Raphaël Colantonio interview: What it would take to make Dishonored 3, where Grand Theft Auto VI could fall short, and what's next for the founder of Arkane Studios

In an exclusive interview with Press Box PR, Arkane Studios founder Raphaël Colantonio has spoken about what fans can expect from his next project, the reasons why there isn't a third Dishonored game on the release schedule, and what he would create if Rockstar asked him to lead the development of a future Grand Theft Auto game.

The French video game design legend, now Creative Director of WolfEye Studios, also gave his thoughts on the costs of games today, what it was like to work for Valve and how he and his team like to approach game development as an artform.

Read the full interview below.

How proud of you are you of Dishonoured and the world you and your team built that people are engrossed in today, so many years later?

It is beyond what we could have imagined.

When I started to make video games, my hope was that I would make games that somehow had that same impact on people as the games that I loved back then when I was a kid, you know?

Part of me believed it was possible. The other part of me thought it would be incredible if it could ever happen. We all have different voices in our heads and there’s that hope but also the more realistic version that is going to say, come on now, who do you think you are or whatever.

And the truth is, yes, it is incredible. And the truth is it's partially random. You know, when you reach something like that, it's a mix of being with the right people, because first of all, it was not just me. Harvey Smith, of course, was involved. Victor Antonov was incredible. Sébastien Mitton, Christophe Carrier, and Julien Roby, all the people that we had worked with for a long time, that eventually we grew together.

We have that same passion together and it put us together in this same bag where all of us, absolutely all of us, were animated by the same values, the same passion, the same desire to make something with integrity and that we loved. And hoping or having the arrogance or the naivety that people would click with it.

But I can tell you, as we were making it, I remember, and I will always remember, we were in a meeting one day and Victor had so much self-confidence. He was that guy, right? And he said, with his really cool voice something like: ‘there was Dark City, there was Star Wars, and now there is Dunwall.’ We looked at each other and we were like, okay, that’s the spirit, and he was kind of right!

We were set to go for Game of the Year and I did announce that to the team at some point. I think maybe during beta. I told them, guys we are going for Game of the Year, and Arkane was not a team where people would be cynical and laugh things off but they reacted the same as I did with Victor. Wow, well if you think so! Hopefully, anyway. But you need that mix of being with the right people with the talent, hard work and luck to some degree.

We had Bethesda too, of course, and that’s the context where you look at all the ingredients to make such a fantastic game, something that hits like that, and even then the market needs to be ready for it. The inspiration needs to be there. You need a dream. You need the energy. And the publisher needs to give you all the means to do it, understand what you’re doing, and trust you, because frankly Dishonoured sucked until it was good.

The world was bizarre. I remember Harvey and I were constantly worried. Would any other people even give a shit about this world we were building? It was so strange. British-inspired but with some sorcery and at that point that was not a story that anyone could relate to. Really, who would even care? Of course, we made it, but we had that fear all along. We did everything we could to make sure that people would care more and more about things in the world. They would care about Emily, the little girl. We would make a few of the characters kind of vulnerable and nice so that you want to care for them. But when you don't know the end of the movie, when you don't know whether people are going to connect with what you’re making, trust me, you really are doing things from a place of doubt and fear. Eventually you let the fear and the doubt go and just go with what you love because that's really what it was all about all along.

Again, I think the fact that it was a game made with integrity by a team of people who were working together for so long and shared the same values, and were assisted or at least empowered by a publisher that trusted us in spite of the delays, in spite of the game sucking for so long. And then with a marketing team that actually understood the game, put the money behind it. We had those giant billboards in New York and we hit it out of the park but you always feel like there were 10 targets to sit at a thousand yards. All of them had our snipers on them and there was some wind and everything else but we hit all of them. Including the lucky one.

For games as an industry to continue to grow, do we need more developers going on a journey to create something meaningful as you did rather than sticking to tried and tested formulas and repeating what they know works and makes money?

I mean, there are many forces against that. We can talk about AI, we can talk about the business mind in general. The business mind is always trying to find a formula. The business mind wants to replicate success. The business mind goes against art, goes against the magic, the luck, the effort and the unpredictability.

The business mind never really existed in the past in gaming but it’s as acute as it can be right now. Everyone wants growth. Everything wants to win. It is a hustling mentality. People don't want to make three times their money. They want to make 100 times more. They want to make 1,000 times more. People are in a hurry to be very rich and do anything to get there.

We’re in a weird world where the traditional gaming industry is now seen as the past and almost in a way too risky because yet again we are back to this question of what makes something a success? And for my part, and the part of the people that work with me now at Wolf-Eye, and that’s a lot of the same people that I've been working with for 30 years, we try to ignore it.

I mean, it's impossible to ignore it entirely because we live in that world. So of course, when we look for a deal, when we deal with publishers, we have to deal with that. And when we open Twitter, we see the anger, the cynicism. We see all that. And it affects us to some degree. But at the end of the day, we can only control what we can control.

We're still animated by the same force. Why are we making games? We're not looking for a formula. There is no formula. Spoiler alert, sorry to disappoint, there's really no formula. Every time we struggle. Every time we're not sure what we're doing. We make tons of mistakes. We course correct while we're doing it. What is at stake is so big because the budgets are bigger and bigger so of course that it can be terrifying.

On the one hand, I’m still that kid, I’m recruiting my inner kid, to make this baby that I know some players want to see because they want to see that passion, you know. When I was younger and I was playing games when I was 15 years old or something, there was nothing that possessed me more than video games. Maybe music was to the same level.

I hope those games still exist. Occasionally I am touched by a game like that but it’s rare, and it’s because we are in a world, governed by money and easy tricks and shortcuts, how can we make more with less, how can you deliver, how can we milk the players and this and that. But my mindset, and the mindset of the people that I work with is still the same, I would say it is even the same since back in the days of Arx Fatalis, and that’s why we are making games. There’s no other reason. If there were any other reasons, all of us would be much more rich, but that is not what we pursue.

What we pursue is to make another Dishonoured. When you make a game with integrity and it’s a hit, it’s totally validating, and not only validating of your work but also validating in what you believe in. You could read this as OK this guy wants some validation for his creativity or whatever but no, it’s about believing in doing things for the right reasons. We believe in making the games we do because there is a burning desire from the people making it to make this game see the day and connect with people. Not because it looks good on an Excel spreadsheet tracking the bottom line or whatever. That’s not where we come at it from. That will never be where our work comes from.

Is it harder to pitch the concept of open world to gamers now given how many games haven’t come through on the promise of the concept now that it has become a trend?

You know we’ve never followed trends. Of course, we adapt and we evolve because our own tastes evolve and adapt, and there are benefits to open world. There is something that feels more contiguous. In fact, if you look at Prey, Prey was contiguous. It was not mission based anymore. It was one big mission or several big missions that were intertwined in a big space where you could always backtrack and come back to and I think for this next game, that's something that we have in mind. It’s a little more of what we want, actually, and I would say for us, because we're not trying to chase a trend, we still want everything to feel very handcrafted.

For us, we are delivering an extremely handcrafted open world. There's nothing set to random. There's nothing procedural about it. Of course that means it’s going to be smaller than other open worlds but at the same time, because as much as we follow our passion and our integrity, we are also always full of fears, right? So we always double check that we're not being stupid because everybody goes with giant open worlds these days.

Thankfully, we realised how the majority of gamers are fed up with these grindy giant open world games where the metric of value is size and the trade off is that everything is shallow or repetitive. There's nothing that feels that it has meaning. There's no feel at all. So we accidentally, I guess, are more in line with the market because it's going to be a very handcrafted open world. You can go everywhere and everything you see you can go to. We don't cheat the player with fake environments. Nothing is generated on the fly in a procedural way. It's the good old style, created by hand, where everything has a meaning and has its place.

So when exploring it, we want to make sure that people feel like everything is cohesive. Everything. That's the trade-off of small open worlds.

Is there a specific mechanic or signature element from your previous work as a team that you hope to explore even more deeply in your new game?

I wouldn’t even know at this point. There are so many people that come from the same DNA that we undoubtedly do things in a very similar way as we always have done so a lot of the feeling that people have had before, they will find it again.

You know, we started out with those filters. We wanted to create a game like Fallout meets Dishonoured or something, or a game in keeping with Arkane Games to be more accurate, specifically Dishonoured. So what we want is to land in the Action RPG space with all those values, dialogue and so on, and that’s still our inspiration.

I think where we will eventually land is, well, the game will land where it lands. It’s not going to be this perfect, absolutely exact percentage of this game or that because every time we have made a game, even when we made Dishonoured, we started to show it to the press and the press were always saying the same thing. It was interesting. They said it was Bioshock meets Assassin’s Creed and I can guarantee you that today, if you were asking the press to describe Dishonored, they probably would not say it's Bioshock meets Assassin's Creed.

I mean, I love Bioshock and yes, we were playing as an assassin, so they are not bad references to pull from. It wasn’t insulting in any way. It did just make us feel like… why are you pigeonholing us? It’s not this meets that but instead it was its own thing. If we wanted to be more accurate, we cold have said it was like Thief on steroids in an interesting world, not that Thief’s world wasn’t interesting in its own right. I think Dishonoured was like a secret handshake for Thief fans.

But what is this new game going to be? I don’t want to describe it exactly, only because it’s too early and I want us to be ready before really talk about the game, but of course our values are our values and it has a lot of the same people behind it. That’s unavoidable and there’s going to be a lot of things where if you watch 10 films from the same team you will probably have some consistency in taste and flavour even if each film might be different.

How have you been finding the early play testing sessions and how important is testing with external players to get the game feeling and playing right?

Testing with people from outside of the team is very, very interesting. It’s an interesting topic in general because you don’t want to make a game by numbers or even by theory because you risk making something formulaic. But at the same time, you don’t want to make something totally in a vacuum where it doesn’t hit what people want at all.

In the past, when we were making Dishonored or Prey, I would say for those two games, we would of course use testers we were familiar with and it’s pretty similar this time around. So far we haven't opened it to the public. We've looked at tiers. So far we've invited the players that played Weird West before. We've invited the people that we really trusted, first of all, so that they would not share anything outside of the company. When you go to the next round of going to the public it might be more risky where some things will leak things and we absolutely didn't want anything to leak.

Also, with the game being in progress for so long, when you make a game, most of the time is about assembling things together without necessarily having too much of a game to play so that requires a specific type of tester. You need people who are able to hold their breath and imagine beyond what they currently see. That’s hard.

These people are typically also very, very critical. They’re very smart. They're very competent. Great, great gamers. They will just tell you what they think and you cannot ignore it.

However, you cannot be too paralysed by it either because often people will say something with very cutting words and that has value, right? Then it's up to you what you do with it. You can look at it the way we look at the trends. Unfortunately, sometimes, you can have something that is not really a trend and it is extremely polarising but like, man, that was the best part of the game. Then some other tester would say that what they hated the most was that same thing that this other guy liked. We've seen that. There's a few mechanics like that. And so it's one tool amongst others, feedback from people that you trust, from people that are smart. But smart people can say the wrong things too. Not everybody is right all the time.

Is there an inflection point where the value of taking your testing to the wider public becomes greater than the risk of leaks?

The truth is that different companies have different results with that approach.

There are some approaches that are super interesting. We haven't really gone to that point but there's a company I know who almost does the equivalent of crowdfunding but for design. They do crowd design. I don't think we could do that.

That would be exhausting because it requires a different type of management. You could have, therefore, maybe 500 people or a thousand people that test the thing, give their feedback, then they do polling and votes. Every creative team has different things that they're comfortable with. That would be too much for me and I think for my team in general.

For us, we've realised that most of the time, if you rotate your testers, that's more the Valve way of doing it, and that's more something we learned with Valve back in the day when we working for them on some stuff. You rotate people, and then the next set of people, and it can be five or 10 people at a time. Five then 10 then five then 10 and no matter what you realise that somehow this is enough to discover things.

The thing that we realised is if someone tests a level and they are a little lost, that's OK. But if you have five people that are lost out of 10, then already you have a problem. It means that, okay, put a light there. There's something that is missing in the direction.

Then the next time you test, now you have nobody getting lost and you go, that's it, we addressed it, because at this point you can guarantee that you're probably fine. It’s very likely that if you have a significant number of testers, you don’t need a thousand, you might just need a hundred. You don’t need 10,000. You don’t need a million.

If you have 100 testers, you’re probably going to have the same results as 1,000 testers. The difference is that with 1,000 testers, you might want to use that as marketing because that can create momentum by having early advocates for your game. I think that’s part of the early access strategy. People don’t only offer early access because they want to test the market. Yes, it’s going to give you a lot of bug testers so there’s a value there but by offering early access you now also have 10,000 or 50,000 people that are invested in your game. They're going to talk about your game to all their friends.

You also find yourself at greater risk of leaks so if you do that, you do it as late as possible. Look at Baldur’s Gate 3. They did that. For them, it was fantastic because that game is so systematic and there are so many possibilities that testing it out with a hundred testers would have been impossible. In their case, it made sense to have thousands of testers. I don’t know how late they went into that process. I think the strategy was to do it as early as possible once the game was already fun, and then they opened up the first chapter or something. There's a lot of interesting decisions they made about that. That was very smart. They had the best of both worlds because even if it leaked, they could not leak the entire game.

There's a lot of things I could say here about our plans but I don't know where we stand. We're definitely going to open it up to a bigger portion of players at some point, and probably bigger than we've ever opened it before because we too have a game with tons and tons of possibilities and there will be a moment where having a lot of testing is going to help us. But it's not really my side, so I might say the wrong things here and I don’t want to take the risk.

Would you still be interested in going back to do Dishonoured 3? What are the stories still to be told in that world?

You know, it's funny because I think I've had my version of what could become Dishonoured 3. Harvey Smith has had his version. Ricardo Bare has had his version too. None of them are all the same at all.

I don't know where we would all take it for a third game because we definitely closed the story of Emily and Corvo in the second game so it would have to be something else. It could be more like a sequel where you try to take on the whole world. Then the spirit of the player experience, what to do in the game, what other things you can do, it would be an interesting thing.

In an alternate dimension, I'm sure it would be great for Harvey, myself, Ricardo, Dinga Bakaba and Sébastien Mitton to be reunited and put Christophe Carrier in there and make it but we only have one life so it would probably never happen. But it would be an interesting thing to create.

Given your upcoming game and the new game from Harvey, Dishonoured fans may be getting two spiritual sequels even if they won’t get a direct sequel?

Yes, that's another way to look at it.

I think with some properties, I understand there could be more stuff to say about the world of Dishonoured, but you need someone behind it that really wants to make it. It cannot just be because it would be a nice number to have. It’s got to be something we want to do that I think we do something great with.

We have to commit five years of our lives to creating a game because that’s what it takes now. If you include all the pre-thinking, the meetings, the production, the post-production, being late, it always takes forever to make a game.

If Rockstar tapped you on the shoulder and said Raf, we want you to come in to lead the creation of GTA 7 to fit your vision, your philosophy, your ideas, your values, what would that game look like?

I could get myself in trouble by talking about Grand Theft Auto because I think they are the biggest tease and at the same time the biggest disappointment when you love immersive sims.

I don't mean that in an offensive way because of course who am I and who are they? They make games that sell I don't know how many thousands times more than mine and they are so incredible at doing surface simulation. But that’s such a stab in the heart for me when they don’t go more than surface level where there’s no long-term consequences to anything you do.

It's more like a fantastic sandbox with incredible execution, incredible cinematography, great gameplay and you know they score — bam, bam, bam — nonstop because they deliver a player experience people connect with, you know, gangsters in LA and that kind of thing.

They’ve got that down and I understand why they do it, and by the way, a lot of this is probably a legacy of them having started this formula in the nineties, the same way that Resident Evil follows a formula to some degree. I suspect they still have those typewriters in the basement to set you a scheme. I don't know if they do that but it was always funny to me. It's possible that GTA have their version of that, which is the fact that they open an instance of the world for a mission that changes absolutely everything, both for them and both for us.

If you think of Skyrim, there's no instance of anything. There's just one instance of the world. You play the game and then things start to bleed onto each other and then it's a mess and now you have this town and when you come back you have to sneak around to do something because the guards would chase you down. You really own your consequences as a player. Everything is playable and you have to deal with your choices for the rest of the game.

What Rockstar basically say is, you know what? That part sucks. It’s too hard to do. It confuses players and most players won’t care at all anyway. Here’s what we will do instead. We put a guy with a question mark on their head. They have a mission for you. When you want to play the mission, we open an instance of the world in which nothing else matters than what's inside this instance. Then, because of that there is a trade off.

The positive is that we can do whatever we want. We can do all the crazy things with the cops coming in, the building exploding, everything we want. People are going to be thrilled but none of it matters. That's the thing. We don't have to deal with the consequences. The players don't have to deal with the consequences. Therefore, we can push the buttons, crank things up to 11, and I totally get the draw.

I totally understand why people are into it. I understand why they would be into it as developers. I understand why it sells so much but this is not my values, not that my values are not to sell a gazillion units! But my values are not to pause the simulation for an instance to then resume the world later. What happens in those games is that if you do something wrong that leads to a mission failure. That doesn't exist in our games. We don't have the concepts of failures.

If you fail the mission, you find yourself back out on the street and there’s the same guy with the same question mark over his head who you click on and you’re ready to restart the mission. There’s nothing immersive to me in that.

I'm trying to say this with the greatest respect for them because I do respect them. What they do, I could not do. They do things that are amazing and I can already imagine the public flaming of what I am saying because that's how the world is nowadays. But no, I respect them a lot. It's just that it's not my bike.

What if Rockstar wanted to make an immersive sim with their next GTA game?

I’d say guys, you don't want to always boost your sales. You want to lower the sales. No, I think they know what they do very, very well. It's highly respectable. It's great in so many ways. It's just not my thing, and I couldn't imagine a world where they would want me in there because I'm going to bring some bizarre stuff. They're going for more direct paraphernalia where instantly

you know the gameplay. It doesn't need digestion and there isn’t anything obscure like what we do here, so yeah it's a difference like the difference between Steven Spielberg and David Lynch or whatever. One is going to sell gazillions and the other one is going to be a little more indirect and obscure and sometimes land a hit. I don't know, maybe that was a weird comparison but like everybody else I'm really, really looking forward to GTA VI mostly because I want to see how far they can push the instant simulation, surface simulation, because they do all that so incredibly well, and it's inspiring, and I love that.

What can you tell me about the project you worked on with Valve around a game set around Ravenholm?

It took us a decade to move on from the pain of the Ravenholm project because we were incredibly excited about doing that game and we put in a lot of creative energy into it and eventually when the decision was made to cut it, we did not understand it as it happened.

We were young and we were just refusing to see the reality of the situation and the reality was much simpler than the way it looked to us. It all came down to the economics behind Half Life 2 and how the DLCs were selling. They had a business ratio between how much they could spend and how they could make it to be worth it to them because it takes the attention of the entire structure on their side.

They had tried to create something internally and then they had tried with an external team already in America but it did not work out because they were too expensive so they worked with us because they liked our work and we worked with them during that time. They thought, you know, why not try these guys? We seemed pretty effective and eventually, like the two other attempts that they had looked at, we went somewhere with it, and it was cool. What we had was really, really cool. But it still needed more time, and too much time to finish. Beyond it being cool there was a business call at some point where it was decided that it didn’t really make sense. It was very painful for us but it made sense, we grew up and got a little bit more mature about it.

It also led us to work very closely with Viktor Antonov and eventually he joined us to create Dishonoured and we did not betray the Valve mentality. We learned a lot from them, actually. It’s just that we probably snuck in some of our own Arkane stuff in there as well. It had everything you would expect with little gadgets that are maybe a little bit more indirect, and maybe there was a little bit more verticality in some ways with the mobility, because that’s always something that we’ve been obsessed with.

But how would I like to see them play it with Half Life 3? You know, I wouldn't have the arrogance to say anything about that. I think they are the grand masters. We've learned from them. We admired them. We still admire them. The bar is so high but I have no doubt that they will rise to meet it because I want to play a fantastic Half Life 3. I just trust that they have the time to do it right.

Is there another IP you and your team would like to work on some day?

Now that we're working on a new IP, that's probably the IP we want to work on.

I think an IP is a love story between the creator and the IP and I think that's the thing we love at the moment.

As much as I've really, really loved doing Arx Fatalis, for example, I don't know if I would come back to it now because if I was to work on these things in parallel, it would be a different thing. The way I work right now is that I put in my entire time and it’s the same for my team. We're all exclusive in a way. So then you think, well, I'm gonna spend another four or five years of my life on this, or three years because if it's a sequel, it's probably less. It’s got to be something that actually matters to you so I think right now my dream game would be this current IP that I'm working on.

What’s your view on the great debate over $100 games?

I don't know if it’s because I'm an old gamer but I remember when games actually were priced at $100.

Back when I was 15 years old a game in France would cost 500 francs which was just shy of $100. We're talking about 1985 or 1990 so the equivalent in real terms in modern money would be much more than that, probably three times that. It would be like spending $300 on a game. But the habits were different back then. People would invest in the game. Those were the days where you would think of the game that you want to buy, maybe you only buy five per year, and this is going to cost you the equivalent of $300 each time.

So when I hear about games costing $100, on one hand I think it's outrageous and on the other hand it's like, whatever. I’d $100 for the next Baldur's Gate. For me it's all about how much I love it because if it's going hold me for a month as a player,

Think about it this way. You’d spend $100 for dinner at some steakhouse with some wine and the next day it’s gone. You spend $100 on a game, you put it down for the night, and it’s still there the next day. I don’t know, everything is relative I guess.

I don't necessarily understand why it's going up. In the sense that the markets should be expanding. We should be selling more units than we were selling in the 80s so it should be the opposite, if anything. Games should be getting cheaper. The cost of games should go down. But for some reason they're going to those higher prices.

But that’s not my area. I make games. I want them to be priced right. I think our game will be priced right because I trust the publisher that we work with.

I don't understand why they go up but if they do go up, it's not the end of the world as long as we still get good games. What's more worrying for me is that there are less and less games that I'm excited about.