Summary

• Wolfeye Studios is working on a new first-person immersive sim, in the vein of Dishonored and Prey.
• Raphael Colantonio and Wolfeye have taken lessons gained during Weird West's development cycle and have brought them to the studio's newest title.
• Colantonio briefly touches on his feelings regarding Game Pass and Microsoft's shuttering of Arkane Austin, a studio he founded.

Wolfeye Studios has teased its unnamed second game, a first-person retro sci-fi immersive sim. Technically speaking, this is Wolfeye's first real crack at a first-person immersive sim, following the 2022 release of its debut title 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Weird West. However, you'd need help finding a member of Wolfeye who hasn't left their imprint on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dishonored, Prey, or another staple of the genre.

This is especially true for studio founder Raphael Colantonio. Having founded 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Arkane Studios in 1999, Colantonio directed Prey and co-directed Dishonored with ꧋Harvey Smith before departing the studio in 2017 due to creative burnout, among other reasons. After a "bootstrapped" development of Weird West, Colantonio and his team of veterans are now making a new game in the genre that made Arkane famous.

"Building new and interesting worlds has always been important to us," Colantonio says. "This world is retrofuturistic. You start in the 1900s, in a sort of Colorado backdrop, but you realise tons of the machinery and technology are very futuristic, but were manufactured in that time. It's not an accident, there's a full backstory behind it. At first, you're just playing in that world which is fascinating and cool but at some point, you realise that it actually all started in our world."

Colantonio explains that this new world is an alternate version of our own, but we won't immediately know what triggered its divergence in historical events. We've already seen a couple of screenshots of the dusty, retro futuristic world Wolfeye is building, which you can check out throughout this piece.

The studio is certainly trying to recreate the success of Prey and Dishonored, with many of the same team members, processes and system design techniques carrying over from those development cycles. Colantonio explains that the way the team builds lore, levels and their verticality, AI behaviours, the types of gadgets available to the player and so on are all inspired by the team's design processes at Arkane. "Yeah, there's something about the flavour of this game that if you're a fan of [Prey and Dishonored], it would be shocking if you don't like this game," Colantonio resolves.

The game isn’t just a retro futuristic Dishonored, though. Wolfeye's new game is also adapting RPG elements, including dialogue options and character progression. Colantonio frames it to me as if on a scale between Dishonored and Fallout, Prey was a step towards Fallout, and this game is an even bigger step towards the post-apocalyptic role-playing game.

Fallout 2 director and creative veteran Chris Avellone is working on the project. Composer Mick Gordon (Doom, Prey) ha꧒s also signe🐠d on.

"It's not a departure, but an expansion," Colantonio explains. "As much as we enjoy the basis of Prey and Dishonored, we took the full game into a format that is more in the RPG genre. The world is bigger, it's continuous, you can go anywhere you want. It's quest-based, there are stats, there is dialogue. It steps into the RPG genre, which, for us, allows us to take the immersive sim further with player empowerment and all of the things that players can do, layers of choices they have and if you add all of the dialogue choices, you have even more possibilities with branching stories and so on."

Colantonio has previously preferred level-based game design with silent protagonists like Corvo Attano and Morgan Yu. When asked whether a more open-world approach was the future of immersive sims, Colantonio took some time to ponder the genre that has 🔜come to describe many of his games.

"Some people would describe Skyrim as an immersive sim," he remarks. "It really heavily relies on a lot of simulation, you can do tons of cool little cheats, you can do these legal exploits that make the game so fun and unique for the player. To me, even though they are big open-world RPGs, they also have immersive sim value. It's more of a spirit than a genre, those values. I think mission-based games still have a place, but even with Prey, we moved towards something that was free-form exploration."

People spend a lot of time debating exactly what an immersive sim is; waxing lyrical about what features are core to an immersive sim, and whether this game or that game should be considered a part of the genre. I pose BioShock's creator Ken Levine as an example of someone who doesn't resonate with the descriptor, but Colantonio has a different view.

"To me, an immersive sim is very… 'If you know, you know'. It's more like a secret handshake," he explains. "I'm very happy for our games to be associated with immersive sims in the sense of, that stamp is very special. I myself am a big fan of immersive sims. But it's inside baseball. People spend too much time trying to define what it is and what it is not. It's more like a philosophy of design you can apply to any genre. I'm sure there's a racing game that could be an immersive sim."

Wolfeye is holding a closed alpha for its upcoming game, a process that cemented itself in the minds of the team after how much the community was able to help improve Weird West post-release. Wolfeye's CEO and executive producer Julien Roby tells me that though alphas are unusual for single-player games, they can help a studio understand how a player chooses to play in a genre where the game's systems allow thousands of possibilities.

"We wanted to make sure to involve the community to see how they get on, how they react to new features," Roby explains. "Do they play the game in a way we didn't expect? Making a game that supports every potential decision is tricky so the goal is that with all of the big feedback items, we can act on them and try to address everything before release."

A secondary effect of an early-access period is that it builds a community of players that can promote the game through word of mouth, often the most effective marketing method for any product. Wolfeye's first game Weird West was positively received, but the community was able to vocalise what it felt the game was 'missing' so the team could respond to these requests. In terms of game design, Colantonio feels they learned a valuable lesson with Weird West.

We 🦋really have a passion for strong emotional moments that can only be achieved with human craft.

"We really explored the procedural aspect of design in Weird West," he begins. "Some of it was to generate content and some of it was more… little events that were generated dynamically based on things that happened to you before. The little events are cool and we want to re-use them. As for content, we don't believe in it so much. We really have a passion for strong emotional moments that can only be achieved with human craft."

Weird West saw something of a renaissance when it was added to Game Pass, though Colantonio has expressed his distaste for 'buffet-like' services in the past. He's remaining pragmatic about the prospect of their new title appearing on Game Pass, however.

"I think everything is business at the end of the day," he admits. "I dislike that format in general because it shifts gamer's perception of games, suddenly they become a commodity, they become expendable. I'll try it for 5 seconds and if I don't like it, I'll move on to something else. The danger is that it influences game design in a way that everything has to be hooky immediately, so you could lose depth. However, give us 100 million dollars and we might say yes," he finishes with a chuckle.

Microsoft's oft-criticised closure of Arkane Austin, a studio Colantonio founded, isn't likely to have clouded Colantonio's view of the mega-corporation.

"I absolutely did not see it coming," Colantonio says. "I think it's a shame. I think Arkane has shown multiple times… I mean the last game before Redfall was Prey from the same team. They showed they can really pull off a game in that vein if you let them do something they are built for. It's shocking that Microsoft would be so short-sighted. They're just looking at a bottom line.

"When you operate with infinite money, you should give a chance to something that has a chance to succeed. Arkane Austin was a bunch of badasses, so it's a shame. It doesn't make sense. But it is what it is. Once you sell a company to one of those big behemoths, they don't operate with logic that makes sense to the rest of the world. They are in a different sphere. The public companies world has different rules that aren't fully understandable. You know when you sell to them, it can happen. They can keep your IPs and close you down."

Now emboldened by the freedom of running an independent studio, Colantonio hopes to create a game in the same vein as his greatest hits. If Wolfeye's new immersive sim comes anywhere close to cult hits Dishonored and Prey, it's sure to be an exciting prospect.