Practical 3: Dishonored Research
Dishonored.
Well, it's about time, I suppose! Somehow, I've never played any of the Dishonored games or any games from Arkane Studios anyway, although a few of the games have been sitting in my Steam library unplayed from a sale for a while.
My lecturers Josh and James both suggested I do a project surrounding Dishonored and the art-style of it, so, I will be exploring this and delving in head first within this research blog post.
I'll note - I am REALLY diving in head first, as someone that genuinely knows nothing about the game(s) nor can I even say at this point I've ever seen any artwork or gameplay from it. As of the time writing this very first post (27/02/24...) I am just naturally assuming the 'style' is just realism, or intended to be. Which, isn't something I find too exciting. Especially not when doing a Masters based on the concept of style.
Where do I start?
Well, while Dishonored 2 is installing on Steam, I'm watching the Noclip Documentary - 'The Making of Dishonored'.
Straight away, the concept art shown in this video, for about the first 7 minutes, really stood out to me:
I thought to myself: WOW.
These concepts are all gorgeous and so striking.
Immediately, I was drawn to all of the chunky brush strokes in these concepts - some are more noticable than others, but, they all have their own style, definitely. None of them are smoothed to perfection and perfectly try to just imitate real life. They all tell a story.
What I found particularly striking was the character portrait concepts though. If you zoom in on any of them, you can notice the very quite geometric and uniform brushstrokes in the faces.
Like here, I drew over one of the concepts to make what I mean a bit more clear:
I only drew over a little bit of the eye for the sake of demonstrating my point, but, each bit of the face can be broken down into many many little very visible chunks. They're mostly quite triangular as well, which, I would guess is to emphasise the gruffness and edginess of this particular character -- as someone that has no idea who this character IS, those are the connotations I got from this concept anyway.
The silhouette and shape language seem very prominent as well. Look at how unsymmetrical this character is overall:
I mean, I still know nothing about this character nor anything about what was intended about his design, but, look at how the feeling and atmosphere around the character changes with the two symmetrical edits I made.
Number two feels even more imposing, but, I'd say he becomes a bit stereotypical. A bit too much of a perfect villian or 'evil guy'. His frown is even more exaggerated, and so are the furrowed brows. There's nothing particularly wrong with this in itself, but, there's just something that feels off. He lost some character. Now, it just seems as though there is a general sense of "I'm going to put my fist in your face" that just emanates from this character that lacks any depth.
The third picture in the collage seems, possibly quite predictably, quite opposite I think. His overall head and neck is somewhat smaller, which definitely makes him feel less imposing than before. However, his facial features just have also seemed to be overall softer. His frown seems to be more of a sadness rather than the "I'm going to punch you in the face" frown. His brows are more relaxed, making his eyes feel more inviting. I'd even say that he looks a bit goofy, as though these visuals possess the archetype of 'looks like he could kill you, but is a big softie inside'.
And then of course, when you go back to the original image, I feel as though you can see both sides of this man in this original concept. There seems to be such a level of depth that is unknown to the viewer about this character that really humanises him and makes this character feel somehow REAL.
And isn't that crazy? How can this character feel real from this portrait when the style is so visibly unrealistic? None of us humans walk around with visible chunky brush strokes all over us do we?
This stylistic choice is what helps reinforce all these feelings though. The exaggeration of shapes and silhouette is how we are led to believe one thing or another about this character. Everything is intentional behind what this artist made and chose to leave in the art, instead of making something 'polished' and traditionally 'beautiful' with the same level of smoothness our faces have in real life.
...I like the concept art of Dishonored very much, to say the least.
So, it isn't impossible to do well at all. I just wonder why Dishonored chose the path it did with its style.
When I watched the Noclip documentary on Dishonored as well, it was said that their inspiration for the game's setting was primarily a mix of London and Edinburgh.
I previously did a project based on these two things in the third year of the Bachelors too, but it was very heavily stylised. The buildings I did in this project ended up just lining up as one in a street and I realised (only just now) the showcase screenshots subsequently don't look as good as I think they could've done, since most of the time you see little bits of the sky at the sides or top peeking through, or the street (which wasn't done to the same standard).
So, I was looking through old English buildings that would fit the Dishonored universe and style and came across the particular building above, which I believe is called The Oxford Arms. I quite like these in particular, especially the first image in the above collage, as the camera position naturally frames the whole image. There isn't really any empty space like there was in my previous 3rd year project.
I also think this building would particularly be a good point of reference because there are a lot of parts of the building that could be utilised to climb and just overall be sneaky in gameplay -- just like in Dishonored anyway.
I'm also having a bit of trouble to find things online from the artists that worked on any Dishonored. It doesn't really seem like there are a lot, or any at this point I'm at, that properly display their work and processes in their work.
Riot artists usually upload their processes and even make tutorials on how to achieve the style and post it online quite frequently, so, in juxtaposition -- I think I'm gonna entirely have to come to my own conclusions about the style, and the style's 'do's and don'ts', etc.
Like usually a lot of companies at least nowadays do have 'art bibles' and these are usually quite public, but I can't seem to find any for this.
It's quite difficult at this stage to be able to narrow down these things because when I played Dishonored 2 for about two hours, I found that majority of the game is quite dim and dark which made it actually quite hard to see any details in the textures overall.
I also think I found some overall differences in the style between assets in Dishonored 2 when I played it. I remember thinking that some of the big assets like walls and flooring looked overall quite realistic, or as though it was intended to look realistic, and then at some points there were some other random smaller assets like barrels or wooden planks that in my opinion looked quite cartoony and simplistic.
I spoke about this to my lecturer Josh and he suggested I try to do my project in the style of the concept art since I find it to be a lot nicer stylisation compared to the actual game. I think I might do a mix of both, but I like this idea a lot. I also said to him that Dishonored reminded me a lot of the game Conway from White Paper Games. Josh suggested that perhaps White Paper Games was able to get their game a lot more painterly and stylised since their setting of Dahlia View is a lot smaller and more contained compared to the massive world of Dishonored.
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