I really feel Arkane have been in decline for awhile now. Arx was incredible, Dishonored was glorious and Prey was fairly good however severely missing in enemy selection. What flavour would you want your vaguely humanoid enemy in? Hearth, poison, or lightning?
Deathloop was a bizarre mixture of a recreation with horrible promoting. A roguelite? An fps? A homage to Shaft and Austin Powers? Redfall additionally had folks confused.
It acquired revealed and a few thought ‘Oh, it is a Left 4 Useless recreation? Disgrace, I hoped Arkane would proceed with immersive sims.’ Others, perhaps, have been excited.
The studio let that stew for means too lengthy in folks’s imaginations earlier than correcting and saying, ‘Truly, it is extra like multiplayer Far Cry’. I can not be the one who thought, ‘Multiplayer Far Cry? What the hell even is that?’ Later they then casually add, ‘However do not forget it is also single-player’. Eh?
While all that is taking place, we get the identical bizarre character designs Arkane appear to be obsessive about and blended messages with the tone of the sport. I imply what’s with all the skinny, long-limbs and large heads, arms and toes? It kinda labored in Dishonored because it was novel and the twisted, caricatured Victorian fashion period suited it. However right here? Not a lot, for me anyway.
And why do the male characters appear to be such dweebs? It offers the sport a comical look and but on the similar time they attempt to persuade us the sport has a horror aspect happening…while concurrently displaying us trailers that make the participant characters look actually highly effective and chill. They gave off a, ‘What’s up? Me? Oh, I am simply casually slaying vampires with my super-cool abilities. Ain’t no huge deal’. Additionally they appear to be the cringey one-liner sorts.
I imply one second the vamps are imagined to be intimidating however the subsequent you could have a canopy picture that exhibits one desperately making an attempt to crawl away from the protagonist’s as they nonchalantly stroll behind it to complete the job, cool as cucumbers.
Then the sport will get delayed, then it is on-line solely, then among the previews have been pessimistic (particularly the one from PCGamer), progress would not carry, 30fps on consoles and so forth and so forth.
I feel most individuals misplaced curiosity awhile in the past and the current stuff did not assist. It has been despatched out as a result of it is not value throwing extra money at it.
My ‘armchair recreation developer’ recommendation to Arkane could be to lose their ambiguous recreation design and wishy-washy creative leanings, return to immersive sims and make one thing with extra, pardon the pun, chunk.