Arkane Studios has been one of the most acclaimed AAA studios since truly rising to prominence with first-person stealth game Dishonored in 2012. Since then, they’ve released a sequel, a standalone spin-off, and a revival of a sci-fi game from 2006, Prey.
The studio is known not so much for telling these really groundbreaking stories but for immersing players in unique atmospheric environments and giving them the tools to create player crafted gameplay. It’s not like Call of Duty where they give you some guns and have you run down some guided paths to the next scripted sequence, Arkane focuses on crafting open levels with great depth that give players the freedom to use their brain to play how they want.
Arkane’s games are some of the best out there, namely in Dishonored for allowing players to come up with such creative ways of progressing through levels and eliminating targets that not even the developers thought of. With that said, fans would really like to revisit that series after the successful sequel in 2016 but… that’s not in the plans for Arkane.
“I can’t say definitively what might happen down the road, anything could happen, but [Dishonored] is resting for now,” Arkane lead designer Ricardo Bare told VG24/7. “As far as pure immersive sims go, I don’t know if we’re going to continue to make like carbon copy – this qualifies as an immersive sim and it’s the only thing we’re ever going to make.
“The things that are important to us as a studio are coherent, deep world building and environmental storytelling – we’re always going to craft spaces that you feel like you’re visiting, whether it’s Dunwall or Talos 1. It’s just as important a character as the player or the people you meet. Then it’s improvisational gameplay – giving players a bunch of cool abilities and tools, then saying, ‘You figure it out, you be creative, you own the experience’. And, typically, we stick to first-person, though that’s not a hard rule and we might try other things from time to time.”
While Arkane is dead set on creating games that thrive off those unique worlds you know and love and awesome gameplay, it may not be in the world of Dishonored. Could there be a Prey follow-up? Who knows. Right now, Arkane is remaining hush-hush on their next game and will likely continue to do so until they’re really ready to lift the curtain off of it.
