Did Dishonored 2 and Prey's commercial chess fail you? Especially since the critical reception was good, even very good, it is inevitably frustrating.
Absolutely not. I had announced my intentions to leave well before
Dishonored 2 and
Prey were even on the market.
Finally, when you're an indie studio like Arkane was, or you're part of a big machine like Arkane is with Bethesda / ZeniMax behind, what's putting the most pressure? On one side or the other we remain dependent on sales in the end.
That is true. In all cases the pressure is there, and sales are always right. It's more comfortable to be in a big group for obvious reasons, but you control fewer things, so that's what the Americans call "a trade off".
In 2010 (so even before Dishonoredand before the buyout by ZeniMax), when I firstinterviewed you, you told me about the frustration that exists when you make a AAA game to have three billion intermediates for every little aspect of a game. You gave me a very funny and very telling example of modeling an apple. " Today the distance between us and an apple in the game is minimum 4 people, 3 days and 5000 euros ". The longer it went, the worse it became, right?
Haha yes, it's worse, because now the apple is doing even more things.
Far be it from me to want to make you spit in the soup or to make you practice the language of wood but I want to know: was Arkane under the leadership of Bethesda always had the free hands to do the games you really wanted to do?
Rather yes. Bethesda has always had great confidence in our abilities to make quality games. Of course, as long as it fits in a market, it's still a business, but our relationship on this side has always been good.
