Back in 2017, Arkane released two great single-player games - Prey and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Prey was developed by Arkane Austin, while Dishonored: Death of the Outsider began life as an expansion for Dishonored 2, before Arkane Lyon spun it off as its own standalone game.

In the five years since, neither studio has released a game that's strictly single-player. Prey's Mooncrash expansion, released in 2018, added a multiplayer mode, Typhon Hunter. In 2019, Lyon worked with MachineGames on Wolfenstein: Youngblood, a co-op shooter that had as much DNA shared with Borderlands as it did with B.J. Blazkowicz. Then, in 2021, Lyon launched Deathloop, a single-player/multiplayer hybrid where the player's campaign as Colt can be interrupted by invasions from Julianna, controlled by another real-life player across the internet. In 2023, we're getting Redfall, Austin's first game since Prey. It, like Wolfenstein: Youngblood, is a co-op shooter. Unlike Youngblood, it's set in a big open-world setting. In Arkane's 18 years of life prior to 2017, (outside of KarmaStar, the studio's little known 2009 foray into mobile gaming) it had released just one game with a multiplayer component - Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, and Dishonored 2 were exclusively single-player.

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Arkane's games have rarely been big money makers. The first Dishonored was a big hit, but since then the studio's games have gained a reputation as rich, complex, systemic titles that impress its fans and developers but have a hard time making much mainstream impact.

Deathloop was pretty good, and Redfall looks like it could be good, too. But, it's disappointing to see a studio renowned for its rich single-player experiences pivoting so hard toward multiplayer.

It's worth noting that Deathloop was announced before the Xbox/Bethesda merger that brought Arkane under Microsoft control, and Redfall just a few months after. Microsoft has shown a willingness to allow its developers to pursue less commercial products. Josh Sawyer, director on Obsidian's Pentiment, said that he never would have pitched the medieval adventure game if not for Xbox Game Pass. The subscription service has shifted the understanding of what a game needs to achieve to be commercially viable. A game doesn't necessarily need to have massive sales anymore, it just needs to encourage a subset of Game Pass subscribers to maintain their subscriptions. Prior to the merger, Zenimax's more traditional business model dictated that Arkane's games needed to sell enough copies to make a profit. Microsoft's pivot toward Game Pass may allow for more leeway as long as the service continues to be profitable post-Redfall.

This isn't to say that Arkane devs don't have genuine interest in making the kind of games they've made for the past five years. Deathloop, in particular, shares a lot of DNA with The Crossing, a canceled single-player/multiplayer hybrid the company worked on in the mid-’00s. But, the pivot to multiplayer came after Arkane had had multiple games underperform in a row. That would seem to indicate some sort of financial pressure.

Fingers crossed, Game Pass can give Arkane options. If the devs at the studio want to continue to make multiplayer games, hopefully they can. But, if they want to return to the single-player style they built their reputation on, I hope they can do that, too.

NEXT: Dishonored 2 Remains The Greatest Immersive Sim Ever Made