Arkane Studios has confirmed that deadly loop takes place in the future of the universe first constructed in the Dishonored games.
This confirmation comes via Deathloop director and Arkane Lyon studio head Dinga Bakaba, who appeared in The Official Xbox Podcast alongside Arkane Austin studio head Harvey Smith.
Xbox’s Jeff Rubenstein asked Bakaba about the rumors and hinted that Deathloop is connected to this larger universe. While Rubenstein said he didn’t have to confirm anything, Bakaba went further and not only confirmed this to be true, but he also discussed the thought process behind doing so.
“Not everyone has seen the same thing,” Bakaba said of Deathloop. “Not everyone has heard the same song that you might have heard hiding somewhere. Not everyone has seen every room, etcetera, etcetera. So, it was nice to see the community take a look at the little clues we scattered everywhere that , yes, in fact, we imagine that Deathloop would happen in the future after [Dishonored 2’s standalone expansion] The death of the stranger”.
Bakaba said the team didn’t want this connection to be too obvious and upfront, as they wanted Deathloop to have a story and identity that would stand on its own, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use the game to explore what would happen next. from the events of Death of the Outsider.
“While we were doing Deathloop, we said, hey, [this story] could be one of the things that could happen next [Death of the Outsider.] So we have a certain timeline to tie that in and there are a lot of clues, actually, in the game,” Bakaba said. there’s a lot of little things and some that were under people’s noses all along, but people are just taking notice.”
One of these references can be seen in the shotgun known as the Heritage Rifle. This weapon has a logo on the side that could not be clearly seen until the recent goldenloop update added “idle breaks where the character plays with his gun.” Now the logo can be identified as Dunwall Tower from Dishonored.
As Bakaba said, these threads are like “this little scavenger hunt within the scavenger hunt” that is Deathloop, and they only wait to be discovered if players search hard enough.
“We tried to see everything as an evolution, but every time they mentioned the past, we were vague enough or disguised, I would say, naturally the names,” Bakaba said. “For example, they talk about the Motherland, and not about Tyvia, but you can definitely… once you know, you can unravel everything. And yes, it makes sense. So, it was good for us to imagine one of the futures of the world of Dishonored and for that to make sense.”
Even without knowing all these references to a larger universe, we give Deathloop a rare 10/10. In our death Loop Review, we said, “His unique, high-concept ideas around time cycles and non-linear research work are elegantly implemented, making his systems feel easy to navigate, learn, and ultimately master. A new high water mark for Arkane and similar game developers to aspire to, Deathloop is a game like no other.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and in Twitch.
