Dishonored co-creator says it was 'a shock' when Microsoft closed Arkane Austin after Redfall's release: 'We were working on something really cool'

Arkane Austin is far from the only studio that Microsoft—in its push to post 30% profit margins year upon year—has closed down. But for me personally, it was the most upsetting. While its vampire looter-shooter Redfall was not the studio's finest work, its previous projects include 2012's brilliant immersive-sim Dishonored, and 2017's System Shock successor Prey—which I increasingly believe to be one of the best games of all time.

Despite this legacy, Arkane Austin's story came to an end just a year after Redfall's launch. Recently, the studio's former director Harvey Smith discussed these events and how they affected the team on the My Perfect Console podcast (via Kotaku).

"I got a call the night before and spent a very stressful night thinking about that, every company makes the decisions they make for the reasons they make them. I don't agree with them often," Smith told host Simon Parkin.

"It was a shock, because we had done really good work, and this is a group of people, in some cases, who had worked together for one project [and] in other cases, like me and Ricardo Bare [Prey: Mooncrash's creative lead] for instance, had worked together since the late nineties."

The loss of such institutional knowhow in these situations is under-discussed in and of itself. But it was the younger people on his team that Smith was most upset for. "Who I really felt for were the people that were new, like, this was their first project, or they'd only been in the industry for a little while" he says. "Mostly it was shock and it was trying to help, especially the people that, for whom, this was just a mind-blowing experience."

Reflecting upon how the closure affected him personally, Smith says that it took a while for him to process everything, partly because he was occupied working on Redfall's post-launch improvements to make the game as it could be before the end. "I was just like, head down for a while. Dealing with that and then only really a couple of months into it did I stop and breathe."

Indeed, Smith is proud of the effort the team made to improve Redfall after its disappointing launch. "We made this huge full court press inside the company, as it was being closed down to release [the] 1.4 version of Redfall, which we thought was a huge upgrade to the game," he says. "If we had launched with that and then built the game from there, that might have been a different story."

Smith is thankful to Microsoft for letting Arkane get that patch out. "Microsoft allowed us to finish 1.4 with a lot of campaigning going on for it. And as a result the team's work wasn't wasted, and the game that sits up there today is much better than the one that we released at launch." Nonetheless, he doesn't think the decision to close the studio was the right one. "It was not a decision I agreed with. I did believe very much in the future of the studio. We were working on something very cool."

While he doesn't specify what that cool thing was, Smith briefly alludes to a couple of other unfinished projects Arkane worked on over the years. He reiterates how Arkane was working on a Thief game before Eidos reassumed control of the license. But mainly he highlights that, before Dishonored, the studio was developing a Blade Runner game. "We were working for a while on a Blade Runner game, which was super exciting to me. What we could have done with Blade Runner…"

Arkane Austin's closure marked the end of the immersive sim revival of the 2010s, which brought us Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex sequels alongside Arkane's work. Consequently, the last few years have proven even more fallow than usual, with Nightdive System Shock remake and this year's indie immersive sim Skin Deep being the only major events in the genre (and possibly The Black Parade, a Thief mod so incredibly ambitious that it's basically a full game)

There are some promising projects on the horizon though, like the Thief-inspired Gloomwood, which is currently in early access, alongside Warren Spector's ambitious multiplayer take on stealth Thick as Thieves. Then of course, there's Arkane Lyon's long-anticipated Blade game. We're still not sure what shape that's going to take, but I would be shocked if it didn't have some Dishonored DNA in it.