Deathloop is inheriting several of Dishonored's supernatural powers
Colt will have more than just Blink in his arsenal
Arkane's next FPS game Deathloop looks absoltuely rad. Their new murder sandbox seems like Dishonored meets Hitman, and that's certainly no accident. Its made by Dishonored's developers, sure, but Arkane now say they're bringing "quite a few" of the supernatural abilities that you'll remember to Deathloop. If you thought you'd spotted some familiar skills in the trailers so far, you're not wrong.
"As much as we wanted to do something very original with this game, we also wanted some familiarity," says game director Dinga Bakaba in an interview with IGN. "We decided to bring back quite a few of the powers that we have in the Dishonored series. I think it’s something that will make players feel right at home."
One you've probably spotted already is Blink, which lets you teleport a short distance. In just about every Deathloop trailer so far, Colt uses it to appear behind unsuspecting enemies or get a height advantage by scaling buildings.
As we've seen, your primary objective in Deathloop is to kill eight targets, the Visionaries, in a single day. Failing to do so in time (or dying) will reset the loop. The challenge is in working out how to get it done on schedule by manipulating your targets and expanding your own abilities.
Arkane explain that Deathloop's biggest abilities come from rare objects called "slabs" that many of the game's Visionary targets have. Snagging those slabs will give Colt their skill. One Visionary has the ability Kinesis which lets him chuck people through the air. You can spot Colt doing a lot of the same in yesterday's new Dishonored trailer up above.
Bakaba didn't let on exaclty which other abilities we'll see, borrowed from Dishonored or otherwise. For my money though, this sure looks like the Domino ability that links enemies together so they die simultaneously.
Interestingly, Bakaba also mentions that there is in fact one right answer for breaking the loop. "In order to line them up there is only one solution, so really the game is a gigantic puzzle that you have to solve and in order to complete that puzzle," he says. Even if there's only one proper order for killing every single target, you can still choose from a whole range of ways to do the deed by using environmental dangers and your many skills.
I don't know about you all, but "one solution" sounds like a challenge to me.
Graham says that the new trailer has him fully on board and I'm of the same mind. It looks stylish as heck and yeah, I can't get that song out of my head either.
Deathloop launches May 21st over on Steam. It will also be on the PS5.