Disclaimer: This contains spoilers for the entire series, obviously. Dishonored and its sequels are some of my favorite video games of all time — any criticism comes from a place of deep love.
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is an intensely selfish game. It’s not that this isn’t in line with the history of the series — it’s just that I thought we were past that.
The Dishonored series as a whole has never quite overcome the fact that, at their core, they are games about people killing to get revenge. Corvo Attano wants revenge against the plotters who killed the empress Jessamine; Emily Kaldwin wants revenge against the witch Delilah who stole her throne. They have their resonant moments, but the plots have come under fair scrutiny for being hollow. The Knife of Dunwall DLC for the first Dishonored countered this by focusing instead on the assassin Daud’s redemption for killing the empress, though it was tempered somewhat by the similarly self-centered tone it took — Daud grasping at straws to redeem himself as the Outsider baited him, where even saving Emily Kaldwin was too little too late.
The cool thing about Death of the Outsider was that it was a respite from the formula of here is a tragedy: now fight. Billie Lurk enters it with a clear head and a steady hand — she’s waited long enough for her turn, and she didn’t need a cataclysm to push her on her way.
In theory, we as the player have encountered Billie Lurk three times: in Dishonored, when she helps kill Jessamine Kaldwin; in The Knife of Dunwall, when she accompanies and then betrays Daud in his quest to stop Delilah; and in Dishonored 2, when she rescues and travels with Emily Kaldwin as she attempts to regain her throne. (In practice, the first of these encounters relies on in-game lore after the fact, as Billie is never depicted or named in the vanilla game.) These three games take place over 15 years. By the time of Death of the Outsider, Billie is almost 40.
The last slide of the ending of Dishonored 2 shows Billie with her back turned to the camera, walking away from playing second fiddle and towards a bright light and a story of her own. That’s what it should have meant, at least — that’s what I and many other fans interpreted Death of the Outsider to be, the righteous pivot of the series from the monarchial vengeance of Corvo and Emily to the slow build of a more subtle story.
Except that’s not the story we get. What we get, in clumsy tones and awkward cutscenes, is a Billie Lurk who barricades herself into one barren room of a ship she captained for fifteen years, who tacks a life of love and loss and friendship and suffering onto the wall with all the dignity of a refrigerator magnet, who hunts down and kills a god not because she decided the consolidation of unearthly power in a being who gives it to the hurt and angry as freely as Halloween candy could perhaps be a factor in the restless writhing of the Isles, but because a man whose demons we’ve already exorcised said so.
Again: there is a time and a place for this story. Dishonored is plague-stricken and grimy, crawling with rats, buzzing with bloodflies. Ever since the first game unveiled the tagline Revenge solves everything it’s been begging for it.
But it is a story we already got. Even more precisely, it is the story we got in Daud’s DLC: regret and redemption muffling his violence as he slunk through blood-wet gutters and waist-high water, as he killed or spared guards and dockworkers and gang members and witches. We saw the aftermath of a high chaos playthrough, in essence, and the mental toll it takes on someone who could have been kind and chose otherwise. We saw Daud through those troubles and out the other side — scarred, perhaps, and weary, but alive and wiser for it.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that Death of the Outsider chose the same story, word for word. It makes no allowances for fifteen years on the other side of such violence: for the Billie Lurk who never quite made amends, but who lived a better life.
Let me remind you: in the time between The Knife of Dunwall and Death of the Outsider, Billie Lurk left Dunwall; she took a new name; she traded assassination for fencing and smuggling; she acquired a ship, christened for the man who spared her life; she met Anton Sokolov, a father to her; she met Aramis Stilton, a friend to her; she lost her arm and eye trying to save Stilton and her chance of a quieter life trying to save Sokolov; she returned to a place she swore never to see again to save Emily Kaldwin; and, after months of writing notes to express gratitude because she felt out of practice, returned one more time to help Emily save the world. She told Daud that she was grateful for the chance to start over, and she did.
And somehow, despite all this, in the introduction of Death of the Outsider Billie claims that no one remembers her. If we pretend that Meagan Foster had a different heart as well as a different life — alright, sure, fine. But she didn’t. Billie Lurk is Meagan Foster just as much as Meagan Foster is Billie Lurk. The lives she saved and the relationships she treasured are no less important because they were under a different name. She listened to Stilton when the pressures of his foreign, high-class life became too much. She teased Emily for sleeping soundly even without pillows made of goose feathers. She bought Sokolov paints. They remember her.
So when she rescues Daud and starts speaking like she’s 19 again, you’ll forgive me for being skeptical. Seeking forgiveness from someone she wronged is one thing — falling back into a pattern of obedience and obligation that brought her so much suffering is something else. She doesn’t bother to question Daud’s desire to kill the Outsider until she stands on the threshold of the act deep within the Void, although after seeing what his machinations did to Daud and Jessamine and Stilton and Emily, the conclusion wouldn’t have been hard to come to herself. But in the end she does it because Daud told her to.
What’s more, for a game that has no chaos system, the ending settles into oddly binary roles. The Outsider deserves a second chance, period. Choosing to kill him is heartless, unsympathetic, and brutal, and leads to a darkly uncertain ending. I have no qualms with the valorization of forgiveness: Billie owes her life to it, after all. But the Dishonored games believe in their own particular theory of “chaos” — that although you may have been mistreated and wronged, to be blind with your violence will lead to a crueler future. The Outsider sought out the furious and gave them weapons of unearthly power, but evidently this means his hands are clean.
(We could talk for days about Dishonored’s continued failure when it comes to class, and what that means when they imply that it’s a bad thing for a dirt-poor woman to take action against the creature that controls all the power in the series and hands it out to whomever it likes, without regard for who it influences or how. But that’s a blog post for another time.)
I’ll admit, despite my qualms — Billie’s parroting of Daud’s grudges, the lack of respect for Meagan Foster, and the unimaginative final act — what hurt the most was that after all of it, she wasn’t given an ending. Billie Lurk survived all possible iterations of the universe. She made it through the darkness Dishonored flourishes in and found reasons to live and love again. She walked into the Void and emerged with her heart intact. But she doesn’t get to be buried by her loved ones like Corvo. She doesn’t get to grow old like Emily the Wise. After the burning of the Wale, she doesn’t even get to go home.
During my impatience and hype for Death of the Outsider, the thing I most looked forward to was revisiting a place I had grown as close to as the Ebon Hawk, or the Bastion, or countless other home bases. I wanted to see how Billie Lurk walked old floors with new steps, confident in her conviction to change the world. I wondered if the game would remember the empty cot in the storage room where Hypatia slept, or if I would find the blueprints Stilton brought as they prepared to take on Duke Abele. I felt nervous but excited to hear what Billie would mutter, brief but fond, when you pushed open the doors of intimately familiar rooms to see Sokolov’s notes, well-read but unmoved on his table, or the silvergraph Emily found in the Dust District and left tucked behind glass as an unspoken forgiveness. I couldn’t have been more eager to hear Daud’s incredulity as Billie brought him to a home the likes of which neither of them had ever had.
Instead, you wake up on a Dreadful Wale so empty and claustrophobic that it felt like a prison, one that is burnt without ceremony offscreen with no regard for the lives it touched. You cannot convince me that Bille saw that little of value in the world.
Thanks for reading! You can find me on Twitter at @allpalaces.
