JULI, with MADLY, DEEPLY
Jess Kinghorn chats Death loop Arkane Studios, and gets to know its latest leading lady
You can be certain that there are no pacifists living on Black Reef. Home to artists, scientists, party animals, and murderers, it's not a place beholden to any line of thinking that's not operating at loo miles an hour. The centre of a man-made time loop, death is cheap for everybody - including the assassin Julianna Blake, who's gunning for you at every turn.
Game director Dinga Bakaba reveals, “When you see the trailer, Colt and Julianna’s relationship seems to be the main thing, but interestingly it didn’t start with that – it started with the time loop and this kind of 1960s world before there was this rivalry.”
When you play as protagonist Colt, you can choose either to have Julianna as just another AI-controlled character or to allow another player online to drop into her shoes. You can take up the mantle yourself from very early on too. It’s an ambitious blend of single-player and multiplayer to say the least.
BANG BANG…
Bakaba reľects on the dynamic, saying, “It’s a key part of the project and it’s so interesting that it just came out of a weird brainstorm about this one NPC and then someone said, ‘What if you could play them?’ And then someone said ‘Like The Crossing?’ and, yeah, we were all doomed. [Laughs] By that point, we were doomed! We went all-in almost immediately.”
In case you’re not familiar with the long tail of this story, Deathloop isn’t the Ľrst time Arkane has attempted to meld single- and multiplayer activity. Back in 2007 it announced it was working on The Crossing, an FPS that featured levels with linear single-player content up to a choke point, at which point all multiplayer hell would break loose. Teams of online players would be tasked with either protecting or assassinating the single player who themself would have to survive the ensuing team deathmatch. As Arkane had yet to establish itself as the creative powerhouse behind the Dishonored series that we know today, securing a publisher and funding was a challenge, ultimately leading to the project’s cancellation in 2009. The spirit of that project gets a new lease on life in the shape of Julianna Blake.
What’s got you caught in Julianna’s cross-hairs are Colt’s many, many attempts to break the cycle by taking out all eight of Black Reef’s ruling Visionaries in one loop. The full story of what’s gone on between her and Colt is anything but that simple, though. When it comes to the assassin, stealthy avoidance will only get you so far and you will have to face her eventually. Bakaba tells us, “We started with this idea of having this target and we wanted one of them – at the time we called it ‘The Nemesis’ – that would just not be in a predictable place on the island. [...] Like, just one ‘break the pattern’ target. Actually, as we were trying to Ľnd interesting ways to make the character Ľt the story and the structure, someone had the idea to say ‘Hey, what if you could play as the Nemesis?’”
According to Bakaba, before this Julianna was already one of the characters being developed by the narrative team within Arkane but she wasn’t initially intended to be playable.
MY BABY SHOT ME DOWN
He tells us candidly, “So, challenges… Uh, well, [there were] a lot!”
“IN THE TRAILER, COLT AND JULIANNA’S RELATIONSHIP SEEMS TO BE THE MAIN THING.”
Bakaba stresses that Deathloop is technically a very ambitious title. He says that it’s double the technical load of all of the spinning plates activated by your assassin in Dishonored 2 as Deathloop will be replicating the same thing for two players at the same time.
“Starting with just the simple fact that in our design philosophy everything needs to make sense. We didn’t want to have, like, a multiplayer mode and a campaign mode – we wanted all of that to work together,” Bakaba continues, “so having a human opponent in a story-driven game was deĽnitely a lot to think about. [...] We didn’t want a lot of limitations on this multiplayer mode [or to] really try to railroad how Julianna would play. We wanted it to be very freeform so we needed the character to have a personality that would accommodate [a variety of playstyles.]”
Whether you’re like art director Sebastien Mitton and want to get straight to the point with a well-placed headshot or your approach is more like Bakaba’s own, to keep the opposition guessing with mind games that draw out the hunt as long as possible, Julianna is an agent of chaos who has you covered.
Bakaba says there’s room for players to roleplay as Julianna, adding that it’s even possible “to be friendly with Colt,” maybe going so far as to assist him with taking out some NPC marks. Bakaba says, “Because why the fuck not?”
He continues, “That’s really something where we, of course, had to take that all into account – like the mechanic and the dynamic into account – and write the character and give her a philosophy that would accommodate all of these playstyles.”
This ľexibility extends to Colt as well, though naturally he’s pulling from a rather diļerent bag of tricks.
Watch this space for more on woman of the hour Julianna Blake as well as Colt when Arkane oļers another glimpse of the future. You’ll be able to play as both, alternately working to destroy the loop or protect it, and crack what Arkane is calling a ‘murder puzzle’ in this console exclusive for PlayStation 5 from 14 September. In the meantime, we’ll be hitting repeat on Deja Vu by Sencit and featuring Fjøra, the game’s banging theme song, now available on all good music streaming platforms.
“WE DIDN’T WANT A LOT OF LIMITATIONS ON THIS MULTIPLAYER MODE.”