Arkane Studios is developing two of the most fascinating upcoming video games: the time-looping assassin sim, Deathloop, and the co-op vampire slaying adventure, Redfall. Though each has the potential to be a unique experience, they both fit comfortably in the 20-year history of development studio Arkane, which has evolved and refined a deep, multi-layered approach to game design throughout its history.
The studio is best known for creating “immersive sims,” a genre characterised by its combination of RPG elements, first-person action, and interlocking gameplay systems. But Arkane takes that one step further, crafting intricate, freeform levels that offer thrilling and impactful choices at every turn. Each successive Arkane game introduces new ideas while reinforcing and refining the studio’s established formula, which has resulted in a library of memorable genre hybrids. And with Deathloop and Redfall signalling the company’s next evolutionary change, it’s the perfect time to reflect on two decades of creation.
This is the story of Arkane Studios, so far.
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Start With a Sequel
Arkane Studios was founded in 1999 in France – the city of Lyon, to be specific – by RaphaĂ«l Colantonio. The studio was born from Colantonio’s disinterest in the games his former employer, EA, had begun to focus on. He’d previously worked at EA’s French quality assurance office, tracking bugs in Origin Systems games like System Shock. But soon, EA began to shift its focus away from the games he enjoyed.
“This machine called PS1 came out and that was the beginning of a big, big shift,” said Colantonio in an interview with Polygon. “Suddenly EA didn’t like Origin. All they liked were sports games and that’s the new thing for EA — consoles, sports. ‘Don’t like it? Sorry.'”
So, with some financial help from his uncle, Colantonio set up Arkane Studios. His original ambition for the studio was to create a new sequel to 1992’s Ultima Underworld, a fantasy RPG notable for the non-linear, freeform exploration it offered players at the time. However, he was unable to secure the rights from EA without agreeing to terms that compromised his vision. So Colantonio and the small team at Arkane pivoted, breaking away from any agreement with EA and instead made Arx Fatalis.
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“I would say Arx is the game that we’ve always wanted to play here at Arkane Studios,” said Colantonio in an interview with IGN in 2000. “A first person dungeon crawler / fantasy RPG combining a real adventure, puzzle solving, lots of object and NPC interactions, immersive fights and magic.” In short, Arx Fatalis was essentially an Ultima Underworld sequel in all but name.
Like its inspiration, Arx Fatalis’ labyrinthine level design encouraged non-linear exploration, with opportunities to fight or adopt a stealthy approach. Clever use of its toolkit – consisting of medieval fantasy weapons and an elaborate rune-based magic system – could help create fun and unusual solutions to problems. These elements will likely be familiar to any player of Arkane’s library of work, but if you’ve never visited Dunwall or walked aboard Talos I, all you need to know is these core mechanics would become cornerstones of Arkane’s future portfolio, remoulded for each new project to fit unique, original worlds.
Adapt and Survive
Arkane released Arx Fatalis in 2002. It did not sell many copies, but it was well received by critics, including IGN. We praised its atmosphere and spellcasting, awarding it 8/10. Importantly, Arx Fatalis’ high quality opened a door for the then-independent Arkane to collaborate with Valve. Arkane began to craft a sequel to Arx Fatalis built in the Source engine, the technology that powered Half-Life 2, but struggled to find a publisher. A lifeline came via Ubisoft, which convinced Arkane to set the game in its Might and Magic fantasy universe. And so Arx Fatalis 2 became Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
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Dark Messiah, released in 2006, stripped back the role-playing stats and interconnected world of the original Arx Fatalis, and instead honed in on clever combat mechanics. The Source engine’s physics system gave each attack weight; sword strikes would cleave enemies in two and send their corpse halves ragdolling across the room, while a satisfying kick could boot orcs into spike pits or off cliff edges.
Despite leaning more heavily on combat, Arkane still wanted to imbue Arx Fatalis’ level of player choice into Dark Messiah. “The main focus of the game is freedom of expression for the player,” explained Dark Messiah senior producer, Romain De Waubert De Genlis in an interview with IGN. “We really want to make sure that players don’t feel like they’re playing in a game that’s been set up by a designer and they don’t have a choice.”
That sentiment is clear in Dark Messiah, which would set the stage for Arkane’s future games. The RPG intricacies of Arx Fatalis faded in favour of greater environmental depth; what if you dropped a chandelier on those enemies, or cast an ice spell on the ground to make it slippy? It may have been a design choice that moved away from the more traditional RPG roots of the studio, but Dark Messiah showcased Arkane yet again making decisions that would define it as the immersive sim studio it is today.
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But Arkane’s evolution would, unfortunately, face a series of setbacks over the next six years. After releasing Dark Messiah, Arkane worked on three cancelled projects. The studio’s relationship with Valve led to a Half-Life game – Return to Ravelhom – but the project was eventually called off due to financial costs. Arkane then shifted to a project of its own, a first-person shooter called The Crossing in which other players could invade your solo campaign, but it struggled to find a publisher. The Crossing’s production eventually dwindled so Arkane could work with EA on a collaboration with Steven Spielberg. But that project, a road trip game called LMNO, was also eventually cancelled due to the impact of the 2008 global financial crash, leaving Arkane in a tight spot. During these tough years, the studio resorted to work-for-hire jobs on games like Call of Duty: World at War and Bioshock 2 to keep cash flowing.
With a slate of disheartening project cancellations behind them, and no project of its own in development, Arkane faced financial struggles. By this point, Arkane was made up of two studios, the original Lyon office and one in Austin, Texas, and something needed to be done to support the costs associated with both teams. Thankfully, in 2010, Bethesda Softworks approached Arkane with an idea for a stealth game set in feudal Japan. Despite being nothing more than a broad idea, it already had a name: Dishonored.
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The Modern Immersive Sim
Bethesda acquired Arkane in August 2010, and provided the funding needed to create Dishonored, which eventually moved from Japan to a fictional Victorian London-inspired setting called Dunwall. There, players would take on the role of a supernatural bodyguard/assassin named Corvo, who is framed for the murder of an Empress.
The player-choice formula dating back to Arx Fatalis and the visceral fighting from Dark Messiah returned, but with an increased emphasis on stealth. This came through Corvo’s equipment – made up of weapons, gadgets, and supernatural powers – which offered players flexibility in how they approached each mission.
“Each of the powers is kind of ambivalent, in a sense,” explained Dishonored’s executive producer, Julien Roby, in an interview with Games.on.net. “You can use Bend Time in combat to take advantage of characters, or can use Bend Time to sneak around and get placed unnoticed. So the powers can be used in both ways. Even if you buy a power for stealth it actually has lots of applications in combat.”
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That versatility was a key component of what players could do as Corvo, but every weapon and power afforded so many opportunities in part because of Dishonored’s carefully crafted levels. Notable for their verticality, these environments allowed players to climb to vantage points to scope out locations and meticulously plan their approach. A teleport skill called Blink was introduced to allow creative navigation of Dunwall’s spaces, as well as engage in hit-and-run tactics against enemies.
Dishonored also placed greater emphasis on story than previous Arkane games; player choice was not just about gameplay opportunities, but also the impact on Corvo’s story, and the tale of Dunwall itself. Every target in Dishonored could be assassinated, but they could also be non-lethally dispatched in increasingly grim ways. These moral choices fed directly back into the gameplay systems; the more players killed, the more the plague infecting the city of Dunwall spread, causing zombie-like creatures called Weepers to populate the streets.
Dishonored was released in October 2012 and exceeded Bethesda’s sales expectations. NPD reported 460,000 sales in its first month in the US, and it has gone on to sell over 3 million copies on PC alone. Naturally, with success in gaming comes the possibility for a franchise, and so Arkane set to work on creating a sequel. Dishonored 2’s creative director, Harvey Smith, said during an interview with Noclip that the team “wanted to refine all the stuff that we had done in Dishonored 1. We wanted a chance to make it bigger and richer, deeper.” And so, fundamentally, Dishonored 2 was more of the same. But Arkane found ways to offer new possibilities while still using the same template.
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Dishonored 2 is arguably Arkane’s most ambitious game, the culmination so far of the studio’s specific approach to level and combat design. That ethos is on full display in the sequel’s two stand-out levels: the Clockwork Mansion and A Crack in the Slab. The former is a huge estate patrolled by menacing clockwork soldiers, through which you must navigate and seek out your target. The mansion itself shifts and changes around you; entire segments folding away to reconfigure rooms and provide new pathways and opportunities, turning the level itself into a puzzle. A Crack in the Slab, meanwhile, takes place in a location that can be explored across different time periods, as the player instantly switches between eras at the press of a button. Vitally, beyond their flashy presentation, these levels are all about player choice, the ultimate key tenet of Arkane’s design. A Crack in the Slab allows you to use time as a navigation tool, weaving in between eras as you would rooms, while the Clockwork Mansion’s adjusting walls are entirely player controlled, and can even be subverted by slipping behind the mechanical curtains and into the metal guts of the house itself.
Dishonored 2 launched in 2016 to critical acclaim. But it struggled to replicate the original game’s success, with launch sales in the UK almost 40% lower than its predecessor according to Chart-Track. It’s a situation that Arkane continually finds itself in; critically beloved, but commercially stunted. Despite this, Arkane soldiered on. Just one year later it released Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, which, at least for now, concluded the story of the series. As a piece of DLC that eventually grew into its own game, Death of the Outsider played much like Dishonored 2, albeit with another set of bespoke supernatural powers for its protagonist, Billie Lurk. While its level design never reached the highs of Dishonored 2, its focus on fascinating, new twists to the studio’s penchant for stealth mechanics – such as the ability to disguise yourself as an NPC – provided the standalone expansion with its own identity.
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This era was a busy one for Arkane’s two studios, as 2017 also saw the release of Prey, a sci-fi game developed by Arkane’s team in Austin. Like with Dark Messiah and Dishonored, Arkane looked back to Arx Fatalis for inspiration, but in a very different way than with those projects.
Prey’s lead designer, Ricardo Bare, explained to PCGamesN that Arkane “wanted to do something that was sort of similar to Arx Fatalis. [Arx Fatalis] was a totally different setting, it was a fantasy game, but the structure is very similar to Prey. It was sort of an open structured game, not a mission-based game.”
Prey doubled down on exploration over combat, with a world design that also drew from System Shock, the game Colantonio had worked QA on back in the 1990s. And so Arx Fatalis’ sprawling subterranean dungeon became an abandoned, infected space station. Its interconnected levels created a genuine sense of functioning space that not only made its layout believable but also one that would be interesting for players; its many routes looped back and around on themselves in a manner akin to the Metroid games.
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Exploration is certainly at the heart of Prey’s design but Arkane also imbued its unique blend of player choice into how players interacted with its world. Like with Dishonored, the player had a toolkit filled with items to be used in combination with the environment in a number of creative ways. The GLOO gun, for example, could encase enemies in hardening foam but also create a staircase up to an out-of-reach platform. And like the give-and-take of Dishonored’s lethal vs. nonlethal approaches, Prey’s Neuromods system enforced long-term consequences. These brain injections granted players supernatural abilities by splicing their DNA with that of the aliens infecting the space station. But should the player become too alien, the station’s defences would identify them as an enemy and open fire. This created a balancing act between unrestrained experimentation and careful decision making.
The following year Prey received an expansion, Mooncrash, which revisited many of the key ideas of the original, but transferred Arkane’s design into a different genre: the roguelite. With death resetting all progress, exploring the interconnected locations of Mooncrash’s space base had a real sense of risk, but each new attempt at playing Mooncrash unlocked permanent upgrades and new tools. Newly unlocked playable characters allowed you to start from different locations. Over time you’d (hopefully) learn smart routes and clever uses of your tools, which would allow you to achieve Mooncrash’s ultimate goal: evacuate all five of its characters from the moon base in a single run.
The Past Informs The Future
Mooncrash’s DNA is evident in Arkane’s next game, Deathloop. While not a roguelite, its time-looping structure does embrace many of the live, die, repeat ideas seen in Mooncrash. Importantly, each run of Deathloop is designed to teach players new elements of its world and characters, while also unlocking new systemic opportunities to approach your main mission, which should ultimately make each loop different, and perhaps more fun, than the one before it.
Your ultimate goal in Deathloop is to eliminate eight targets in a single time loop, similar to Mooncrash’s evacuation goal. The execution of this objective, however, has more in common with Dishonored; one that, again, Arkane is imbuing with a mix of supernatural powers and inventive weapons to allow players to approach their victims in whatever manner they choose. It also includes a PvP invasion mechanic, in which a second player can drop into someone’s campaign and hunt them down, an idea dating all the way back to Arkane’s work on The Crossing. Deathloop may very well be the culmination of every lesson the studio has learnt so far, in both its published and cancelled games, though we’ll know for certain when Deathloop hits PS5 and PC in September.
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But Arkane has even more on the horizon: the Xbox and PC co-op adventure Redfall, the vampire-slaying game announced at E3 2021. So far, all we know is that it’s an open world co-op shooter, which at a high concept level is already treading some brand new ground for Arkane. But the studio promises its “signature gameplay” to return in Redfall, which likely means the developers are drawing on the design philosophies that date all the way back to Arx Fatalis and have been refined over the company’s last few projects.
Deathloop and Redfall may be bringing new ideas to the table, but there’s a clear lineage of Arkane’s design sensibilities and trademarks in what we know of both upcoming games. It’s a lineage that goes right back to the studio’s original inspirations; for 20 years Arkane has kept the spirit of 1990s immersive sims alive. The freedom of approach found in the likes of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief can be seen in all of Akane’s games. The studio has spent years refining the design pillars first found in those old PC games, becoming the main name in AAA development keeping those ideas alive and evolving. Arkane continually finds new ways to bring choice in combat, exploration, and story to the forefront like few other studios can. And though every new game may try new things, they all share a dedication to player expression, deep level design, and intertwined gameplay systems. That’s the Arkane way. And that’s the studio’s story so far.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer, and Arkane aficionado.
