Dishonored |03/02/2025| Rev. Elation's Sunday Service

The Fall of the Code: A Sermon on Arkane’s Rise and Ruin

Brothers and sisters, gather ‘round the dimming glow of this pixelated altar, controllers trembling, save files corrupted. Today, we embark on a pilgrimage through the digital halls of a once-great kingdom—Arkane Studios—a house built on the rock of ingenuity, only to crumble under the sands of greed. Their tale is a parable for our age, a mirror held up to the soul of man, wrapped in the veil of video games and their designers’ rise and inevitable fall. Let us play through this story, frame by frame, and heed its warnings, for as Ecclesiastes 1:9 declares, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
In the beginning, there was the Word—not of scripture alone, but of code, crafted by hands that dreamed beyond the mundane. Arkane rose from the shadows of Lyon and Austin, a studio forged in 1999 by visionaries like Raphaël Colantonio, who sought to weave worlds as rich as the tapestries of old. They gave us Arx Fatalis, a flawed but earnest hymn to immersive sims, and then Dishonored, a masterpiece of stealth and consequence that echoed Psalm 139:12: “Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day.” Their games were lanterns in a dimming industry, offering players not just entertainment, but agency—choice, depth, a dialogue with the divine spark of creation itself. For years, they built their reputation brick by brick, interacting with fans as shepherds tend their flock, listening, refining, pouring their souls into every level design and line of dialogue. This was their genesis, their Eden, a golden age when passion trumped profit, and the community sang their praises like a chorus of angels.
But behold, the serpent slithered into the garden—not with an apple, but with the glint of gold. Investors, those modern-day Pharisees, smelled the mercantile winds blowing from the temples of live-service games and microtransactions. Where Arkane once crafted cathedrals of code, the money-changers now demanded bazaars—endless grindfests to milk the faithful for every coin. As Proverbs 11:1 warns, “The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him.” Yet the scales tipped, and the studio’s soul was bartered. Enter Redfall—a vampire stalking the legacy of Arkane’s past triumphs. Conceived in 2018 under ZeniMax’s lust for acquisition bait, it was a multiplayer loot shooter, a genre foreign to Arkane’s artisans, who thrived on single-player symphonies. The designers, once free, were shackled to a vision not their own, their team dwindling as 70% of Prey’s veterans fled the sinking ship, morale bleeding out like a glitched health bar.
Oh, how the mighty fell! Redfall launched in May 2023, a hollow shell of what could have been, its release a dirge sung over a studio’s grave. Critics reviled it—Metacritic’s 54 a scarlet letter, branding it among the year’s worst. Players abandoned it, sales plummeted, and customer retention withered like vines in a drought. The open world was barren, the gunplay clunky, the vampires mere shadows of the threats they promised to be. This was no Dishonored, no Prey—this was a betrayal of the covenant Arkane had forged with its flock. Microsoft, having bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion, watched as their hands-off hubris let the game stagger into the light unfinished, unpolished, unworthy. Some at Arkane had prayed for cancellation, a merciful end, but the machine marched on, and with Redfall’s failure, Arkane Austin closed its doors in May 2024—a studio sacrificed on the altar of avarice.
Scripture cries out against this folly! In 1 Timothy 6:10, we are warned, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Arkane’s investors, drunk on the promise of wealth, pierced not just themselves but a legacy, a community, a dream. They forgot Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Arkane once served art, served us, but the masters of mammon rewrote their code, and the game crashed.
Yet this is not just Arkane’s story—it’s ours. We, too, are players in a grand campaign, lured by the loot boxes of this world, chasing hollow achievements while the Designer Supreme calls us to a higher quest. Arkane’s fall is a shadow of Babel’s tower—Genesis 11:4 tells of men who said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” But their pride scattered them, just as Redfall scattered Arkane’s faithful. We must ask: What are we grinding for? Digital gold that fades when the servers die, or treasures in heaven that moth and rust cannot touch, as Matthew 6:20 promises?
So, rise up, warriors of the controller! Let Arkane’s ruin be your revelation. Cast off the microtransactions of the soul—greed, apathy, compromise—and return to the main quest. The Designer above didn’t code you for side missions of selfishness, but for an epic of love, justice, and truth. When the credits roll, will your playthrough be a tale of glory or a cautionary glitch? The clock ticks, the screen fades, and the choice is yours. Game over is coming—play it well.