Dishonored Dunwall City Trials Video Released

Bethesda has released a new gameplay trailer for Dishonored: Dunwall City Trials, the first add-on pack for Dishonored. Dunwall City Trials includes 10 challenge maps that test and track combat, stealth and mobility skills, letting players combine supernatural abilities, weapons and gadgets to eliminate as many targets as possible, fight off waves of tallboys, guards, weepers and thugs, or take out targets in a non-stop run of drop assassinations. The pack also adds a new set of achievements and trophies along with a global online leaderboard.

Dunwall City Trials became available worldwide on December 11 for 400 Microsoft points or $4.99 on the PlayStation Network.

Dishonored itself, the base game this add-on extends, was developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks, releasing in October 2012 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. It casts players as Corvo Attano, a former bodyguard framed for the murder of the Empress he was sworn to protect, who is granted a set of supernatural abilities by a mysterious figure known as the Outsider. Chief among those powers is Blink, a short-range teleport that lets players close distance or escape danger instantly, alongside abilities like Possession, which lets Corvo take control of animals and even certain people, and Dark Vision, which reveals enemies and objects through walls. These powers combine with a more conventional arsenal of a retractable sword, a flintlock pistol, a crossbow and various grenades and traps, giving players a wide range of ways to approach any given assassination.

The city of Dunwall itself is one of the game’s defining features: a whaling-powered, plague-ridden metropolis with a heavily Victorian, steampunk-influenced look, patrolled by guards, mechanical Tallboys on stilts and infected citizens known as Weepers. Dishonored was built around Arkane’s background in immersive sim design; the studio had previously released Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, both known for blending RPG systems with physics-driven, player-directed problem solving, and that lineage carries through into how Dishonored lets players choose between stealthy, non-lethal solutions and more chaotic, violent ones, with the game’s Chaos system tracking those choices and shifting how the world and story respond in turn.

Dunwall City Trials, the add-on covered in this piece, was the first of several DLC packs released for Dishonored, and it took a different approach from the ones that followed. Rather than continuing the story, it isolated the moment-to-moment combat, stealth and mobility mechanics into standalone challenge maps focused on scoring and leaderboard competition. The DLC packs that came after it, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, went the opposite direction, adding new story content that puts players in control of Daud, the assassin responsible for the Empress’s murder in the main campaign, and filling in more of his backstory and motivations.

Dishonored was widely praised on release for how naturally its powers, gadgets and level design worked together, and that reception helped the series continue well beyond this add-on, with Arkane later releasing Dishonored 2 and the spin-off Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Dunwall City Trials, in that context, reads as an early sign of how much replay value Arkane saw in its own systems, packaging them into a mode built purely around mastering the mechanics rather than pushing the story forward.