To create the perfect loop, Arkane Lyon started at the end.
Deathloop is a game where you play as a supernatural assassin stuck in a time loop. To break out, you have to figure out how to kill eight targets in a single day. You have four chunks of time and four districts, and you have to line the targets up so you can kill them in as efficient a manner as possible. To stop the player from feeling overwhelmed, there’s a single solution - called the Golden Loop - and the game nudges you towards it with completable objectives called Leads.
You’re bombarded with information during your first few hours in Blackreef: here are the eight people you have to kill, these are your four districts, these are your tools, this resource allows you to keep weapons and skills between loops, you also have a lives system, you can be invaded by other players, and more. It’s a lot, but it’s manageable. One thing that seems less manageable is putting it all together as a developer.
“One of the first things that I tried to do was say, ‘Let's nail down what the most interesting and satisfying solution will be, and then work backward from there,’” campaign designer Dana Nightingale explains. “Of course, it changes as you go through, it's not going to be set in stone - it is just a starting point.”
Nightingale says Arkane had to “fail a lot” to make it all fit together in a way that works, but you can’t tell when the game is in your hands. If you’re a hardcore player, you can ignore the Leads, which place a waypoint on your HUD and give you a general idea of what you should do next, but there’s always a helping hand there for when you feel lost. It’s much more approachable than it seems in the trailers.
“We do a lot of user research,” Nightingale explains. “We have our own user research group. As often as the pandemic allowed, they get a group of players together, some who were Dishonored fans, some [who] had never heard of us, let them play the game for a week or two weeks, and just listen to everything they had to say.”
User research and feedback are important to any game, but it’s key to Arkane games. At Arkane, designers have a lot of freedom to create what they want. Each level or vignette within a level is headed up by a designer, and that’s why there’s so much variety in Deathloop - each person on the team is putting their personal stamp on the world. And when you’re too close to something, it’s hard to see where players might slip up.
“You have to empty your head of all the knowledge you have in this scenario and realise that if you approach this blank, then you can make an incorrect assumption from this piece of information and then carry that forward,” Nightingale says. “You're expecting this and you're getting that and it's just very common when someone's actually playing the game and you’re watching through your fingers.
“Many of our level designers love the hard-as-nails puzzles and mysteries. And we give the individual level designer - and this is true for all the games we make - a lot of autonomy and responsibility and trust to make that content. So my focus is on the campaign - that's on the critical path. So I will be a pain on all of their asses like, ‘No, another iteration, another iteration. This is the feedback we've done, nail this down, we need to polish this.’ But they all add their own stuff to the side missions. There wasn't someone micromanaging them. There would be leads in direction, of course, that would review it and give them feedback. But they’re designers, we trust their calls. That's the power that we give our level design team to say, ‘Yeah, make stuff, we trust you.’”
Nightingale, who has a Master’s in Architecture, was a level designer on Dishonored 2, and she was trusted with what’s widely considered as one of Arkane’s best levels, the Clockwork Mansion. This level is an intricate puzzle, like exploring the inside of a mechanical Rubik’s cube. Nightingale spent three years of her life creating it. Now, with Deathloop, Nightingale has gone from an ever-shifting clockwork house to an ever-shifting campaign that players can approach in any sequence they wish.
“The correlation there was definitely not lost on me,” Nightingale laughs. “I was making a clockwork house and now I’m making clockwork islands, making sure all the moving parts could move together and everything still worked and made sense and the player wasn't overwhelmed or lost. But also just trying to maintain the spectacle of it was... yeah, there were a lot of moments where it reminded me a lot of working on the Clockwork Mansion, for better or for worse. It was very difficult.”
It’s a credit to the studio how intuitive Deathloop feels despite its complexity. Just like how you can explore the Clockwork Mansion in its entirety without ever going into the spaces between the rooms and seeing its inner workings where the gears shift and whir as the house recalibrates every time a lever is pulled, Deathloop just works however you decide to approach it - whether you’re entering areas without a guide or you’re following objectives through to completion. It’s a studio of arcane architects, creating mechanical magic and interactive intricacies. It might be handy to start at the end, but sometimes you have to look back to get where you’re heading.
You can experience it for yourself on PS5 and PC now.