{"id":1434404,"date":"2025-12-21T14:29:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T14:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/JLmBK6y2DnJE3r2bEwVfjL"},"modified":"2025-12-21T14:29:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T14:29:10","slug":"dishonored-co-creator-says-it-was-a-shock-when-microsoft-closed-arkane-austin-after-redfalls-release-we-were-working-on-something-really-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/dishonored-co-creator-says-it-was-a-shock-when-microsoft-closed-arkane-austin-after-redfalls-release-we-were-working-on-something-really-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Dishonored co-creator says it was ‘a shock’ when Microsoft closed Arkane Austin after Redfall’s release: ‘We were working on something really cool’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Arkane Austin is far from the only studio<\/a> that Microsoft\u2014in its push to post 30% profit margins year upon year<\/a>\u2014has closed down. But for me personally, it was the most upsetting. While its vampire looter-shooter Redfall<\/a> was not the studio’s finest work, its previous projects include 2012’s brilliant immersive-sim Dishonored<\/a>, and 2017’s System Shock successor Prey<\/a>\u2014which I increasingly believe to be one of the best games of all time.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> podcast (via Kotaku<\/a>).<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“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<\/a>‘s creative lead] for instance, had worked together since the late nineties.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

\n