Despite the critical acclaim that Dishonored 2 got, and the big reaction to the standalone expansion “Death of the Outsider”, Arkane Studios has announced that they will be taking a break from Dishonored games for a while, so the next game likely won’t be coming out anytime soon for you big fans.
Dishonored has, for the past few years since its debut in 2012, been telling us the story of a number of special individuals in a hostile and oftentimes frightening and eldritch world as they are given the power to take revenge on those who wronged them by a being known as the Outsider.
With their wide-open levels, wide array of special abilities, variety of different tools, and narratives that change based on how you play, the Dishonored games have become some of Arkane’s best-known. However, with Arkane taking a break from Dishonored for the time being, who knows where the studio will go next.
Not even Arkane itself knows where the series will be going next; Dishonored 2 took place after a large time skip, with Emily Kaldwin all grown up and ready to take her place as Empress while her father and bodyguard Corvo stood by her side, along with Death of the Outsider, which was intended to serve as the finale to that story. Who knows what the world will be like in Dishonored 3, if that game ever happens.
Arkane lead designer Ricardo Bare has said that whether you’re in Dunwall or Talos-1, environmental storytelling and deep world building play a big part in Arkane games. Both the Dishonored series and last year’s game Prey had a large amount of worldbuilding in a variety of ways, ranging from newspaper clippings and documents found to exposition, which helped to establish the sort of world you were in.
While Arkane’s break from Dishonored is well deserved, hopefully that break won’t be too long before we can get back to making use of crazy powers in all sorts of different ways.
