Arkane Studios is best known for developing several immersive sim games, including the Dishonored franchise and 2017’s Prey . However, it looks like we won’t be delving into the walls of Dunwall or following the tales of Corvo Attano, for now, at least. In a recent interview at QuakeCon 2018, Arkane Studios lead designer Ricardo Bare said that the Dishonored franchise is “resting for now.”
The first Dishonored game was released over six years ago. Its sequel, Dishonored 2, launched in 2016, along with a standalone expansion, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, arriving just a year later. These games were all published by Bethesda Softworks. Bare explained the current status of the Dishonored franchise to VG247.
“I can’t say definitively what might happen down the road, anything could happen, but [Dishonored] is resting for now,” he said. “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.”
It seems likely the developer will continue creating immersive sims for the foreseeable future. It ventured into dystopian steampunk with the Dishonored franchise and science fiction with Prey, so it will be exciting to see what else Arkane Studios has in store for fans of the immersive sim genre. Bare then went on about what was important to those kinds of games.
“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,” he said. “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.”
