Tucked into tonight's fresh report on the inner turmoil happening at Xbox right now, Bloomberg has dropped a tidbit of information on what Arkane Austin might have done next - had the studio not been shuttered by Microsoft.
According to the report, Arkane's Austin team was "looking to return to its roots" by "pitching a new single-player 'immersive sim' game" to Microsoft. Before the studio's recent release of Redfall, it was known for its work on 2017's Prey and the Dishonored franchise.
Speaking of Dishonored, this report does hint that a sequel to Dishonored 2 could have been this 'new immersive sim game', but Bloomberg's sources don't outright state that 'Dishonored 3' was definitely mentioned internally. Still, given the franchise is well-known to gamers, it could have absolutely been an option for Xbox and Arkane, had a new immersive sim had gotten the greenlight.
"Before its closure, Arkane had been looking to return to its roots by pitching a new single-player “immersive sim” game, such as a new entry in the Dishonored series, according to the people familiar."
While such a project will no longer go ahead of course, it's also interesting that apparently, Redfall itself wasn't the reason behind Arkane Austin's closure. We don't know the full reasons right now, but Bloomberg sources claim that the shutdown "was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game, Redfall".
We'll never know exactly what the Austin-based developer could have produced under Microsoft post-Redfall, but it's a shame that we didn't see a new immersive sim from the team over there. As ever, this is reported information and should be treated as such without hearing anything official from Xbox, Bethesda or Arkane.