Deathloop is the new stealth shooter in the works at Arkane Studios, developer of the Dishonored series. Many of the mechanics revealed in the trailers shown so far, from the gunplay to teleportation, are reminiscent of the first two Dishonored games, though the upcoming game will also contain multiplayer aspects.
Deathloop has the potential to be an incredible immersive experience, especially considering its multiplayer aspects, which in most games require a greater suspension of disbelief than their single-player counterparts. The premise of Deathloop contains one key aspect which could really help players get into the head of the protagonist, Colt.
Deathloop takes place in a time loop. One of the main characters, Colt, is trying to break out of the time loop, while his rival is trying to maintain it. One of the most interesting things this dynamic changes, however, is that it makes every death and restart in the game canonical, something rarely seen outside of gaming’s most meta moments.
If a player puts 100 hours into Deathloop, there’s no reason that those 100 hours wouldn’t be experienced by the player character in exactly the same way, failures and all. Indeed, unlike Dishonored, the way the player learns from trial and error is directly paralleled by the player character in the story, who is also failing and literally dying before getting a chance to come back and try again.
Not only that, but this allows the violence of an assassination game to have far fewer implications for the story – after all, everyone comes back when the loop resets. Deathloop appears to permit violence in a way Dishonored’s Chaos system did not, which not only has the potential to make the game far more exciting and satisfying but also helps avoid one dissonance which has plagued many a video game protagonist in the past.
The extreme violence committed by otherwise sympathetic video game characters like BioShock Infinite’s Booker DeWitt is rarely supposed to factor into the player’s view of them. After all, it’s a video game, and the fact that these characters are essentially mass killers can be hand-waved as a necessary part of gameplay.
When Colt kills, however, the resetting of the loop brings back everyone, making it far less of a question of morality. This could allow players to sympathize with Colt more while also getting to engage in quick-paced, satisfying, and at times extremely violent combat without that undermining the character. The loop also helps explain Colt’s extreme skill and precision in a way that is rarely explained for other video game protagonists like Far Cry 3’s Jason Brody, who seemingly transforms from a spoiled rich kid to a highly trained killer almost instantaneously once the player takes control and gets a gun in their hands.
Many of the details about Deathloop‘s time loop story and the way it will attempt to merge singleplayer and multiplayer aspects have yet to be revealed. However, if the story is the main backbone of Deathloop, it could be one which asks players to suspend their disbelief far less than other titles, and could be a uniquely immersive experience as a result.
Simply put, the mechanics of Deathloop’s world align with video game mechanics, and could directly incentivize some of a shooter’s most fun features without putting strain on the story as a result. Only time will tell how well Arkane Studios is able to pull this off in practice, but for now, Deathloop’s premise gives it the potential to be an extremely immersive experience where its mechanics directly complement the story instead of having to be ignored for the story’s sake.
Deathloop is set to release on May 21, 2021, for PC and PS5.
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