Arkane showed us a little behind the scenes of this interesting title.
Deathloop is a title that, in many respects, has been on the players' radar since the reveal that took place during E3 2019. Its appearances have been numerous, from the Sony event in June 2020, to the announced delay in August of the same year until to that of a few weeks ago and, in September, when we can finally get our hands on it, we will be able to give you more information on this inverted Cluedo which will be an exclusive PlayStation 5 temporal per year.
For now, however, we can tell you something more thanks to a press event to which we were invited to participate, obviously remotely, a few days ago.
Let's start with a short recap, just to refresh your ideas: Deathloop is an action-adventure title from Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda in which they will take on the role of Colt who, awakened on the beach of the mysterious island of Blackreef, will soon discover that he is at the center of a paradoxical situation; the island is in fact the epicenter of a time loop that resets itself every 24 hours but, if its inhabitants don't realize this, Colt remembers each loop. It seems like a game that almost writes itself but Arkane's work is truly extraordinary, at least for what we have been able to see so far, especially thanks to the introduction of Juliana, a character as powerful as and more than Colt who will try to continually give him the spanner in the works, moved by a player who decides to invade the game or by the AI. In the preview we were able to attend the incipit of the game, which obviously we will not spoil you, and we were able to ask a few questions to Dinga Bakaba (Game Director) e Sébastien Mitton (Art Director), which we report below.
Deathloop is a title that seems both easy and difficult to explain at the same time, so: what is Deathloop?
Dinga: "Taking titles such as Back to the Future, Sourcecode and others as initial references, we conceived Deathloop as a murder puzzle, a sort of inverted Cluedo in which the role of the players is to discover the best way to kill the eight goals we set in front of them but to be honest some compare it to a Dishonored with many more streamlined weapons and abilities. However, Arkane's purpose has always been to build experiences aimed at an immersive simulation genre; in this context, Deathloop is the craziest exploration of the FPS genre, thanks to the freedom given by the creative team, to move in atypical spaces in the AAA world. At a genre level I have also heard it called roguelike, but personally I wouldn't define it that way: in Deathloop you can practically always choose where to go and when to go; there are four districts and four different times of the day to choose from so the player moves independently to figure out the best loop to kill all the targets before the day ends. It is definitely not a difficult game per se, just atypical: the day is always the same, Colt is the variable"
Sébastien: “We definitely decided to opt for a colorful world and strange characters combined with a very open and wide-ranging level design: it is not a huge island but each area is easily recognizable and has its own precise identity. Throughout the creative process, however, it was a continuous confrontation on an idea, develop it independently and then compare it; whenever. As for the aesthetics, the art department and I wanted to push on the 60s also to visually and diegetically restore the freedom of those years, dominated by a retro sci-fi filter that perfectly adapts to the basic mechanics of the game. "
How rigid is the time loop in which Colt is trapped? How much freedom do he and the player have?
Dinga: "I can tell you without problems that going forward with the campaign, if on the one hand you will arrive at an offensive capacity so elegant as to seem something taken directly from a John Wick, on the other you will also discover ways to break the time loop, at least in a sense. Basically, especially at the beginning, each loop allows you to discover things that will be needed in the next loop, be it the code to open a door or the position of one of our targets. There is even a power that allows a sort of mini-rewind up to two times, without completely resetting the loop.
For the rest there is a lot of freedom in the sense of customization, from the trinkets that allow you to adapt the weapons to your playstyle, up to the skills that the Slabs provide: there are those who, for example, will find themselves more often using Shift (teleportation - Editor's note) to sneak around and whoever will unleash aggressively Nexus o Karnesis (the first connects the enemies to each other to apply the damage we do to one of them to all, while the second is a sort of telekinesis - Ed.) Especially as soon as you start, however, we advise you to opt for a playstyle more aimed at stealth, because Colt is definitely not a tank, at least at the beginning of the adventure. "
If Colt's role is clearly to try and destroy the loop, what is Juliana (the antagonist) aiming for?
Dinga: “Colt certainly has the role of a variable in a world, or rather an island, which continues to reset itself; Juliana instead wants to protect the loop for reasons that are obviously not yet known. More than a real enemy it is almost more a frenemy (enemy-friend). His invasions are an essential part of the experience we want to provide, so much so that his arrival is signaled by a very clear acoustic input that the player can hardly ignore. In placing it in the game concept we honestly never thought of it as an obstacle, a game ruin, but more as a sort of story generator for the player. "
Deathloop will be temporal exclusive on PlayStation 5 for a year. How did you decide to take advantage of the console's performance?
Dinga: “I think the integration of the triggers is the most interesting thing. The drop of the shells of some weapons will be heard from the speaker on the controller of course, but you can also hear directly on the controller when for example a weapon freezes: this greatly increases the immersion even if almost all of the intimacy with the weapons we wanted creating is done visually, with customizations. At the level of performance of the console itself, however, Deathloop will fully exploit its potential by running at 60 FPS with adaptive 4K resolution: undoubtedly a performing platform is needed for when the stealth section suddenly goes to pieces because we made an evaluation error. . PlayStation 5 also allows us to better manage the behavior of NPCs, making them more complex and almost real realistic behavioral loops. "
One last thing: in terms of duration, how many hours can we expect to spend in the company of Colt?
Dinga: "Considering that it is impossible to do everything in one run without dying - since there are passages that need clues to be overcome that we can only discover in other loops - I would say that we are around 15-20 hours, more towards 20pm. Internally, some elements of the team are also enjoying some interesting speedruns, but I can't tell you what minimum duration we have reached. "
In short, we have been able to discover some news but there is still a bit of mystery around Deathloop, secrets that we assure you, we will discover together with you from here to the release of the title, on September 14, 2021. You just have to stay on the our pages.
► Deathloop is a Shooter type game developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda for PC and PlayStation 5, the video game was released on 21/05/2021
