WolfEye's first game, Weird West, attempted to pack some of the immersive sim wizardry of Dishonored into a top-down action-RPG. For the studio's next game, co-founders Raphaël Colantonio and Julien Roby are leaning more seriously into comparisons to their previous efforts at Arkane. The new game, which currently has no title or release date, is a first-person sci-fi RPG set in an alternate 1900s North America, ostensibly combining the creativity and tools of Dishonored and Prey with a “real RPG” experience reminiscent of Skyrim and a modern-day Fallout.
“The structure is very freeform and you can explore whatever you want,” Colantonio says on a video call. “But the mobility and the type of gameplay is very reminiscent of games we've worked on in the past, like Prey or Dishonored. So there's a mix between an RPG and an open experience, where you can go wherever you want and level up and there's branching and so on, but there's also the physicality and the types of gadgets and powers that you've seen in previous games from Arkane. So if you look at the continuity from Dishonored to Prey, imagine what it would be like if it were more open, if it were even more RPG than Prey.”
Colantonio and Roby aren't saying much about the game's story at the moment, but the announcement screens give you an idea of the ambiance and stakes: industrial brickwork, big smoky skies, vending machines made of delicately etched steel. There are Gatling guns and water silos, canyons surrounded by wobbly piers, and workshops divided into what look like convenient shady hiding spots in the setting sun.
“It's a world where you can recognize the landscape, but even though the types of technology are futuristic, in a style that would make sense in the 1900s,” Colantonio says. “So you have a really unique look — it's not really steampunk, although some people would say it is steampunk. And part of the story is that at some point you'll understand why this alternate timeline was created.”
The developers aren’t ready to talk about the specific gadgets at your disposal just yet. The project is set to enter pre-production in 2022, and Wolfeye just finished the first vertical slice, an internal demo that gives a taste of every aspect of the experience. But you can expect to get your grubby hands on various types of automatons, along with firearms like shotguns and a special fancy morphing vehicle that wants to be this game’s Blink.
“We have a magnetic rope, so it sticks to any metal in a very systematic way,” Colantonio says. “If there's metal in the scene, a trash can or something, it sticks to it and creates a rope that you can use to climb, for example.” You'll also get abilities that seem more supernatural in nature, like an ability that lets you “set a point that then allows you to escape in the middle of a fight.”
Overall, Colantonio continues, the game is about “digging deeper into the realm of possibilities that his and Roby's previous projects at Arkane have offered,” while incorporating concepts and approaches from traditional role-players. “If you think about our games, I think they have interesting worlds to explore, very – I don't know if realistic is the right word, but even if they're not realistic, they're grounded, there's a whole consistency and tradition that players will enjoy exploring. And the other aspect is playing your own way. There's a very sandbox aspect, where you can customize your playstyle, and the game responds to that and branches the story. If you do certain things, there are sometimes consequences – there's more than one way to do things.
“We're doing that again, but I think putting it in an RPG structure opens up even more possibilities. It's a little bit more freedom in a way, and it's something new for us, and I think our players will enjoy it. Because our games have always been close to RPGs, but this time we're going into real RPG — so dialogue trees and leveling up and stats and all the other things you can grow.” Colantonio seems particularly excited about the addition of proper branching dialogue, noting that this is relatively unexplored territory for Wolfeye. “If [a high enough speech skill] Or if you've done something special, you might say something to someone to open up new options and possibilities.”
Character stats, meanwhile, will be familiar to genre enthusiasts, but Colantonio says that everything is still WIP. “We just finished a vertical slice, and the details of the stats will change as we progress through the game, because if you think about it, the stats drive all the core systems. They can change names, they can cover multiple mechanics, so all of that is still very flexible. So it's too early to define all the stats right now. But yeah, it would be something like that — maybe it's not 'Strength', it's 'Gratitude'. We're still trying different things and adapting, so things could change by the time we get to the alpha stage.”
Given all these additions to the formula, is the game still recognizable as an immersive sim in the Arkane mold? “Absolutely, people who have enjoyed our past games will enjoy that layer,” Colantonio assures. “So yes, on the page of an immersive sim, even if from a genre perspective people perceive it as an RPG.”
He gives me a fleeting example of an in-game scenario that mixes abilities, gadgets, and obstacles into an open-ended, Dunwallian mix. “In my current vertical slice, it's the beginning of the game, and so there are different things you do to figure out who you are and the inciting incident of the story. But before that, one of the challenges is to go through a factory guarded by automatons, and here, again, there's a bunch of ways you can go, whether it's a more direct approach with dynamite that you find along the way, or shotguns and protective gear, or protective drones — because you might have drones. Or you can go stealthy and find the security room and disable the automatons.”
As for which RPGs have proven influential, there are some obvious big hitters. “I would definitely mention Fallout,” Colantonio says. “I could list RPGs that we've been very influenced by in general, but that doesn't mean they're a direct comparison or inspiration for us. Skyrim was a very good game, Baldur's Gate 3, of course, was a really great game, and the Fallout series has been around since it was 2D and then it came to 3D with Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4. We really like that kind of structure.”
All of this comes with the caveat that Arkane isn't trying to make something as expansive as an Elder Scrolls game. “The scope, the size — historically we've always created games that are more dense, more high-intensity, and less about size,” Colantonio says. “So that's something we've always gone for — more possibilities and more detail, more crafting, rather than endlessly repetitive dungeons. We're not aiming for that — it's going to be more of a rendered world. If you want to pinpoint it, it's going to land somewhere between Fallout, Prey, and Dishonored.”
The game's world won't have any separate exploration, combat, or town areas; it's a continuously expanding sandbox that supports multiple modalities, nice and ugly. Unlike Weird West, there won't be any loading transitions between areas. Definitely don't call it an open world. “It's not like Weird West, it's more of an evolution of Prey in terms of the structure of the game,” Colantonio says. “Prey is technically considered continuous, some people say 'no, it's an open world.' The reason we don't want to call it an open world is because it comes with the expectation that it's going to be huge — you know, it takes six months to get from A to B on horseback — which is not what we do. But it's technically an open world in the sense that it's so continuous that you can go anywhere you want, there's no loading, etc.”
Colantonio and Roby’s former team, Arkane, isn’t in a great place right now. Parent company Microsoft recently shuttered Arkane Austin, the original creators of Prey, after the studio’s poor reception to vampire shooter Redfall (and, more importantly, Microsoft’s $68.7 billion splurge to buy Activision Blizzard). Arkane Lyon survived these “strategic repositionings” and is working on a new immersive sim centered on Marvel’s vampire hero Blade. The future of the Dishonored franchise, which also includes spy-fiction madness Deathloop — a game technically set in the same universe — remains uncertain, but a leaked Microsoft planning document from 2020 does mention the words “Dishonored 3.”
Wolfeye has long used its connections at Arkane for promotion. But in the wake of Microsoft's cuts, it's increasingly looking like an Arkane rescue mission, reclaiming the legacy of immersive sim design from Bethesda and Microsoft. According to Roby, the studio has “essentially doubled in size” since the release of Weird West, and they've hired many of Arkane's former colleagues from Lyon and Austin, who “already understood the value of the type of games we were making from a design standpoint and a pure experience standpoint.”
Wolfeye has become “alt-Arkane,” Colantonio suggests in closing. “I think it's the spirit of Arkane, absolutely, but Wolfeye is its own company. We have so many people from Arkane now that it feels like being at Arkane before it was acquired. So yeah, it's a liberated Arkane. A free Arkane.”
Next year, there will be a limited number of private alpha tests for WolfEye's new game.