Raphael Colantonio wants you to imagine a spectrum. On its left you have Dishonored, the series he co-created with fellow immersive sim veteran Harvey Smith. It’s relatively linear and tightly mission-based; once you’ve finished with a level there’s no going back. On the right there’s Fallout: New Vegas—a rambling open world. 2017’s Prey is in the dead centre, open but dense, with some areas gated off until you have the equipment (or creativity) to get in.
Colantonio says the new immersive sim from his team at WolfEye Studios sits between Prey and New Vegas on that spectrum—”We favour density over size.” That’s all you need to say to rocket to the top of my wishlist. Billed as a “First-person action RPG,” Colantonio and WolfEye CEO Julien Roby make the game sound like a return to their roots at Arkane: “We are even closer to that Fallout thing, [but] still with the values of previous games we’ve worked on like Prey and Dishonored. It’s mobility and that kind of physicality, the level design, the worldbuilding of those games, but served in a structure that is more open than ever.”
Those are all my keywords, and I reckon the same goes for a lot of other immersive sim sickos out there. Lucky thing, too, because Colantonio and Roby are keeping their cards very close to their chest when it comes to revealing anything else about the game.
All Colantonio would tell me was that it’ll have all the RPG stuff you expect—stats, dialogue choices, XP-based level ups—in a “what-if story” set in “the early 1900s in America,” where “a big tech event… like some sort of crazy technology from the future came” and set the world on an alternate course about 30 years before the game takes place. That scans with one of the game’s earliest teases: An image of a whiteboard at WolfEye’s office with the words “first person” and “retro sci-fi” written on it. The scant few screenshots WolfEye has released as teasers make the game look like someone smashed BioShock and Firewatch together.
Depending on your perspective, it’s either a departure or a return for Colantonio and Roby. WolfEye’s first game was the experimental Weird West, a third-person, isometric immersive sim with an anthological narrative, and which some PCG writers (myself included) will tell you was severely underrated. Even long-term fans of these kinds of games were a bit sceptical of it: How could a 3rd-person game be actually, you know, immersive?
So WolfEye’s as-yet-unnamed next game isn’t that, but it is in-keeping with its devs’ previous experience at Arkane. “I think we have a desire to become better at our craft,” says Roby, “That’s exciting for us, to go back to first person and build up on all those years of experiments.”
“It’s my favourite view,” adds Colantonio, “I think naturally we all went back to what we know how to do best, and it’s also what gamers want us to do, so it perfectly aligns.” By “we all,” Colantonio doesn’t just mean him and Roby. The pair noted that WolfEye is home to more than a few Arkane alumni, hard at work on the new game.
Plus, Weird West gave the studio a chance to figure some things out about itself. “We did like some of the procedural stuff [in Weird West],” says Colantonio, “but there was a lot of procedural stuff we thought was not for us… I don’t think procedural quests are a good idea for us: It’s very hard to generate content that has the emotional impact that a crafted quest has.”
In other words, I’m fully expecting WolfEye’s game-that-has-not-been-named to feel very much like it came from an alternate-universe Arkane: A first-person RPG with a focus on its narrative, with room in its systems for players to come up with their own solutions to problems. God willing, I’ll pick up a crate at some point and it’ll turn see-through, and I’ll know I’ve come home.
It’ll be a while until I find out, though, which you could probably guess by the way I keep having to find new hyphenated phrases to use in place of a name. The-next-immersive-sim-from-WolfEye-studios has only just wrapped up pre-production, and Roby and Colantonio are currently in the process of showing it off to potential publishers behind closed doors.
There will be an “exclusive and limited private alpha” next year, though. “Essentially,” says Roby, “the motivation for next year is to try to involve the community of players into the game development early on, before we release, so that we have enough time to take their feedback into account in a meaningful way.”
But those are the only crumbs we can expect in the medium and mid-term future. Colour me excited though. Arkane—and Colantonio specifically—has been responsible for some of my favourite games of all time. To hear the gang is getting together to put out something in the style of its greatest hits, with all that experience under its belt? Even crumbs are enough to make me very interested indeed.