Recently news broke that Dishonored was shelved for the foreseeable future. While this news was only just revealed to the world, Arkane in Lyon, France has known this for the past year. While my sources couldn’t say with certainty if this was what caused studio founder Raphaël Colantonio to disembark from the studio last year, it was stated that he left shortly after the pitch for both Dishonored 3 and Prey 2 had been turned down by Zenimax.
With Arkane Lyon’s flagship series put on hold, and with no other game approved to start production, the studio was broken into multiple teams. The first worked on Wolfenstein 2 DLC with Machine Games, while another team aided with the development of Wolfenstein Cyberpilot. A game as per a source that is “not great”. Meanwhile, any team members who weren’t working on Wolfenstein projects were left to prepare a project for a new and original game. A game, that as of July 2018, has yet to be officially green lit.
I was unable to gather any specifics as to what the current idea for a new game entailed, but I was informed that it’s being pitched with live service in mind. A direction that Zenimax is pushing for.
Across the pond in Texas, Arkane Austin is going through a similar conundrum.
The studio should be a year into development for Prey 2, but after weak sales of the first game — a game which was already under immense pressure to succeed after the financial disappointment that was Dishonored 2 — the pitch for a sequel was turned down.
Following the ‘disappointing’ releases of Dishonored 2 and Prey, Zenimax decided that they didn’t do well because no one buys single player games, a sentiment that one source stated was “dead ass wrong.” This mindset has led to a hard pivot by Zenimax to focus more on multiplayer and live service experiences, with only a few single player games in the pipeline.
On a positive note, it was expressed that we can expect something interesting coming out of Austin within the next 4 years. What that means was left a bit vague, as shortly after it was stressed that the studio is still struggling to figure out how to preserve immersive sim principles in a new format.
With Zenimax making life tough, the morale at both studios is low. More so when one considers how litigious Zenimax is, which has created an environment of fear where employees don’t feel safe speaking out.