Dishonored Death of the Outsider: Mission 3, The Bank Job

The Bank Job is Death of the Outsider's centrepiece and maybe its most famous level. Having cased the joint in Follow the Ink, Billie is ready to break in and steal the only weapon capable of killing the outsider. She leaves Daud aboard The Dreadful Wale, sat on deck in the spot where Billie, as Meagan Foster, once conspired with Aramis Stilton and Emily Kaldwin to take down Luca Abele. Then it's off to the Dolores Michaels Bank, already sighted and possibly visited during Follow the Ink, for a mission that recalls the classic First City Bank and Trust from Thief II.

The choice to re-use the entirety of the map from Follow the Ink, right down to the same black market (featuring a new shopkeep if you robbed it on the previous visit) has the effect of arming you with environmental knowledge and being comfortable with traversal, so you can approach the bank with confidence. This reminded me of Thief II also - a brace of late-game missions literally called 'Casing the Joint' and 'Masks' sees Garrett make two trips to the same mansion, contributing to a confident and efficient heist on the second visit.

You even have the keys you need for the vault. This puts Billie in really quite an advantageous position, which is quite empowering in this huge level and a nice piece of texture considering she is becoming more personally powerful compared to the people around her - guards, elites - who once oppressed her. You can even choose your starting location, since if you leave via the skiff in the previous mission you'll begin even closer to the bank. Billie and by extension the player was once locked out but has become the master of this space.

The level makes for an intriguing comparison with The Clockwork Mansion. The Dolores Michaels Bank, like Kirin Jindosh's mansion, is a technologically advanced building capable of reconfiguring itself to suit its inhabitants' purpose, contains mercurial locks and puzzles, and is filled not only with human guards but clockwork soldiers (the design for which here is the same as those in an early trailer for Dishonored 2). The difference is that the Jindosh mansion was the grand inventor's home and workshop,  where he received guests, and in itself a testament to the man's ingenuity and hubris - it bore his personal signature all over, its opulent facade and shifting walls reflecting his brilliant brain and arrogant, changeable persona. The Bank meanwhile is a place of work for many people, a commercial space and a high security public place. Billie can even enter the bank's public area, the ground floor with the tellers, in the previous mission when she scopes out the district. The technology is behind the scenes, serving specific functions unlike Jindosh's flashy, showpiece entrance hall designed to impress and intimidate.

Also where Jindosh's mansion had only one entrance, the bank necessarily has many. The main doors through which the public enter during opening hours are shut tight, but Billie can inflitrate via the roof by repairing the painter's lift, through the sewers or through sanitation. There are some things Billie can do to prepare - robbing the black market shop and completing a contract that happens on the Upper Cyria streets for a start, but most importantly procuring some laudanum to pour in the ventilation system and send everyone on security to sleep before she enters. This can be bought (or stolen) at the black market, or pilfered from an auction of the Cienfuegos pharmacy's property by using Semblance to impersonate a punter and bid for it. Michaels has been illegally and cruelly foreclosing on several small business owners in the district, and now it's going to backfire on her.

A Noclip documentary on the Hitman reboots saw the designers talking about the separation between public and forbidden spaces, and the power fantasy inherent in 47 always being able to cross from one into the other. A similiar thing is at work here, with an unsurprising if ornate teller hall and offices masking a fortified interior that bristles with weaponry and unique security features.

The bank's architects and security team have prioritised certain areas and personnel as requiring high level protection. These are the vault, and Dolores' office. As such there is a corridor full of arc pylons on the route to the vault, meaning entering the bank from the sanitation department usually means walking round a corner and instantly dying. By re-wiring these, Billie can create a deadly funnel into which to draw the guards and clockwork soldiers. Along with finding the security codes to access the high level areas, send Michaels to the atrium and even send the entire security team to the now lethal arc pylon corridor, this adds a compelling element of using the technology and architecture against the enemy. It's like you are turning the bank against its inhabitants.

On the other hand, you can avoid violence entirely - as is always the case in Dishonored, but the addition of the laudanum which knocks every guard out encourages you to do so and you're rewarded for it by one of the contracts which wants you to get in and out without being seen or hurting anyone. Crucially, this doesn't remove the tension from the mission - the guards won't be knocked out for good as if you've choked them out, but only be sleeping lightly. Make too much noise and they'll wake up. So this can actually make things even more tense as you creep around trying not to rouse the guards and worrying they'll get up at any moment.

I was very fortunate to get to talk to Arkane Studios' Dana Nightingale, who was a level designer on both this level and The Clockwork Mansion, regarding this aspect of the level after she posted several illuminating sketches and maps from her work on them as well as The Flooded District on Twitter. 

"'All humans asleep' was a big "find the fun" moment", she said. "How do you keep that interesting for a whole map? It put a lot of emphasis on the security systems and gating puzzles. But it all had to work if everyone was awake too! It was really challenging to balance." Of the methods she and the team put in place to do so, she said "The only contract that I remember working on was 'Quiet as a Mouse'. It was set up to work best with everyone asleep, but still had to be possible in either case. I enjoyed finding ways to make all of the security bypass-able without shutting them off."

It is a twist that works amazingly well once inside the bank - you really feel as if you are going up against the building itself, which bristles with hostile technology and security hurdles.

Getting the vault master key and using the bank's central controls to move it either to the archives or Director Michaels' office will allow Billie to pick up the knife and complete her mission, as well as get crucial information and a new lead - documents with information on how to enter the Void have been sent to the Royal Conservatory. Billie is now well on her way, and the Twin-Bladed Knife provides access to bonecharm crafting and Void Strike, a charged knife-swing that fires an energy blast and can be used to great effect in conjunction with certain bonecharms.

There's plenty else to do - you can visit bank employees working late in the office areas, which players who entered from sanitation won't even pass on their way through. You can enjoy several easter eggs including a Dark Souls style bonfire, a lockbox belonging to Morgan Yu (the game released in the same year as Prey) and discover that the hapless Dr. Galvani also banks with Dolores Michaels Bank, using his same old code. 

However eventually it's back to the Dreadful Wale, and thanks to an encounter with the Outsider in the vault Billie knows full well Daud is no more. The Knife of Dunwall is dead on the boat, and Billie makes the Dreadful Wale his funeral pyre, setting it alight in the ocean off Karnaca and watching it burn until sunrise before setting off for Cyria Gardens.

Although the Death of the Outsider is huge, cosmology-wise, the Death of Daud is almost a bigger deal in terms of characters. An enigmatic antagonist in Dishonored, the anti-hero of its DLCs, a shadowy memory and whispered legend throughout Dishonored 2 - he may be the most compelling character. While some might bemoan the demise of such a powerful individual offscreen, I feel it is apropos for a man who lived, killed and first doomed and then saved an Empire from the shadows, out of sight.