Arkane Lyon has posted twenty new job openings for what it simply describes as its ‘next project’.
As shared by Klobrille on Twitter, the job openings are up on LinkedIn and this was blogged on the official Zenimax website.
Most of the job openings are for artists and animators all the way in Arkane’s home base in Lyon, France. So this might not be for everyone, but it could be life changing for some talented artists who don’t mind waking up to madeleines for the next few years.
While Arkane Lyon likely did support work for their sibling studio Arkane Austin’s recent release Redfall, they should be recognized as the studio behind the highly acclaimed Dishonored franchise, as well as their most recent release, Deathloop.
The Dishonored games were multiplatform by design, and demonstrated the growth and maturation of the studio as it realized its ambitions throughout the franchise.
On the other hand, Deathloop is a very novel innovation to the shooter franchise, that happened to get caught up in between Microsoft and Sony.
Sony funded development of Deathloop, thereby securing exclusivity for the game. However, while Deathloop was in development, Arkane Studios’ parent publisher Zenimax was acquired by Sony rival Microsoft.
Microsoft honored Sony’s prior agreement with Arkane, and so Deathloop stayed a PlayStation exclusive for a few year. It’s been a few months since Deathloop arrived on Xbox, and was even on Game Pass on the first day.
But here we arrive at an interesting situation. In spite of the close association of Redfall’s name with Arkane in marketing, this ‘next project’ will actually be Arkane Lyon’s first project under the Microsoft banner.
Thus far, Microsoft’s record with Zenimax games has been a mixed bag. There was the poor release of Redfall, which came weeks after the successful shadow drop of Hi-Fi Rush.
As we now know, Microsoft is ironically not as controlling of recent projects under their umbrella as they should have been, and that led to Redfall releasing in the state that it was in.
After Xbox Studios head Phil Spencer’s public mea culpa, it seems reasonable to expect that Microsoft will keep a closer eye on the projects that they are paying for, that they will deliver on what’s been promised.
So we can only hope that Arkane Lyon’s first game under Microsoft will be a winner. To be fair, they do have a great track record on this regard.
