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Players will “need to play Dishonored 2 twice” to understand it, says Arkane’s Harvey Smith

Dishonored 2

You can’t put a price on a game with replayability. Well, actually, you can. It’s roughly $60, like every other game, but you know what I mean. According to Arkane Studios, that’s exactly what we’re set to have with Dishonored 2 – a game that not only has replayability, but according to game designer Harvey Smith, you’ll actually need to play more than once in order to understand it.

Here’s everything we know about Dishonored 2.

Speaking in response to the fact players can play through the game as either Emily or Corvo – the game branching off at a fixed point depending on which character you opt for – Smith was asked if that meant players would need to take on Dishonored 2 twice in order to get the full experience.

His response was as candid as it was full. “Well we have a large group of players who buy the game, go through it once, make some decisions and that’s it,” he began, speaking to Australian site Finder.

“They choose Possession and Rat Swarm, they kill a lot of dudes and go high chaos, then finish the game and say, ‘that’s it, I’m done’. Or they go the opposite and they are stealth players, who upgrade their Blink and sneak past everybody and finish the game without killing anyone, then stick it on their shelf and they are done.

“But we do have a lot of players who go through many times, because in Dishonored you cannot see everything at once. You probably only see 25 percent of the game if you play it once. There’s a path on the right; a path over the roof; a path on the left; or maybe you just possessed a fish and swam around in the river. And you can’t do all of them; you have to choose one. Plus you can play violently, or sneakily, or a combination of the two.”

Smith went on to say that, because play is so “dynamic”, the paths people choose in play aend up being incredibly varied. No one play through is the same.

“So previously some people played once, some people played many times, but in Dishonored 2 there is even more reason to play it again,” he concluded.

“And I think players won’t understand Dishonored 2 till they play it twice, because there is so much overt conversation that you can miss, and lore to read and even just understanding the environment’s impact on the storytelling. Plus, there are all these powers and you don’t get enough runes to buy all of them; you can’t even buy half of the powers in one playthrough.”

Dishonred 2 will launch on November 11.