Back in 2017, Arkane released two great single-player games - Prey and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Prey was developed by Arkane Austin, while Dishonored: Death of the Outsider began life as an expansion for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dishonored 2, before⛄ Arkane Lyon spun it off as its own standalone game.
In the five years since, neither studio has released a game that's strictly single-player. Prey's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mooncrash expansion, released in 2018, added a multiplayer mode, Typhon Hunter. In 2019, Lyon worked with MachineGames on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wolfenstein: Youngblood, a co-op shooter that had as much DNA shared with Borderlands as it did with B.J. Blazkowicz. Then, in 2021, Lyon launched 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Deathloop, a single-player/multiplayer hybrid where the player's campaign as Colt can be interrupted by invasions from Julianna, controlled by another real-life player across the internet. In 2023, we're getting Redfall, Austin's first game since Prey. It, like Wolfenstein: Youngblood, is a co-op shooter. Unlike Youngblood, it's set in a big open-world setting. In Arkane's 18 years of life prior to 2017, (outside of KarmaStar, the studio's little known 2009 foray into mobile gaming) it had released just one game with a multiplayer component - Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, and Dishonored 2 were exclusively single-player.
Arkane's games have rarely been big money makers. The first Dishonored was a big hit, but since then the studio's games have gained a reputation as rich, complex, systemic titles that impress its fans and developers but have a hard time making much mainstream impact.
Deathloop was pretty good, and Redfall looks like it could be good, too. But, it's disappointing to see a studio renowned for its rich single-player experiences pivoting so hard toward multiplayer.
It's worth noting that Deathloop was announced before the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox/Bethesda merger that brought Arkane under Microsoft control, and Redfall just a few months after. Microsoft has shown a willingness to allow its developers to pursue less commercial products. Josh Sawyer, director on Obsidian's Pentiment, 🐬sa🌠id that he never would have pitched the medieval adventure game if not for Xbox Game Pass. The subscription service has shifted the understanding of what a game needs to achieve to be commercially viable. A game doesn't necessarily need to have massive sales anymore, it just needs to encourage a subset of Game Pass subscribers to maintain their subscriptions. Prior to the merger, Zenimax's more traditional business model dictated that Arkane's games needed to sell enough copies to make a profit. Microsoft's pivot toward 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Pass may allow for more leeway as long as the ser♋vice continues to be profitable pܫost-Redfall.
This isn't to say that Arkane devs don't have genuine interest in making the kind of games they've made for the past five years. Deathloop, in particular, shares a lot of DNA with , a canceled single-player/multiplayer hybrid the company worked on in the mid-’00s. But, the pivot to multiplayer came after Arkane had had multiple games underperform in a row. That would seem to indicate some sort of financial pressure.
Fingers crossed, Game Pass can give Arkane options. If the devs at the studio want to continue to m🌜ake multiplayer games, hopefully they can. But, if they want to return to the single-player style they built their reputation on, I hope they can do that, too.