In a recent interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, two of the key developers at Arkane Studios talked about their timey-wimey, loopy-shooty game Deathloop. The studio, which previously made the Dishonored series, Prey, and (for the more aged among you) Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, has long been known for its immersive sims - games offering myriad angles of approach, playful (and sometimes game-breaking) abilities to encourage experimentation, and excellent world-building.

The interview was interesting enough, but it was a little sobering to hear the two devs, Arkane Campaign Director Dana Nightingale and co-creative director Dinga Bakaba, kind of poo-pooing Dishonored. They didn't directly dunk on it, but used certain aspects of Dishonored - its linear campaign, its morality system - as examples of things that they 'fixed' in Deathloop. The latter was very much framed as the future of Arkane, while Dishonored is the past.

To a fan of immersive sims and big admirer of Arkane's work, that's sad to hear, especially as on the evidence of Deathloop there are still plenty of things that Arkane could learn from Dishonored.

That's nothing against Deathloop, which is one of my top games of 2021. It incorporates Arkane's trademark mechanical playfulness and excellent level design into a Groundhog Day-style time loop in which you must assassinate several people within the course of a single day to break the loop; the PvP invasion mechanic was neat, and true to its rogue-lite stylings, it didn't allow quicksaves either, which was a bold but ultimately good call.

In the RPS interview, Arkane Campaign Director Dana Nightingale, when talking about Dishonored, said:

“I don't feel any interest in making a completely linear campaign again. It's not something I want to do again. I fell in love with the way Deathloop is structured, where the players' goals are their own. The idea of saying, ‘Okay, mission one, mission two, mission three...' that feels like a step backwards for me."

Regular

The issue with this is that Deathloop isn't really the subversion of linearity that it appears to be. Yes, in the early-mid stages you can pick which of the game's four levels to go into at each time of day, with the time of day altering your experience of that level; a level may be low in enemy activity in the morning, before it becomes rammed with revelling baddies at a party in the evening, and crucially certain targets will only appear in certain areas at certain times of day.

However, with each successive loop the game moves more and more towards linearity, as you're lining the Visionaries up into the same exact scenario as everyone else playing the game. For example, to break the loop it's essential that you get Visionary lovebirds Charlie and Fia into that bunker, and that Wenjie, Egor, and Aleksis all end up at that party at night. You can't get creative, devise your own scheme, and create the 'perfect loop' your own way - you're ultimately being funnelled to a singular scenario through which you complete the game.

Besides, is playing the same four levels at different times of day any better than progressing through a game and getting to explore new levels? Each of the two Dishonored games' nine levels are masterclasses of design, taking you through the diverse districts and dark corners of richly layered cities. I wasn't bored by Mission 7 or 8 in Dishonored, I was looking forward to seeing whatever awaited next. On the other hand, by about halfway through Deathloop I was speeding through each level towards my objectives, and by the final act any sense of novelty and exploration had long since faded.

To call the Dishonored games 'linear' based on their sequential missions also ignores the incredible freedom and depth nearly every level across these two games offered. The world-building was phenomenal as you could spend hours getting a feel for this fascinating steampunk world, looking at the tinctures on sale in an alchemy shop window, or breaking into the bloatfly-infested apartment of a dead family and learning their story through things lying around the house. Revisiting the various districts of Karnaca, even without the Deathloop-style time-of-day variations, always offered new insights into a lovingly crafted world.

Dishonored's morality-ish system, undeniably one of the shakier elements of the game, also came in for criticism in the interview. Bakaba said:

“In Dishonored, we had this consequence system that some people took as a morality system, which is at odds with that philosophy. There is definitely a right way to play there, because there’s one that gets me a green checkmark, and one that gets me a red cross."

Bakaba is referring to the Chaos system. It wasn't perfect, and meant that the wonderful array of supernatural powers at your disposal felt very much designed around a lethal playthrough (you were an assassin, after all), but the game punished you for playing violently with narrative knock-on effects and by increasing enemy presence. The fun way to play wasn't the 'good' way to play, which sent a confusing message to the player. 

The solution, apparently, was to remove non-lethal play from Deathloop, which ostensibly liberates the player because, according to Bakaba, "it tells the player that there isn't a right way to play." The thing is, it also tells the player that there's really just one way to play - murderously. The game reduces your possibilities to play morally, which feels like it avoids rather than tackles the problem in Dishonored. Is stripping away any sense of morality really progress in terms of offering player freedom? 

In fairness, you won't have many qualms about shooting and stabbing your way through Deathloop's weird society of hedonistic sociopaths. They're all deplorable, and even if you do feel some remorse for psycho-cat-mask-lady-with-the-pistol or whoever else, they all come back the next day anyway. The game deftly side-dashes any questions of morality by taking place in an amoral world. There is a degree of freedom to that, but it comes at the cost of inspiring the player to reflect on their actions.

The Knife of Dunwall DLC had some hard-hitting moments.

Dishonored's Chaos system wasn't perfect, but the choice to kill or not to kill could give rise to some poignant moments. I'm still haunted, for example, by the whale butcher I killed in Dishonored: Knife of Dunwall. These guys are very much framed as 'baddies,' but after cutting his throat (well, decapitating him) one of them, I entered his house and discovered a letter to his wife. In the letter, the butcher was ruing the fact that he had to quit his studies in order to find menial work and support his wife, whose father died in an industrial work accident. It made me wish I'd choked him out instead, or perhaps even simply left him in peace.

It's no secret that the Dishonored games were big-budget titles that didn't sell as well as expected. Arkane's next game in 2017, Prey, was even purer in its old-school immersive sim sensibilities, but also failed commercially. Soon after that, Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio left the company, and it's clear the new creative leadership has a somewhat different philosophy to what came before.

Deathloop is a fast, snappy game with a clever hook and some great ideas, but it's by no means a clean successor to Dishonored, which still contains ideas that deserve to be built upon rather than dismissed. Arkane's next game, the co-op shooter Redfall, looks like it'll be following the studio's new creative philosophy rather than plucking ideas from its past, but there are still parts of that old 'arkane knowledge' that deserve to be explored. Besides, with Dishonored and Deathloop almost certainly set in the same universe, what's to say that a timey-wimey, loopy-doopy return to the Pandyssian Continent of Dishonored wouldn't work?