DINGA BAKABA
Since it was founded in 1999, Arkane Studios has built a reputation for crafting deep worlds and systems, but Deathloop has proved something of a breakout hit. Game director Dinga Bakaba discusses how our game of the year differs from its precursors, and how that affected its reception both publicly and internally.
Congratulations on Deathloop landing the top spot in Edge’s 2021 Awards – we’re sure this won’t be the only such recognition it receives. How has the game’s reception felt on your side?
We are super happy that the game is recognised like that. If we were to go back and tell Dinga of three and a half years ago… he wasn’t cynical enough to laugh, but he would have been surprised. Not because we didn’t want to make an interesting game, but because we thought that we were going to make something interesting enough that it will repel as much as attract. That was what we said since very early on: this is a game that some people will love and probably many will hate.
We didn’t really update our thinking on that until maybe one or two weeks before release, when I finally got to play the entire package, including multiplayer, on my TV, plug in the PS5 and start invading journalists and ruining their day as Julianna. That’s when I started to think, actually, maybe the group of people who will hate it – well, I don’t know about that group. But the people who will love it, maybe that will be a bigger group than expected.
Why did you anticipate that players would react negatively to the game? Because it doesn’t have the characteristics of a lot of the games that we see – and even the ones that we made, that got these awards. For Dishonored 2, we were happy and surprised when we started getting nice reviews and awards and stuff but, you know, we were working for that. We were working to make the best possible Arkane game. And this one was: ‘Let’s make something different. Be true to ourselves but innovate and maybe go into the weird a little bit’. Because weird is always fun in brainstorms but then you’re like, ‘Well, you know, at some point real people have to see this, so tone it down’. I always loved projects like Bayonetta or Psychonauts where you can tell that someone in the room said “not crazy enough” or “not weird enough”, rather than the contrary. I always dreamed of that. And I hoped that Deathloop was the right occasion to do that.
What impact did that decision have on the development of Deathloop, and the way Arkane Lyon now makes games as a studio?
For me as a director, because it was my first time directing a game… [pauses] I will say this: in the beginning of the project, there were so many fires to put out, so many questions to answer, that I dedicated almost all of my time to that. Which is what you expect, in a way. And actually, that was a mistake. Because this is a complex game. And it is complex for the people that are conceptualising it – but then, at some point, it gets to the team. And clearly not everyone understood what we were going for. And not everyone necessarily liked what we were going for. That’s always the case in a game studio, right?
Because we’re professionals. The thing is, professional or not, sometimes it’s really nice when you take the time to explain things.
Personally, that’s what I learned. I [approached the project] like we did it before, working on some things that were maybe less challenging. Now, for something as challenging as this, I should have spent more energy and resources formulating, reformulating, reformulating, reformulating the pillars. Even if you think it’s clear, it’s about finding different ways to explain what we are making, why it’s cool and – very importantly – why some people will absolutely love it.
“THIS ONE WAS: ‘LET’S BE TRUE TO OURSELVES BUT INNOVATE AND MAYBE GO INTO THE WEIRD A LITTLE BIT’”
And how different is the game you initially conceptualised from the one we’re playing today?
The weird part is, even though the game is not the same thing at all as the first versions, in terms of the overall vision there is a lot that is still there. It’s not like we did a 180 at some point. We never rebooted the project, for instance, which is weird for something like this. When we changed our minds, we always built on something that was there – which is good, because it gives you a frame of possible iteration that you cannot go too far away from.
One of the biggest additions Deathloop makes to the traditional Arkane game is multiplayer, taking all the systems and opportunities for player expression your games are known for and introducing a competitive element. Have you been surprised at all by how players have approached it?
The things that we hoped would happen, like people helping each other without synchronising – like, you just invade someone for the first time and are like, “Yeah, I feel kind of bad, I’m going to help them through the mission” – we’ve seen that happening.
I was hoping for that because Julianna, in the fiction, doesn’t want Colt to give up. She wants to keep him
motivated enough that he is an interesting, worthy opponent – she wants him to ‘git gud’, in a way [laughs]. That’s why she’s horrible with him. She wants him to be a worthy opponent. And it’s not even out of hate – well, there is some resentment. But it’s not about that. It’s mainly about: this is fun, isn’t it? And it’s more fun when you’re motivated. And [for the Julianna player], you don’t want them to rage quit, you want them to keep playing.
After launch, there was a lot of talk about people just turning off multiplayer invasions so they could play solo. How are you feeling about that, a few months down the line? Multiplayer did turn out how we hoped it would, which is both integral to the experience and entirely optional. That’s what we wanted. And those are two big points of tension when you’re trying to develop a feature.
We want it to be inherent because that’s the Arkane thing, right? Everything has to be there for a reason. An explainable, articulable reason. Like Sébastien [Mitton], when he does character design, he hates when there is a pocket that is just impractical – like: “How do you put something in this pocket?” And the same for multiplayer – if it’s there, it cannot just be a mode, it needs to be something diegetic, very integrated, that reinforces the themes and high concept of the game. And we are pretty happy that it’s all those things.
But! It’s your game. If you don’t want that vision that we have for the experience, and you will be satisfied without that, we need to allow that and we need to make it as good as possible. Which was actually one of the pivots [during development]. At some point – for reasons I will not go into today – we decided to say, let’s stop the tension: if we have to prioritise one thing, it will be the singleplayer experience. Because the multiplayer, as integral as it is, exists to reinforce the experience of being Colt and breaking this loop. Colt, fictionally, has the most scary person in front of him, harassing him. Ah, the Internet! That’s a good recruiting ground for Juliannas [laughs].
Adding multiplayer to a singleplayer game is not an easy task. But the thing is, when someone deactivates it, it’s not a failure for us. On the contrary, it proves that we made the right choices in the big picture.
Speaking of the big picture, Deathloop introduces a lot of mysteries around Blackreef and this time loop, but by time the story ends, they haven’t all been resolved. Was that an intentional decision to leave room in case you ever want to go back to the setting?
I’ll say this: the focus was not about building a mythology with this game. That’s something we did with Dishonored that was not a goal for this game. We wanted it to be something – even though it is a loop – with a beginning and an end. Explaining everything was not necessary to that. We do have an explanation somewhere. You need to, otherwise things can be contradictory or incoherent. But we felt this time it was interesting to leave the mystery.
Some people have been pretty good at deducing some of it. Some parts, maybe we went too far to the subtle side, so people are now confused, and there are some wrong
assumptions that are circulating in the community. But it’s fascinating. When people are entirely convinced about the wrong thing, it tells you that your work has outreached you, in a way.
But no, it wasn’t to leave room this time, it was to focus on what was important, and what was important here was Colt’s, and the player’s, journey and struggle. And if that was a way of probing for whether we are adding more story, I will not answer that today [laughs].