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WolfEye's debut game Weird West attempted to pack a little of Dishonored's immersive sim sorcery into a top-down action-RPG. For the studio's next game, co-founders Raphaël Colantonio and Julien Roby are leaning into comparisons with their old endeavours at Arkane more earnestly. The new game - currently untitled and without a release date - is a first-person sci-fi RPG set in an alternate-1900s North America, which ostensibly combines the ingenuity and gadgetry of Dishonored and Prey with a "real RPG" experience redolent of Skyrim and modern-day Fallout.
"The structure is very freeform, and you can explore whatever you want," Colantonio tells me over videocall. "But the mobility and the type of gameplay is very reminiscent of games that we've worked on in the past, like Prey or Dishonored. So you have this blend between an RPG, like an open experience, where you can go wherever you want, and level up, and there's branching etcetera, but at the same time, the physicality and the types of gadgets and powers that you've seen in games from Arkane before. So if you look at the continuum from Dishonored to Prey, and then we imagine, how would it be if it was even more open than that, even more RPG than Prey."
Image credit: WolfEye
Colantonio and Roby aren't saying much about the game's story right now, but the announcement screens give you a sense of the ambience and stakes: industrial brickwork, big smoky skies, automatons of delicately embossed steel. There are Gatling guns and water silos, canyons lined with rickety gantries, and workshops sliced into what seem like convenient shady hiding spots by the setting sun.
"It's a world where you can recognise the scenery, but then the types of technology are futuristic, even though in a style of fabrication that would have made sense in the 1900s," Colantonio says. "That's why you have this really unique look - it's not really steampunk, but some people will say it's steampunk. And part of the story is that at some point you will realise why this alternate timeline was created."
The developers aren't quite ready to talk about specific gadgets at your disposal, either. The project entered pre-production in 2022, and Wolfeye have only just finished the first vertical slice - that is, an internal demo which gives a sense of every aspect of the experience. But you can expect to get your grubby mitts on automatons of various kinds, together with firearms such as shotguns and one particular fancy traversal tool which sounds like it wants to be this game's Blink.
"We have this thing that is a magnetic rope, so it sticks to any metal in a very systemic way," Colantonio says. "If there is any metal in the scene, like a bin or anything, it sticks to it and spawns a rope you can use to climb, for example." You'll also get abilities that appear more supernatural in nature, such as one that lets you "set a point that allows you to escape from the middle of combat later".
In general, Colantonio goes on, the game is about "going deeper into the space of possibilities" offered by his and Roby's previous projects at Arkane, while stirring in concepts and approaches from traditional role-players. "If you think about our games, I think they have, one, interesting worlds to explore that are very - I don't know if realistic is the word, but even though they are not real they are grounded, there's full coherence and lore that players will enjoy discovering. And the other aspect is play your way. There's a very sandboxy aspect to it, where you can customise your playstyle and the game responds to it as well as branching the story. If you did some things, there are consequences now and then - there are multiple ways to do things.
"So we are doing this again, but I think putting this in an RPG structure gives even more possibilities. It's a little more free, in a way, and that's new for us and I think our players will enjoy it. Because our games have always been adjacent to RPGs, but this time we're going real RPG - so dialogue trees, level-ups and stats and other things that you can grow." Colantonio seems especially enthused about the addition of proper branching dialogue, noting that this is relatively unexplored territory for Wolfeye. "If you have [a high enough speech skill] or if you've done something specific, you can tell something to someone to access new options and possibilities."
The character stats, meanwhile, will be familiar to genre aficionadoes, though Colantonio again cautions me that everything is still WIP. "We've just finished a vertical slice, and the detail of the stats will change as we make progress in the game, because if you think about it, the stats are guiding all the underlying systems. They can change name, they can encompass more mechanics than one, so all of this is still very flexible. So it's too early right now to describe all of the stats. But yeah, it would be that kind of thing - maybe it's not "Strength" but "Fortitude". We're still trying different things and adapting, so that might change all the way until alpha."
Image credit: WolfEye
Is the game still recognisable as an immersive sim in the Arkane mold, given all these additions to the formula? "Definitely, people who are into our past games will enjoy that layer," Colantonio assures me. "So yes, it is on the page of an immersive sim, even though from a genre perspective, people will perceive it as an RPG."
He gives me a tentative example of an in-game scenario that brings abilities, gadgets and obstacles together into an open-ended, Dunwallian melange. "In the current vertical slice, it's the beginning of the game, and so there are different things you do to understand who you are and the story's inciting incident. But before that, one of the challenges is to go through a factory that's protected by automatons, and here there are, again, many ways you can do things, whether it's the more direct approach with dynamite you've found on the way, or shotguns and protective gear or protective drones - because you might have drones. Or you can be sneaky and find the security room and disable the automatons."
As to which RPGs have proven influential, there are some obvious big hitters. "I would definitely mention Fallout," Colantonio says. "I can tell you a list of RPGs that we've been very impressed with in general, but it doesn't mean that they are a direct comparison or inspiration for us. Skyrim has been a very good one, Baldur's Gate 3, of course, a really fantastic game, and the Fallout series, from when it was 2D and since it came to 3D with Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4. That kind of structure is really what we like."
All of this comes with the caveat that Arkane aren't trying to make anything nearly as sprawling as an Elder Scrolls game. "The scope, the size - historically we've always created games that are more dense, higher density, and less about size," Colantonio says. "So that is something we always favour - more possibilities and more detail, more craft, over endless repetitive dungeons. We're not going for that - it's going to be more of a crafted world. It will land somewhere between Fallout, Prey and Dishonored, if you wanted to try to pinpoint it."
The game's world won't have any discrete exploration, combat or town areas; it'll be a steadily unrolling sandbox that supports a multitude of methods, nice and nasty. Unlike Weird West, it won't have any loading transitions between areas. Definitely don't call it an open world, though. "It's not like Weird West, it's more of an evolution of Prey, if we were to look at the game structure," Colantonio notes. "Prey, technically it would be considered continuous, some people would say 'no, it's an open world'. The reason we don't want to say open world is that it comes with expectations that it's going to be gigantic - you know, it takes six months to ride a horse from A to B - which is not at all what we do. But technically, it's an open world in the sense that it's so continuous, you can go anywhere, there's no loading, etcetera."
Colantonio and Roby's old outfit Arkane isn't in a great place, at present. Parent company Microsoft recently shut down Prey's original creators, Arkane Austin, following a poor reception for the studio's vampire shooter Redfall (and more importantly, following Microsoft's $68.7 billion splurge on the acquisition of Activision Blizzard). Arkane Lyon have survived these "strategic repositionings", and are working on a new immersive sim featuring Marvel's vampire hero Blade. The future of the Dishonored series - which technically includes spy-fi extravaganza Deathloop, a game set in the same universe - remains ambiguous, though the words "Dishonored 3" appear on a leaked Microsoft planning document from 2020.
Wolfeye have long traded on their Arkane associations for publicity. But in the wake of Microsoft's reductions, they increasingly resemble an Arkane rescue mission, clawing back that 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 a lot of former colleagues from Arkane Lyon and Austin, these being people "who know already the value of the kind of game we're doing from a design standpoint, and from a pure experience standpoint".
Wolfeye has become the "alt-Arkane," suggests Colantonio in closing. "I think it's the spirit of Arkane, for sure, but Wolfeye is its own company. We do have so many people from Arkane at this point that it does feel like being at Arkane prior to being acquired. So yes, it's an unleashed Arkane. It's a free Arkane."
Look out for a limited private alpha test for WolfEye's new game next year.
