I’ve been playing a lot of the Dishonored series on PS4 lately, finally giving Death of the Outsider a go before circling back to finish Dishonored 2 because I thrive in chaos. It’s my latest obsession, evidenced by me accidentally buying shirt for women with the Outsider logo on it.
This quest for stuff also led me down a path of trying to get all the games in the series in physical form, especially as I had only dabbled in the original Dishonored previously. That’s when I found Dishonored & Prey: The Arkane Collection, a collection (wow, really?) of all of Arkane’s games since they started working with Bethesda.
Featuring Dishonored: Definitive Edition, Dishonored 2, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, and Prey, The Arkane Collection is a good starting point for those not familiar with Arkane’s work that released earlier this year. As Dishonored: Definitive Edition is the only one I don’t already own, I left it, though that incidentally also seems pretty difficult to find physically these days without spending slightly over the odds. Still, for £20, not a bad deal, especially as this physical collection only released in the UK at the end of October.
I shopped around a little and couldn’t find it selling anywhere for more than £30. Even GAME, the retailer that doesn’t understand value, have it retailing for £25.
Curious, I went over to the PlayStation Store to check out the pricing — maybe I would get a discount for already having Death of the Outsider digitally. Not only did I not get a discount, but I was also asked to pay more than four times the physical price some retailers were asking for.
£84.99. That is madness.
I don’t want to turn this into a whole physical vs. digital thing, but it did raise some alarm bells for me. Not only is The Arkane Collection literally just four games’ digital versions as a bundle, but it’s also much more expensive than its physical edition, which actually had a little bit of thought put into it with unique packaging and the like, even if it’s part-disc and part-code. Also, can we stop doing that please?
Of course the price of The Arkane Collection might come down on the PlayStation Store during a deal and it’s obviously included as part of Game Pass, yet I can’t think why any PlayStation players wouldn’t want to go for its physical version instead. It’s not even competitive with Steam, where you can get it for an RRP of £77.25 outside of a deal, but it also includes Dark Messiah Might and Magic and Arx Fatalis as part of the bundle. I’ve often found that digital collections of games are a little lazily assembled on console and that applies here.
What are definitely not lazily assembled, though, are Arkane’s games. While stabbing and blinking my way through two Dishonored games over the past few weeks, I was constantly struck by how rare it is these days to play such complete single-player games with so many different ways of approaching how you play. I don’t think Arkane have ever properly been rewarded commercially for their work, so if you haven’t experienced any of their games yet, The Arkane Collection is the perfect reminder of the power of single-player stories.
Just maybe not from the PlayStation Store.
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