WolfEye’s fresh first-person RPG is an “evolution” of Prey and Dishonored with mechs, magnets, and a persistent world

WolfEye’s debut game, Weird West, attempted to cram some of Dishonored’s immersive simulation magic into a top-down action-RPG. With their next game, co-founders Raphaël Colantonio and Julien Roby are more seriously leaning into comparisons to their venerable endeavors at Arkane. The fresh game — currently untitled and without a release date — is a first-person sci-fi RPG set in an alternate 1900s North America that supposedly combines the ingenuity and gadgetry of Dishonored and Prey with a “true RPG experience” reminiscent of Skyrim and modern-day Fallout.

“The structure is very freeform and you can explore whatever you want,” Colantonio tells me over a video call. “But the mobility and the type of gameplay is very reminiscent of games we’ve worked on in the past, like Prey and Dishonored. So you have a combination of RPG, like an open-ended experience where you can go wherever you want and level up and branch out and stuff, but at the same time the physicality and the types of gadgets and powers that you’ve seen in Arkane games before. So if you look at the continuum from Dishonored to Prey, and then imagine what it would be like if it was even more open, even more RPG than Prey.”

Colantonio and Roby don’t say much about the game’s plot, but the preview screens give a sense of the atmosphere and the stakes: industrial walls, massive smoky skies, delicately stamped steel automata. There are Gatling guns and water silos, canyons lined with rickety walkways and workshops cut into what seem like comfortable, shaded hideouts by the setting sun.

“It’s a world where you can recognize the setting, but the kinds of technology are futuristic, even though it’s in a production style that would make sense in the 1900s,” Colantonio says. “So you have this really unique look—it’s not real steampunk, but some would say it’s steampunk. And part of the story is that at some point you understand why this alternate timeline was created.”

The developers aren’t ready to talk about the specific gadgets you’ll have at your disposal just yet. The project is set to enter pre-production in 2022, and Wolfeye has only just completed its first vertical slice—an internal demo, that is, that gives you a sense of every aspect of the experience. However, you can expect to find your grubby paws grappling with automatons of all kinds, as well as firearms like shotguns, and one particular, fancy mobility tool that sounds like it wants to be this game’s Blink.

“We have something that’s a magnetic rope, so it sticks to any metal in a very systematic way,” Colantonio says. “If there’s any metal in the scene, like a trash can or anything, it sticks to it and creates a rope that you can use to climb, for example.” You’ll also get abilities that seem more supernatural, such as ones that let you “set up a point that later lets you escape from the middle of a fight.”

Overall, Colantonio continues, the game is about “diving deeper into the possibilities” that his and Roby’s previous projects at Arkane offer, while also mixing in concepts and approaches from conventional RPGs. “If you think about our games, I think they have, one, interesting worlds to explore that are very—I don’t know if realistic is the right word, but even if they’re not realistic, they’re grounded, there’s a whole coherence and story that players will enjoy exploring. And the other aspect is playing the game your way. There’s a very sandbox aspect to it where you can customize your play style and the game responds to that and also branches out the story. If you do something, there are consequences every now and then—there are multiple ways to do that.”

In the meantime, the character stats will be familiar to genre fans, though Colantonio again warns me that it’s all still a work in progress. “We just finished a vertical piece, and the specifics of the stats will change as we go through the game, because if you think about it, the stats drive all the core systems. They can change names, they can cover more than one mechanic, so it’s all still very flexible. So it’s too early to describe all the stats. But yeah, it would be something like—maybe it’s not ‘Strength,’ but ‘Toughness.’ We’re still trying things out and adjusting, so that could change all the way into alpha.”

Is the game still recognizable as an Arkane-style immersive simulator, given all these additions to the formula? “Definitely, people who liked our previous games will appreciate that layer,” Colantonio assures me. “So yes, it’s on the immersive simulator side, although from a genre perspective, people will see it as an RPG.”

He gives me an early example of a scenario in the game that combines skills, gadgets, and obstacles into an open-ended, Dunwallian mix. “In the current vertical slice, it’s the beginning of the game, so there are various things you do to understand who you are and the incident that triggers the story. But before that, one of the challenges is to get through a factory protected by automata, and there are, again, a number of ways you can do that, whether it’s a more direct approach with dynamite that you find along the way, or shotguns and protective gear, or protective drones—because you can have drones. Or you can be sneaky and find a security room and disable the automata.”

When it comes to which RPGs have been influential, there are a few obvious standouts. “I would definitely say Fallout,” Colantonio says. “I could give you a list of RPGs that have really impressed us, but that doesn’t mean they’re direct comparisons or inspirations for us. Skyrim was really good, Baldur’s Gate 3, obviously, a really fantastic game, and the Fallout series, from when it was 2D and when it became 3D with Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4. That kind of structure is what we really like.”

All of this comes with the caveat that Arkane isn’t trying to make anything as sweeping as an Elder Scrolls game. “The scope, the size—historically, we’ve always made games that were denser, more dense, less focused on size,” Colantonio says. “So that’s something we’ve always favored—more possibilities and more detail, more crafting, as opposed to endless, repetitive dungeons. We’re not going to do that—it’s going to be more of a crafting world. It’s going to land somewhere between Fallout, Prey, and Dishonored, if you want to try to pinpoint it.”

The game world won’t have any distinct areas for exploration, combat, or cities; it’ll be an evolving sandbox that supports a variety of methods, both pleasant and unpleasant. Unlike Weird West, there won’t be any loading transitions between areas. But let’s definitely not call it an open world. “It’s not like Weird West, it’s more of an evolution of Prey, if we were to look at the structure of the game,” Colantonio notes. “Prey, technically, would be considered continuous, some would say, ‘No, it’s an open world.’ The reason we don’t want to call it an open world is because there’s an expectation that it’s going to be gigantic—you know, it takes six months to ride a horse from point A to point B—and that’s not what we’re doing at all. But technically it’s an open world in the sense that it’s so continuous that you can go anywhere, there’s no loading, etc.”

Colantonio and Roby’s venerable team, Arkane, aren’t exactly in great shape right now. Parent company Microsoft recently shuttered original Prey creators Arkane Austin following the penniless reception of vampire shooter Redfall (and, more importantly, Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard). Arkane Lyon has weathered those “strategic repositionings” and is working on a fresh immersive sim featuring Marvel’s vampire hero Blade. The future of the Dishonored series — which technically includes the espionage extravaganza Deathloop, a game set in the same universe — remains unclear, though the words “Dishonored 3” appear in a leaked Microsoft planning document from 2020.

Wolfeye has long traded on its Arkane affiliation for publicity. But in the face of Microsoft’s downsizing, they’re increasingly looking like an Arkane rescue mission, reclaiming the legacy of immersive simulator design from Bethesda and Microsoft. According to Roby, the studio has “basically doubled” in size since Weird West was released, and has hired a number of former Arkane collaborators Lyon and Austin, who are people “who already know the value of the type of game we’re making, both from a design standpoint and from a pure experience standpoint.”

Wolfeye has become an “alt-Arkane,” Colantonio suggests in closing. “I think it’s the spirit of Arkane, for sure, but Wolfeye is a separate company. Right now, we have so many people from Arkane that it feels like we were in Arkane before the acquisition. So yeah, it’s an unleashed Arkane. It’s a free Arkane.”

Expect a confined, private alpha test of the fresh WolfEye game next year.