The Making of Dishonored | Noclip Documentary

Overview

Arkane’s Dishonored development story centers on turning a Thief-like stealth concept into a distinctive setting and building technology that could support ambitious player abilities. The excerpts trace the shift from a proposed medieval Japan to London, the design of plague-struck Dunwall and resource-scarred Karnaca, and the reuse of a discarded portal system to create Dishonored 2’s two-timeline mission, “A Crack in the Slab.”

Key takeaways

Arkane rejected a proposed medieval Japan setting for a Thief-like game in favor of London, which the team saw as recognizable to North American players and less culturally prone to cliché.
Dishonored’s plague setting reduced the need for crowds but created a technical challenge when designers proposed rat swarms and other creature types.
Arkane’s incremental prototyping let designers expand possession from human NPCs to rats, adding requirements such as small-space navigation and specialized pathfinding.
Karnaca’s visual design connected its abundant trees and wooden construction to a story about mining, environmental damage, dust storms, and social inequality.
“A Crack in the Slab” repurposed a cut portal feature into a two-timeline level, while limiting each timeline to about half a normal map’s geometry and NPC budget.
The two timeline maps were vertically stacked with a Z-axis offset to avoid precision issues that arose when maps were placed far apart horizontally.

Chapters

0:00 From a Medieval Japan Pitch to Dishonored’s Setting

Todd Vaughn brought Arkane a proposal for a Thief-like game set in medieval Japan.
The team reconsidered the setting because it risked relying on clichés and did not reflect the developers’ own cultural background.
The supplied transcript excerpt begins at 1:47, so it does not include the opening minutes of the documentary.

7:54 Plague-Struck Dunwall and the Rat-Swarm Challenge

Dishonored began with a plague-ridden city designed to have few people and no crowds.
Rat swarms became a proposed way to make the largely empty city feel alive.
The team needed technology to simulate the rats alongside multiple creature types under production time constraints.

9:58 Possession Expands from Humans to Rats and Fish

Arkane typically started with a small prototype, such as letting the player take over a human NPC’s body.
Designers then expanded the idea to rats, requiring pathfinding through holes and beneath tables.
The team also considered fish, illustrating how a single ability could generate broader engineering requirements.

15:00 The Missing Middle of the Development Story

The supplied transcript contains no dialogue between the possession discussion at 10:35 and the Karnaca section at 23:54.
No specific production events from this interval can be established from the available transcript.

23:54 Laurent Gapaillard’s Organic Starting Point for Karnaca

Sébastien described Karnaca as a fresh creative challenge after the completed design of Dunwall.
Laurent Gapaillard developed large environment sketches, including tree forms inspired by broccoli and cauliflower.
Gapaillard had previously produced sketches for The Crossing and unusual planetary environments for films.

25:00 Karnaca’s Trees Shape a City Built from Wood

The idea of vast trees led the team to imagine a city where wood supplied much of the construction material.
Karnaca’s wooden tools and street barriers contrast with Dunwall’s colder, greyer visual character.
Large windmills and a wind corridor helped give the city a distinct physical and atmospheric identity.

26:40 Karnaca’s Wind Corridor Connects Extraction to Inequality

Rich residents seek to mine the mountain for resources, gradually enlarging a destructive excavation.
The expanding opening channels wind across the area, exposing nearby workers and residents to dust storms.
The environmental hazard became a critique of resource exploitation and its unequal effects on Karnaca’s people.

28:20 Uncovered Development Interval Before Dishonored 2’s Mission Design

The supplied transcript jumps from the Karnaca discussion at 25:57 to “A Crack in the Slab” at 47:29.
It provides no verifiable details about the intervening development work or topics.

47:29 A Crack in the Slab Reuses a Discarded Portal System

The mission grew from a previously developed feature that let players move between two positions in the world through a portal.
Christophe Carrier proposed building a level around two timelines that players could switch between.
Reusing the portal technology salvaged work from a feature that had been cut from the final game.

48:40 Two Timeline Maps Require Half a Level’s Resource Budget

Running both timelines required the game to manage two maps simultaneously.
To preserve frame rate, each map received roughly half the usual level budget for geometry and NPCs.
Level designers used scripting and the available tools to create meaningful differences with constrained resources.

51:30 Overlapping Maps, Paired Cameras, and the Cut Void House Portal

The two maps were placed one above the other after side-by-side placement caused precision problems far from the world origin.
Their geometry was duplicated with a Z-axis offset, and two cameras tracked the player across the timelines.
The earlier portal system had been intended to open a Void House room for inventory access, but designers cut it because the feature felt too slow.
The transcript ends at 51:41, leaving the remaining portion of the 59-minute runtime without dialogue in the supplied excerpt.

Summary, takeaways, and chapters were generated by AI from the video's transcript and may contain errors. The video belongs to its creator, /noclip.