WolfEye's new first-person RPG is "an evolution" of Prey and Dishonored featuring mechs, magnets and a continuous world

rockpapershotgun.com:

WolfEye's debut game Weird West attempted to pack a little of Dishonored's immersive sim sorcery into a top-down action-RPG. For the studio's next game, co-founders Raphaël Colantonio and Julien Roby are leaning into comparisons with their old endeavours at Arkane more earnestly. The new game - currently untitled and without a release date - is a first-person sci-fi RPG set in an alternate-1900s North America, which ostensibly combines the ingenuity and gadgetry of Dishonored and Prey with a "real RPG" experience redolent of Skyrim and modern-day Fallout.

"The structure is very freeform, and you can explore whatever you want," Colantonio tells me over videocall. "But the mobility and the type of gameplay is very reminiscent of games that we've worked on in the past, like Prey or Dishonored. So you have this blend between an RPG, like an open experience, where you can go wherever you want, and level up, and there's branching etcetera, but at the same time, the physicality and the types of gadgets and powers that you've seen in games from Arkane before. So if you look at the continuum from Dishonored to Prey, and then we imagine, how would it be if it was even more open than that, even more RPG than Prey."

Colantonio and Roby aren't saying much about the game's story right now, but the announcement screens give you a sense of the ambience and stakes: industrial brickwork, big smoky skies, automatons of delicately embossed steel. There are Gatling guns and water silos, canyons lined with rickety gantries, and workshops sliced into what seem like convenient shady hiding spots by the setting sun.

"It's a world where you can recognise the scenery, but then the types of technology are futuristic, even though in a style of fabrication that would have made sense in the 1900s," Colantonio says. "That's why you have this really unique look - it's not really steampunk, but some people will say it's steampunk. And part of the story is that at some point you will realise