// PC GAMER — GAMING
Dishonored 2 director Harvey Smith wants to honour sacred imsim texts while finding news ways to surprise fans: "That's the two wolves inside me"
"On one hand, I want to pay off those expectations. On the other hand, I want to exceed them."
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Harvey Smith remembers the 10 months he spent as quality assurance lead on System Shock as a "brush with greatness".
"I had loved Ultima Underworld, and then I got to work with the very people that were rolling off of Underworld onto this new cyberpunk game," he says. "Looking Glass fought like cats and dogs, but man, they were passionate about what they were doing. And this was a mission for them."
Afterwards, when Smith joined System Shock producer Warren Spector at Ion Storm Austin, "we just applied that same hunger to Deus Ex," he says. "And then when I got together with Raphaël Colantonio, we were like, 'Why just live a normal life? Why fucking punch in and sit at a desk and run some numbers? We're just dying to do this, right?' And so we made Dishonored."
It's a simplified take on the story—one that skips the wilderness years spent fighting for funding before Arkane partnered with Bethesda. But the stubborn and single-minded outlook Smith describes is crucial to explaining his career in immersive sims. If he had been more sensible—less determined to funnel his days into spiritually satisfying work in the genre that first lit his creative fire—Arkane would never have made Dishonored at all.
"When Arkane was independent, very often people would come in and they would try to get us to work on some game that was not in our wheelhouse," he says. "People would say, 'You're going to go under by turning your nose up at doing this DLC for this third-person action shooter, this is money.' And we'd be like, 'Yeah, but we don't like those. We don't know how to do them well, and we think that game is dumb. So we're generally going to say no, and gamble the company on doing what we are known for.'"
Arkane very nearly did go under, pursuing its dogged goal of making immersive sims. But eventually, that doggedness was recognised by its peers in the games industry.
There are many ways to fail, many ways to succeed. But specialising in what you love is not a bad path.
"There was a moment we were pretty desperate, and a bunch of people working on BioShock 2 said, 'God, we're in a tight spot. We need somebody to take on a bunch of levels. You know who's out there? Arkane.' So we took Christophe Carrier, our level design director, who is really the wellspring from which a lot of that thinking at Arkane came from. We took him and a team, and we put them on BioShock 2. And that only happened because people associated us with that kind of game."