[Emperor Smeat]

Bunch of new details courtesy of Gamespot's interview with the director of the game.

So do the two characters share any supernatural powers, or are their ability sets entirely separate? Corvo has exactly the same powers as last time but with all these upgrades--three to five upgrades for each power. Emily has all-new powers. Then we have enhancements, which are the passive powers--your jump distance or your agility. There are some interesting ones, like Shadow Kill, where people turn to ash when they die. Corvo and Emily share those.

Can you talk a bit more about how Corvo's new upgrades work? What kinds of upgrades can players expect? In Dishonored, you took the power, and there was one upgrade for it. Usually, that upgrade was: It works for a little bit longer, or it works a little faster. This time, we really wanted to do something more interesting than that, so we took the power, we gave you a good basic package of the power, and then we said, "How many different ways can we upgrade it?" We tried not to have symmetrical trees. We don't care about, "Each [power] has three [upgrades]," or whatever. We say, "Whatever tree is under that power, based on what we can come up with, fine." Corvo's Devouring Swarm in the first game, the upgrade was: The rats are more vicious, they destroy bodies faster, and they kill people faster. That was it--one power, one upgrade. Now you can do that, but you also have an upgrade that allows you to make two swarms. You can be attacking two different groups of people with rats. You can also upgrade it to have large swarms. You can upgrade it so that your swarms follow you, so when you take off running or Blinking across the ground, there's a trail of rats behind you, Pied Piper-style. That's a light dive into how we break up the upgrades.

In the original Dishonored, players could choose to go "high chaos" and murder everyone, or play "low chaos" and stay relatively stealthy. How will that carry into Dishonored 2? Will there be multiple endings again? The endgames are much more nuanced than last time. They're not just a gate at the end, but they're rather branches along the way: who you supported and who you didn't support, and who you killed and who you didn't. It makes a series of permutations of the endgame. Put all those permutations together, and then put different voice-over with commentary on it, and you have very many different states.

Some other details include more non-lethal options being added for the game, Emily playing differently meant they had to tweak certain sections of the game in order to flow well for both characters, and time travel is not a special power ability for either character.

High/Low Chaos system got overhauled where it now randomly places enemies into different groups before every mission and also weighs kills based on the status of the person killed.

Killing people contributes to chaos; it destabilizes the world around you. But killing a sympathetic person is worse in terms of weighting than killing a murderous person. That's a concession we made to the more nuanced desire that players had. Also, it solved a problem, because players were like, "Oh, it just comes down to killing fewer than 20 percent of the people." Not anymore. The weighting is different character to character. At the beginning of a given mission, we take all the characters in the world--the random guards and such--and we procedurally decide whether they're sympathetic, guilty, or murderous, so every time it's different.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/dis.../1100-6442571/