Arkane Studios founder Raphaël Colantonio was recently interviewed by PC Gamer and had the chance to share his own thoughts on a couple of topics, starting with the closure of the Austin office.
As you’ll most certainly remember, Microsoft decided to shut down the studio’s US branch (alongside Tango Gameworks) earlier this year, largely due to the failure of Redfall. Unsurprisingly, Colantonio wasn’t a fan of the choice, calling it ‘stupid’:
I think if you look a little bit, it’s obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group of people that have made some cool things and that could pull it off again. I think it was a decision that just came down to, ‘We need to cut something.’ Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They’re playing a different game. The rules that they play, we might not understand them. It’s a different thing. It’s hard to know why they did what they did. The only thing that I stand by is saying that the specific choice of killing Arkane Austin, that was not a good decision.
Recreating a very special group like that is, I would dare to say, impossible. It takes forever. When you have that magic of Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare etc that all come together, it’s a specific moment in time and space that just worked out this way, that took forever to reach. Those people together can really make magic. It’s not like, ‘Doesn’t matter, we’ll just rehire.’ No, try it. That’s what big groups do all the time. They try to just hire massively and overpay people to create those magic groups. It doesn’t work like this. So to me, that was stupid. But what do I know?
As a reminder, Colantonio left Arkane over seven years ago precisely because Bethesda had planned a switch towards live service games. Dishonored and Prey hadn’t sold as well as they hoped, so there was a push towards live service (which didn’t end well).
Colantonio also discussed with PC Gamer why immersive simulations never went mainstream:
If you don’t hit the market, it doesn’t matter how good your game is. Prey is a good example of that, where it was sold as an immersive sim. It’s an immersive sim in every way one can imagine. But because of that, there were a lot of marketing points that were spent in trying to explain to people with an immersive sim is. Nobody wonders what an RPG is. We might debate whether the Bethesda RPGs are an immersive sim or not, but who cares? The market just understands what an RPG is. Same with Baldur’s Gate. If you say, ‘This is an immersive sim,’ you’re going to have a tiny percentage of people that are super excited because they know what it means.
And then the other ones, they’re going to be like, ‘What is an immersive sim?’ And then you’re trying to explain to them what it is and they say, ‘Well, that sounds like most games. Every game is trying to be cohesive. Every game has possibilities. What are you talking about?’ It’s like, ‘Nah, man, if you don’t know, you don’t know.’
Still, the veteran game designer (whose credits while at Arkane include Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Dishonored, and Prey) believes immersive sims might simply start to seep into every genre in the future, rather than being shoehorned into a category that not every gamer fully understands.
That is, after all, what Colantonio’s WolfEye Studios did with Weird West, which was an isometric action RPG with immersive sim elements. Following that debut game, the studio is now making a more ambitious title in the first-person action RPG genre, and we can bet it’ll have plenty of immersive sim features. The game will enter limited Alpha testing in 2025, and you can sign up for it on the official website.
