I wanna pick someone’s brain at Arkane for how they chose to make the Dunwall setting in the specific time frame it’s in
Specifically that it’s late Victorian to early Edwardian, but they’re starting to run electricity (powered by supernatural whale oil), and they very specifically and explicitly do not have anything approaching germ theory.
Clearly they have some idea that inhaling fumes is bad (see: Whalers), but I can’t find any hint that they would have miasma theory either. What DO they think causes disease? In game several people are investigating the cause of the rat plague but the closest they’ve gotten to a causative agent is “rat parts???” like not even the droppings or fluids of a rat, just “rat.”
I know that is supposed to resemble the bubonic plague, but there’s no mention of fleas on the rats we can find being studied. If the plague is closer to my personal guess that it’s some sort of turbo hantavirus, then Sokolov has no chance of figuring it out if he doesn’t know that germs are a thing.
Did the Abbey of the Everyman decide that germ theory was heresy or something and that’s why they don’t have it?
via @howdyp33ps
Yeah how WOULD Galvani have known that??? Maybe there was a sudden dramatic change in symptoms and he’d been meticulously tracking them since the plague first showed up… But he doesn’t seem like the kind of John Snow shoeleather epidemiology kind of scientist to have gone and tracked down the Dunwall equivalent of the cholera pump.
None of the science assholes whose labs we can visit have microscopes, which Galvani and Sokolov certainly would have been able to afford, even just to show off how rich they are. No one is looking at anything on a scale smaller than what can be seen through a magnifying glass.
We also keep coming back to the text of the game saying yes, it’s the rats themselves that cause the plague, specifically the fat bastards from Pandyssia that were imported as part of the Regent’s poor people extermination plot (sorry about spoilers but this game has been out for 11 years now). We also know that Sokolov is one of the few people who successfully went there and came back with research. So how would he have known the rats cause the plague? Did he see it himself on the voyage back? Argh I wanna grab him and shake the secrets out of his pockets.
The Doylist explanation is that Arkane wasn’t really thinking about how people studied epidemics in the time period they wanted to use, and definitely wasn’t expecting a bunch of epidemiology nerds to get on them about their setting.
I’m still poking the Watsonian explanation with a stick though, because they give us so much information (I was joking to my friend that you need to do a lot of reading to be able to play Dishonored).
They’re beautifully and incredibly consistent about so many things, like how the things you can read are all written from a perspective that props up the status quo, and how short-term self-interest is immediately rewarded but repeatedly creates long term collapse. So the fact that they’re inconsistent with one of the major plot drivers, the plague, really bothers me.