Dishonored wouldn't exist without failed Thief 4, Blade Runner pitches
Dishonored was inspired by Arkane Studios' unsuccessful pitches for Thief 4 and a Blade Runner game. The studio's co-directors revealed that these projects led to the creation of Dishonored after Bethesda could not secure the rights for either IP. Ultimately, Dishonored evolved into a distinct game that became a classic in the stealth genre.
- ▪Arkane Studios pitched for Thief 4 and a Blade Runner game before creating Dishonored.
- ▪Bethesda approached Arkane with the opportunity to work on these franchises, but could not secure the rights.
- ▪Despite the initial setbacks, Bethesda encouraged Arkane to continue developing their ideas, leading to the creation of Dishonored.
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| Original publisher | Polygon |
| Canonical URL | https://www.polygon.com/dishonored-origins-thief-4-blade-runner-pitches/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 17:03:12 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T17:07:27.532Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T17:07:27.532Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | p9zHmhHdozH9 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Follow Followed Like Thread Link copied to clipboard Add us on By Tomas Franzese Published May 23, 2026, 1:03 PM EDT News Dishonored was preceded and inspired by Arkane Studios' pitches for Thief 4 and a Blade Runner game that never came to be { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": "1", "name": "Home", "item": "https://www.polygon.com/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position":"2", "name": "News", "item": "https://www.polygon.com/news/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position":"3", "name": "Dishonored wouldn't exist without failed Thief 4, Blade Runner pitches from Arkane", "item": "https://www.polygon.com/dishonored-origins-thief-4-blade-runner-pitches/" } ] } Related Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees is finally…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Polygon.
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