As teased earlier this week, Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio has today unveiled the first details of his next game at WolfEye Studios.
While the game’s name is still under wraps, this new project is a first-person action RPG that’s set in an alternate America in the 1900s, marking a shift in time and perspective from the top-down, isometric sandbox towns of WolfEye’s debut game, Weird West.
As the studio also previously teased, the new game’s visuals will be grounded in a retro sci-fi aesthetic – and if the first three in-game screenshots didn’t already give it away, Colantonio (who’s creative director for this new game) and executive producer Julien Roby tell me over a video call that both its gameplay and art direction are intended to be “something like Fallout meets Dishonored”.
“That’s where we want to be, we want to be in that space,” Colantonio tells me. “If there is such a thing as a continuum between Fallout and Dishonored, I would say Prey is somewhere in the middle because it’s already more RPG than Dishonored, and this new game is somewhere closer to Fallout, as far as the RPG-ness goes.”
That means you can expect “a lot of [quest objectives] such as ‘investigate about this thing, infiltrate that building’,” Colantonio explains, “but with any approach you want.” This can range from “very, very direct” approaches, perhaps utilizing the new weapon mods WolfEye are making for this game, or “more indirect” methods, such as talking your way in or out of a scenario with the game’s speech options. All classic RPG fare, in other words, which Colantonio and Roby hope will “add even more layers of possibilities [to the game], which is really what we’ve always been about.”
“I love personally RPGs that fall back on their feet when you shoot them between the eyes, for example,” Colantonio says. “Games from Obsidian are pretty good at that, and that’s that zone that we’re hitting in this game.”
The world will be “continuous”, too, allowing players to “go anywhere” and “kill anyone you want”, Colantonio adds. He doesn’t ever mention the words ‘open world’, mind, but I get the feeling it will at least be more connected than the discrete locations of Weird West, for example.
Alas, WolfEye isn’t ready to reveal any details about the citing event that set this alternate timeline in motion yet either – only that “something happened in America,” Colantonio says, “and the player is going to find this out as they play. It’s going to be one of the reveals in the development of the plot.”
As for what part of America the game will take place in, there are a couple of hints we can glean from those initial screenshots WolfEye has released. It still looks as though there will be a certain Wild West-ness about it, judging by the canyons and rocky landscapes, and when I put this to Colantonio, he confirms that, “Yes, of course, you can recognise the views and the vistas. It’s in that area, and in that location.”
Crucially, though, the game won’t be drawing from traditional Western tropes. “I think the big distinction we’re making here is, as far as genre literature goes, this is more like sci-fi literature than it is Wild West or whatever,” he says. “I think the Western is a genre of literature that people associate with certain types of scenarios like revenge or duels in the streets. We don’t have any of that.”
Rather, it’s more of a visual backdrop “where something so crazy has happened that there’s not much left of it,” he adds, though he does tease that at least some form of culture has managed to evolve in the intervening 20-30 years since that event in the game, “but it’s already a different thing,” he clarifies. “If you really wanted to pinpoint it, it would be like some sort of, I don’t know, steampunk outtake 1900s.”
It’s an ambitious step-up for this entirely remote team, but throughout our conversation, Colantonio and Roby are both keen to emphasise how many former Arkane developers are now working at WolfEye – including Prey’s lead visual designer and Dishonored level artist Emmanuel Petit, who’s now the art director on this new project. They have also been able to hire a handful of Arkane Austin developers following that studio’s closure earlier in the year, though Colantonio states that “we had done most of our growth before” over the last couple of years. Still, working with so many former colleagues from across their respective careers “makes things a lot easier,” says Roby, and Colantonio agrees. “It’s the same formation of people [from Prey and Dishonored] who are now with us, so we already know what we’re doing,” he says.
That said, the studio’s headcount still only numbers between 55-60 people, according to Roby, and the challenge will be “trying to keep the game within a scope that allows for the team to be that size and not too much beyond,” he says. “Beyond that size is where things start to change the way you actually work, and we’d like to keep that sense of, ‘Hey, everyone has a big impact on the game and a big enough say on what they’re doing’.”
As for when we might next hear more details about WolfEye’s new game, it likely won’t be until next year, when WolfEye are planning to run a private alpha for it (sign-ups for which are available now).
“We’re still discussing the details for it,” Roby says, “but whatever we call it, we want to make sure that before we release the game, we get the community involved.” The studio put on a similar test for Weird West, but Roby admits that they did it “way too late before release and we didn’t really have time to act on the most major feedback”. Hence the desire to bring in players earlier this time, so they can better act on any potential problems.
With pre-production now complete, WolfEye will now be moving into full production while they search for a publishing partner.
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