RIP Arkane Studios, I'll miss them...I guess?

I had the urge to play Dark Messiah of Might and Magic recently, and so I did. For a game that is almost two decades old, it can still feel like a revelation. It was also a broken, janky mess. That contradiction, I've realised, is the key to understanding Arkane Studios.

It was a highly experimental sandbox combat sim, the second game Arkane made after Arx Fatalis. It was clearly a smaller, experimental title, something you can tell from the rushed, repetitive nature of its second half. But playing it now, you can see them developing the "Arkane DNA" that would later define them.

Then came 2012. Arkane dropped a bomb on the gaming world with Dishonored. I won't go into a full review, but if you played it back then, you know. It was a masterpiece of player freedom, a stunningly unique world powered by whale oil and black magic, and it let you be a supernatural assassin of unparalleled creativity. For most people, this was THE Arkane game design, and it certified them as a unique and distinct studio.

It was also, unfortunately, their only clear-cut, runaway commercial success.

Fast forward four years to 2016, and we get Dishonored 2. It was alright. It was fun for a bit, but it also felt extremely stale. It was more of the same, albeit with some truly spectacular level designs that only Arkane could create. The problem is, they took four years of development for this. That's a lot of time and money for an iteration that ended up being a commercial disappointment.

Of course, it likely was not their full team working on that, because just six months later they released Prey (2017).

The game's strange afterlife is the perfect example of Arkane's problem. Before the cult fans shout "hidden gem," remember that it was a commercial disaster at full price. The publisher even gave it a permanent price reduction not long after launch, a clear admission that it failed to find an audience. Years later, new players pick it up for less than the price of a coffee and discover its sandbox systems. They are not the target audience from 2017 who expected a polished shooter. They are a new audience with different expectations and a much lower investment. Its "masterpiece" status was not earned through overlooked genius at launch. It was manufactured by years of deep discounts that filtered out everyone except the niche players most likely to praise it.

An actual masterpiece that sold poorly due to marketing is a game like Okami. Released at the very end of the PlayStation 2's life cycle with little fanfare, it failed commercially despite being almost universally beloved for its timeless art style and brilliant gameplay mechanics. Years later, it is hailed as one of the best games ever made because its core experience was fundamentally excellent. Prey does not get this same defense. Its sales were a direct reflection of its divisive design. The game itself was simply not engaging or fun enough for a large majority of players, and no amount of marketing could have fixed the core friction in its gameplay.

This inability to master core genre elements was not a new problem. It goes all the way back to Dark Messiah. Their early attempt at a fantasy RPG had borrowed lore, but its RPG systems were pitiful. It launched in the same year as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, or even Morrowind before that and the comparison made Arkane's RPG efforts look like a school project next to a behemoth.

And if Prey was a commercial misstep, what came next was the final nail in the coffin: Death of the Outsider. To put it bluntly, this DLC sucked arse. I know what you are thinking. How does it have an 86% positive rating on Steam today? It turns out that eight years and countless 75% off sales can work wonders for a game's reputation. The people reviewing it now are not the same people who rejected it at launch. That 86% is a receipt from the fan club, not a true verdict on its quality.

For anyone who actually cared about the story, this expansion was an act of creative bankruptcy. They did not build on the lore. They just erased the best part of it. Worse, they gutted the series' soul by completely removing the Chaos system, which made player choice utterly meaningless.

The die-hards rated it well because the core gameplay loop was still there. It was one more fix, another dose of the Arkane sandbox. For them, that was enough. But for me, and for the wider audience that had already abandoned ship, it was the final signal. Arkane had completely lost the plot.

As you can see, before Arkane was sentenced to death by Redfall, they were already on a huge downward trend. This slide started just four or five years after their breakout hit. They could not grow. They were trapped by their own specialised design philosophies and expertise. These are the same philosophies that require a large amount of time and money to develop, but they were met with shrinking player interest with each new game.