THE MAKING OF. . .

How the time-loop shooter won over Bethesda, players – and its own developers

BY ALEX SPENCER

Format PC, PS5

Developer Arkane Lyon

Publisher Bethesda Softworks

Origin France

Release 2021

Everything started with a party. Before Colt and Julianna, before multiplayer, before even the concept of a time loop, game director Dinga Bakaba tells us, the initial seed of Deathloop was simply this: “The northern setting – you know, this small, isolated island, with harsh nature – and the contrast with this big, lawless party. That was there from the start. This big, lawless party, everyone’s wearing masks, and it’s sinister. Everyone’s having fun, but you’re not. You’re the butt of the joke.” It sounds like the stuff of nightmares from which you can’t wait to awaken, and it doesn’t exactly suggest the game Deathloop would become. Things start to become a little clearer, though, as Bakaba recalls other aspects that arrived in time for the initial proposal. “Making it somehow connected to Dishonored – that was already part of it,” he says – aconnection that is buried deep in the final release, requiring some excavation by players. While Arkane didn’t want to entirely abandon the world it had spent the best part of a decade building, though, it was keen to chart new territory in other ways.

“Exploring different ways to play an immersive sim was part of that pitch as well,” Bakaba says. Following the departure of studio founder and president Raphaël Colantonio in 2017, this was a transitional time for Arkane. “And the good thing is, we had our publisher Bethesda – and especially Todd Vaughn, VP of publishing – who basically told us, ‘If there is ever a time to experiment and to try things, to make the right decision about where you want to go as a studio, it’s now. This doesn’t happen often. So let’s use this time and think’.”

During that thinking time – some of which was spent helping out sister studio MachineGames with its Wolfenstein games, which might explain the Lyon studio’s newfound taste for guns – ideas began to accumulate quickly. “The moment where it takes shape, it seems like a lot of things arrive in a burst,” Bakaba says. “The thing that was actually eventually greenlit, the second proposal, a lot of the things that you might think of now as the core of Deathloop were there. The ’60s were in there. The time loop was there – so now it’s not only a crazy party, it is a crazy party that doesn’t end.”

Deathloop’s selection of powers are clearly rooted in the Dishonored games – Shift is the natural successor to Blink

By the time the growing team of developers had to start work on a vertical slice of the game they could show to Bethesda, all of these ideas had knotted together in ways that made it difficult to carve out an isolated chunk of game that would represent the whole experience. They chose one of the game’s four districts, Updaam, but in two versions: one at morning, one at evening. If the starting points of Deathloop’s development – isolated island, wild party, familiar setting, novel structure – seem disparate, then there couldn’t be a more perfect meeting point than Updaam.