I will also give you Ghostwire: Tokyo 2, that game owned
The Zenithesda plan is a litany of safe bets, because that’s the culture of games now. It costs loads to make a big game, so for a company with shareholders it makes more sense to make and remake the same things over and over again because that will yield profit more reliably than taking a big swing with something weird or new. EvenStarfieldis largely a remake of other Besthesda games and concepts. If you take a swing and miss, as withImmortals Of Aveum, a chintzy fantasy that didn’t do everything right but at leasttriedand demonstrated a developer having ideas, you might not get a second chance. You might have to lay offalmost half of your staff.
So. We remake. We serialise. Dishonored 3 is a sequel in a series I do at least really like. It’s weird, specific, imaginative, and the systems that allow you to run around using stealth-magic to gut people (or knock people out if you’re doing a low chaos run, I don’t know your life) work very well. But it was also wrapped up pretty well in the Death Of The Outsider expansion, a game about removing the very source of your stealth powers, one way or the other. Death Of The Outsider showed the world itself moving away from superstition and mythologising and towards technology and rationality. So do you make it a prequel? Do you just ruin it? What do you do?
“But Dishonored is a tried and tested series from a tried-and-tested studio,” you might rightly point out. And thanks to this leak, I can point out toyouthat Microsoft is so risk averse they decided not to bringBaldur’s Gate 3to Game Pass, anddescribed it as a “second-run Stadia PC RPG"in a leaked email. Why should I, writing on a PC site, trust a video game company that uses “PC” as a pejorative term - despite the fact that it provides the operating system for a vast majority of PCs! I am looking a couple of years into the future and I see Arkane being sunsetted, or massively downsized and turned into a developer that makes Starfield DLC. Although at least that might mean the Starfield DLC was interesting, I suppose.
If I sound down, I am. I’m having one of those days. If it is revealed that Kestral or Platinum are brand-new Arkane games, or some weird cool different thing that’s all jagged and strange, and that hasn’t been rounded down by the forces of market-trends-windsocking like a beach pebble in a whirlpool, you can bring me back to this article and rub my nose in it and tell me to take my business outside. But I woke up today unconvinced that we live in a world willing to make the next Dishonored game, either metaphorically or literally.
(They should make infinite Ghostwire: Tokyo sequels though, that’s the exception that proves the rule).
