Breaking Out
With Deathloop, Arkaneis reinventing the wheel it spent two decades perfecting
Exploring Deathloop’s incredibly stylish, intricate world with the development team at Arkane
Almost every aspect of Deathloop, in the gradual unfurling of details since the game’s first showing at E3 2019, has come as something of a surprise. Revealed less than a fortnight on from the release of Outer Wilds and mere hours after 12 Minutes got its own E3 spotlight, Deathloop was the title that confirmed time loops as a gaming trend, and carried that trend into the triple-A space.
Then, just as we were starting to grasp the intricate workings of the loop, it was followed by a second revelation: confirmation that Colt and Julianna, the two characters shown in that very first trailer, would both be playable in head-to-head multiplayer – a first for developer Arkane Studios.
Even after seeing the game up close for the first time, the full implications of both are still coming into focus. But in the moment, they’re nudged out by a fresh source of surprise. Because, as game director Dinga Bakaba steers us through one of Blackreef Island’s four regions, we’re actually a little taken aback by just how quick it all is.
Colt applies a machete to the midsection of one poor masked goon, readies a grenade for his next victim and switches to the sniper rifle at a range that makes the scope frankly unnecessary. Finally, to mop up any remaining enemies, he uses the Pepper Grinder, a rapid-fire cannon we’re told is this universe’s equivalent of an assault rifle but looks and sounds like it should be strapped to the underside of a Spitfire. It’s fast, loud and bloody.
In the Dishonored games, which occupied Arkane’s Lyon team for the eight years prior, action tends to come in carefully planned bursts. A sleep dart here, a teleport there, ducking back into the shadows before anyone’s the wiser. That’s not the rhythm of Deathloop at all. At least, not as played by Bakaba, who
THE PEPPER GRINDER LOOKS AND SOUNDS LIKE IT SHOULD BE STRAPPED TO A SPITFIRE
manages to compress an entire Dishonored level’s worth of violence into the space of a few seconds.
He’s aided by a set of powers that will be familiar to fans of the studio’s previous work but, vitally, have been recalibrated to make them easier to deploy on the go. Shift, this game’s teleport power, lets you hang in the air and release a shower of bullets before pivoting to blink off in a new direction. Nexus is Dishonored 2’s Domino ability reimagined as a rocket launcher, linking the fates of every person in its blast radius so they can all be felled simultaneously with a single followup headshot. Turrets can be hacked remotely, using a gadget that doesn’t even require you to be aiming directly
THE IMMERSIVE SIM ISN’T A GENRE, BAKABA SAYS, BUT A SET OF PRINCIPLES
at them. There is rarely any need to stop, or even slow down.
This change of pace is another way in which Arkane is tearing up the unspoken assumptions of its previous releases, and one that simultaneously draws on and feeds back into those other two major departures. So let’s take a leaf out of Deathloop’s book and rewind.
Over the past two decades, Arkane’s twin teams – working in parallel from Lyon and Texas – have released five full games. From Arx Fatalis to Prey, these titles span a breadth of settings and genres, but all of them can be loosely corralled under the banner of ‘immersive sim’. This term can be tricky to define, but the games it describes put the focus on player agency and improvisation over tightly choreographed setpieces, with level design that rewards closer examination. Games, in other words, in the tradition of System Shock, Thief and Deus Ex – a tradition which Arkane has been observing almost entirely on its own, at least in the gaming mainstream, since the decline of Irrational Games.
So does Deathloop, with its fleetof-foot combat and startling forward momentum, really fit into that same lineage? “Arkane is pretty much an immersive-sim specialist,” Bakaba says. “But that shouldn’t prevent us exploring and playing with the boundaries of this design philosophy.” This last bit is a distinction on which he is firm – the immersive sim isn’t a genre in its own right, according to Bakaba, but a set of principles that can be applied to other genres.
He demonstrates with a quick stroll through Arkane’s back catalogue: each title, Bakaba says, is a “chimera” of genre elements. The stealthy inclinations of Dishonored are a tip of the hood to Thief, but 2017’s Prey fused System Shock with elements of survival games. Arx
Fatalis and Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic, the studio’s first two releases, were action-RPG games that put the stress on opposite sides of that hyphen. Whatever else changes, two underlying design principles remain: a world built with sufficient depth that players can immerse themselves completely, and sim-style systems that are reactive enough not only to allow but to encourage creative solutions.
“I remember [studio founder Raphaël Colantonio] often joked that if one day we did a go-kart game, it would be an immersive-sim go-kart game,” Bakaba says. And Deathloop, it seems, is an immersive-sim take on the modern firstperson shooter, in all its immediacy and with all that blockbuster appeal.
It’s a departure for the studio, certainly, but perhaps not as much as it might seem at first glance. Arkane’s catalogue is something of an iceberg, and its work on more straightforward shooters has remained mostly beneath the waterline. Before Dishonored, it acted as a support studio on BioShock 2.
More recently, it collaborated with Bethesda stablemate MachineGames on Wolfenstein’s co-op shooter Youngblood and its VR companion piece Cyberpilot, with everyone we speak to on the Deathloop team contributing in some capacity.
And then there are the games from the studio’s dark period in the late 2000s, which includes two unreleased shooters. Its Half-Life 2
spin-off, given the working title ‘Ravenholm’, stuck to the more linear structure of Valve’s set-piece-driven campaigns while expanding the toybox of player abilities to include manipulation of electricity. It was cancelled by Valve, and footage only saw the light of day last year.
After that came The Crossing, an ambitious experiment in fusing single- and multiplayer shooters.
Set in two parallel-universe versions of Paris, its big idea was to let other players step into your campaign, filling the shoes of what would normally be AI-controlled enemies. A squad of four rank-and-file soldiers would face off against a single character who controlled very much like the Arkane protagonists we’re used to now, able to outmanoeuvre their foes with the help of a nifty grappling hook. In 2007, when the game was announced (and previewed in Edge 174), this kind of asymmetric multiplayer experience – which Arkane termed ‘cross-player’ – was a revolutionary concept. Alas, in 2009, Arkane had to step away from the project for financial reasons.
Which brings us back, in appropriately circular fashion, to Julianna. “When we made The Crossing, it was ahead of its time, and we weren’t able to sell it how we wanted,” says Sébastien Mitton, art director on Deathloop and a 17-year veteran of the studio. “And it’s funny because now we’re doing Deathloop with Julianna, who invades parts of the game. That’s kind of the same concept we had with The Crossing.”
Deathloop’s multiplayer aspect is optional but woven directly into the campaign. Once players have familiarised themselves with Colt, they’ll get the option to step into the shoes of Julianna – a counterassassin working alongside the people they’re normally trying to kill off. Sound familiar? “That is definitely an idea we’ve been toying with for a while at Arkane, but it was never fully realised in a commercial product,” Bakaba says. “There was actually a brief moment where we considered calling this game The Crossing.” This would have made for a neat closing of the loop – but, Bakaba says, the project wasn’t simply a case of unfinished business.
In fact, Arkane didn’t even set out with any intention of making a multiplayer game, Bakaba explains. “This project’s inception was very iterative. We didn’t start with the PvP multiplayer. We had the character of Julianna already, we knew that she was important for the story, and we wanted to basically have one of the targets that was unpredictable.” And what, after all, could be more unpredictable than an actual human being?
There’s no one correct way of playing as Julianna, we’re told. “There is definitely potential to have some roleplay in there, some potential for encounters that are full-frontal, some that are more catand-mouse,” Bakaba says. As the invader, you’re a little more vulnerable than the game’s main hero, with only one chance to mess up Colt’s day before getting booted out of that reality entirely. “Because of that, maybe she will play in an interesting way, trying to set ambushes, traps, work with the NPCs and the security systems, or do some kind of harassing and escape.”
Aside from The Crossing, we’re immediately put in mind of Dark Souls’ invasion mechanic, and Bakaba references “the tension that you have when you meet someone in something like DayZ, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.” But the primary multiplayer game he looked to for inspiration was rather more amicable than any of these. “For me, Journey was more of a reference than The Crossing,” Bakaba says. “But instead of meeting strangers that are helping you, you’re meeting strangers that are trying to impede your progress.”
Of course, part of the magic of Journey’s encounters was their anonymity. It showed how much humanity could be communicated without language, just through another player’s actions. That unmistakable unpredictability. Deathloop won’t let you speak with your opponent, or ever name them.
But given that Julianna can also be controlled by AI, will the game ever explicitly tell you if you’re facing off against another human? Bakaba can’t say for sure. “We are quite late in the project,” he says. “Interestingly, this one is still being decided.”
It’s a reminder that this is all experimental territory for the studio – something that was baked into the game right from its conception. “When we were looking for the next project, looking at various ways we could go after Dishonored, one thing that was clear was that we wanted to do something fresh, something different,” he says. For the Lyon team, after all, it had been eight years of working with the same characters. The same setting. The same rules. It was time to, as Bakaba puts it, “go a little bit crazy”. And there’s no better example of this than the titular time loop.
Looked at one way, Deathloop is a shooter campaign with just four levels. There’s Fristad Rock, the area we tour with Bakaba: a small archipelago just off the coast of Blackreef Island. Karl’s Bay, yet to be revealed. Above it, Updaam, home to a clifftop nightclub and its resident wolf-masked partygoers. And farther inland, The Complex, a remnant of Blackreef’s military history overlooked by the antenna halo which tops the island’s silhouette.
These are the homes of the AEON Program, a private organisation of scientists and celebrities with the bright idea of creating their very own Groundhog Day as a route to eternal life. Think of it as an entire island of Bill Murrays, all aware that they’re living this one day over and over. The time-loop machine is switched on, the launch party kicks off and… something goes wrong. The exact nature of that something is yet to be revealed, but it results in everyone’s memories getting wiped every time the clock strikes midnight, with two exceptions: Colt and Julianna. And one of them wants out.
The only way for Colt to break the cycle is to kill the eight leaders
THINK OF IT AS AN ENTIRE ISLAND OF BILL MURRAYS, LIVING ONE DAY OVER AND OVER
of AEON, the Island’s selfproclaimed ‘Visionaries’. And, of course, because everything resets after 24 hours, all eight Visionaries have to be offed within a single run.
Those days don’t pass in realtime, of course – once again, Deathloop speeds things up significantly. Each day is split into four parts: morning, noon, afternoon and evening. You can spend each of these visiting a single location, all of them changing significantly over the course of the day. And so those four levels become 16. As for deciding which combination makes up your perfect day, well, that’s the basis of what campaign designer Dana Nightingale calls the “murder puzzle”.
Nightingale is a veteran level designer, responsible for The Clockwork Mansion – a shuffling Rubik’s Cube of a level that proved to be one of Dishonored 2’s highlights. It’s not hard to see, then, why she was selected for this new role, overseeing the unusual structure of Deathloop’s campaign. “It’s a game where, after the first couple of hours, it becomes completely nonlinear,” Nightingale explains.
The Visionaries move around over the course of the day according to their own schedules, occasionally gathering together or disappearing off the map entirely. You can chase after them, but with twice as many targets as there are opportunities, this approach won’t let you bag all eight of them in one go. There’s simply not enough time in the day. But perhaps you could give those schedules a nudge, right?
To guide you, the game offers a set of leads. These work like quest markers, pointing towards key beats. But you can ignore them entirely, step off the beaten path and find your own way to this goal. Or just work on getting very, very good at the murder part of the puzzle.
If you want access to Shift, Nexus and all the game’s other supernatural abilities, you’ll have to kill for them. Each Visionary has a single signature power that they’ll wield against
you in battle. Beat them, and it’s yours to keep. Beat them again, and you’ll earn an upgrade to that power. So if there’s one ability you’re especially keen to master, serialkilling the particular target who holds it may become your sole focus for a little while.
Then again, perhaps you fancy playing as a more freewheeling detective type, gathering clues and following your own threads. (We get the impression that Deathloop will be one of those games best played with a notebook by your side.) Or you could jump from one approach to the other as the fancy takes you.
The aim was to “let the player craft their own campaign,” Nightingale says. But for all this freedom, the ‘puzzle’ description implies a single canonical solution – is that the case? “There is one correct solution – there is one way to break the loop,” she says. “But discovering it is not something you can do right off the bat.” In part, this is because some of the necessary information will be different for each run: key codes, for example, reset along with the loop. But don’t worry, there are other lessons you can carry with you from day to day.
Back on Fristad Rock, deep inside the base of Ramblin’ Frank Spicer, Colt discovers a note which clues us into the location of a code for bypassing the building’s security. The only problem is, it’s in another region, in another Visionary’s pad. And besides, Frank is already dead, the victim of a smartly placed proximity mine. But maybe next time we’ll go there first, grab the code, then swing by Frank’s place in the afternoon. A decision for tomorrow.
One Visionary down, at least for the day, a fresh lead in the pocket for tomorrow: it’s been a productive morning. Bakaba heads out of the level, and demonstrates the game’s time-progression system. You can spend the day’s four slots however you like: moving onto a different location, revisiting one you’ve already seen earlier in the day, or simply declining to use them at all. Bakaba skips past midday to show us Fristad Rock in the afternoon.
We return to the level to find two things have swept across it in our absence: a street party and a snowstorm. The former thoroughly wrecked the joint on its way through (a time loop means there’s no need for partygoers to worry about the morning after, nor who’ll clean up), but they have left us a snowman, to which Colt immediately applies his boot. Bah, humbug.
There’s another, more significant effect of this turn in the weather: the sea has frozen over, granting access
THE NUMBER OF LEVEL VARIATIONS QUICKLY STARTS TO TICK UP TOWARDS INFINITY
to a previously unreachable floe just offshore. “Certain [routes and activities] are open only in the morning and not in the afternoon, and others vice versa,” Mitton explains. “There are tides, as well, that give you access to some places at some moments during the day.” Your actions can influence these changes, too: a group of tunnel diggers can be put to the sword, but leave them to their work and you’ll be able to benefit from the resulting shortcut later in the day.
With every location branching off in multiple directions, that number of level variations quickly starts to tick up from 16 and towards infinity. Even if, ultimately, it’s the same four maps over and over.
Drawing the player back through spaces was actually one of the main reasons Arkane landed on Deathloop’s time-loop design in the first place. The studio’s levels have always been Swiss-cheesed through with shortcuts and secrets – in this game, it seems, more than ever before – but not every player gets to see that. While some will explore every cranny of a Dishonored level, others will simply blast their way from one corner to the other, and never return.
“It’s a legitimate playstyle,” Bakaba says. “We’re fine with it.” But it does mean those players won’t experience any of the countless other ways each mission can be approached. And besides, it seems like rather a waste of all that thoughtful level design. This is a problem that IO Interactive (possibly the only studio in the world to rival Arkane in the intricacy of its clockwork sandboxes) solved brilliantly in the just-concluded Hitman trilogy, incorporating challenge systems that reward players for returning to the same map and trying something different.
IO’s approach is thoroughly extra-narrative, all contained in menus and level-up screens. Arkane, though, is aiming for something more diegetic. “Is there a game structure that could encourage people to build that familiarity with the spaces, so that by the end of the game they feel like experts, the same way you might in a Counter-Strike map?” Bakaba says. “Is there a way to do that but still tell an interesting story with character development?” Hence: the time loop.
The repeating structure also accounts for another type of immersive-sim player that exists right at the opposite end of the spectrum: the perfectionist. The type who compulsively save-loads their way to a Ghost/Clean Hands playthrough, never seen, never killing a soul. The ones who hoover their way across the entire map, picking every pocket, reading every diary entry and opening every cupboard. If it sounds like we’re being judgemental here, it’s only because the archetype is all too familiar.
Nightingale recognises the urge, too. It’s how she naturally approaches this style of game as a player, she admits – but when you’re making them, it’s necessary to be more of a “bull in a china shop,” and that reveals a different side to the levels. “If I think about someone who’s only ever played that way,” she says, “wouldn’t it be nice if they see what else our games have to offer?”
The loop discourages players from sticking to a single playstyle through sheer repetition: ghosting a level is still entirely possible, but next time you might try wreaking havoc in it instead. It’s supported through the absence of quicksaves, which forces players to live with their mistakes and then improvise around them. And Deathloop has jettisoned entirely one of the traditional markers of a ‘perfect’ playthrough: the non-lethal approach.
This is the kind of change that risks upsetting immersive-sim puritans, but we can’t argue with the developers’ reasoning. After all, from a narrative perspective, what does it matter if these people die? They’ll be back tomorrow morning with no recollection of the bullet hole you bored into their skulls. “In Dishonored, the theme was the abuse of power, so it made sense that there were consequences for [killing],” Bakaba says. “Here, the theme is more about the ugly things you have to do to break a pattern.” You have to suspect that Colt is not the only one he’s talking about.
So, yes, Deathloop is Arkane breaking free of the loop it so carefully constructed for itself with the Dishonored games. It’s putting action first, bringing in a second player with Julianna, and experimenting with a campaign structure that not only deviates from what the studio and its immersivesim predecessors have done before but is finding a whole new approach to the blossoming time-loop genre. With all that in mind, does Deathloop still fit within the studio’s design philosophy, as laid out by Bakaba?
Its super-stylish world is certainly one we’re keen to immerse ourselves in: a palimpsest of ideas and eras that invites the player to peel it back and see what lies beneath. “We live in Lyon,” Mitton says. “This used to be France’s capital, in the time of the Gauls. When we walk in the streets, we don’t even realise it, but we’ve got all that past and culture with us.” And the same goes for Blackreef Island.
The ’60s retrofuturism of AEON’s era is the part that catches your eye first, with all its colourful plastic interiors and lurid shag carpeting to spill blood across. But this is layered on top of the island’s history as a Second World Warperiod military base with a sideline in paranormal research, and before that as the Faroe-Islands-inspired location of a remote fishing village and home to a lot of unexplained phenomena. It all adds up to a setting which pulls equally from NASA Antarctic expeditions and Twiggy fashion shoots, the gadgetry of classic Bond and The Wicker Man’s folk horror.
The worlds Mitton creates have always run on contrast and conflict. In Dishonored, it was disparity of wealth. In The Crossing, between two divergent versions of Paris. Here, it’s the clash between old and new, past and present. The pops of bright colour that stand out against the rusted-out browns of reclaimed military hardware; old stone giving way to patterned wallpaper and glittery sci-fi tech. These are locations built to be sprinted through, weapon raised, but Arkane seems confident that even the most blinkered shooter enthusiast will slow down and appreciate their surroundings eventually.
As for the ‘sim’ part of the equation, well, in the moment-tomoment, we’ll need more time to prod and poke at Deathloop’s systems to know for sure whether the increased focus on action comes at any cost. But during our two loops of Fristad Rock, we catch sight of a number of paths not taken: piers jutting out into the sea, bunker doors embedded deep in the rock face, geometric architecture inviting us upwards – and, of course, plenty of rooftops to run across. It’s exactly the kind of variety in approach that Arkane has always been good at, and that will be doubly important to Deathloop’s success, as it tries to keep a sense of repetition from setting in from loop to loop.
Repetitiveness is something Arkane is fighting on multiple fronts. Your powers and weapons have to be slotted into a slim loadout before each foray, meaning you’ll rarely tackle a level with exactly the same build twice. This works in tandem with the concept of a player-guided campaign – you might want different equipment for infiltrating to grab a clue rather than attempt to assassinate a target or two. And, of course, there’s always the chance you could get invaded, with that unpredictable human factor helping to keep things fresh.
Every ostensibly disparate idea has its place in the larger structure, it seems. We only glimpse the edges of this structure during our session, and trying to hold the whole in our head is a little dizzying. It’s the promise of those immersive-sim principles applied at a grander scale than ever, letting the player not only ad-lib in the heat of the moment but improvise an entire campaign.
If it all comes together, Deathloop could be the rare game that continues to surprise. The effect certainly doesn’t seem to have faded for Bakaba, even after years of leading the project through development. “There is a level of ‘I’m not sure this thing should exist,’” he says, when we ask about the unlikely path that led Arkane to this game. “But it does. And that’s beautiful.”
THE ’60s RETROFUTURISM OF AEON’S ERA IS THE PART THAT CATCHES YOUR EYE FIRST