Dishonored 2 is out tomorrow, and Phil's working on our review right now. By all accounts it's shaping up to be a worthy sequel, albeit one with troubling performance problems on PC you can read more about that right here.

If you're planning to play Dishonored 2 but it's been a few years since you set foot in Dunwall, then this article is intended as a primer to get you up to speed with the events of the first game. Alternatively, if you'd like to spend the weekend getting caught up the proper way, then this also doubles as a guide to making the 'canonical' choices that will shape the story in Dishonored 2. This applies both to the characters you kill or spare and also your general playstyle, which pushes the world towards 'low chaos' and 'high chaos' states based on how violent you are.

It should go without saying, but this article includes heavy spoilers for Dishonored, its DLC, and some of its related media. There are no spoilers for Dishonored 2.

The sequel takes place fifteen years after the events of the first game, but it doesn't carry forward whatever choices you made. Instead, Dishonored has a canonical outcome that confirms certain things about Corvo's approach and lets us extrapolate others. The easiest way to break this down is by character: who lived, and what they were like.

Corvo and Emily

Both Corvo and Emily can die in Dishonored, but it should be obvious to anybody paying attention that this isn't the case in the canon ending after all, they're both playable characters in Dishonored 2.

In and of itself, that doesn't tell us much. The only ending it precludes is the worst of the 'high chaos' outcomes, with many other playstyles resulting in both characters surviving.

The one thing that doesn't necessarily survive, however, is their relationship: Emily expresses distrust of high-chaos Corvo and doesn't embrace him as her father. Given that their relationship has subsequently been depicted as closely familial, this is the first of many suggestions that low chaos Corvo is canon Corvo.

High Overseer Campbell

I visited Arkane earlier in the year for a glimpse at Dishonored 2 in development, and while I was there they suggested that High Overseer Campbell was one of the targets spared by Corvo. This means that he was branded as a heretic and expelled from the Abbey, and presumably also spared when Corvo later encounters him as a plague-ridden weeper in the Flooded District.

The plague probably killed him in the end, but if the low chaos ending is the one we're going with then he could have been saved by the cure concocted by Piero and Sokolov.

Geoff Curnow

Rescuing Calista's uncle is an optional objective when Corvo is sent to kill the High Overseer, but the canonical outcome is that Corvo indeed got him out he's alive in the tie-in novel The Corroded Man.

The Boyle Sisters

One of the most unusual targets in Dishonored, Corvo infiltrates a party at the Boyle Manor in order to determine which of three identical sisters is the Lord Regent's mistress. Each time you play the mission, the identity of the target sister is randomised and, of course, you've got the option to assassinate her or arrange another fate.

The Corroded Man confirms that Waverly Boyle is the 'canon' target, and that Corvo didn't kill her: he arranged for her to be kidnapped by the obsessive Lord Brisby. In fact, all three Boyle sisters survive the party again suggesting that a stealthy and non-lethal approach is needed to play Dishonored in a way that is narratively consistent with its sequel.

Slackjaw and Granny Rags

Again, shown to survive in The Corroded Man. This dictates a few of Corvo's choices during Dishonored, chiefly his decision to rescue Slackjaw from Granny Rags in the later part of the game. In turn, this implies that Granny Rags died at Corvo's hand which Harvey Smith confirmed on Twitter earlier this year.

The conspirators

They're dead. In the low chaos ending, which is the one we're sticking with, Havelock poisons both Pendleton and Martin before being confronted by Corvo at the end of the game. If he doesn't die by Corvo's hand, Havelock himself commits suicide.

Corvo's other adversaries

The Lord Regent is, canonically, killed by Corvo. The fate of the Pendleton twins is left a little more open. While Dishonored 2 implies that Corvo didn't exactly go on a rampage in pursuit of these marks, if you're replaying the game you're free to deal with them more or less as you wish. Might I recommend staging a drunken staircase accident or arranging for somebody to drop a canister of whale oil at the worst possible time?

Daud

Harvey Smith confirmed in last week's AMA that Daud is alive, which means he was spared by Corvo more evidence, if you still needed it, that low chaos Corvo is the official version of the character. However, this also has ramifications for Daud himself, who is the player character in the Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches.

Depending on how much chaos Daud accrues over the course of the two DLCs, he will either be spared or killed by Corvo at the end. This means that the two assassins' canon chaos counts must be low. In fact, it means that the narrative playstyle for both characters is remarkably similar: spare people when you can, and kill as few guards as possible on the way to each target.

Billie Lurk

At the climax of The Knife of Dunwall, Daud chooses whether to spare or execute Billie Lurk after she betrays him for the witch Delilah. She's mentioned in the novel and appears in the comic, confirming that she survived their encounter. Again, this confirms 'good guy Daud' as the canon version of the character.

Daud's other adversaries

The fate of Bundry Rothwild, Arnold Timsh, Leonard Hume, Edgar Wakefield, the Geezer and Nurse Trimble isn't clear: it's easiest to assume that they're dead or were disposed of, and if you're replaying the game then consider your options open as long as you don't push your chaos too high.

Delilah

At the climax of the Brigmore Witches the witch Delilah is either killed by Daud or tricked by him into trapping herself in the Void. Given her presence in trailers for Dishonored 2 and on the poster packed in with the collector's edition of the game it's fair to suggest that she survived her encounter with Daud. Given that she's a witch, however, there's a lot of different forms 'survival' could take but as we're already considering a low chaos approach for Daud, 'trapped in the Void' seems like the most likely canon outcome. At least, trapped in the Void for now.

As you can probably imagine, balancing art direction with the practical aspects of level design is not easy. That seems especially true for immersive sims, where the player expects the freedom to improvise, to subvert expectations and to feel clever when they ve approached a problem in a less-than-obvious manner.

The Dishonored series exemplifies this. As I pointed out in my preview of Dishonored 2's Clockwork Tower mission a few months back, Arkane Studios approach to stealth is impressively organic. Rarely does an overtly game-like element intrude upon the coherence and plausibly of the world. You ll find a scarcity of oversized air vents and conveniently forgotten waist-high shipping containers in Dunwall, or Karnaca, but that richness does not come easily.

It s super difficult, Art Director Sebastian Mitton told me at PAX Australia last week, ahead of Dishonored 2 s Friday release. I d asked him whether it was tricky to get the art and level design teams to get along all the time. We have a good collaboration between the level designer and architect, who puts the fun in it they put the AI in, they incorporate the story, the lore and everything. We discuss and we fight together during four years to get the best result that we can.

So yeah, we fight, but it s great to collaborate because when it works when you see something that s stunning visually but also perfect in terms of gameplay it s good. But it s really hard.

Modern game development is a hugely complex balancing act, where a tweak in one area might bring the tower crashing down in another. One example of art direction and broader design which clashed was on the matter of the Clockwork Soldiers the mechanical sentries strewn throughout the aforementioned tower. According to Mitton, there was some debate over how tall they would be.

We fought over the Clockwork Soldier, he said. He was two metres high and Harvey [Smith] wanted it taller. But we were like, We have doors that are two metres, we can t do it taller . Someone picked up the document and pointed out that we only have two doors that are that tall, and these are the restroom doors: the Clockwork Soldier will never go there. So in the end, we did the new Clockwork.

So the finer details of level design can affect larger elements, like the dimensions of enemies, but Mitton s vision for the new hub world of Karnarca a place equal parts inspired by European Mediterranean cities and Havana, Cuba ended up presenting even more functional obstacles than was first apparent.

We now have rooftops that are flat. In Havana, people have a great life on rooftops, they eat, have parties etc. So when we applied that to Karnaca, it raised the question: if I go to the rooftops, the guards should be able to follow me up there. So that changed the layout, adding a new floor on the top of already tall buildings. It was kind of a nightmare to set up in the beginning, but then it opened up a new condition.

Meanwhile, the seamlessness of Dishonored 2, the way loading screens don t interrupt the game during transitions between open-world sections and missions, proved problematic. It was challenging not to have guards, for example, follow you for a kilometre into a mission, Mitton said.

Another pain? Windmills. These are scattered throughout Kanarca, and while they were initially designed to look pretty, it was inevitable that they also needed interactivity. We had big, giant windmills, but also smaller ones. This was a nightmare because [our motto is that] we say Yes to the player. So looking at the windmills, if I shoot at them, I should be able to break it but the blades are really thick, so I was like, You cannot break it in one bullet, maybe with a grenade. Okay, but now [that you can break it], do we also need a lever to deactivate it?

Each time you show something really cool visually, the level designer can say, I want to take it for gameplay purposes , and it can break all your visual design. It s always really crazy when we say yes to a new rule of gameplay, [because] it can affect everything in the game. If a new rule is written, we need to embrace it and sometimes re-do things elsewhere.

Mitton says the move to the new Void Engine, which is based around id Tech 5, allowed the studio to be more demanding when it came to finer details and finer details are very important in Dishonored. While some imperfections lingered in the Unreal Engine-powered original, Mitton says that each time I saw something that was a bit wrong or just a detail that I didn t like, I d have it corrected.

So yes, Dishonored 2 will likely be a very beautiful videogame, and the aesthetic Mitton shaped in the original helps to define it. But when a game is this painterly, does it grate that it s also so violent?

Mitton is quick to point out that you don t have to kill anyone. But yes, that s true, but I think there s a beauty in the violence," he said. "Maybe it s politically incorrect to encourage the violence [in the game], but when you look at the news outside, it is everywhere, this is a real part of life. We have a lot of discussion about violence and the core aspect of it.

But it s a different thing: the violence, I don t compare it to the beauty of the art. I don t compare the style of the game with the violence this is just the way I want to do art.

AMD sent along an email today letting us know that they would be posting another hotfix driver today, this time for Dishonored 2, which officially comes out tomorrow. That's good news as a few of our people have had early access to the game and are preparing a review, and so far their experience on AMD's cards has been more than a bit troubling. The drivers are now live on AMD's site, and you can find them at the usual place.

As for release notes, there's little to report. It looks like the site only has old release notes (from Crimson 16.9.2) and no mention is made of Dishonored 2. AMD's email is the only place with that information, which succinctly states "Support for Dishonored 2." The only other piece of information is that the drivers also fix a problem with Steam and Origin: "Steam and Origin will no longer terminate when using AMD X-Connect Technology on unplug."

I don't have access to the game yet, but we have a short performance overview. So far, the game appears to be quite demanding, but driver updates may improve the situation. I'll be looking at additional cards in more detail once the game is officially available.

Dishonored 2 is finally out tomorrow. I've had access to the PC version of the game since this morning, UK time, and over the coming days I'll be sharing some initial impressions, followed by the full, scored review next week. Here, though, I'll be providing performance impressions based on tests on my office and home PC, along with a couple of other builds courtesy of other PC Gamer editors.

The bad news is that, while performance on a high-end rig was solid, we've had trouble on only slightly more modest PCs. Even if you're running GTX 970, there's cause for concern.

Settings

Before that, let's dig briefly into the settings provided. Dishonored 2 offers most of the good stuff. On the basic video settings page, FOV can be adjusted between 65 and 110 degrees, v-sync turned on or off, and HBAO+ support. You can choose to run in Windowed, Fullscreen or Borderless Windowed modes. Dishonored 2 also offers adaptive resolution, from 50-100% although, in performance tests, this didn't seem to make much difference to the framerate.

Over in advanced settings, you'll find an impressive level of configuration options. Texture details, model details, environment details, water quality, view distance, shadow quality, decal quality and fog quality can all be tweaked from Very Low to Ultra. Anti-aliasing comes in FXAA Low, FXAA High and TXAA flavours. Beyond that, you can toggle the following on or off: bloom, depth of field, lens flare, volumetric lighting, god rays, and even specifically disable shadows for rats and bloodflies.

Beyond graphics settings, keyboard bindings are fully configurable, and there are a number of controller presets should that be how you choose to play. You can also disable mouse smoothing from within the in-game options, which is always appreciated. More than that, just about every HUD and marker can be disabled something I'd recommend based on my experience with the original Dishonored.

The one disappointment in this area: despite Dishonored 2's Void Engine being a modified version of id Tech 6, the standard '+com_skipIntroVideo 1' does not work in the Steam launch options. That's three unskippable intro logos you'll have to watch, every time you play (unless someone stumbles upon a command that does work.)

Performance

Here it is then. On my home PC, using a GTX 1070, i5-6600K and 16GB RAM, things work pretty well. I'm playing at 2560x1440, and the auto-detect has suggested a mixture of High and Very High options. Using those suggested settings, I'm averaging around 80 fps, with dips to 60 fps on city streets. It's perfectly playable.

Things were less rosy on my work PC: a GTX 970, i5-3570K and 16GB RAM, playing at 1920x1080. This is below the recommended settings, and it shows. Auto-detect recommended mostly Medium settings, with a couple on High. Performance kept steady at 60 fps indoors, but could drop to around 40 fps in the streets. This was inconsistent. Looking in one direction, I'd get 60 fps. Turning around, it'd drop back down. Killing everyone in the level didn't make much difference.

I wouldn't call it unplayable, but it was distracting. The framerate dips are noticeable. Even beyond the pure framerate number, though, I experienced refresh rate problems most notable when moving the mouse in small increments. Combined with the head bob effect (which can be disabled) it started to feel uncomfortable. I also experienced audio stuttering on this machine: background music, sound effects and even some character dialogue all briefly cutting out. This was most notable when loading into a scene. During the intro, the dialogue was briefly out of sync with the visuals. Also, with view distance set to Medium, I did notice some pop-in, even at what seemed to me like relatively modest distances.

UK web editor Tom Senior experienced much the same on GTX 970, 16GB RAM, Intel Core i5-2500K. Tom reported audio and visual stuttering, and framerates of between 40 and 60 fps. For whatever reason, even reducing all graphics presets to Low didn't increase the speed. Tom also noticed some slow-loading textures. id Tech has had plenty of streaming problems in the past. The bright side is such issues have tended to be patched out.

Finally, associate editor James Davenport tested on two rigs. On an AMD R9 Nano, i5-4690K and 16GB RAM, playing at 1920x1080, he noted that Medium was as high as he could get before feeling sick from the fluctuating framerates. High and Ultra settings, were, in his words, "a slideshow", both indoors and out. On a GeForce GTX 980 Ti, i7-5960 and 16GB RAM, things were smoother even at 2560x1440. James was able to hit Ultra, at between 45-60 fps during the tutorial. Even then, once outdoors, the framerate dropped more noticeably. James also experienced the refresh rate problems, noting that even 45 fps can feel nauseating.

It's troubling. While my home PC, happily above the recommended settings, seems to performing well, all those PCs that fell between minimum and recommended noted some significant issues that reducing the graphics quality didn't fix. That Tom experienced additional problems suggests that a better CPU could make some difference. I hope it's fixed soon. Performance aside, everything I've played points to Dishonored 2 being an exciting and satisfying successor.

We'll make additional tests as more of the team get access to the game, and keep you updated as new information presents itself. A new AMD driver was also just released, so we'll retest to see if that makes any difference.