Dishonored Death of the Outsider: Mission 1, "One Last Fight"

While their actions catalyse the events of the main games, the Dishonored DLCs and this expansion-priced stand-alone tell the stories of who Daud and Billie Lurk are as people, from their perspectives. You can see how they became the people who would change the fates of Dunwall's royals forever, but you see that only after the fact. Daud sets the events of Dishonored in motion by assassinating Jessamine Kaldwin - then we see a path to redemption for him in The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, when he saves another Empress without her ever knowing.

Billie Lurk was his accomplice as well as becoming involved with Delilah long before the coup, and is a crucial ally to Corvo and Emily under the guise of Meagan Foster. Only after Delilah has been defeated once more and the Kaldwins restored to power in Gristol are we put in Billie's shoes and offered a chance to see the world from her eyes. 

A street urchin who fell in with Daud for survival more than anything else, Billie has had a hard life and has had to scrabble for every coin and every scrap of bread she's ever had. When we return to the Dreadful Whale at the beginning of Death of the Outsider, the boat is in worse disrepair than ever, scuppered and threatening to fall apart completely. Billie is taking on contracts for a few hundred gold here and there and chasing down leads on Daud. A notice board filled with replies to her messages and other findings establishes the story in medias res, showing the progress of her investigation. The Low Chaos ending to Dishonored 2 is canonical, as - for now - Billie has her arm and eye. However, she has been having traumatic dreams about losing them, and mourning her long-dead lover Deirdre.

The main games feature Corvo and Emily falling from a great height at the beginning only to single-mindedly take back what is theirs. Billie has never enjoyed such stature and starts this game in the same situation she has always been in - near-destitute and haunted. She is also being hunted, now that she has dropped the name of Meagan Foster and begun reaching out to contacts for information on her mentor. Emerging from the Dreadful Whale's cabin presents you with a grey sky, pouring rain and a steep sea wall. Karnaca looks neither accessible, nor inviting - contrasting to the lively dockyard you first encounter in The Edge of the World.

Billie's target is the Albarca Baths - which has been converted into a fight club by a gang called the Eyeless, an organisation obsessed with the occult but lacking any true aptitude for it themselves. They are advertising bouts with "the Black Magic Brute", a hitherto undefeated champion.

The world of the Isles is an unkind place to those who aren't necessarily "individuals of note", and One Last Fight's initial return to Karnaca finds the city gloomier, harsher, more hemmed in than it was in Dishonored 2. Even the train station you arrive at is bricked up, with you having to crawl through a hole in the door to get onto the street. 

Part of this cramped feel has to do with the level taking place on a small map, with you having no powers yet and also needing to be tutorialised on controls and gameplay again since this is a stand-alone title that could conceivably be someone's introduction to the series. The first guard is alone with his back to you, following which bright artifical light illuminates a path to bypass the next two and get into an apartment where you can find a lot of useful loot. However the Albarca Baths' fight club and its environs are also less well lit than nearby Cyria Gardens and more claustrophobic than the dockyards and Addermire Station just to the south. It gives you a sense that for Billie, these streets don't promise the same ease of mobility and access as they do the Kaldwins. At least, not for now.

Much like Daud's story, Billie's begins in a more working class environment than the main games. Corvo's stroll across Dunwall Tower as Royal Protector, hailed by the Empire's seniormost administrators and thinkers and greeted in-person by the Empress, and Emily walking into ther mother's remembrance ceremony as Empress herself both display the station these characters are about to lose. Billie is native to the slums, the fight clubs, slaughterhouses and contested gang territory where the Kaldwins eventually find themselves.

The first floor of the Albarca Baths themselves and the streets outside are neutral areas, and although you find and overhear indications that the Serkonan Guard has taken an interest in the Eyeless' operation they're nowhere to be seen in this back half of the map. In classic immersive sim style you can pay an NPC to let you into the off-limits parts of the baths straightaway, or go and explore the fight club itself. Daud, the Black Magic Brute, is visible, kept prisoner with some kind of magic-suppressing device that Billie will need to unlock. The target becomes local gang leader Jeanette Lee.

Death of the Outsider has a few major systemic differences to the main games and the Daud DLCs. Most levels don't have an assassination target, there aren't breadcrumb-based quests leading to unique kills as a result, there's no Chaos system and there is a new side quest system called Contracts. The Albarca Baths provide an opportunity to engage with all of this however you want. Whether you pickpocket Jeanette and let her live, unleash a wolfhound on her and her bodyguard by opening its cage, or rush the gang for a fracas, the state of the world won't be impacted. 

The Contracts meanwhile provide small side quests that Billie can get paid for completing - at the baths you need to steal a moonshine recipe and kill and burn a white wolfhound, the same one you can set upon Jeanette. There have always been ludic incentives to thoroughly explore Dishonored levels as well as the need to hoover up Runes and Bonecharms (the latter of which is still featured here), but the Contracts provide a good structure for engaging more deeply with a given level. I find that even after three playthroughs I still do most of them every time. Bonecharms are now the only source of customisation, and since they drop randomly and sometimes with Rune-strength upgrades, your playthrough can be affected quite massively depending on what you come across. For example, getting Agility (which previously had to be bought with Runes) as a drop in the opening level was a real advantage in my most recent run.

Once you have Jeanette's key it is a simple matter of walking up to the lever for the suppression system and unlocking and pulling it, and Daud will deal with any of the Eyeless who are still around. He is old, silver-haired, bitter. While The Knife of Dunwall opened with him conflicted, uncertain, here he is anything but. Daud is singleminded - he plans to kill the Outsider, and he wants Billie to help him. His reasoning is straightforward, although at the bathhouse he simply says he's going to kill the one responsible for "all of it, the black magic, the cults, this mark on my hand." 

Daud actually believes and later mentions that the existence of a being who can apportion supernatural power on a whim is intolerable, and an injustice that he and Billie can remove from the world. Perhaps the dying old man is reflecting on a life of world-changing actions wrought for coin, a career that shook Dunwall to its foundations over and over because the Outsider thought that Daud and his Whalers might provide some entertainment to him. Maybe his battle against Delilah, long ago, eventually made him realise that there are worse potential applications of the Outsider's power than supernaturally enhanced mercenary wetwork.

For now Billie grumbles at being dragged back into the world of the occult, and the mission ends with the guards bursting into the Albarca baths - you can either run past them or slip out a window you hopefully opened earlier, and return to the Dreadful Whale.