Arkane has used a variety of engines in the past. They used an in-house engine for Arx Fatalis (as far as I know), they used Source for Dark Messiah and they used Unreal for their work in Bioshock 2.

id software has id tech 5 and Bethesda has the Creation Engine. Both are very powerful engines and Arkane Studios probably has access to those engines since they are owned by Zenimax.

I'm hoping that this new game will be somewhat similar to Dark Messiah, at least in the way it used physics and the environment to add another level to the gameplay.

so yeah my question is "What engine do you think Arkane will use for Dishonored?". Also this thread would probably be a good place the discuss the technical details of this new game.

I'm guessing id tech.

Dishonored uses a custom version of Unreal Engine. But hey, don't expect it to look (or feel) like any other Unreal based title !

oh I know just how versatile the Unreal engine is. Anyway, thanks for the quick response

now the Unreal engine has a pretty damn good physics engine (and it's powered by PhysX if I remember correctly), and PhAT is an awesome tool as well. Can you give us some info on whether you will be taking advantage of those unreal features in Dishonored or not?

I really like the the unreal engine, it looks pretty in the games I've played that use it

Wonder what this game will be about, GL devs!

It's a stealth FPS is all I've got, but going by that and the fact that Harvey Smith is involved has sure piqued my interest.

wasnt harvey smith the one that botched deus ex IW, or was that warren specter who did that? i keep getting those two mixed up. im definitely looking forward to it though. as someone else posted in another thread it does look a bit reminiscent of half life except it looks more steampunkish to me. assuming a 2012 release and with prey 2 coming out next year and RAGE, Skyrim, Deus EX HR this year, the next two years are going to be freaking awesome.

Smith was the lead designer on Deus Ex and the project director on Invisible War. He does admit that IW was poorly done though. Search Deus Ex: Invisible War Post-Mortem (Harvey Smith) on Youtube for a very revealing discussion.

Every Unreal Engine game looks like an Unreal Engine game.

The ones I found to look slightly less like one are probably All Points Bulletin and Mirror's Edge (which I always associated with the Source Engine ).


Do you guys use UE3.5 when it's available or will the project stay in UE3?

Well in fact there's no such thing as "Unreal 3.5": the guys at Epic keep adding features, fixing stuff, improving their code, etc... And from time to time, when they consider their engine evolved enough compared to the previous major version, they promote it to a new version number.

So basically for Dishonored we're keeping an eye on these changes, grab some, leave others, and also developed a whole bunch of homemade features. But we're definitely somewhere in-between Unreal 3.0 and Unreal 3.5 !

Man, I love the Unreal engine. Easily my favorite game engine, and definitely one of the most flexible.

yeah i remember seeing that video. the current deus ex looks like its back on track the only thing that i dont like and i plan on modding out are the constant popups every 5 seconds just for killing some guard or going into a vent. i would rather they just give you one score at the end of a mission based on what you do during that mission. its a bit obnoxious.

i loved arx fatalis and if they recreate the great things from dark messiah, deus ex and arx fatalis all of which are in my top 20 games and 2 of them in my top ten games. i cant wait to see what they do with this.

very sad for me. I hate this commercial engine (unreal). limiting the devs. the key for good game is id tech. very sad because bethesda allows this like activision (with raven soft). i have hope with bethesda but maybe not... very disappointing.

nah dude, Cry engine 3 ftw

why use UE 3 instead of idtech 4? can you state some pro/cons? Do you think that there might be a linux version of the game?

The engine doesn't exactly matter, I just want to kill something! This game looks interesting though, I'll keep my eyes and ears peeled.(ouch?)

+1 u mean id tech 5
I want to ask Bethesda... is this support for genius Carmack ? that exactly do and activison before... so so disappointing.

iirc, idtech 5 isn't available for licensing... so the logical way to use an idtech version would be the 4th version. Honestly i can't understand your question about supporting Mr. Carmack. mind to clarify?

I liked the use of Unreal 3 in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Alpha Protocol somehow made it look terrible. Mass Effect 2 did a good job with faces in the engine, but it's level design was terrible. Too bad it's not using id Tech 5. RAGE looks pretty amazing.

Will stealth be like deus ex(third person)?

okay man you know NOTHING of what youre talking about. Unreal is one of the MOST flexible engine out there. this is the engine that pwned id sofware a few years ago when unreal 1 shipied and pwned quake.

to this i will add. it was pretty obvious that the engine would be unreal. the studio is used to this engine and probably dont have the time nor the ressources to reform their whole team to id tech 5 just because its an engine made by a zenimax media owned studio

That's not the way I'd have said it, but yeah that's definitely one reason (among many others).

I don't want to start a flame war or anything so just consider the following situation: you're playing a pure shooter (something such as, let's say, Bulletstorm). You enter a super high tech laboratory filled with tubes and jars. Enemies are coming in, bullets start flying everywhere, with a lot of smoke and particles emitted in the air... And when you finally kill your last opponent, everything returns to calm again. Now look around you: wouldn't you like the glassy stuff to be broken down with pieces of glass lying everywhere on the floor? Well, that's exactly what you'd expect to see in an immersive sim such as Dishonored, and that's the kind of stuff which is easier to achieve with Unreal (and its built-in tools) than with a lot of engines out there. Because we'd like the whole world to be dynamic and to react to the player's (and AI's!) actions the same way on consoles and on PC.

And don't get me wrong: that does not mean Dishonored is a heavy shooter.

That sounds wonderful. Deus Ex was built on Unreal?

The original Deus Ex was unreal. The new one is Crystal Engine.
I like Unreal it has some very nice features.

Damn good way of putting it.

Since there's not many other topics on the board right now, I might as well write this here: I'm very happy to see that Arkane Studios is alive and well again. You guys disappeared off the radar for a while after DMMM and got slammed for the console port, so I was a bit worried that I might never see another game from the guys who made Arx Fatalis. Now we hear that you've been working on your own project after getting snatched up by gamesas, being headed up by one of the guys who worked on Thief and Deus Ex, and it looks like it has a wonderful schizo tech sort of setting, half age of sail and half age of teleporting G-men with bizarre speech patterns. The video game horizon was looking pretty bleak for a while save for a few choice titles, and this is one thing I'll definitely be keeping my eye on.

Oh, one question, though: will there be plenty of racks of spikes placed all over the place for no reason that Corvo can kick his enemies into?