Dishonored Co-Creator Is Working on a New Arkane Game With Dishonored and Prey Developers [Updated]

New details about an unannounced project at Arkane Austin – quite possibly Harvey Smith’s new game – point to it being a fantasy game made in the Unreal 4 engine.Spotted by Twitter user Timur222, the LinkedIn profile of senior VFX artist Lisa Charriere explains that the company is working on an “Unannounced project in Unreal 4 (fantasy)”.

That fantasy genre would seemingly rule out a new Prey game, but could point to a new entry in the Dishonored universe – while not a traditional fantasy game, the presence of magic and dark gods definitely see Dishonored overlap with the genre. The original Dishonored was also built using Unreal Engine 3, although Dishonored 2 used Arkane’s own Void engine (built using the id Tech platform).

Arkane Austin has yet to make any comment about its next game, beyond Smith’s previous remarks.

Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith is working on an unannounced new game at Arkane Austin, alongside devs from the Dishonored and Prey teams.Speaking to Vandal (and translated by IGN), Smith explained that he had moved back to Austin after completing Dishonored 2 at Arkane’s Lyon studio, and confirmed that he’s not a part of the company’s next game, but a separate unannounced project: “I’m not on Deathloop , I’m on something else, working with the guys who made Dishonored and Prey.”

Smith makes no further mention of what that project could be, nor how far away it might be. It’s possible that it could be a new Dishonored game, but we already know that any sequel to the much loved immersive sim series would feature new characters, after the Death of the Outsider ‘expandalone’ marked the end of the series as we know it.

Whatever the game ends up being, it will be part of the new era of Microsoft-owned Bethesda games, meaning it would almost certainly launch into Game Pass and, perhaps, even be an Xbox exclusive.

Vandal asked Smith if the upcoming acqusition had changed anything at Arkane as yet, who replied that there’s been no difference so far. He added that, of all possible partners for Bethesda, he’d find it difficult to think of a better one than Microsoft, concluding, “They fit perfectly.”

Before we see Smith’s game, however, there’s the matter of the extremely exciting Deathloop, which arrives for PS5 and PC on May 21. We’ve named the time-looping FPS as one of the biggest games coming in 2021, not least because of its intriguing gameplay reveal last year.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].