Dinga Bakaba, game director and recently promoted studio head of Arkane Lyon

Since it was founded in 1999, Arkane Studios has built a reputation for crafting deep worlds and systems, but Deathloop has proved something of a breakout hit. Game director Dinga Bakaba discusses how our game of the year differs from its precursors, and how that affected its reception both publicly and internally.

Congratulations on Deathloop landing the top spot in Edge’s 2021 Awards – we’re sure this won’t be the only such recognition it receives. How has the game’s reception felt on your side?

We are super happy that the game is recognised like that. If we were to go back and tell Dinga of three and a half years ago… he wasn’t cynical enough to laugh, but he would have been surprised. Not because we didn’t want to make an interesting game, but because we thought that we were going to make something interesting enough that it will repel as much as attract. That was what we said since very early on: this is a game that some people will love and probably many will hate.

We didn’t really update our thinking on that until maybe one or two weeks before release, when I finally got to play the entire package, including multiplayer, on my TV, plug in the PS5 and start invading journalists and ruining their day as Julianna. That’s when I started to think, actually, maybe the group of people who will hate it – well, I don’t know about that group. But the people who will love it, maybe that will be a bigger group than expected.

Why did you anticipate that players would react negatively to the game?

Because it doesn’t have the characteristics of a lot of the games that we see – and even the ones that we made, that got these awards. For Dishonored 2, we were happy and surprised when we started getting nice reviews and awards and stuff but, you know, we were working for that. We were working to make the best possible Arkane game. And this one was: ‘Let’s make something different. Be true to ourselves but innovate and maybe go into the weird a little bit’. Because weird is always fun in brainstorms but then you’re like, ‘Well, you know, at some point real people have to see this, so tone it down’. I always loved projects like Bayonetta or Psychonauts where you can tell that someone in the room said “not crazy enough” or “not weird enough”, rather than the contrary. I always dreamed of that. And I hoped that Deathloop was the right occasion to do that.