Dishonored 2’s leads play differently and you have to choose between them

Will you play as Corvo or Emily?

Hello, Dishonored 2. I missed you. I was eating a hamburger and watching the Warriors game when you were announced, and then it was a whole week of E3, then working on the Arkham Knight review. I finally caught the Dishonored 2 trailer and got pretty stoked, remembering how pleasant the first one was: gorgeous and with plenty of stealth and fun abilities to experiment with. I like it a lot.

One of the sequel’s possible protagonists, a grown up Emily Kaldwin (from the first), has a whole bunch of new abilities, like that gross (cool) tentacle arm that replaces the Blink ability and gives me warm remembrances of fun with Q-claws. Co-director Harvey Smith explains, “Emily fights with a little more finesse than Corvo does. Whereas Corvo has the very classic Possession, Rat Swarm, Blink [abilities], Emily has Far Reach, Shadow Walk, Mesmerize… these powers that nobody has heard of.”

Far Reach sacrifices Blink’s invisibility, but it sounds exciting: “You can stick to walls, you can yank somebody toward you and assassinate them in mid-air, so you have these synced assassinations in mid-air. It begins to feel different, and it adds momentum. You can run and jump and it has rope physics to it.”

Should you wish to dabble in both old and new powers, you’ll have to keep separate save files, replay the game, or just remember how Corvo played in the first (as his skills seem to be mostly the same). “[Y]ou play as Emily for like half an hour and then you get to this pivotal moment where a dramatic thing happens, and you choose at that point whether to continue with Emily or switch to Corvo. And then you’re locked in.”

Interesting move. I’ll be going with the fresh face. Smith says the missions are the same regardless of your choice, but both characters are fully voiced, so you’ll get a different tinge depending. I kind of would like to see how the non-entity Corvo gets turned into an actual character this time. “There’s a different theme in the narrative sense, in the literary sense,” Smith says, “Corvo’s an older guy, he’s coming home for the first time to Serkonos. Emily is like an empress outlaw on the run, and she’s young, she’s 25. So their perspectives are very different.”

Then again, one look at my music library is all you need to know that I identify as a 25 year old empress outlaw, so maybe that’s still the choice for me after all.

From damsel to hero: How Emily became Dishonored 2’s new badass [Mashable]