Ricardo Bare Interview – Arkane Studios and Dishonored

Ricardo Bare, the lead designer at Arkane Studios had a chat with VG247 during this year’s QuakeCon. He talked about the company’s future, the team’s plans to experiment with more multiplayer elements, and the fate of the Dishonored series that’s said to be on hold for now. Here’s a snippet:

As for the studio’s most popular series, Dishonored, it seems like it might be a while before we see another, if we do at all. With Arkane’s assassination series, the story came to a natural conclusion with the last release, Death of the Outsider.

“I can’t say definitively what might happen down the road, anything could happen, but [Dishonored] is resting for now,” Bare tells me. “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.”