However, it played a big role in the studio finally going in the direction of Dishonored in the late 2000s.

One of the most unfortunate missed opportunities in the gaming world is Arkane’s canceled Ravenholm game. Around 2007-2008, Arkane was working on a standalone spin-off that would have taken players back to the zombie-infested Ravenholm of Half-Life 2. It was canceled because Arkane couldn’t finish it in time. This was at a time when Valve was still pushing hard for an episodic format, but eventually Gabe Newell’s knife was driven into the concept.

Making games is an expensive and time-consuming process, and even then Valve was not an industry giant (Steam was nowhere near as popular as it is today). But to hear that there was something fully playable that just needed six months of polishing and was never finished can be a real pain. But the Arkane studio learned a lot from that experience. The late artist Viktor Antonov, who died this year and was something of a visionary, played a role in that. He essentially created the vibrant, brutalist aesthetic of Half-Life and Dishonored, and was a huge influence on the industry as a whole. This was also discussed by Raphael Colantonio, co-founder of Arkane, during the Quad Damage podcast:

“It was great, honestly. And I think the people at Valve who tried it – if you asked them, they’d probably agree. But the thing is, we needed another year, at least six months. And Valve had a very clear business plan for those episodes. They were trying to make the episode business work, and they could not do it internally because it was too expensive. So they tried it with us, and we had 12 months. We had, frankly, an alpha. We had the whole game playable from start to finish. We had one or two of the cinematic moments that were really polished and very impressive. But then we had to add another six months, maybe more, to get it to where it needed to be.

When the game was canceled, we were devastated…in reality, what we didn’t know was that Ravenholm was school for us. We graduated. Viktor Antonov was training us in all their practices in terms of art, in terms of how to think about a level, how to think about architecture… That meeting with Viktor was crucial to what would become Arkane. He was a fantastic, fantastic artist…he had so much charisma, and everyone who met him was hypnotized by this very specific person. He was kind of a genius, and he really helped make Arkane what it was,” Colantonio said.

It’s a shame that Valve eventually dropped the Arkane project…

Source: PCGamer