The Metacritic 90. Rare upland territory. Dishonored hit it (on PC) and XCOM: Enemy Unknown fell tantalizingly short, 89 (same platform). You'd think that no one has anything subtstantially bad to say about either. You'd be wrong.

Dishonored

Released: Oct. 9

Critic: ebeneezergoode (Metacritic)
• "Honest final opinion? I'd rather go read a book! "
Score: 3.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Released: Oct. 9

Critic: joeblade (Metacritic)
• "As a PC game I rate this rather low. As a PS3 game I would consider it a 7."
Score: 4.

Critic:majorwitty (Metacritic)
• "This game will be okay when it's $5 in six months on a Steam sale.."
Score: 0.

Critic: tdctaz (Metacritic)
• "Don't buy this game unless you are from the new generation of console players which don't want to make any real tactical decisions. "
Score: 3.

Fable: The Journey

Released: Oct. 9

Critic: SoiSoiSoiSoi (Metacritic)
• "Kinect is a bad, overpriced tech demo and this game is just another example(as if Star Wars Kinect and Steel Battalion weren't enough) as to why Kinect doesn't work and how motion control based games aren't good with the current tech. "
Score: 2.

You know, the guy has a point.

Have you played Dishonored yet? The folks who made it wrote out a great deal of lore to flesh out the game's steampunky, alt-fiction, whale-filled world. So it stands to reason that they might want to make a sequel.

But designer Harvey Smith isn't sure. Speaking to me in an interview last week, Smith said he kinda wants Dishonored to be a one-shot deal.

"Part of me would love to see future games leverage this world," he said, "and part of me would love it if the vault door was just closed and that's it. This is your one view into the Empire of the Isles and into the city of Dunwall."

"Are you leaning one way or the other?" I asked.

In response, Harvey just laughed. "I can't say!"

Pro tip for anyone wanting to write a video game: "If it's longer than a tweet, a character should probably not be saying it in the play of a game."

For those with dreams of seeding video games with their scintillating prose, Austin Grossman's observation may be a bit deflating. But the writer/designer who helped craft Dishonored's narrative knows what he's talking about.

It seems like there's always some kind of debate about how video games can tell stories, what kinds of tales they tell best and whether scripted narratives deaden player-driven experiences. Grossman doesn't much care about any of that. "The beautiful thing about games and novels and films is that you don't tell a story one way," Grossman told me last week. "You have a huge tool kit for telling stories. Montage is a tool. Flashback is a tool. First-person is a tool. Third-person is a tool. Environmental storytelling is a tool."

" ‘We find a trail of blood leading from the office to the bedroom…' That's a tool for telling a story," he said. "And it's a tool that you can use in various different media. I'm not saying it's the same thing in each, though. Novels are big and you need, like, 50 different techniques to get a story told. And games are that way, too, except that we're still discovering more and more tools."

Grossman's history in games goes back to the 1990s, when he worked on Ultima Underworld II. He then wound up contributing to System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows among other games.

"The fun thing about spending my 20s in games and doing games again now is seeing how the medium is rethinking stories from the ground up. Now we're getting more sophisticated about telling stories in games. And we have a lot of weird different tools. I did games before I did novels and it was a good preparation for novels."

Grossman invoked a classic sci-fi horror game to illustrate how working on that helped him figure out how to write prose. "You have all those stories running in System Shock, for example. You have guys exploring the space station and the crazy AI. And you have the little backstories of the people who are dead by the time we find them, but you can kind of reconstruct what happened to them. It was a weird sort of MFA in taking story apart and putting it back together."

"One thing I came to accept early on is that language written and spoken is not the central tool in games," Grossman told me. "It is not as central as it is in film. Language is just not the main show. The main show is that connection you have with the controller in your hand and motion on the screen and the image on the screen. It's not about the words so much. That was kind of the basic thing to accept when you're the writer working in games. I think it's one of the many confusions that can attack as we try to integrate writers and their craft into games, which has been done historically very poorly."

The relationship between game designers and game writers can come in a lot of different shapes. Sometimes the roles are tightly woven together and other times, a story's plot is mapped through and a writer's job is to script it out. Grossman said that he doesn't wait for developers on a project to come to him. "Ideally, I will approach them rather than vice versa, because a lot of designers don't know how to use a writer. So, part of your job as a writer is to teach them how to work with you. On Dishonored, the basic level design got done first. The layout of the levels, the mission logic, the goals, some of the basic problems that you have to solve, and who the major characters are in it. And then they spec it out and they actually put together a spreadsheet saying, 'OK, these are the conversations that we need.' So, in many ways, a lot of the high level stuff in Dishonored is designer-driven.

"Then we sit down and walk through the level. And I can see how everything is played out in space and time. And it's very, very tricky, because the timing issues are crazy when you do spoken dialog in a game. What if this person doesn't have enough time to get their line out because you have the sniper rifle and you can take their head off before they finish what they're saying. Or, a character in a video game is sprinting all the time. If you want to hear somebody's dialog, you don't want the player to slow down if they don't want to."

How do you get around a problem like that? "You're going to have to write a very short line or have an actor talk very fast. Or have somebody talking over a PA system or something. Which is overused in games, but at the same time, it's kind of exactly what you need," Grossman answered. "You have to work that out. There's a lot of just messing with logic. Like what if you can get into the warehouse but you don't interact with this character? Or this character dies first? And now you are supposed to have knowledge and you don't. There's a lot of messing with logic in game design, and it generally deals a particularly broad spectrum of possibilities that can happen. Like by the time you get to a castle, the entire building could be on fire. And so you need to allow for that in a conversation tree."

I mentioned to Grossman that a game like Dishonored highlights the challenge for writing for video games because letting the player have so much freedom to improvise fills an experience with fractal possibilities. "That's why I think games that are conversation-based can feel like they're doing it wrong. It's not a medium that favors conversation. And really, why should it? Not every medium needs to do that. The stories that have true impact are the stories that came from the player, not ones that came from a well-written moment in the dialog."

"As a writer, your clever quips are not there to be the main show. The main storytelling, it's storytelling in the design. It's in the layout of the level. It's in the feeling in the player of who you are and what you know that you were doing, and the feeling you have attached to that. So the writing supports your sense of who you are in the world and what that world is. So you're in a support role by the time you play."

But some game design studios feel like they still want players to soak up every word that comes out of characters' mouths. I wondered what Grossman thought about Rockstar Games and how their titles seem to key in on a very cinematic feeling, drawing on spaghetti westerns for Red Dead Redemption and crime thrillers for Max Payne 3.

"I think Rockstar are kind of geniuses. They do a much better job of integrating the interactive stuff in with how they approach language and character. Rockstar is an interesting example because they're not the most idiomatic games out there. I think of that end of the spectrum as being like Call of Duty. Those titles tend to be basically single tracks. Shooters with a big set piece that's triggered when you step into a room. That's the big sort of wannabe-film track. I hate to tell people that they're not having fun when they play those games. I kind of understand why [people think that] because the games have some of the relaxing passivity of a movie. But, everybody, this is me saying it: ‘You're not having fun [when you play Call of Duty].'"

Part of Grossman's job on Dishonored was to populate the world with ambient NPC dialog that would communicate the moodiness of life in Dunwall. "NPC chatter is great and the fact that's it's become so easy to implement changes things a lot," he said. "If you're writing a game, you can have what we call the blocking conversation where the play stops and you say, ‘OK, we have to get this information to the player.' So we're just going to freeze him place and make him listen. That line is really short but to the point. But then you have the NPC chatter and, with that, people can just go on and on and add a lot of flavor and background to the world. Because if you're playing the game in stealth and you're waiting for a fucking guard to clear out, you got nothing to do but listen to them talk."

"So that's where you try to drop in a lot of fun, indulgent language that helps the world. NPC chatter is where you can keep world-building and play with language. That's where it kind of belongs. If you have any writerly ambitions you want to put into a video game, that's the place where you shift those to. Because it's opt-in, opt-out. It fills a space if you're waiting for a searchlight to finish its sweep. It doesn't stop the game. Learning to use NPC chatter has been a really good lesson for the game industry, partly because of stealth mechanics than the whole stalk-and-wait activity of gameplay. But partly just because they realize that's where language belongs. That's where we can do a lot of our writing and not kick the player's experience in the nuts."

Okay, so Dishonored is excellent. That won't stop me from nitpicking and critiquing some of the things I didn't like about the new stealth-action game.

And if I'm gonna complain about Dishonored, I might as well complain to Harvey Smith, the guy who co-designed it.

While talking to Smith on the phone last week, I decided to bring up some of the little things that bugged me about the game. He dodged nothing, and gave me some great responses.

Here are a few of them.

Those Goddamned River Krusts

You might have noticed these goo-spewing monsters, which tend to spring up in sewer tunnels or flooded streets. (I called them plants at first, but Smith quickly corrected me: they are mollusks.)

You might have also noticed that they're a pain in the ass. They hit hard, they're tough to take down, and they can ruin your day very quickly. Most annoyingly, you can't sneak around them and put them to sleep or stab them from behind like you can human opponents. What's the deal?

"We had a huge internal debate about those, the River Krusts," Smith said. "And honestly, I can see both sides of it. And we went back and forth, right? On one hand we were like, 'Well, let's leave them semi-vulnerable even when they're closed, that way even if they soak some of the damage, you could probably come up with some ways to kill them.'

"Then we had another side to the argument where we were like, on the other hand, if these things were really an obstacle and you really had to engage them a specific way, there's still multiple ways to deal with them. You can still stop time and walk up and stab them or avoid them or possess them. We have stories about people hiding from Weepers by possessing a River Krust and looking around from this mollusk's perspective.

"But anyway, we went back and forth on that and I think there's an arguable defense to either viewpoint. And at the time, I believe we felt we needed some more, because Corvo is so powerful, I think we felt like we needed some more hardcore enemies in the world that like, would cause you, would force you to get strategic. If you just try to bully through them instead of stopping or getting clever or using your powers in some way, they do present a challenge, right?

"So I think—I don't know. Like I said, it's arguable either way. But that's just some insight into our back and forth process."

Unresolved Problems

(Warning: Minor spoilers for one of Dishonored's missions follow.)

During an early mission, you're tasked with killing the two Pendleton twins as they hang out at a brothel. You don't have to kill them, though. You can do a separate quest for a thug named Slackjaw. If you get him the combination to one rich aristocrat's secret safe, Slackjaw will promise to take care of the twins for you.

So you do the deed, go back to Slackjaw, and he promises to take care of the Pendletons by kidnapping them and sending them off to work at their own slave mine. Then the conversation ends. You never actually get to see the twins get kidnapped. There's no real resolution. What's the deal, Harvey?

"That's a fair point," Smith said. "There were cases when we let you see those things as they play out, and then there are cases where—rarely—where it happens off screen. I would say given the choice we would like to show you these things. Players like the validation, they like seeing that.

"So the Pendletons represent the elite, you know, they're not nice people. So players wanna do some of these poetic justice-like alternate resolutions. I think if given the choice, in a perfect world, with all things being equal we probably would have. But that might have been a case...

"It wasn't so much deliberate as it was working within the constraints we had to work within. Because we came up with the idea for the non-lethal alternate story resolution stuff like maybe halfway through the project, and so a lot of things were already—a lot of work had been done on them and they were already sort of set in stone, and so we had to work within certain constraints."

Witchcraft!

If you're playing the game, go ahead and use the blink spell in front of an NPC. "Witchcraft!" they might shout. Maybe they'll gasp and step away, taken aback. Simple stuff.

But they never really react to you using magical spells in their faces. Remember, this is a world where magic is totally extraordinary. It's not exactly normal that you're teleporting and summoning rats and slowing down time. Why aren't people more shocked? Why don't they run away or report you to the police or something?

"To give you my version of it, we decided that this is a world that resembles an 1850s whaling city, or London during the Victorian Age, even though it's not on Earth," Smith said. "And that the average person probably walks around with like a piece of scrimshaw or carved ivory or an odd-looking rock in their pocket that they believe grants them good luck or will keep them from getting pregnant or whatever.

"There's sort of superstition at that level, the sailor level. And then of course the outsider marked certain people rarely in history—these like super sorcerers are wandering around...

"We reached a point where they're probably gonna say things like 'Did my eyes deceive me?' or 'Oh God, I've gotta stop drinking!' And then once in a while we were also torn to just acknowledge it for what it is with the player, like 'Ooh, witchcraft!' or whatever. I was playing last night on my Xbox at home and I blinked in front of Griff, the scavenger/shopkeeper guy and he was like 'That's impossible!'

"It just comes down to this: you want to acknowledge the player's actions, but you want to be careful about doing something that will just not be fun, that will be a turnoff even if it's more 'realistic.' That might be a moment to bend away from realism. And the other thing is in a game like ours where we try to simulate as much as possible—the rats in the world are really AIs and they will follow you up the stairs and whatever—you also have to avoid what we call 'over-simulation' where like you have to decide: How far do we model this?

"Do we like have this guy never talk to you again because he knows you're a sorcerer? Do we have him go find the nearest overseer and report you as a heretic? You can't simulate all things, you have to stop at a certain point. I would say the primary reason is because that was a moment where the sort of realism isn't so much fun if we punish you every time for something like that.

"Although I could see a game where the point was to conceal the fact that you're a vampire, conceal the fact that you're supernatural, and that would become a different sort of stealth. That might be cool, you know, a social stealth. But in our case, with all the constraints we were under and all that we were modeling, I think we just decided that it'd be more fun for the player if we acknowledged what they did but we did not punish them for it."

There's no question that the classic PC stealth game Thief: The Dark Project was a big influence on Arkane's masterful new game Dishonored.

The folks at Gamefront are up to their usual tricks tracking down easter eggs and references, and have found this just lovely Thief reference in one of Dishonored's later levels. I don't think there are any significant story spoilers in here, though it is from one of the third-act levels.

I'll have to keep an eye out for this on my second playthrough. I just played that part of Thief for the first time a few weeks ago!

Dishonored: How to Find the Thief Easter Egg [Gamefront]