DEATHLOOP by Arkane Lyon

I just did the tutorial (I guess) Longest Day mission and so far I am not feeling it. It feels all over the place, yet without any of the distinctly strong atmosphere Dishonored had. I am kinda…not excited to keep playing.
I guess I have to force myself through at least to get that infusion stuff going and then it will hopefully click…

Ugh. Now I every time I go to the trinkets menu it crashes. Seems to be very common, judging by the Steam forums. Hopefully this means it will be fixed soon.

I’m seeing the bright side of waiting one year to the Gamepass version!

Lol, as if the PC Game Pass version won’t have its own unique set of issues.

Switching off V-sync in game seems to have fixed it.

The effort to reward for some of the side stuff seems a bit off.

I finished this last night. It’s not really what I was looking for, but still pretty good.

The main characters are great. Some of the vignettes with the Visionaries too, though they’re a bit more uneven. Didn’t see some of the plot twists coming at all, and really wonder how the order in which you do things recontextualizes things. The ending… Told me to ask questions, did not provide the answers, and I seriously doubt that the answers are behind the side-stuff I haven’t yet done.

In terms of the core gameplay, I like how it feels and plays, and played around with different builds a lot more than usual. You get access to everything and a free respec before every mission, so why not? But you also reach the limits of the system very quickly due to no difficulty settings, a moronic AI, lack of enemy variety, and no noticeable difficulty scaling over the run. (The game claims the difficulty scales up the more visionaries are killed, but if that functionality exists it’s not working.)

This is a pretty sharp contrast to both Prey and Mooncrash. In particular in Mooncrash, the environment is constantly changing and the increases in difficulty from one threat level to the next are extremely noticable (perhaps even brutal).

I don’t understand this design at all. It makes sense on no level, except if they’re thinking that the variety and difficulty are supposed to be coming from the multiplayer. And if that’s what they’re thinking and are intending to do in the future, well, I hope they’ve finally gotten this out of their system. I did not engage at all with the multiplayer, and don’t intend to. But it seems completely impossible for it to save the core gameplay loop, given you’ll fight a human at most once per game.

The visionaries have no real set routine, they’re just standing around in a room doing nothing of note. There’s none of the Hitman-style plotting of figuring out the clockwork mechanisms of what people do and how to change it, or getting variety by doing it all the different ways. You fight one of them once, and you might as well not do it again. It’s so strange, because that kind of gameplay would have meshed so incredibly well with the time loop concept.

Finally, the world, which should be the actual main character in an Arkane game… While I warmed up to the world a little bit while playing, it’s nowhere near what was done in the obvious touchstones of Prey/Hitman/Control/Cyberpunk 2077. Fundamentally the architecture and the world of Deathloop are incoherent and illogical. It really feels like somebody built some level geometry with the appropriate amount of swiss cheese, alternate paths and looping back that you expect from these games. Then another level designer was told to put some furniture in each room, but not what the room’s purpose was, and then the intern was told to spray some decorative junk around with a paintbrush tool.

I realize what I wrote above feels pretty negative. But I played through this, and did have a good time. But also honestly having finished the game mostly makes me want replay Mooncrash or Cyberpunk rather than finish mopping up the side content in Deathloop.

Yeah… It’s hard for them to provide big material rewards just due to the structure of the game, and I’m fine with that. But the story content or vignettes aren’t really there either.

  • The Pact of Smoke? You just get one of the cookie cutter interviews, this one with Fia IIRC.
  • The Trivia Game? One voice line that told you nothing about the world or the characters.
  • The artist in Updaam whose generator was sabotaged? All you seem to get is the joke that rather than making a huge sign spelling “LOOP” they were making a huge sign saying “POOP”.

And these are not trivial. I think winning the trivial game honesty will take half a dozen tries, the Pact of Smoke requires like four loops a few of which will have difficulty advancing the main plot.

I was really disappointed in this as well. They even have a name for it. Loop Stress. As near as I can tell, Loop Stress counted for bupkis. Once you have all your ducks lined up in a row, the finale is trivially easy. Of course, it can’t have hurt that I had all the arsenal quests completed. But even then, I didn’t need to vary anything for the finale. I just did all four times of day with the same loadout, and only ever died maybe once?

And you’re right to point out the contrast with Mooncrash. This is clearly based on the Mooncrash template, but unlike Mooncrash, I never felt Deathloop ever pushed back.

I had hoped that reveals at the end would clear some of this up. Nope. Everything still makes no sense. You mentioned plot twists in your post, but I’m struggling to think of what they might be. Other than some dippy soap opera stuff between the Visionaries, and one big reveal that goes absolutely nowhere, I can’t think of many plot twists or even developments.

For a game that leans so heavily on its narrative, it’s a pretty lean narrative.

-Tom

What I was thinking of was Julianna being Colt’s daughter, which to me was completely non-obvious but made sense, and since the mission where you find that was the absolute last thing I did before the final loop started felt impactful. At least it affected my choice in the ending.

I can totally see that a different timing for that reveal would not have worked.

Yeah, that’s what I was talking about, too. I liked that, and I especially liked how they handled it, but it felt pretty darn inconsequential. Which maybe was the point?

I assume you mean whether Colt REDACTED because if you finished the game, you already know what we’re talking about, and if you didn’t finish the game, you shouldn’t be peeking at this!. I wasn’t even sure if it was a choice. And if it was, heck if I know how or whether it affected anything. :/

-Tom

I too am disappointed with DEATHLOOP. I did enjoy much of my time with it, exploring and unraveling the very long to-do list, but it’s too weak as an immersive sim, assassination sandbox, and stealth game.

There are some good elements and fun moments, strong lead performances and level design, but they aren’t enough to rescue it. The pacing in particular becomes problematic, with so much repetition, too many long load screens, and looping transition dialogs. It’s a great concept let down by conservative gameplay, seriously lacking in interesting decision making. I appreciate how much it helps the player track the time-loop information overload, but it goes to far into becoming self-spoiling and rigidly structuring the final outcome.

What I wanted: Groundhog Day meets Mooncrash.
What I got: a Bioshock-lite metroidvania full of tedious make-work.

With what I’m reading, I have the feeling they have dumbed down some immersive sim elements and the difficulty in an effort to reach mainstream success, as their last two games didn’t do great, sales wise.

The thing, it seems it barely moved the needle. Let’s compare Steam max ccu numbers:

Thinking it well, 20k is even worse than it seems. Not pictured here is the fact that Dishonored 2 released 5 years ago and Prey 4 years ago.
Steam’s userbase has grown a fair bit these last years, so even if they would have got 24k all-time peak as Prey, it would be actually worse than 24k-in-2017.

On the other hand, I imagine this was a lot cheaper to make than either Prey or Dishonoured, because of the efficient use of art assets (hell, they could probably even re-use some of the code from Dishonoured for the slabs).

I’ve only played for a few hours, but I played Dishonored 1 and 2 quite a bit. I didn’t notice a single re-used texture. In addition, the art style of Dishonored was more muted and softer than Deathloop.

I mean re-used across the four different times within Deathloop, and just the overall loop structure. They get a lot more “content” out of the same assets than a linear game spread out over multiple levels (Dishonoured) or a more conventional open-ish world (Prey)

This would seem logical, but the game still took the entire Lyon studio full 4 years to make, so I am not sure it was significantly cheaper than e.g. Dishonored 2.

Dishonored is also split into two Steam entries (RHCP, aka eastern european version). It has another 4600 CCUs
https://steamdb.info/app/217980/graphs/

So all in all the first Dishonored is still the most successful Arkane game on PC in the last decade.

Nah.

  1. It’s likely the studio has several projects in several stages of development.
  2. It’s unlikely studio size remained constant over the years. The “entire studio” can mean different things at different points in time.
  3. Outsourcing. You would be surprised how much art is outsourced, even in AAA games. Given that art eats a significant amount of the budget, two games done by the same studio at the same size during the same period of time can end up with wildly divergent budgets.

In terms of content and mechanics this does look to me as much easier to execute (in therms of content load) than Dishonored 2 or Prey (Dishonored 1 with its simpler art style and being several generations ago, was probably cheaper).

But it’s just a guess. There are many ways to spend money that are not immediately obvious.

Anyone finish the spy locations ? The payoff was decent in terms of info given to help progress in the game.

I am thinking its totally optional, but was easy enough to compete in under an hour. Once you know how many times to push the buttons and have the grid maps discovered.

After 30 hrs played, I think I’ve found the best weapons and weapon/body trinkets, everything that drops now is meh.

I can kinda see why MS weren’t too bothered about this being a playstation exclusive