Q&A

Was Corvo always a silent protagonist?

One of the critiques of Dishonored is that people say Corvo feels weirdly flat and emotionless – he doesn’t have a reaction to things. There were some of us who wanted him to be silent so it didn’t tamper with the player’s viewpoint, and we did decide very late in the project. I think Todd Howard mentioned to Raf, “Have you tried giving Corvo a voice? Have you just tried? It might be interesting,” but it was just too late. We had already started translating and it would have been another recording session at the very, very last minute.

Is that why you chose to voice Daud in The Knife Of Dunwall DLC?

Absolutely. By that point, we had decided that was something we should have done. Letting people play Daud and see the flip side of Corvo’s story was really cool because it allowed us to not tell some new story but stay focused on Empress Jessamine, her murder andd Princess Emily’s abduction, and see the other side of the coin. Which we almost called it at t one point: The Other Side Of The Coin.

Daud features only briefly in the main game. How did you flesh him out?

We just said, “What if we wrote some monologues for Daud that help the level designers explain to the player what situation’s ’s going on?” It’s a very useful tool. Austin wrote e the first round of monologues from Daud and they were a little bit too gumshoe, so we rewrote them. And so we eventually got his voice right and we really think that the popularity of the Daud character comes down n to the fact that you know what he’s thinking.