Honestly, I would want more indie games and teams going with oldschool engines.
Doing more games like Thief/Gloomwood, we already have boomer shooter genre. Would love to see the revive of immersive sim genre, this way.
It's a niche genre, so no need for AAA or AAAA production values.
Honestly even Dishonored 1 type of graphics and really fun gameplay wise game would suffice. Had the time of my life with this game back in the day and also Thief 1-3 series - it's amazing what the community is doing with Thief games with TafferPatchers and TFixes and all, they even rewritten the engine for modern systems.
I've read it was only possible because of one person and we still don't know who that is. Apparently he shared the source code for Dark Engine and it was such a sudden drop and was never heard again.
This allowed folks to do The New Dark- and Thief series and also System Shock got a huge upgrade. Nice stuff.
There's this dude, Bentraxx he is doing amazing work with Thief
https://www.youtube.com/@Bentraxx/videos even wind simulation on grass.
Saw some usage of AI, for oldschool games. ESRGAN it is called, I believe.
It can redo textures without changing the original style and I believe it can upscale videos.
Could be something small devs could use to upscale low res textures and keep the costs down but also to do HD Texture packs for older games as well as HD in-game videos.
FYI, Dishonored is Thief's successor pretty much because of Harvey Smith. When the Looking Glass Studios closed, a lot of devs from there came to Ion Storm - and Harvey was there. Then some of them, I presume came with Harvey to Arkane Lyon.
There are similarities, homages and easter eggs in Dishonored 2 for sure.
I'm 100% sure Clockwork Mansion level from D2 was inspired by Constantine Mansion from Thief 1. Obviously they didn't have moving rooms in 1998 because of tech limitations but the disorientation, level shifting was there.
They also got Stephen Russell in D2, the voice of Garret in original Thief series.
And I remember "It's a loong way down" line in D2, an easter egg for Thief- there was the same voice line in there somewhere.
Bought D2 at launch in 2016, time piece level was so much fun - it blew my mind then.
I'm curious if we will ever get Dishonored 3, world map is massive. Pandyssia Continent is as large as The Isles- maybe even bigger, apparently going by the lore of the game it was purposely drawn closer to the Isles and smaller to make the Isles more significant. Wish they would do something there, apparently it's a more primal a bit more connected to the void.
There are two Arkane Studios Lyon and Austin. Lyon (Dishonored) and Austin (Redfall) - do not confuse these two.
