#dh doto

[annoyed-galaxy]

You guys aren't gonna believe what I did....

Yup. I got marked by the Outsider.

My third official tattoo and I just had to get the Outsider's mark. I love the Dishonored series and I absolutely love the Outsider. But also this symbol is just so fucking cool so I committed and finally got it.

Surprisingly it wasn't that painful, except in very tiny spots. I am so happy though. Seeing my hand makes me smile because it's just so fucking cool UGH I'm so happy.

[no-light-left-on]

[meglosthegreat]

If Dishonored 1's element is water, Dishonored 2's element is air. Karnaca is described as a city "at the edge of the world", and is defined by its elevation, its towering trees, and the wind currents that provide the city its power. Almost every map in the game has you climbing upward, away from the water that is your home and haven, until you reach the Dust District where the clouds blowing through obscure it completely. Bloodflies are the game's primary environmental hazard, replacing the river krusts and rats of Dishonored 1.

The wind is a double-edged thing in the story. It brings prosperity, allowing Karnaca to escape the need for whale oil in the face of rationing. But that prosperity does not extend to those facing the brunt of its effects; those condemned to toil in the silver mines and live in the district poisoned by their exploitation. The wind powers homes; it also powers the devices used to exert control over the city's population. In short, the wind is like the Empire - as easily put to harm as it is to good. All it took was one Empress deposed by another, and those forces shifted with all the fickleness of a breeze.

Even the Void changes from the serene, underwater-like place in Dishonored 1. It becomes a wasteland of howling emptiness and tall, jagged spires. Shindaerey Peak is the place where the Void meets the world, and the gulley connecting it to Karnaca is where the city's wind currents originate. It is a city at the edge of the world not just in the physical sense - it also lies at the boundary between this world and the Void.

When you leap from Coldridge Prison at the beginning of Dishonored 1, the water is there to greet you. But in Dishonored 2, the water is withheld. When you fall, there is only empty, unforgiving air. Which makes it all the more compelling when the Outsider reaches out to catch you.

(Also, I should point out that there are two more Isles yet to be featured in a game and two more elements yet to be thematically implemented...)

[stealingpotatoes]

sure being trapped in the void was bad, but now humansider has to deal w the hardship of being a short king who can't float

(ko-fi requests are open!)

[presiding]

genuinely admire those who were optimistic for dishonored 3 but in this videogame industry climate and [insert a 4hr video essay about arkane's recent history here], honestly, not getting dh3 is good news

[folkdevilism]

Say what you want about Dishonored 2's flaws, but the Bonecharm Crafting system and ability to carry over Runes between playthroughs spoiled me to the point where it felt awkward revisiting the first game without it.

[broken-grace112]

"Strange how there’s always a little more innocence left to lose."

[icedjuiceboxes]

I like to remind the DH Fandom that's not only is there in-game fanfiction of Corvo and the outsider, it's also a play-

I need to know if Corvo knows about it. Did he see the play before it got banned by the abbey.

Does Emily? Does she know her dad is a dilf and everyone in the isles wanna fuck him?

[ipcearn]

I'm replaying DH1 (high chaos this time) so it's once again on my mind, but I am giving every single person that has ever put some serious thought into Royal Spymaster!Daud a kiss on the lips

It is one of my fave AUs, particularly post low chaos DH1

There is just something about Daud atoning in the only way he knows how: by making sure what happened to her mother will never happen to Emily, that when Emily has children they will never have to see their mother die in front of them the way she did

(also don't get me started on low chaos being the canonical ending and because of that Daud's choice to not kill Delilah gave her an opportunity to stage a coup against Emily 15 years later, I have so many feels about how unfair that must be to him, suddenly him deciding to kill the Outsider doesn't seem that strange anymore as stupid as I think it is)

[void-damned]

Thoughts on the marking process. When do you think the other marked except Corvo and Emily got the mark of the outsider?

Thoughts? I have a lot of those!

First of all, the Outsider gives his Mark to people who seem to be at a low point in their life and who possess the drive and the opportunity to cause change in the world. But not all live up to those expectations - the Outsider seeks interest but as we all know, the paths are endless and they are not linear. Where Fate shall ultimately take his Marked is unknown. And he seems quite fond of gambling with that, high risk-high reward style.

We know of Marked like Corvo, Emily, Daud, and Delilah, all who caused great ruckus in the world, whose paths diverge and converge, change with the slightest actions. But their impact is felt heavily.

We know of Marked, who merely are, who might have had potential but became quite dull or too much, such as Granny Rags.

But we also know of Marked who had barely stirred much talk if any at all. I would say that the Lonely Rat Boy is one of them but I also like to think that he might have contributed to the spread of the plague. Others are barely mentioned.

Chronologically, we can speak of an almost clear timeline, actually:

(Potentially Daud's mother, who would have been marked circa 1790 before Daud's birth)

The Unknown rune-carving woman, marked c. 1800—3

Vera Moray, neé Dbhghoill, marked c. 1807—10

Daud, marked c. 1820

Delilah Kaldwin, born Copperspoon, marked 1831

The Lonely Rat Boy, marked 1835

Corvo Attano, marked 1837

Emily Kaldwin, marked 1852

Another potentially marked person, who'd have been marked around the same time as either Corvo or the Lonely Rat Boy, is one of the noble attendees of the Boyle party in DH1. If you point the Heart at the woman (chosen at random by RNG, I believe), the Heart tells you this:

"She had to dismiss the maid-servant who saw the Mark of the Outsider, branded on her back."

Either we are talking about the real thing or perhaps, as the gossip around the party went, someone who'd worshipped and prayed to the Outsider, enough to brand themselves as Zhukov and the Cultists did.

In any case, all years are more or less confirmed - however, we do not have much info on the when-circumstances other than Corvo and Emily. Vera, according to the Dunwall Archives, had been marked on her journey to Pandyssia, seeking the occult and religious practices native to the lands. We can only wonder just what she had witnessed and how the Outsider eventually approached her but whatever she went through, and whatever she saw, came at the cost of her vision and kickstarted her instability and steady decline into madness. With how men had begged for her, she might have had the potential to unmake the entire Empire. And wouldn't that be fun to watch? (But Vera had strayed from her path.)

Daud is said to have been marked after scouring the Isles and seeking out the Outsider's shrines. If there was ever any obsession, I would say it was the yearning for power and wishing for survival, yet with craving for blood - Daud had been a mercenary for hire since his young age. Who's to say that what ultimately lead to Jessamine's death wasn't a part of his resentment and thirst for revenge after what had been done to him as a child? He had inadvertently set things into motion but came to regret his actions - maybe he had realised he had become someone who he had fought his whole life against.

Delilah was at her worst. Young and so full of anger and despair. 'He came to us in 1831,' she whispers to you. She begun her apprenticeship under Sokolov in 1828 but perhaps the Outsider's Mark was the last push she needed (or maybe he merely wanted to spite Sokolov by marking her, who knows) - she learnt how to weave the Void into her art to get what she wants. The life she was always promised. And one she would make real one day, through the blood of her blood and flesh of her flesh. Even if it meant destroying everything in her path.

The Lonely Rat Boy was marked at the beginning of the plague. Of course he would be the target of all the adults who had immediately written him off for death. Another case of being wronged and being angry, of seeing revenge. And survival. But the boy had burned through his gifts immediately and paid the price too soon.

And the rest, we can only hypothetise as there are no accounts other than the bone-carving woman whose son's journal we get to read. Her story was of survival too, of running away from the Abbeymen that had pursued them.

The Outsider really is just someone tapping at the glass surface separating the waking world and the Void, like it is merely water surface and he (and his Marked) is creating ripples. To see what will happen and what people are capable of. Whatever happens, happens. He's there just to observe the human nature and how power shapes men when they are given access to it.

(And what of Morris Sullivan, you might ask? I believe his teacher, Vera, had merely shared some power with him in the same way Daud shared his through an Arcane Bond or Delilah had. But we can see him being immune to Bend Time, which oof.)

[no-light-left-on]

post-DotO Emily and human Outsider shenanigans, because their friendship needs more love. a little over 800 words

“How do I look?”

Emily looks up from her correspondence with the Duke of Serkonos to see the Outsider dressed in his new clothes. The shirt is of fine ashen grey silk, paired with deep blue pants and a waistcoat to match. He’s fidgeting again, his fingers toying with the corded loop of his top button, but he lowers his hands to let Emily take the whole look in.

She knew why she recommended her personal tailor to fashion the Outsider's new wardrobe for his inevitable introduction to the court.

The clothes suit him.

“You look stupid,” Emily says and the Outsider gasps.

“I will have you know that this style of embroidery and fine cording has a long tradition in Tyvia that predates the Empire of the Isles by centuries,” he tells her. “By incorporating it into the newest fashions of the Isles the people of Tyvia express their connection to their history and tradition while embracing the modern ways of life and cosmopolitanism of the Empire.” His back straightens and he rolls his shoulders back. The fine wool fabric hugs his chest perfectly and the silk of his sleeves falls over his slender forearms like waves of a stormy sea as it spills over into the Void. And yet the clothes make him appear much more human than the leather he wore back when he still was the Outsider.

Emily rolls her eyes. “Wow, you are nerdy and stupid.”

The Outsider’s cheeks flush with irritation and his top lip juts out. He is pouting. Emily chooses to forego teasing him about that.

“I thought you said you want to try something new?” she asks instead, diverting the Outsider’s attention from whatever lecture he had coming next about the importance of tradition and history of Tyvian folk motifs in aristocratic fashion. She vaguely remembers him speaking of it as she wrote a letter to Wyman while he decided how he should present himself to the nobles of Dunwall.

“This is different,” he says. “I’m wearing more colour than you could have ever possibly seen me don in the past.”

“Barely,” Emily shoots back. The blue of the fabric mirrors that of a clouded sky right after sunset. Variety, Emily thinks, is not something that she can expect from the Outsider’s wardrobe anytime soon.

Her tailor, bless her heart, does not say a word in regard to the insults thrown at the Outsider’s personal style and taste. “We can still adjust the fit,” she says, brushing over the differences between black and indigo or ash and slate grey that encompass all of the Outsider’s wardrobe. She’s heard enough on the topic from Corvo in her years at the helm of the royal boudoir. She provides no warning as she grips the strip of fabric at the Outsider’s back and pulls until the fit is snug and the Outsider startles and yelps. She pays him no mind, instead fixes the folds of the fabric fanning out over his backside.

Emily whistles. “Your waistline is incredible.”

“Thank you,” the Outsider says with a smug smile. “I hear narrow waist is popular with the older gentlemen of Dunwall these days.”

Both Emily and the tailor freeze.

“Do not,” Emily stresses, “ever say these words around me ever again.”

“I could fit the waistcoat to this size,” the tailor suggests in a desperate attempt to move the conversation anywhere that is not the Outsider’s subtle suggestion of sleeping with half of Emily’s court to gain their favour and support. “We can keep the clasp, too, but that is mostly seen as…” she weighs her words, “juvenile.”

“Leave it as is,” Emily tells her. “He’s going to fill out some, now that he has real food, and then you’d have to change it again. Save yourself the trouble, please.”

“Real food,” the Outsider mimics with a tinge of sarcasm. Juvenile, Emily thinks, is the perfect word to describe him after all.

“Yes,” Emily says. “You’ve only really eaten whatever in the Void Billie bothered to feed you with. And I would not ever dare suggest that to be real or proper meals, for the most part.”

“How would you even know what she fed me?”

“I spent a couple weeks with her. To call our eating habits proper meals would be an insult. Then again, your habit to eat only pastries is not to be considered a proper meal, either.”

The door opens, then, breaking the awkward air hanging over their little company, and Corvo walks in with a small collection of letters for Emily.

“Corvo,” the Outsider exclaims in way of greeting. “How do I look?”

Corvo does not spare him even a glance, instead passes by him to hand the letters to Emily.

“Stupid,” he answers after a beat of silence, and the Outsider pouts once more.

“I hate you,” he tells him, then turns to Emily, “both of you.”

Emily bursts out laughing.

[don1t1red]

i dont know how this type of celebration is called but i know that Dishonored would be ten times better if we had one

[meglosthegreat]

Can't stop thinking about how Death of the Outsider begins and ends with someone falling into Billie's outstretched arms. Daud, who held her life in his hands and who forgave her; who let her go on to become someone else, and the Outsider, whose life she now holds in her hands.

Did Daud really think that Billie, whose own life is owed to forgiveness, would make any other choice when confronted with the opportunity to do the same?

[lesbianaglaya]

finally playing dh:doto and i mean. having fun. love that daud looks terrible. but the tonal… idk inconsistency isnt the right word. okay rephrasing. trying to have a game with the same vibes as dh1 and dh2 (and the daud dlcs) but not having it take place in a time of major political upheaval makes all the previous games feel like. what was the point here. because if there are still draconian security measures in use and catastrophic infrastructure breakdowns even when things are “better” (and like, dh2 did try to qualify it as marginally better and critique empire. it also failed. but that’s a different post.) then why did we care if burrows or delilah were running things? and with the problem of doto being ‘outsider bad’ instead of ��fascist coup’ theres a huge gulf between the problems billie actually sees compared to the problem shes trying to solve. which in turn cheapens the environmental storytelling dh is usually so good at by making the small scale tragedies she sees feel pointless. and it would be one thing if you could interpret billie as totally apathetic (i dont think she is but that aside) but the game has her explicitly comment on things like the eyeless draining people of their blood for aristocrats like! doto suffers even more pronouncedly from the problems of dh2 except almost worse because both billie and daud feel like characters who should know better than the game tells us they do while emily can at least be interpreted as blinded by privilege. which sucks because like i love billie! I want to spend time with her! and im having fun! but a daud billie dlc could have been soooo crazy and it instead… isn’t.

[presiding]

I'm not a new follower and I've been here long enough but i do have a relatively bad memory

So I've wanted to ask, what's your opinion on "Dishonored: death of the outsider"?

Right now I'm replaying Dishonored games not in the release order, i already finished DH2 and started Daud dlcs. Maybe I'll go for vanilla DH later

But thoughts about going through death of the outsider again makes me feel something that i can't explain... 😬

It has some interesting ideas but antagonists are underused. Locations repeat a lot. And Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

I'm genuinely debating if i should revisit *this* one or pretend that DH2 is the last game. I know that some people love DOTO but i can't find strength in me

love to chat about death of the outsider, ty for the ask!

i feel your pain. it's the one game i struggle to revisit. but! i was thinking about your points and how DotO has the feel of budget cuts.

it's been about a year since my last DotO post - so, essay time -

a measured response to common DotO criticisms

(the thousand bugs of dishonored 2 I had borne as I best could, but when doto ventured upon sidelining billie and retconning daud's arc I vowed revenge*

*can't resist a cask of amontillado joke

criticism is easy and creation is hard, so, if this isn't the type of response you wanted, you can read my other DotO posts:

how i'd write death of the outsider

that post i did after trying to play doto a third time and couldn't make it past the opening scene (you might like my tags on this re: your comment "makes me feel something i can't explain")

billie lurk as a nonprotagonist & misogynoir (more on this below...)

gonna leapfrog off your comments cause I agree!

antagonists are underused/locations repeat a lot.

who is steering the boat?

let's start up at the top; everything stems from there.

DotO was caught up in ownership/transition issues. here's an article about harvey smith and raphael colantanio at that time. if you didnt know, colantonio is the main founder of arkane (semi-related but just for fun look his appearance up then go through arkane's protags and tell me what you notice...).

quote from harvey smith re: DotO -

“Then, just as I move back, [Colantonio is] announcing that he’s leaving. Going forward, I’ll focus more and more on the Austin studio and what we’re going to do there. Death of the Outsider is my wrapping up with the guys in Lyon – the first half of that we planned together while I was living there, but the second half was worked on while I was living in Austin. I’ve been communicating with them through video conferences and stuff, so they carry a lot of the load of the second half of it.”

so the founder jumped ship and the co-creative director has to step away from his usual position (over to sinking ship Austin). meanwhile, DotO is still in development. i'm a big believer in people making art, and not companies (even in this article Smith acknowledges much of their "secret sauce" can be traceable to specific devs but i digress)

$$$ kaching - some speculation

on the note of founders - past this point in arkane's history (ie. the main founder stepping back), arkane would have been being primed for sale. this translates to high scrutiny on project expenditure (such as hiring cheaper early career staff, hiring less workers, denying your best staff raises causing them to leave and hiring cheaper workers in their place, etc) to make the company's EBITDA look more appealing to buyers (briefly, its the piece of paper that proves you're profitable). based on speculative timelines, from a purely $ perspective within the first year of dh2 being released is when you'd be looking to slim down your capitalised expenditure (aka: cutting staff while the revenue is at a peak to make number go brr and make your company look like a better investment) because to maximise the profit of a company's sale, you really have a great track record for a few years.

this is purely speculation based on timelines. companies are very careful to hide when they're doing this, ideally they want ~3 years of a great track record (and staff that will keep working their hardest).

big goals and no money

DotO was meant to be a two-part DLC like the Dh1 DLCs, so shout out to what could have been made if their original pitch had worked.

On locations & antagonists & budget - this dev's site discusses the Conservatory level in game AND specifies it was budget constraints being the reason for cutting off traversable area from that mission. Great link for comparing the original level & the DotO version, especially re: your point about reused assets/levels.

We could pick other examples here but this post is already long so -

Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

i would forgive this game anything if there was any good billie storywriting.

:')

its never just the writers

after revisiting articles to fact-check for this essay, i've seen a lot of articles blaming writers by name (you didn't do this anon which i love <3)

games are made by teams, and decision making is generally done top-down, so blaming individual contributors is shit. 1) writer's pay isn't good enough to cop this kind of abuse. 2) it's rarely in their control - you can write a beautiful scene only to have that level cut due to costs (etc), and then you need to work out how to make the story make sense. ideation & decision-making are separate and i guess 'this idea was [X]'s' should not be mistaken for 'this is the fault of [X]'s.'

on hiring fans (& imm-sim writing strategies)

the new writers [...] already had an idea of the world, as they’d seen it from the outside, as fans. “These are all people that knew this world we had created and they took it as canonical, as the gospel. Whereas, for us, it was bits and pieces we’d made up along the way.”

as someone who used to hire writers, and i promise this isn't in bad faith: don't hire fans unless your priority is cost then, sure, fans are likely to put in overtime (and not be in a position in their career where they can ask for higher remuneration - they'll pay the passion tax to be involved).

writers (esp new career writers) have to be open to receiving feedback assuming healthy/functional processes, and being a fan makes that harder because you care more. and, as a fan, you know what loose ends exist and that's where you'll naturally jump to, even though writers should start with target audience and branding, and build from there. if i expand on this i'll get offtopic so let's keep going!

DotO feels lifeless because it doesn't add anything to the DH universe, it only takes away by closing storylines without the satisfaction of closure. sure, stuff was added - the cult subplot, locations, some NPCs/enemies, etc. but they feel like part of the objectives, not part of the dishonored universe. you can feel the decision-making process when you play: there's a feeling that the priority was to finish the assets required for missions, instead of writing a story that feels immersive.

compared to standard videogame writing, where you can generally get away with "everything you touch and read relates to your objectives as the protagonist", as an imm-sim writer, you need to focus on:

how does this text build the universe so that the player feels like they're only seeing a small part of the world?

of course - this is difficult with budget/time concerns. i've said it before but this is part of why we rarely have games as rich as dishonored 1 & 2, because imm-sim design philosophy flies against the current videogame industry trends of microtransactions & cheap-to-make addictive mobile games. given a tight budget you focus on the high level story, but player immersion is a function of details.

most likely, dh2 was the end of an era. typing that out makes me sad.

what did the devs say about writing billie

*breathes deeply*

the death of the outsider protag was originally pitched as being about a regular human, someone not related to emily and corvo but instead an overseer or a brigmore witch. daud was also pitched.

this could have worked! really cool to have a nobody, or a heretic, or an overseer, be involved with the death of a god. and i've mentioned before that storywise DotO's protag could have been anyone (i think i made a joke about wyman? hah) and wouldn't change the story much, bar some daud bits.

quote from the same article:

eventually Arkane settled on Billie Lurk, Emily's companion from Dishonored 2. [...] Bakaba tells me that because Billie had already received her redemption arc in Dishonored 2, Death Of The Outsider's story could be about something more than that.

welp.

so there's two things here - a redemption arc claim, and DotO's actual story.

in addition to not being the first pick, the view was that billie's story was over. i question the 'redemption arc' claim - sure, billie helps the protag in dh2 but after her confession, if you tell her she's changed, she brushes it off and you part awkwardly without forgiving her... does that count? if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? if a character redeems themselves but the story never tells you, are they redeemed?

billie's role in dh2 isn't really that different to the dlcs, where she follows you around being Mr Exposition while withholding a LOT of information that could have actually helped the protag. given DotO's plot, going after the killer who shaped her doesn't scream 'reformed' either. ludonarratively speaking, the lack of chaos implies billie never changed from being a callous killer - which i'm not against, it would have been a cool story.

and! contrast this with daud who already had his redemption arc!

When first conceptualising Death Of The Outsider in around 2014, Smith and Duval knew they wanted two things: Billie Lurk being used to get to The Outsider himself, and closure for Dishonored villain (and later ally) Daud.

in the two DLCs, as we know, he comes to realise his actions sucked, and as the player you actively make things right (related: my post about ludonarrative dissonance in dh2). so if billie had "already received her redemption arc", why was this another daud story?

imo this isn't a budget issue but a misogynoir issue. "we want this story to be not about the protagonist so any random NPC will do, how about we go with billie lurk and get a black woman as a dishonored protag?" this logic, which is what i'm reading of the above two quotes, feels frustratingly tokenistic when she's an established character with a rich background. it's an example of surface level diversity because DotO is not about her by arkane's own admission. it's a similar vibe to the companies who say they have a diverse team but you check their staff page and all the people of colour have 'assistant' in their title and the board is all white, so it's not people of colour who are driving the business. maybe this was entirely by accident but these accidents add up to systematic failure - billie gets her own game but never her own story. it feels like she got assigned the caretaker role for these two guys. great.

for fairness, let's compare to dh2. corvo & emily are relatively hands-off protags in terms of their ongoing thoughts about their surroundings and the lore placement about them specifically is sparse, and this style continues in DotO. the issue is the core narrative: corvo & emily are both the protagonists of their story in the sense that dh2's story reflects their goals ("take back what's yours"), whereas Billie is an established character who has arguably little reason to go along with each mission. worse, the main plotline she's literally forced into going along with. in the opening scene billie gets assaulted and still helps the guy who assaulted her.

fundamentally, DotO's narrative is not about billie but about daud and the outsider, and this article makes clear that was by design.

whats the takeaway

DotO is the weakest entry in the Dishonored series for most people, and blaming budget & a corporate changeover makes me feel... uh well it doesn't really help me tbh but your mileage may vary. it does interest me to think about what we could have had!

for me, my opinion is that if writing billie was a priority (link to my own post where i describe the feeling of playing doto as someone interested in billie) arkane would have made it a priority, even amidst constraints. billie's redemption arc was not resolved imo, and putting her in a game without a chaos system feels like as much a backwards slide for her as daud's plotline to kill the outsider was for his arc.

we absolutely 🤝 on not being in a rush to play the game again.

on the upside. dishonored 2 is a really wonderful game and i love it very much.

[tenebrare]

Inktober 2023 / Day 20 - Frost/ Dishonored How this correlates to 'frost' perhaps could do with small back story and explanation .

In my country in old folk tales was belief that the way to the land of the dead is trough cold and frosty places. Each February, when it is coldest in here, sometimes the dead might come back to visit us too. We even lit candles in February so that ancestors spirits would find their way to us so they can see we are doing well. Putting lights on our windows is still a tradition (and not related to Christmas). When I was meditating on what should I do to nr.20: Frost, and closed my eyes, this one song started to play on my local playlist while outside was snowing. Yello- "Monolith" (<- YT link) ... and I immediately got of a scene of Daud after his death taking journey slowly trough the Void on board of Dreadful Wale towards the shimmer and empty forgetting who he is and who he was. The Void always felt cold and frosty to me. Daud's journey after death might be something I return to after Inktober outside the Inktobers time limitations. Down-scaling probably again killed some details. Also after inktober might post better versions of all those DH environments. From same Dishonored related series as prompts 3 and 14 and one of few works without any Hellraiser reference (even when I almost added Leviathan in it as there's some similarities of the Old God in DotO and HR leviathan)