Prey developer Arkane made their name with the fantastic Dishonored series, which received the excellent Death of the Outsider expansion just last year. The games have been well received, so we’re sad to say that fans should not expect to see Dishonored 3 get revealed any time soon, as according to Arkane the series is “resting.”
This is according to lead designer Ricardo Bare, who was interviewed by VG247 at QuakeCon. He told the site, “I can’t say definitively what might happen down the road, anything could happen, but [Dishonored] is resting for now.”
Bare suggests that the reason isn’t to do with sales, as some may expect, but more like Arkane wanting to do other games – although they still want to continue making first-person ‘immersive sims’ such as Dishonored, its various spin-offs and expansions, or Prey. “As far as pure immersive sims go, I don’t know if we’re going to continue to make like carbon copy – 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. 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’. And, typically, we stick to first-person, though that’s not a hard rule and we might try other things from time to time.”
Dishonored’s creative director Harvey Smith previously suggested that if the studio were going to do a Dishonored 3, it would have to feature “different characters in different situations” since Death of the Outsider marked a definitive end to the current storyline. Smith said that he hoped there were more games in the series, but admitted that “he honestly doesn’t know” if it’s going to happen.
We thought Dishonored 2 was fantastic, earning a perfect 10 from our reviewer Fraser Brown. Expansion Death of the Outsider was excellent too, which Kirk McKeand awarded a 9 to. It’d be a crying shame if the Dishonored series ended there, but we’d be just as happy if Arkane applied their skills to a brand new game.