The 2012 first-person action game Dishonored proved that developer Arkane Studios knew how to craft a slick and engaging gaming experience, and follow-up games such as 2016’s Dishonored 2 and 2017’s Dishonored: Death of the Outsider helped in building up the IP’s unique steampunk-esque lore. However, as of late Arkane has moved on to other ventures, and one member of the Arkane team recently confirmed that the Dishonored IP likely won’t be revisited for some time, if ever.
In an interview with VG24/7, Arkane Studios lead designer Ricardo Bare confirmed that the Dishonored IP is being shelved for the foreseeable future:
“I can’t say definitively what might happen down the road, anything could happen, but [Dishonored] is resting for now.”
While Bare’s comments are no-doubt disappointing for Dishonored fans, they’re also not very surprising given how the main storyline of the previous Dishonored games reached a very natural-feeling conclusion at the end of Death of the Outsider. Bare went on to say that Arkane is still very much interested in creating worlds that players want to explore, a philosophy that was applied just as much to the studio’s 2017 sci-fi horror title Prey and its Talos 1 space station as the Dishonored series’ setting of Dunwall:
“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’.”
Speaking of Prey, the game’s standalone Mooncrash expansion recently received a ‘Blue Moon’ update that added in new collectible cosmetic items and other features. Meanwhile, Prey and Dishonored publisher Bethesda has been riding high off its recent QuakeCon convention, an event which revealed a bunch of new information for Doom Eternal among other upcoming games.