0451
The death of Arkane Austin just the latest in a series of cultural crimes committed by big business in the name of...actually who the fuck knows?
I really don’t want to spend my life writing grand but ultimately futile anti-capitalist rants, but here we are in the stinging aftermath of another round of reasonless game studio closures, and this one hurts me more than usual.
Everything about the announced closure of four game studios owned by Bethesda and, by proxy, Microsoft, has led to a revival of disgust in the machine itself, asking the critical question: how much fucking money does anyone really need, and why does it always come at such a heavy social and/or cultural cost?
I could write pages and pages about how about how neoliberal policies have directly led to a more vicious, cannibalistic capitalist class than ever before; or how the very foundations of modern economics are responsible for this new wave of rewarding short term gains at the expense of long term survivability.
I could talk more broadly here about how money is a rot on the human soul, but the truth is, in all this red-eyed ire, I’m just really sad that Arkane Austin is gone.
Dishonored is a game I bought a new PC just to play. The singlular title I have played the most out of any game ever. It is a series I became obsessed with for years, thrilled by the prospects of every secret, every weird instance and unusual challenge hiding round every corner, behind every locked door.
Arkane Austin’s brilliantly complex dark fantasy combines my great love of sneaking around in the shadows with my great love of having enough tools to mitigate the fact that I’m dreadful at sneaking around in the shadows.
It’s engaging, and clever, and has an incredible depth to its design that continues to astonish with every subsequent play through.
To me, each game in the Dishonored trilogy (yes, I consider Death of the Outsider as canonically ‘Dishonored 3’) is the defining poster child of the modern Immersive Sim.
Mechanically deep but also aesthetically stunning, these are games I could fire up time and time again and never find anything less than total excitement in my bones during play.
While I found myself struggling more with the later titles in their repertoire, I’ve always appreciated between Arkane Austin and their thankfully still afloat European sister studio Lyon, that there is a level of care and precision in how they build their environments, how they develop their core systems and even how they evolve familiar ludonarrative motifs over time.
Even Redfall, which I’ll admit didn’t meet those same high standards we expect of the studio, had within it clear echoes of those design sensibilities peeking through the cracks of the AAA live service rot thrust upon it.
We know this isn’t about economic performance.
Since Microsoft also shitcanned Tango Gameworks, in the direct aftermath of the widely successful and critically beloved HiFi Rush, this isn’t about the disaster that unfolded around Redfall putting Austin on the chopping block, but it’s also a sad truth that not all the games that they make have been the heavy hitters the way I think most of us agree they should be.
I’m not qualified to talk about the financial comings and goings of games studios, or about the motivations behind accepting buyouts and ultimately exploitative contracts. I wish we knew more about how IOInteractive managed to break free and keep food on the table in almost equally bleak circumstances, but I suspect the answer is a set of circumstances entirely untransferrable to anyone else.
I’m also not so naiive as to not acknowledge that games of this calibre, especially in the post-HD era, are now pretty much intrinsically tied to these kinds of deals. As development becomes more expensive and time consuming, that kind of up front financial support probably feels like the only option for many studios, even if it’s clearly not a good deal for them in the long run.
I think perhaps we as consumers need to bite the bullet and accept that the triple-A sphere has no space for this kind of game anymore.
There are obvious silver linings abound. Studios come and go all the time, the folk who worked on these games will find more work in the industry should they want to continue. If Harvey Smith wants to follow the charge of his former co-creator Raphael Colontonio (who released the excellent Weird West a few years ago), and continue the spirit of of 0451 in a new guise, that’s an idea we can all rally around.
Faces change, but ideas live forever.
As a final send off, alongside this, in a seperate post I will republish a piece of writing I did about the Dishonored series many years ago, which I think can also be attributed to everything that Arkane Austin has made, even all the way back to the heady days of Arx Fatalis. Hope you enjoy reading it.