Why Raphaël Colantonio's next game is and isn't like Dishonored

Raphaël Colantonio and his team at Wolfeye Studios haven't revealed much about their second game. A few teaser images have been released, and the briefest glimpse of gameplay was shared on social media, but the game remains a mystery beyond that.

Two things we know for certain are that it's a first-person action-RPG in a retro sci-fi setting, and that it's going to be in keeping with Colantonio's background as creative director at Dishonored and Prey developer Arkane Studio.

Colantonio describes this as "the perfect project for the team," whose members also include Christophe Carrier (the lead level designer of Dishonored) and Joackim Daviaud (the lead level designer of Dishonored 2), among other former Arkane devs. And he expects fans of their past work will particularly enjoy what Wolfeye is working on, which is dramatically different to Weird West, the top-down action RPG that was Wolfeye's debut title.

"People who loved Dishonored and Prey are going to feel very at home," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "It's uncompromised… We are just going full on into that kind of game [in] the way we create worlds, the way we let choices to the player. And I think there are going to be even more choices this time because of the RPG layer. We'll have a lot of different ways to do things."

It sounds like a natural fit given the team's expertise. If this new title is "the perfect project", why make Weird West first then, a project that's a big step away from their comfort zone?

"After Arkane, I didn't exactly know what I wanted," Colantonio admits. "I knew I wanted to do something smaller. I think Julien [Roby, Wolfeye CEO and another Arkane alum where he was executive producer] was in the same mindset. And we had to go through something smaller because it was a new company, so we had to bootstrap. It's hard to recruit people, and they have to gel. You can't just take 50 people like this and run with it. So, it was a necessary phase for us.

"Some of it was purely artistic. After so many years doing first-person stuff, which was very expensive, very complex, we thought it [was] going to feel good to do something with a little less pressure, easier to recoup on the money. Because our games are always risky on the money side. We do them [out of] passion. Weird West was in that same spirit, except that it was with much less money, and a smaller team."

"Weird West was the first time we had revenue share, kept the IP, were able to do something with not much money, and that felt good. It was grounding, and we needed that in order to recalibrate"

Colantonio adds that Wolfeye believed Weird West would be faster and easier to make – it wasn't. In fact, it was just as difficult as previous projects they had worked on. So upon completion of that project, the team felt the itch to create something more akin to the titles they had been even more passionate about, and that players wanted them to do.

That said, Colantonio stresses that the success of Weird West made the current project possible. While it didn't exactly make the studio rich, it recouped its costs and enabled Wolfeye to recruit the team it needed.

"We had a good deal on Weird West," he continues. "It was the first time that we had revenue share, we kept the IP, were able to do something with not much money, and that felt good. It was grounding, and we needed that in order to recalibrate."

The only glimpse of gameplay we've seen of Wolfeye's new title, teased via the studio's X account in August, shows that it will be played from a first-person perspective and guns will be central to combat, although Colantonio is keen to avoid labelling it a first-person shooter.

Dishonored was focused on stealth, while Weird West's action was interspersed with slower paced sections of exploration and talking to other characters. The implication that this next title will play more like a shooter suggests a new approach for the team, and while Colantonio is keen to emphasise that this project has RPG elements, he notes that moving to shooter-style combat opens up different playstyle possibilities.

"There is something about real-time decision making, as opposed to everything being stats, that makes us feel more in the moment, more immersed," he says. "I'm surprised the intersection between RPG and first-person shooter has not been more of a thing."

"[Players] appreciate they can cheat the game through the systems by doing weird stuff that wasn't planned by the designers"

He points to Bethesda's Fallout games as a prime example of how blending the two genres can work, where players can explore in a very fluid way via first-person, but the optional VATS system – which pauses the action and lets them line up attacks based on damage probability – adds a bit more depth.

While Fallout, Dishonored and Prey have all been named in the same conversation as this new project, Colantonio stresses that they are not direct comparisons as he believes this game will be something very different. Communicating that is a challenge, but one he already faced when first presenting the original Dishonored, which players and media were keen to try and label ahead of release.

"They wanted to understand what it was, so people would say things like, 'It's BioShock meets Assassin's Creed, with a touch of Half-Life.' All those are good games, so that's fine, but in reality, it was not exactly any of those. It's funny, because a friend of mine in the industry even told me recently they're doing a 'Dishonored-like' – I was like, 'So it's BioShock meets Assassin's Creed, with a touch of Half-Life?'

"We do the same for music. 'What genre is it? I need to know otherwise I'm lost, I'm not interested.' We just have to deal with it. I know that ultimately it won't be like any of those. Right now, I've been mentioning Fallout, and Prey, and Dishonored, because in my vision of the game, I know why I'm saying this. But when you play it, you might think of something else. It's a way to try to communicate what it is."

Historically, the immersive sim genre has struggled; Dishonored, Deus Ex, Thief and other franchises that have shaped the immersive sim genre are all currently dormant following commercial struggles with their previous outings. While Colantonio believes immersive sims deserve more success than they have managed historically, he does recognise their complexity can be something of a barrier.

"Their strength is also their weakness," he explains. "The fact that you can do things in so many different ways, it's a big mess of systems, of storytelling. Because on the other side of that, you have games that are very funnelled, very controlled, very safe. You arrive into a place, the doors close around you, boss fight. I can't stand that, because I'm the guy who prefers to come in, and they haven't seen me yet."

Colantonio cites Baldur's Gate 3 as a major step forward in this regard; while that is distinctly an RPG rather than an immersive sim, he says the game "shares a lot of the same values" and has opened many players' eyes to the notion that any given situation may have multiple solutions based on their playstyle and abilities unique to their characters.

"People appreciate all the choices that they had, they notice all the consequences, or they notice all the permutations of things that can happen. They appreciate that they can cheat the game through the systems by doing some weird stuff that was not planned by the designers. Those are amazing realisations from a gamer standpoint.

"And that was a big game. It sold gazillions. And again, I think Skyrim, Fallout, the Bethesda games in general, are adjacent to immersive sim, and they've sold gazillions as well. So, there is a way to make those games sell gazillions.

"It's really about making the player not too lost, making the player feel just the right amount of help, and removing that anxiety – because you make a lot of your own fun in an immersive sim. We just need to encourage things to happen. It's a lot of testing. We all learn more and more as we make these games, so it's a rare type of game, and we are all very passionate about them, so we are still trying to do everything to make them successful."