Arkane vamps it up in its open-world co-op shooter

Vampires. An odd choice, we’ve always thought, for the villains of the latest entry in the Arkane canon. In most of its games, even the end-of-level bosses tend to be frail human beings – supernaturally powerful in what they can do to you, perhaps, but able to be taken down with just a couple of shots, or a single knife in the back. “The average enemy in [Dishonored] was, like, an elderly aristocrat,” says Arkane Austin studio director Harvey Smith. “So what do you do? You can’t turn them into, you know, Hitler in a mech suit.” We’re having this conversation in Bethesda’s London HQ, watched over by a screensaver image depicting BJ Blazkowicz. “Well, you could do that, but…”

The point is that creatures of the night tend to be a little hardier. Arkane loves diegetic explanations for its design decisions, and we wonder if this might be a way of explaining the need to extend their health bars when four players are out slaying together. “We don’t do the bullet-sponge thing, because it’s not as much fun,” Smith says, to our relief. “That gets obnoxious, where you’re just dumping clip after clip into them.” We only get to play Redfall solo – and Smith concedes that there is a little damage scaling when more players enter the fray – but in this mode at least vampires can be put down with a single well-aimed shot. Although that’s not, strictly, the end of them. If you don’t finish them off – with fire, electricity or a good old-fashioned stake – they’ll eventually revive, like Dracula rising from the grave again at the end of the movie.

“There’s an old saying – it comes from economics, but I think game designers should all have it handy as well,” Smith says. “‘Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.’” This is why most of Dishonored’s villains can be dispatched with a single stab, he explains: it encourages smart and stealthy play. And in this one dusting mechanic we can detect the hint of an incentive, nudging towards the desired outcome of clever teamwork. It’s easy to imagine one player sneaking up close to a pack of vampires, then signalling to a distant sniper buddy to unleash a few well-placed headshots so they can close in with the stake.