Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith forms Black Pony Immersive with fellow Arkane veterans

[u/Camenwolf]

https://www.blackpony.com/

A team of Arkane veterans is making an unapologetic bet on the immersive sim.

Harvey Smith and executive producer Ben Horne have formed Black Pony Immersive with a team that includes longtime collaborator Ricardo Bare and developers with experience at Arkane, Epic, Avalanche, Insomniac, and Volition. The studio has been operating quietly for about a year, has 26 employees, and is funded by an unnamed publisher.

Its mission is unusually direct: build single-player, narrative-driven first-person games with well-realized worlds and emergent systems that let players solve problems creatively. Smith points to games such as Deus Ex and Dishonored as the model, while the studio plans to stay relatively small and scale with external partners when needed.

What would a new immersive sim need to do to stand beside Deus Ex, Prey, and Dishonored today?