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The creative team behind upcoming stealth-role-playing action adventure Dishonored have revealed a little more about how they've balanced the gameplay to accommodate the multiple ways each player can approach the missions.

"It was a hard paradox for us to get right in the game design," co-creative director Raphael Colantonio said in an interview with Joystiq, "because we wanted to give you very strong powers, to make you really a badass, but at the same time we didn't want the game to be too easy. So it took awhile to get it right, and some of it is just obvious tuning. Every power has a duration, cost of mana, and some other tunable properties ... So even if your power is incredibly strong, you can mitigate it by saying 'Well, it only lasts three seconds.'"

"As much as possible we try to say 'yes' to the player and enable the cool combinations and powers that they put together," added project lead Ricardo Bare, "but it's really hard sometimes... The way that we've got the game balanced right now, our intention is: If it feels too easy, increase the difficulty. That's the way I play. If I feel like, 'Wow, I've got a really crazy power combination, this is really easy,' then the game gets more fun for me when I ramp up the difficulty and suddenly everything gets very lethal and super tense."

Dishonored is an open-ended game, set in a steampunk world, in which you play a disgraced bodyguard who must clear his name after being framed as an assassin. You'll be able to be as sneaky or violent as you like, and the game won't judge your actions as good or bad. It will simply record how much chaos you cause in the world, and leave you to work out how you feel about the outcomes created.

It's out for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC from October 12th.