what their stories were, you start to wonder if there is a dark side of what they're all trying to do, like with the Manhattan Project. It's my way of working out why the best minds of my generation tried do this ridiculous yet compelling thing of making video games."

I thought it a bit paradoxical that Grossman spent part of his time working on Dishonored—in an environment where he has to be really spare and economical with words and language—while, at the same time, writing a novel where he has free reign to sprawl all over the page. I asked him if there was there a big of cognitive dissonance moving from one thing to another within the same time frame. "I do notice the contrast. I wouldn't even say cognitive dissonance, though. I would say, "This is where we get to let it all hang out." During the day, I've got to count my words. When I switch to the book, it's ‘No more haiku. No more tweets.' Too much language does not belong in games, but that doesn't mean that I don't love to work with it. I just sort of figured out where in my life I would get to do what. I could afford to be spare in games because I know that later on I'll get to do whatever I feel like doing."

And, it's not just the people who already play games that Grossman is trying to reach with YOU. "One of the purposes of this book is to try to open that world [of game development] to non-gamers," he explained. His last novel, 2007's Soon I Will Be Invincible deconstructed the psychological forces and emotional baggage that drove a set of super-powered heroes and villains to become costumed characters. Grossman says that he wants to do something similar in YOU. "Games are really interesting and tons of people make them," Grossman said. "Yet it hasn't been talked about in a very satisfying way. Why are people doing when they play games for hours and hours and hours out of their day? What are they feeling? What's driving the people who play and make games? It's a really human experience and I want to write about it in a way that felt satisfying and truthful."

"I feel like there are a lot of emotions bound up in games," Grossman continued, "but the majority don't have names." Something unique comes from the mix of the familiar—anger, fear, exhiliration—and with the experience of interactive control. "You go and sit down and play and three hours later you get up and what happened? You don't remember what happened. It's just time that got sent away. Where did it get sent away to? What's happening in your mind?"

Talking to Grossman, I compared it to my own experience playing Shadow of the Colossus. I did things for reasons that weren't always clear , driven partly by the scripted narrative but also by this unnamable urge that I had to follow. "I was playing and I was, like, ‘Ouch, this game is making me feel things that I didn't really quite know I could feel this intensely. And I have no idea how they do it,' " said Grossman, thinking back to his own time with the PS2 classic. "My job with the book is try and capture some of that and make it intelligible. Try and get gamers and gaming to feel human rather than an addiction."

Anyone who gets really depressed about how that broad sensationalistic brushstrokes that misrepresent video games will find things to like about YOU. I asked Grossman about why he thinks those interpretations linger. "Partly, I think it's a lack of a vocabulary," he answered. "People don't know how to talk about the experience. They compare it to addiction or they compare it to God I don't know what else. Video games get cast as a dirty secret or just something degenerate or reptilian unless you know better. But, you know what? Millions of people do know better. I just want to put that down into words."