"Fallout meets Dishonored is a shortcut." Raphael Colantonio, co-founder of immersive sim developer Arkane and now his second studio, WolfEye, clearly understands the value of a hook. But after 2022's Weird West, the studio's second game - a dense, open-world immersive sim with strong RPG elements, set in an alternative version of the American Old West - doesn't necessarily sit happily on that hook. In the week since its reveal, Colantonio has tried to describe a spectrum upon which his game does sit. Fallout: New Vegas sits at one end of that spectrum, with a more 'pure' immersive sim like Dishonored at the other. But to understand how WolfEye's new game exists on this spectrum, we need to look back more than two decades.
One of the first things that jumps out to me as Colantonio describes his new game is the ambition behind it. A dense, first-person immersive sim feels like a daunting prospect for a sophomore studio, but when I put that to him, he shrugs it off: "We had exactly the same on Arx Fatalis," he says, pointing to Arkane's 2002 debut. "We were an even smaller team, nine people. The difference here is when you commit to doing these things, you also commit to a certain level of execution. The higher the level of execution, the more time, the more daunting it is."
