Arkane Studios revealed their plans regarding the future of Dishonored.

The studio’s two recent big games, Dishonored 2 and Prey were critically successful, but they didn’t sell well (2.5 and 1.5 million sales, respectively). Yesterday, we discussed how Bethesda tends to support its studios’ ideas, but it might not be the case with Arkane, as the publisher might be pressurising them to change.

VG247 talked with Ricardo Bare, Arkane‘s lead designer, at QuakeCon, and he confirmed that Dishonored is taking a break: „I can’t say definitively what might happen down the road […] but [Dishonored] is resting for now. As far as pure immersive sims [like Dishonored] go, I don’t know if we’re going to continue to make like carbon copies – 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.”

He also doesn’t rule out that Arkane might switch over to a multiplayer, games-as-a-service model: „More online sharing or multiplayer type stuff, we totally might do that. It’s interesting because, for a while, there was this push with a bunch of big publishers to force teams to include multiplayer modes. […] It was super distracting and resource-draining to the team and, as it turns out, it didn’t help some of those games anyway. But what I feel like is happening now is way different – it’s more community-oriented, it’s more about what gives your game legs, builds community, sharing, and things like that. Games are approaching that with lots of different models.”

If Dishonored ever returns with the third main instalment, it might have multiplayer components. Let’s not forget the past, though: a decade ago, Arkane was working on a revolutionary game with Valve being the publisher on PC and Xbox 360. The Crossing would have combined a single-player campaign with multiplayer, as our enemies in the plot (which mixed current-day Paris with the 14th-century one due to parallel universes) would have been controlled by other players. The game got cancelled.

Arkane knew something in 2007 that others didn’t…

Source: WCCFTech