The internet is ablaze with acclaim and excitement for Arkane's Deathloop and its complex world, combat, and stealth system. But many have also enjoyed the simple, violent pleasure of the game's kick move. Recently, Arkane Lyon game director Dinga Bakaba shared the story behind how kicking in Deathloop evolved from a scrapped parrying system.
Responding to one streamer's amusing example of Colt's explosive boot jabs — in which IGN's Stella Chung went for a gentle push and ended up servicing an NPC a helping of "this is Sparta" — Bakaba explains that the mechanic originated from an older prototype for the game.
"When we made the first player versus player prototype, we had a parry like in Dishonored," Bakaba said in a tweet. "But the host player had too many frame advantage compared to the invader due to network latency. Timing for a successful parry was too different from when playing in either role and vs NPCs."
After some workshopping, Bakaba and game designers Jonathan Foudral and Jerome Braune decided on ditching the idea of a Dishonored 2-like parry system and opted for a "boot kick in the gut" to stagger and disarm enemies. A later iteration added the benefit of sending a character flying if the player kicked them from behind or stunned them with a gunshot first. Two years and a lot of tweaking later, they had a kick that, according to our Andy Kelly, feels like a "violent delight."
Deathloop is receiving near-universal praise not only for its over-the-top kicks and guns-out violence, but also its complex arsenal of player abilities, its execution of a fair and low-frustration looping system, and the use of stealth tension in its multiplayer component. In our review for the game, we called Deathloop an example of "Arkane Studios at the top of its game," and likened its tension in player-versus-player gameplay to that of a battle royale game like PUBG.
I can count on one hand how many multiplayer games incorporate stealth, but there should be more - it taps into the same place as an intense horror game like Alien Isolation, but the predator that’s hunting you here is far more cunning than any AI could ever be. Marry that to some of the best level design, art direction, narrative design, and audio work in the business, and you have what makes Deathloop so special.
The game is available on PC and is currently a PlayStation 5 exclusive, though no telling how long that will last, as Microsoft later acquired all Bethesda Softworks studios in the Zenimax merger earlier this year. Some players are reporting that Deathloop is running inconsistently on PC; Arkane has acknowledged the issue and is investigating.