![]() Before I came in this way, I had to deal with this challenge. ![]() “I notice that path, and when you come out the other side, I’m in a good position now to approach the rest of the map. Switching to a player’s perspective, Nightingale explains: “You see a crawl space under the building, and that’s not going to be an interesting route – we’re not going to try and make it interesting,” says Nightingale, before arguing that it should instead offer something that is tangibly rewarding for players to pursue. Nightingale says that from a design perspective, these routes are less about being “interesting” for players, and more about being both satisfying and rewarding to players. If you spend all morning causing havoc in Karl’s Bay, for example, and return there in the evening, you’re bound to notice some differences – and vice versa, when the map physically changes, so do your options for traversing it. These routes are further muddled by the sheer scope of events that players can affect in Deathloop. Well, now you can pick all five – because you’re coming back over and over again.” You can go into these maps – you enter the space, and you see you’ve got five different ways you can go and you’ve got to pick one. “Switching to how we did it in Deathloop, it wasn’t so much we had to change our approach to level design, we changed the approach to game design to how we’ve always done level design. Instead, the idea of replayability – deliberately bringing players back to the same location to try something new – ties back in and feeds into Arkane’s philosophy on level design. Sharing insight into Arkane’s design process, Nightingale reveals that Arkane designs maps with “horizontal progression in mind”, meaning – as Nightingale puts it – players won’t be able to “have everything on the tree” in one playthrough. Trying to physically incorporate a player’s freedom of choice into a game’s core level design sounds daunting, but Nightingale says Arkane doesn’t actually want players to try and break everything at once – despite the potential for chaos each level seemingly invites. We kind of hide that fact, but it’s definitely true. Some of them are even optional – you can complete the game without ever having completing them. You can complete some of them without ever meeting the visionary. There aren’t any boxes to tick, except ideally you do meet the visionary – that it’s about. We try to do that as rarely as possible, but I wanted to approach each lead as there wasn’t a standard length. ![]() We can do only so many novel interactions where you interact with a thing and a dialogue choice comes up. Of course, there will be similarities because the verbs stay the same. “It’s not just going through the motions of the same pattern of events and tricks for each one. There’s tens of leads to pursue in Deathloop, and Nightingale says it was important to ensure these leads – and all the decision-making they entail – weren’t just wrapped neatly into dialogue choices. “One of the things I never gave up on – and I felt like I succeeded on – was each one you play should feel different,” says Nightingale. In Deathloop, offering players different storylines and leads to pursue is at the heart of its campaign and gives players compelling reasons to return to each area. For Arkane fans, it’s probably no surprise that the studio pulled this off – after all, this is the studio that created The Clockwork Mansion – but it doesn’t diminish the question: how exactly does Arkane manage it?įor Deathloop campaign designer Dana Nightingale, it’s not just about filling each map with a rats-nest of routes for players to explore and calling it a day – it’s about making each one worthwhile to play, and more importantly, play again. Anyone who’s played Deathloop knows that there’s endless nuance to be found within these locations, as different elements – including which characters have already been killed, the time of day and more – makes revisiting these locales a dramatically different experience with every jaunt. READ MORE: Dan Le Sac on turning to video game soundtracks: “it’s really similar to being in a band”ĭeathloop– the studio’s latest hit – takes Arkane even further, and sets players loose in a handful of locations across the hedonistic party island of Blackreef.Letting players seek out fresh perspectives at the same locations, without getting bored of the same sights, is a very fine line to walk, but Arkane has been capering across that tightrope long before Deathloop. In any game, having players return to the same old place – again and again – risks invoking the dreaded B word: boredom.
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