You would possibly assume Dishonored’s Outsider is an offended god, a Loki-style trickster, or maybe a bored deity who exists solely to tempt mortals into hurting one another. In each video games, he’s all the time there behind the scenes, seemingly pulling the strings. But there’s rather more to this otherworldly observer than it appears.
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Violence doesn’t please the Outsider – it solely compounds his cynicism, his seething hatred for a grimy world that betrayed him. I solely got here to grasp this fact once I learn a tweet thread by Hazel Monforton, one of many writers on Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, following the discharge of Dishonored 2.
In the thread, Monforton likens the Outsider to pharmakos, an historical Greek ritual the place a slave, disabled particular person, or a legal takes on the function of a human scapegoat and is expelled from a group throughout occasions of turmoil. The sins of the Greeks are solid onto these victims and so they turn out to be literal outsiders. As we study in Dishonored 2, the Outsider was as soon as a human who was sacrificed for related causes by an unknown cult. Now, from the void between worlds, he bestows powers on the much less lucky.
Monforton’s observations have been so correct that they caught the eye of Dishonored recreation director Harvey Smith, and he requested her to work on the upcoming, Outsider-centric standalone enlargement. Imagine doing tweets so good that you just’re employed by Harvey Smith.
That’s to not say Monforton lacks the credentials, nonetheless. For years prior she’d been exploring untold tales in video games, digging into issues which can be hinted at however not fairly absolutely fleshed out in recreation worlds, writing her personal fanfiction to discover a recreation’s themes. In schooling, Monforton gained a firstclass diploma at Lancaster University in English and Creative Writing, she has a grasp’s diploma in Women’s Studies at Oxford, and she or he’s at present present process a PhD at Durham University in English Literature – her analysis targeted on ritual violence and girls’s writing. Yes, ritual violence.
While Death of the Outsider is the primary recreation she has labored on, these research give Monforton a singular perspective on the Outsider. That’s basically what drew Smith to her tackle the Dishonored mythos. Monforton herself tells me she was pulled to Dishonored a special method: by realising she may conceal below tables.
“I can’t believe I can do this,” she remembers considering whereas crouched beneath one such piece of furnishings, eavesdropping on High Overseer Campbell. “I can just be under the table and hear all this shit go down. I had switched the poison in the glasses, so I watched as he poisoned himself and he fell over, and he looked right at me. I was like ‘Haha, I got you’. It was really cool to have that moment emerge from what I’d done.”
This anecdote distills Monforton’s love for the sequence. While, for me, Dishonored is a recreation about stabbing folks in more and more artistic methods, Monforton was drawn to Dunwall, to the rats, to the establishments and characters of Arkane’s world. “I like that element,” she tells me, “the eavesdropping and exploring such an intricate world where characters have all their own motivations.”
Regarding the Outsider particularly, Monforton didn’t realise his true nature till the second recreation, following a scene that exhibits his creation by way of ritualistic sacrifice. “It’s very easy to read him as a trickster god and that’s what I did in the beginning,” Monforton explains. “He does sort of meddle, however he does so in a method that I didn’t actually choose up on first – he needs you to make ethical decisions and he cynically assumes that you’ll kill all people, however he’s sort of happy if you don’t.
“It took me some time to piece that along with what we realized concerning the Outsider’s backstory. It was once I made that reference to sacrifice and concepts of healing violence being utilized in a ritual context in opposition to scapegoats, I figured it out and that opened up the sport’s themes for me in loads of methods. ‘Eldritch twink Jesus’ kind of encapsulates how I really feel about that character – he’s an androgynous-looking determine who has these Lovecraftian parts, he’s within the Void, he’s this spectral ‘other’ that’s reviled by the church establishments, however he’s additionally a sufferer of formality violence, like Jesus.”
Monforton later turned these ideas into a superb PC Gamer article, and shortly after its publication, she was working with Arkane as a distant freelancer. Monforton and Smith grew to become Twitter mutuals and the pair used to speak about Dishonored and its themes previous to the article’s publication, however this will need to have been what embedded his religion in her that she actually understood the supply materials.
That article was initially printed as a result of the commissioning editor noticed Monforton’s tweet thread. It was then handed round and loved by the employees at Arkane, serving as an icebreaker for Monforton when she went all the way down to the Lyon studio to work for every week when she was drafted onto the challenge. “Every contact and paying gig I’ve had in the game industry and around the game industry is through Twitter,” Monforton tells me. “It’s a great networking tool. I think we can forget how great Twitter can be, between the Nazis, the beef, and the discourse. It’s how I’ve met a lot of really cool people and got these opportunities.”
Monforton was introduced onto Death of the Outsider similtaneously Anna Megill, a senior recreation author who at present works at Remedy. Megill is a seasoned skilled, however she wasn’t as conversant in Dishonored as Monforton, so Monforton ended up writing the lore and character dialogue in collaboration with Smith and lead narrative designer Sachka Sandra Duval.
“Anything that was lore-heavy was assigned to me,” Monforton explains. “I had a lot of responsibility, but it was really thrilling. For the main characters, for Billie Lurk – so, Rosario Dawson – and Daud – Michael Madsen – I sat in on their recording sessions. I was there to give a little context to lines when they needed it, and to kind of redirect stuff to help them understand the tone or the emotions happening in those particular lines. It was really fun to hear these things I’d helped work on come to life.”
Despite the months of writing work, Monforton can’t wait to get her fingers on Death of the Outsider to see it come alive correctly. Being distant, typically sitting in on recording periods over Skype at 3am from her mattress, Monforton’s affect on the sport has been like an ethereal arm reaching over to Lyon. It should be surreal for the Dishonored fan to see her ardour for the sport bleed into such an essential challenge. In that method, Monforton has taken on the function of the Outsider herself, tugging away behind the scenes. I assume meaning Twitter actually is the Void.
We have a hands-on preview of Dishonored: Death of the Outsider going stay at 08:00 (BST) tomorrow, August 24.
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