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Dishonored has a very unique and peculiar non photo realistic art style. It features a steam punk city with a gloomy dirgeful environment to explore. It reflects an exclusive relationship between industrial design and science fiction. There are things which do not exist in the real world but look very appealing. I conducted my research on the art of Dishonored found some really interesting facts about it.

Dishonored’s creative team was led by Viktor Antonov and Sebastien Mitton. The game was originally set in London 1666, the last year of plague and the year of great fire. The creative influences were taken from historical architectural pictures of London and all kinds of different inspirations from painters, artists, photographers and film makers. There are rooftops and smoke stacks which are specific only to London.

The creative team visited London to study the weather, generally the fog, night, rain, sky which is very low and which has got an impact over the experience of the player. It doesn’t have a good weather or a nice bright sun and the light is filtered in a certain way. That’s exactly what I noticed when I was playing the game.I could actually feel the environment around me. The surroundings and atmosphere compliment the role of a dishonored assassin. As told by Sebastien Mitton, they needed some technical development in order to try to modify the way the light reacts with elements of the game like fog, to also see whether they could create hazes and light blooms. Something very unique was created by not approaching the game in a traditional way.

As the team progressed with the game they moved far and far away in time which somewhat resulted in the look and feel of 1800s. It also distinguished from the real world. Thus, the city of Dunwall was formed in a time period where there is quite a lot of mechanical technology based on steam, suspension and basic fuel. The team wanted to bring some modern elements into the game by adding more science fiction and pulling it more forward in time including technologies from the 19^th century.

Technologies and machines have a specific narrative function. They tell the story of a ruler of the country who has a shine for industrial design and progress. He builds bridges, buildings, fences and devices to modernize the city and to crush and oppress people. The government takes advantage of the volatile whale oil and sokolov’s inventions against people as a sort of security level. The whale oil is manifested and represented through visual and design elements such as ships and boats which suggests that the world is bigger than the city. There’s a vast ocean, foreign countries, colonies which are shipping strange kind of animals which expands the scope of the city.

The characters are designed the same way as the architectural design. It reveals the identity of the characters. The developers looked into British morphology and studied how the features like eyes, nose and skin have been set. The characters have variety of very real faces. They also have a back story and a meaning to them. The team has worked with people all over Europe who were specialists of anatomy in order to try not to lose the intention they had in visuals at the very beginning of the production. They also worked with people who specialized in the silhouettes, clothing, creases that appear on cloths. Dishonored’s characters have not been designed as regular video game characters with legs like tubes and some polygons for creating certain effects or just shaders.

The characters possess a clear identity in the game. For instance the city guards have enlarged hands and reduced size of skull in order to show his role in the game. The aristocrats are much more slender with higher foreheads which are arrogant and egoistic with much tougher faces. The developers made sure not to lose the essential quality of the paintings; a technical difficulty to obtain something alive and not in general. The same concept has been applied to animals as well. The wolfhounds have been made by a mixture of crocodile, dog and giraffe.

Dishonored comprehends and appreciates a distinctive nature of pure art. It shows that it’s not important to have very realistic graphics with ultimate fine lines and wrinkles on skin, defining each hair strand and textures. The art is very much like paintings, yet incredible and realistic. I appreciate the research and effort that was put in the development of the game. It is a must play game for people who like to explore different kind of games.

Rating - 8.5

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