Arkane Studios

UPDATE: That's all the time we have today, folks! Thank you so much for your insightful questions, and for taking the time to hang out with us. The team had such a blast answering your questions, and they'll probably still try to answer more as they can!

As a bonus, QuakeCon is beginning today at 12PM ET on and will be going on all weekend with tons of nonstop streams. Some of the Arkane folks have fun (and informative!) streams over the weekend, such as:

Susan Kath will be chatting all about Prey with Janina Gavankar at 6PM ET today

Dinga Bakaba will be giving some behind the scenes insight into the first Dishonored game tomorrow, August 8th @ 8AM ET

Harvey Smith (and friends!) will be playing a Dishonored Tabletop RPG campaign tomorrow, August 8th @ 6PM ET and again on August 9th @ 1PM ET

Ricardo Bare will be giving the inside scoop on Mooncrash on Sunday, August 9th @ 8PM ET

We hope to see you there!

Hello everyone!

My name is Abigail, and I'm a Community Manager over at Bethesda. I'm so excited to introduce the five Arkane Studios devs who will be participating in today's AMA celebrating 20 years of Arkane:

Harvey Smith, Studio/Creative Director:

Dinga Bakaba, Game Director:

Sebastien Mitton, Art Director:

Ricardo Bare, Co-Creative Director:

Susan Kath, Lead Producer on Prey:

You may recognize Arkane Studios from the Dishonored series and Prey (along with the DLC Prey: Mooncrash), as well as the upcoming DEATHLOOP. They'll be answering questions for the next hour--so until around 11:45AM ET.

Ask them anything!

I'm Harvey Smith (Dishonored_Harvey), Co-creative Director of the game Dishonored, along with Raphael Colantonio and Arkane Studios. I've loved video games all my life and I've been working on games professionally since 1993. Specifically, I'm into first-person games that mix action, adventure and story, and that allow the player to determine pacing, creative tactics, play-style and moral approach. This is me too:

I’m Raphael Colantonio (Dishonored_Raphael). I’ve always had passion for first person games with depth and RPGs. I founded Arkane in '99 to make our first game: Arx Fatalis.

Go ahead and ask us anything!

And here's our proof! -

EDIT: Wow, what an afternoon. We've never done this and it was super interesting. (We've done everything else from IRC forward...) We're going to wrap this up now, but thanks to everyone for showing up and asking great questions!

Hey everyone - I hope this is interesting to people here. I was a senior level designer on Dishonored 2, and now I'm teaching level and game design on my youtube channel. I made a video where I show the Half Life 2 level that I made as part of Arkane Studios' level design test, back when I applied for the job in 2013.

It's 27mins long and very in-depth - I talk about everything from the brief and how I approached it, to the 3D layout design and non-linear structure, and how I used Half Life 2 to show my understanding of Arkane's design values (player choice and intentionality, systemic gameplay, etc).

I thought it might be interesting to people who want to learn more about what AAA level designers think about - I hope it's useful! Here's the link:

Anyone looking for a good imsim for cheap all the Arkane Studio games are on sale on Steam. Arx Fatalis is $1.64 USD. Prey and Dishonored series are all there for under $3. I’d highly recommend any of these games, particularly Arx Fatalis, with the fan made Arx Libertalis patch. It’s great

Deathloop is the type of game where you don't really know what to expect when you first boot it up. The story and characters are immediately engaging, the combat is tight and creative, but the gameplay loop (no pun intended) may catch you off guard.

You are placed on an island with four distinct districts and, at first, these districts don't seem like anything special. But then you begin to find things...hidden clues, locked safes, tape recordings, dead bodies, strange glowing objects, hidden paths and steel bunker doors...

I loved this game and I'm struggling to find a flaw in its design. If I had to choose something it would probably be the inventory and clue UI. Consulting your clues and deconstructing items so that you can save what you need to carry over into the next loop is an essential aspect of this game, so the UI being so messy is a big miss.

The combat is a lot of fun, the guns feel and sound great, and there are many ways to approach it. Want to go around force pushing goons like Vader? You can do it.

Want to take a more stealth approach? Hacking turrets, cameras, and explosives? You can do it.

Want to be a tank? Go for it.

A common complaint I've seen is that the enemies are dumb. The recent updates have made them a bit smarter, but it's not a Hitman game or anything. It's an island of horny drunks and criminals, their main goal is to swarm and kill you.

Deathloop is a mystery game at its heart (something that they didn't market too well). You have to visit the island's districts at each time of day (Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Evening) to investigate the islands 8 main antagonists and figure out how to kill them all during one loop.

As you begin to unravel the mystery of the island the districts begin to open up, revealing more depth than what was initially seen on the surface.

To close, Deathloop is great.

Hey guys!

I’ve just noticed that the Arkane Studios have a considerable price drop right now on my Steam. I have a few questions for you. What game would you recommend between the Dishonored series, Prey, and Deathloop? I don’t mind hard games (I love FromSoftware and the soulslikes).

Is Dishonored stealth? What about the other games I mentioned?

Thanks a lot.

I've been playing through Arkane Studios' video game Dishonored, and thought Daud and his assassins would make really cool D&D enemies, so I converted Daud into an action-oriented boss, and made statblocks for him and his henchmen based on a mix of traditional 5e monsters and Flee Mortals! monsters.

I would love to hear feedback on the abilities (especially Daud's villain actions), CR/balance, and how to create a fun encounter using these enemies. (My very tentative idea was to have four or five assassins at the beginning of the fight.)

My main questions/concerns are the following:

1. Is Blink too powerful? Should I nerf it to limited uses/day for the Supernatural Assassins?

2. Do these enemies have too many abilities to keep track of, leading to combat slog?

3. Are the villain actions too weak/too strong/too boring?

4. Should I give Daud (or the assassins) a unique reaction to use? If so, what?

I'm fairly new to DMing, and very new to homebrewing monsters, especially using the FM! design, so any critiques are more than welcome!

P.S. apologies for the slight blurriness of the statblocks, that's caused by the site I used to generate them, which is otherwise excellent and very easy to use. ()

Hi Reddit!

We are Arkane Studios, creators of Prey (releasing Friday!) and Dishonored. Lots of us will be around answering your questions today - including Raphael Colantonio (President and Creative Director), Ricardo Bare (Lead Designer), Susan Kath (Lead Producer), Seth Shain (Lead Systems Designer), and Stevan Hird (Lead Engineer).

You can find us at:

We’re all excited to talk about creating games, playing games, and of course, Prey – releasing this Friday, May 5th. Ask us anything!

EDIT: Thank you guys so much for your questions! We had a lot of fun. Our time is over, but we may hop on from time to time to see what else we may have missed. Don't forget, Prey comes out this Friday and we can't wait for you to get your hands on it (or more of it if you've been playing the Demo)!

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