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Arkane Deathloop - first-person action game from Arkane set on a time loop island

SharkClub

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Strap Yourselves In
I've yet to play a game which smugly boasts an adaptive difficulty system that actually does it well, it's usually just fucking bad in practice.

I'm also thinking about how aids it's going to be to have a game which has difficulty modes (albeit hidden/adaptive) also having "invasions". Dark Souls doesn't have difficulty modes, you know what to expect of the enemy AI while you are being invaded. If I invade someone who has been playing well vs the AI he's going to get aids from trying to fight me while I use the enemy AI to my advantage, conversely the enemies might as well not even exist if I invade someone who has been playing poorly and thus has them set to easy mode. This really doesn't scream consistent to me.
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Didnt know about that. I remember when they got adaptative difficulty on RE 4, basically you ended punished by playing well and rewarded by being lazy, people eventually figured out what triggered the changes and started exploiting the hell out of it.
Exploiters gotta exploit. I remember RE4 as a consistently challenging and deeply enjoyable game.

Anyone who looks up ways to break the system only has themselves to blame if the game ends up broken. In a single-player title, this behavior is known as "pathetic".

It is a very easy system to fuck up
I don't disagree here. Time will tell if this is put together with the right amount of pushback. Hopefully they throw enough $ at testers, and iterate enough, to make it fun.

This really doesn't scream consistent to me.
Of course it isn't. So what? You worried about your leaderboard rank?
 

DeepOcean

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I've yet to play a game which smugly boasts an adaptive difficulty system that actually does it well, it's usually just fucking bad in practice.

I'm also thinking about how aids it's going to be to have a game which has difficulty modes (albeit hidden/adaptive) also having "invasions". Dark Souls doesn't have difficulty modes, you know what to expect of the enemy AI while you are being invaded. If I invade someone who has been playing well vs the AI he's going to get aids from trying to fight me while I use the enemy AI to my advantage, conversely the enemies might as well not even exist if I invade someone who has been playing poorly and thus has them set to easy mode. This really doesn't scream consistent to me.
Consistency is the first thing that dies on an adaptive system.
 

1451

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Deathloop requires merely 30 gb of space while Dishonored 2 required 60. Another sign of the game's short duration.
 

Ash

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Some unedited combat footage (din't find any on mouse/keyboard)


The combat looks like shit, especially on how he just recovered pretty much the whole damage he got on the middle of the fight and how the Ai missed shots when shooting right on his face, also the enemies seem to be way too hesitant into shooting him, maybe it is a normal difficulty thing but it isnt impressive, maybe this is a case of the hard difficulty is the true normal difficulty game like most popamolers, we will see.


Oh dear it has an annoying Arkane signature alert sound whenever spotted by enemies, like in Dishonored and Prey. It's probably the most obnoxious here too.
Combat looks rather popamole and not unique in any way. I also enjoyed at 2:32 when the AI all reflexively at the same time dive-dodged away from the player's grenade, none of them escaped the explosion regardless despite it not even being cooked, and one of them seemingly knocked himself out by diving head first into the workstation :lol:

Still, I'm not writing off the game just yet.

Didnt know about that. I remember when they got adaptative difficulty on RE 4, basically you ended punished by playing well and rewarded by being lazy, people eventually figured out what triggered the changes and started exploiting the hell out of it.
Exploiters gotta exploit. I remember RE4 as a consistently challenging and deeply enjoyable game.

Anyone who looks up ways to break the system only has themselves to blame if the game ends up broken. In a single-player title, this behavior is known as "pathetic".

What if the player stumbles upon the exploit naturally in-game? Exploits are bad, but thankfully most developer's intent is to not feature any and are always questioning whether or not x feature being implemented could be exploited.

Adaptive difficulty is lame pussy dev shit but Resident Evil 4 is forgiven in this regard: its professional difficulty mode has no adaptive difficulty. "Game rank" is set to 10 and everything stays consistent, no matter how many times you die.

The only form of adaptive difficulty I find to be suitable is those equivalent to DMC1's: if you die often, the game offers you to lower the difficulty to easy mode. But there is no going back from this if accepted without starting a new game, you are forced on easy mode and do not get the unlocks, general game experience, rank bonuses or sense of accomplishment you would otherwise get beating the game on a higher difficulty. Even this is barely acceptable because challenge is something you have to come to understand and appreciate in video games, and the only way that can happen is struggling through it without option for a truckload of handicaps. In real life, humans are often averse to struggle & challenge. It can also often bring out the worst in us, or the best in us. Ultimately though, natural differing player skill level is a thing. And Arkane have never been good with difficulty design right from the start with Arx Fatalis, and since then they have only gotten worse. It's one of the major failings of their latest handful of games in particular.
I was hoping this game would be different, especially given they had done away with unrestricted saving.
 
Last edited:

Wirdschowerdn

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Review: Deathloop
Posted 12 mins ago by Chris Carter


Deathloop-review-2-scaled.jpg


You only live thrice


I tried to go into Deathloop as blind as possible, only glancing at trailers in the middle of conferences, and avoiding everything else.

I suggest you do the same.

Deathloop-review-5-scaled.jpg


Deathloop (PC, PS5 [reviewed])
Developer: Arkane Studios
Publisher: Bethesda
Released: September 14, 2021
MSRP: $59.99


Still reading? Well I won’t give away too much!

Groundhog Day with two assassins by way of Arkane” sums up the premise of Deathloop, which is enough to entice a large chunk of people; especially Dishonored and Prey fans. Arkane definitely dips into the font of those two games, and ends up pouring a refreshing drink that’s generally bolder, and more flavorful than several past efforts.

Personality is not a problem in Deathloop, for one. Colt, your avatar and the main event of this time-looping mess, is more interesting than the entire cast of most modern AAA games. The banter between him and Julianna (his rival) is glorious, and manages to rise above the typical edgy dialogue of a lot of shooters by actually making you laugh out loud. The ’60s decor and fashion sense help bring out that personality more, especially with all that marvelous wood-based interior design! Nothing better than techy sci-fi clashing with wood.

Deathloop‘s primary weapon is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The game highly encourages experimentation, loadout swapping, and exploration, and makes all of that very easy. The way the core loop (as it were) works is that you have an ultimate end goal in mind, but an unlimited amount of time to figure out how to do it. “Days” are broken up by morning, afternoon, and evening periods; all of which feature different environmental changes in four areas (connected by central tunnels, which you start and end every period in), and have key NPCs (Visionaries, which are basically bosses) in different spots. During all this, Julianna can randomly pop in as an extra encounter, both as an AI or as another player.

Loadouts, initially, are tenuous at best. You can’t keep all of your gear between loops, but very early you discover a mechanic that lets you pump what is essentially leveling currency into keeping items permanently. While a lot of games would make this process deliberately obtuse and annoying, I had what I could consider an “ideal” personal loadout in a little over an hour of playtime. From there, it was mainly tweaking, and adding extra flair for specific encounters (sneaking around, versus head-on fighting/boss battles).

It’s a very, very chill game with a lot going on, which is a feat to balance both so well. In case you’re worried, it doesn’t feel anything like a roguelike or a roguelite. The time loop gimmick actually serves the player at a foundational level, which really helped me become invested in it: I couldn’t stop playing from the time I installed it. Deathloop gets very fun to play very fast because it’s willing to get kooky and arcadey. Case in point: I was given a double-jump almost immediately and it was off to the races.

What are essentially magic powers (conducted through relics called “slates”) supercharge everything, providing access to berserker strength, stealth, teleportation, and more. Colt’s unique power is that he can die three times each day before starting over a loop: essentially providing you with three lives (complete with the now-classic “loot your corpse to regain your currency” conceit). Arkane could have gone the gritty route with grounded Call of Duty style clamboring and sliding (which is in!), but they plussed it up. Getting these powers is meaningful, too, as bosses (which respawn every day) basically poop out materia, which you can then pay to keep permanently (dupe abilities will provide upgrades).

Beyond chipping away at the critical path, part of the joy is slowly uncovering the mystery of why you’re in the loop, and I’ll basically leave it at that. The in-game mission screen is centered around this premise, offering a conspiracy theory style pinboard to help you slowly unravel everything. You can do multiple parts at once depending on the area you’re in, or take it bit by bit, and start fresh the next day.

Deathloop-review-3-scaled.jpg


However you choose to play, the game saves your mission progress/knowledge like passcodes and major revelations: so you don’t need to repeat a ton of things over and over until you get it perfectly right (nor do you have to memorize what you were doing). Again, Arkane could have gone so south with the number of roguelike elements they could have crammed in, but it really does play like an action-adventure that just happens to take place in a time loop.

All of these mechanics help facilitate cycle-based runs through a selection of four sandboxes that are combed through the way you want to. It isn’t perfect though. I encountered a few instances of “go here…oh actually now that you’re here, you need to come back in the morning.” Great! At least I had the opportunity to scour the immediate area, have some fun, head back, keep what I wanted by investing in those items, then dive back into the zone within a few minutes. Slightly annoying, but ultimately painless.

What wasn’t as painless was my encounter with several glitches on PS5, all of them menu-based. Sometimes when selecting a loadout the menu won’t load, and on a few occasions, it locked up and didn’t let me quit or start a mission. The only solution was to reboot, which let me pick up right where I left off due to the auto-save system. Your mileage may vary, but I encountered menu lag twice (which cleared up after 30 seconds), and soft crashing twice.

What I find especially fun is the post-mission “run back.” It’s a blast to figure out different paths to return to the tunnels before the next time period begins each day while all hell is breaking loose, and Deathloop entices you to come back under different circumstances to encounter new activities. None of the zones feel bloated: they’re packed just enough to warrant multiple runs without getting old, without providing the sense that they’re jammed with Ubisoft open world busywork.

Deathloop-review-1-scaled.jpg


At what I would call a “medium pace,” I finished Deathloop in around 10 hours (after the game ends, you can repeat the final day or start over). Part of the genius is that if you want to rush it, you can. If you want to take twice as long, you can too. There’s a lot of speedrunning potential in Deathloop, and I’m stoked to see what people come up with as the “optimal way to solve the game.”

The other part of Deathloop is playing as Julianna, which has a very 2010s “we need multiplayer in this game” feel at first, but ends up being a bonus rather than something that detracts from Deathloop as a whole. Your job is to dive into another (human) Colt’s game via matchmaking, and take them out, similar to invading a game in a Souls joint. It has its own loadout screen and progression system, as well as a few subtle story bits. You can even turn off human invasions and restrict them entirely to AI as Colt. What I’m saying is you can ignore it, but it’s also justified.

Extra mode or not, the main game is not compromised in any way. Deathloop combines a classic Arkane stealthy-shooty foundation with a genuinely interesting and fun premise to aplomb. This is going to be on a lot of Game of the Year lists.

[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]

9
Superb
 

DemonKing

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Dec 5, 2003
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5,958
Seems to be well received, way more than I expected.

It's a new IP. They tried something new. It seems to have come off.

Will reserve judgement till I play myself but if all the above are true the reviews are probably deserved.
 

Raghar

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There is no difficulty option, but we have an adaptive difficulty system. As you can play the same maps several times at different moments of your play-through, we had to think about a system that can make the game challenging the more you play. If the NPCs accuracy is forgiven at the beginning, they will be more accurate, aggressive, and reactive the more you perform. Every once in a while, a target may experience déjà vu, meaning they'll sense something off about doing a certain action that made them end up dead during the last loop. Colt will have to plan new ways to eliminate targets if they eliminate a target the same way enough times.
So proper play is punished?
 

Ivan

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Yeah, after listening to ACG's review I expected the mainstream sites to dole out 7s and 8s.
 
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Damn, Psychonauts 2, Wrath of the Rivhteous, and Deathloop all coming out within a month of each other? 2021 is shaping up to be a much better year for releases than any other in recent memory.

Now if I only had more time to actually play games.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


DEATHLOOP Launches on September 14!

"This whole island's like a broken record, skipping endlessly on one fullfilling day". Welcome to the island of Blackreef, where the fun never stops and every day is a celebration of debauchery and chaos… unless you’re Colt, a prisoner in this timeloop who is being hunted by every person on the island.

You have 24 hours, 8 targets, and 1 rival assassin hunting you down...Do whatever it takes to break the timeloop.

The trailer features a brand new track named "Pitch Black" by Sencit Feat. Lady Blackbird.

If At First You Don’t Succeed… Die, Die Again.
 

ADL

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The game unlocks for me in an hour. I'll give high-end PC port impressions.
https://opencritic.com/game/10993/deathloop
Hopefully there's enough people playing in NZ/AUS to test out the invasion-style PvP, that's really what I want to do. Been waiting to do that in Arkane's games since The Crossing was announced.
 

Siel

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Damn I want to play this but my GTX 970 don't event meet the min requirements. Could play nu-Prey on decent settings so that's kinda strange.
 

Trithne

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Played the intro. Mechanics are pretty straightforward, you've got a remote hackamajig for hacking shit and making distractions. Guns jam. Colt's an enjoyable character. Middle of the night sadly, gotta wait until after work tomorrow to really get into it.

Also there's a cheevo for trying to use The Code(tm)
 

Belegarsson

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Ryzen 5 1600, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070 8GB, very high setting, 1080p, currently running at 55-75fps (I lock it at 75 cuz I don't like seeing my GPU temp goes over 80C).

Sadly I can't capture FPS counter since the game crashes when I enable MSI Afterburner.
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o6ElaMg.jpeg
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-09-12-deathloop-review

Deathloop review - not Arkane's most surprising game, but possibly its best
All-rounder.

png

A brilliant timeloop shooter that gives Dishonored's best tricks and techniques more opportunity to shine.

Deathloop is about killing the people who are killing time. Set in a kind of alternate 1970s that feels more like the far future of Dishonored's Gristol than part of Earth's history, it's a freeform, first-person mix of shooting, assassination, hacking and sorcery in which you wind and rewind a single day both to experiment with tools and manipulate targets such that you can massacre them all before darkness falls.

The lead is Colt Vahn, a hulking amnesiac who - shortly after being hacked to death by a mysterious woman - wakes on a time-locked Arctic island occupied by a hedonistic Bond movie organisation called AEON. To undo the rippling Anomaly keeping the island's never-ending murder-party in motion, Colt must slay the eight "Visionaries" who preside over four, separately loading areas, which also involves digging into the island's buried secrets, slaughtering no end of rank-and-file "Eternalists", and unravelling the riddle of his own presence. Amongst the Visionaries is Julianna, the aforesaid mystery lady, incorrigible nuisance-caller and the game's second playable character, who stars in a multiplayer mode where you invade the worlds of other Colts and kill them for unlocks.

Probably Deathloop's biggest disappointment is that all the Slabs have precedents in Dishonored. You could also argue that it doesn't steal enough: some of the Outsider's weirder gifts have been left on the table, like conjuring up spectral assassins or transforming yourself into rats and fish. But what Deathloop lacks in terms of individual tools, it makes up for in terms of freedom to use them. Your power bar recharges for starters, so you can wield all those intoxicating skills without scraping around for elixirs. You also have more license to screw up thanks to Colt's Reprise slab, a Tracer-style rewinding skill which essentially gives you three stabs at each level before the entire day resets.

These tweaks are the mark of a gentler, more playful game, structured to reward improvisation and investigation rather than lock you into the story, which is here conveyed more through backstory documents and charismatically written dialogue than cutscenes. It's not so much an improvement on Arkane's other sims as a change of tune. The Dishonored games insist on a suspenseful friction between breadth of options and severity of consequences: yes, you can dream up killing methods beyond the designers' wildest nightmares, but the soul of a city hangs on your conduct, and while you can replay levels in search of more elegant or inventive solutions, you can't (pre-patching, anyway) fire up any level and mess around as you please. Deathloop, by contrast, is a devil-may-care holiday album of places, periods and layouts that only synchs up into a linear campaign when you want it to. In theory you're at the mercy of the clock, but the time of day only advances when you move between areas, and if you're in a rush, you can always hit fast-forward in the mission lobby.

Deathloop's setting doesn't reset completely between deaths. Certain key developments persist. The first is Colt's expanding memory of events, with things like mission objectives and passwords conveniently preserved on your inventory screen (there's an autofill option when using keypads, a vital shortcut in a game with dozens of codes to learn). Once you've killed a particular Visionary and harvested their research, you can also retain weapons, Slabs and trinkets - aka smaller upgrades such as faster aiming or exploding projectiles - between runs by infusing them with "Residium" energy gathered from objects in the world. These objects are plentiful, and you can always obtain Residium by recycling items between forays, so amassing an arsenal is much easier than in the average roguelike. I almost never found myself visiting areas simply to scrounge for guns and materials.

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Slab mods, meanwhile, are obtained by killing the Slab's owner over and over - a brilliant incentive to revisit times and places and improvise afresh using powers and insight gained from the previous murder. It does away with the tedium of XP grinding, while simultaneously spotlighting the DIY ethos for which Arkane is famous. The mods themselves again recall Dishonored, but that doesn't make them any less entertaining. Employ the Shift Slab's self-explanatory Swapper mod to leave a trail of disoriented people in your wake, moving them into the paths of their own grenades, or leaving them to screech confusedly on windowsills. Or you can mod Nexus such that the effect spreads between characters as they pass each other - as stern a lesson on the importance of social distancing as any.

There are two halves to Deathloop's story. In the first, you kill the Visionaries one by one and obtain their powers, infiltrating and mastering the eccentricities of lairs that range from Punchdrunk-style live action shooting courses to sprawling castle masquerades. In the second, you exploit your foreknowledge of events and access to hidden locations to bring everybody together, perhaps messing up one Visionary's morning so that they decide to come along to the evening gala. The game's lore and mission menus are startlingly intuitive, given the complexity of all this - there's a daisy chain of clues and leads you can ponder, but all you really need are the brief directions you're given when you select an area.

The Visionaries and Eternalists themselves are an army of clown-painted mayflies who can be slaughtered over and over without penalty and remorse. They're also a bunch of extremely inebriated people with minimal training, which helps explain away AI shortcomings like everybody charging heedlessly into your sights, and leads to some amusing combat chatter. "Hey, it's that one guy!" one woman slurs a second before you land on her machete first. "Fine, I guess I'll cover myself then," complains one man to his shredded brethren as you circle round his position. It's often worth stopping to watch the Eternalists go about their business, whether they're getting loaded in the bars or taking advantage of their "amortality" to kill each other for kicks. While exploring one roof in Updaan, the island's social hub, I stumbled on a woman industriously setting up a line of cereal boxes so as to drop a landmine on somebody's head.

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Like Hitman - whose influence is also traceable in the modular campaign structure and certain setpiece environment kills - Deathloop's writing and characterisation take square aim at what The Great Gatsby called the "vast carelessness" of the super-rich. The Visionaries range from elite scientists to ogreish rockstars and pampered artistes. They resemble classic Bond villains at first, but the dialogue channels that more contemporary blend of sociopathy that sees billionaires trying to reboot humanity on Mars while claiming that we all live in the Matrix. While Deathloop stands out among blockbuster shooters for featuring two Black leads, the social divisions it explores are less about race or for that matter gender or sexual orientation, more about the reality-altering force of hideous quantities of cash. The Visionaries are a diverse bunch, but at the end of the day, they are all one and the same concentration of impossible wealth.

For all this, it's possible to view your targets with a certain pity. AEON's disciples might think they've shucked off mortality, but their refuge is a purgatory that's all foreplay without release. One thing you learn early is that only a tiny handful, including Colt and Julianna, retain any awareness of the fact that they've been reliving their "First Day" for a while. The majority are caught on the threshold of immortality. They will never know anything beyond anticipation (and hangovers, in many cases - if you're entering a time-loop, it's best not to party too hard the night before). There are scientists who will never build on their breakthroughs, and creatives who will never finish their masterworks. There are characters who are caught forever in abusive relationships, and randos doomed to perform one and the same odd-job for eternity. Julianna and one other individual aside, the only person in a position to actually enjoy the timeloop is Colt. So why, as she continually asks you over the radio, are you in such a hurry to leave?

I'd have liked Deathloop to take a few more cues from Hitman. There's a hint of social stealth here and there - you can obtain a disguise to access that evening party incognito - but it doesn't bloom into a full on mingle 'em up. The Eternalists always know you're coming, which means that they always behave like guards rather than civilians, and as Julianna warns you early on, everybody recognises Colt's trademark leather jacket. It feels like a slight missed opportunity. Given that this is an online game, I'd also have liked to see something like Hitman's Contracts mode, which let you assign a target and killing method for other players to master.

In place of that you get Julianna's side of the game, which recalls Assassin's Creed's long-forgotten PvP multiplayer. Where Colt has his rewind ability, Julianna's Slab lets her swap faces and outfits with any NPC, leaving a clone of herself strolling around while she play-acts as cannon fodder. In practice, I've found that a lot of Juliannas just run towards the loudest noise firing a shotgun, but given an appropriately methodical opponent, Deathloop sings as a cat-and-mouse game. Julianna seals all the map's exits when she invades, obliging Colt to hack a radio tower to escape. As the invader, the obvious approach is to surround the tower with tripwires and landmines, but you might also sic the Eternalist mob on Colt with the D-pad, or shuffle the automated defences around to make your adversary's familiarity with the map a disadvantage. If all this sounds like a chore, you can always turn off the online, though this means that you'll only get to fight an AI-controlled Julianna once in the game. There's also a limit to how often any given Julianna player can invade you to stop high-level griefers ruining the experience for greener Colts.

Appropriately for a game about time travel, Deathloop can be read as a game both for newcomers and old hands - an accessible introduction to Arkane's grittier immersive sims, or a triumphant refinement of the Dishonored style. Where it feels most like a concluding act is in how it builds on a theme in Arkane's work about games as means of both coercion and liberation, trapping you in order to empower and motivate you to break out of them, forever challenging you to think of some possibility that has escaped the developer's calculations, to the point of sabotaging the illusion entirely. I've argued in the past that this contradiction is fundamental to the immersive sim genre, but Arkane is unique in making it a question of story and setting. We see this in the opening and closing moments of 2017's Prey, in Dishonored 2's Clockwork Mansion and in the studio's penchant for villains who are domineering game designers in all but name. And we see it in Deathloop, which takes that curious inside/outside thinking and applies it to Time itself.
 

Siel

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Played the intro. Mechanics are pretty straightforward, you've got a remote hackamajig for hacking shit and making distractions. Guns jam. Colt's an enjoyable character. Middle of the night sadly, gotta wait until after work tomorrow to really get into it.

Also there's a cheevo for trying to use The Code(tm)

Whats your system and does it seems stable?
 

ADL

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The game runs really well on my system (2700X/6900XT with 32GB of memory and a PCI-E 4.0 NVMe) at ultrawide 1440p/75-100FPS on a mixture of high/very high/ultra settings. If I use FSR Ultra Quality mode it's basically locked at my refresh rate. The game looks great in motion. Load times are under five seconds.

No comments on gameplay yet but I do appreciate the kick being back. Also interactions with things like bottles are actually animated, they're not just floating in your invisible hands anymore.
 

Trithne

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Messages
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Siel

An old ass Ryzen 1700x, 5700XT, running it on an SSD with 16GB of DDR4 at some speed or another. Only played 15 minutes so I won't say for certain but at 1440p 75hz it was silky smooth. Turned off motion blur and bloom, everything else standard.

It also bitched my drivers were old, will fix that tomorrow.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/deathloop-review/

DEATHLOOP REVIEW
Arkane returns with a clever and stylish update to the immersive sim genre.

Arkane Studios is calling me out. It knows how I played Dishonored 2—my habit of quickloading away any mistake in pursuit of a perfect stealth playthrough. And given that almost 30% of Steam players have the Ghostly achievement for finishing a mission without ever being spotted, I suspect I'm not alone. Despite having a suite of tools for dealing with messy situations, we ignored them in favour of the most OP button on our keyboard: F9. With Deathloop, Arkane is removing the crutch. Quicksave is gone.

Deathloop is all about what happens when things don't go to plan; about panic and improvisation; about learning from a mistake, and taking those lessons forward. Trapped in a time loop, it doesn't matter if you botch your way through combat encounter after combat encounter—it doesn't even matter if you die and get kicked back to the beginning of the day. All that matters is that, in doing so, you gained some information that will help you the next time around.

Information is your primary objective in Deathloop—it's how you find and kill the Visionaries that act as the bosses of the island. There are eight in total, and your job as the amnesiac Colt Vahn is to take them all out in a single day in order to break the loop. Your problem is that your day is split into four chunks—morning, noon, afternoon and evening—and you can only visit one of the island's four areas during each period. The Visionaries only appear in certain locations at certain times of the day, and at first it doesn't seem possible to kill them all before the loop resets and your work is undone.

As you dig into the lives of your hit list, though, you'll uncover new ways to manipulate them. This is the bulk of the game, and your progress is tracked and updated as each new lead is uncovered. Colt is one of only two people whose memory remains intact when the day loops, which means his targets' behaviour remains consistent, and thus repeatable. It's immensely satisfying as the pieces start falling into place—as you see the consequences of your actions, and start filling out your itinerary in preparation for that perfect day.

The process of gathering information doesn't just apply to your primary objective, either. It turns out that looping repetition leads to a more organic sense of discovery that suits the immersive sim genre well. Arkane's level design is filled with secrets—hidden routes and locked doors that hint at new approaches. In Dishonored, you were rewarded for patience and observation, for scouring through notes and diaries and searching in hidden corners. And you can do that in Deathloop, sure, but it also supports a more direct approach.

Party crasher
My first visit to Aleksis's party in the Updaam district of Blackreef was an embarrassing disaster. It's the most dangerous area in the game—all of the guests are packing heat—and so my botched stealth attempt became a protracted hunt, as I desperately attempted to run and hide, only to be caught anew. In the end I prevailed, but only after killing every single person in the building. With that done, though, an opportunity presented itself. I was free to explore in peace; to work backwards from inside the building, digging out its quieter areas, and discovering the routes that linked them. When I returned the next day, I was prepared. It still descended into chaos in the end, but did so on my own terms.

So far in this review, I've taken the stance that stealth is success, combat is failure. And I do think it's fair to call Deathloop a stealth game first-and-foremost. You hear it in the discordant audio cue that plays when you're spotted, and see it in the exclamation marks that appear over nearby Eternalists—Deathloop's name for the rank and file revellers that will attack you on sight. The game's DNA is so heavily entwined with Dishonored—from its powers, to its art style, to the very function of its UI—that I naturally gravitated towards stealth as my de facto approach.

But even with that mindset, it's clear that Deathloop wants to nudge you away from obsessing over a flawless run. When you take out an Eternalist, they instantly fade into a sort of swirling ethereal mist that others can detect and react to. That means you can't spend hours neatly clearing out the map, hiding each body so that your handiwork is never detected. Deathloop wants you to be pressured into slipping up; to cause a situation that you're forced to react to. And then, when you do, it lets its weapons and powers feel fun to use, and, crucially, never punishes you for taking advantage of them.

At first, you start each day carrying only the basic weapons Colt has on him when he wakes up. Pretty early, though, you unlock the ability to infuse items—letting you carry them between loops. This is done by spending residuum, a resource harvested during missions or earned by sacrificing other, unwanted bits of gear. Infusion lets you permanently unlock better equipment for use. The best, of course, is held by the Visionaries themselves, who carry high-tier guns, trinkets and a signature slab—a power in the mould of Dishonored's supernatural abilities.

You're restricted in the number of weapons and slabs you can take on a mission, so if you see something you want in the field, you'll have to swap it with something you're already carrying. Dropped weapons and slabs are, logically enough, unavailable for the rest of the day. But thanks to the properties of infusion they'll be waiting for you at the start of the next loop.
Chaos theory
Another early power lets you respawn twice on the map without dying and thus resetting your loop. This means you can shrug off the occassional stupid mistake or botched encounter. If you can successfully return to your body without dying again, you can retrieve the residuum off your corpse and carry on as normal. At every stage, the game is telling you not to worry. Enjoy yourself. Don't sweat the mistakes.

You see, Arkane Studios is also calling out Arkane Studios; in particular Dishonored's central tension of giving the player a suite of tools for murder and mayhem, but using the story to admonish you for using them. There's no such thing as a non-lethal playthrough of Deathloop. Your basic stealth weapons are a machete and a nail gun. Colt's idea of a silent takedown is snapping an Eternalist's neck.

It made sense for Dishonored to condemn killing—its story would have been worse if it didn't—but Deathloop's entire structure is built around the idea that everyone you murder will wake up none the wiser when the loop resets. So hey, here's an SMG with an intrinsic perk that recovers your health when you damage an enemy. Try pairing it with the Havoc slab, which makes you tougher and deadlier while it's active.

You can tell that Wolfenstein's MachineGames played a role in Deathloop's development. The guns are chunky, powerful and cacophonously loud. That said, the increased focus on violence and combat does accentuate some weaknesses in the AI. It can be easy to cheese combat encounters if you're of a mind to, using corners or doors to funnel enemies into a killzone. But between the guns, the tools, the more combat-focused slabs and the free respawns, it just feels more exciting to embrace the chaos and wade into the mess.

It's liberating to revel in destruction, and Colt clearly isn't the only one who feels this way. Throughout you'll find Eternalists enjoying the lack of consequences, vandalising the island and performing idiotic stunts over the course of the day. If death doesn't matter, why not shoot yourself out of a cannon?

Throughout the game, there's a voice telling you that, actually, you love this. That's not me making some grand point about the duality of man or something: there's literally a voice—one coming from the other end of your radio each time you step into a new level. It belongs to Julianna, the other person on the island whose memory persists through each day. Her job is to protect the loop by hunting and killing Colt. And it's a task she revels in.

This cat-and-mouse relationship is the heart of Deathloop's story, and enhances the mystery of the loop, the island and Colt's past. As antagonistic as their conversations are, it's also clear Julianna enjoys their game. At one point she clarifies to Colt that she doesn't love watching him die, she simply loves killing him. There's a playfulness to her goading, but also an underlying frustration that makes uncovering the past that Colt can't remember all the more intriguing.

Invaders must die
Julianna's hunts are also the final piece of Deathloop's systemic puzzle, the thing that ties its various riffs on the immersive sim genre together. She can invade any level that contains a Visionary, and—if you play with online enabled, at least—will be controlled by another player. With an entire level as your playground, this leads to some incredibly tense encounters, but also plenty of slapstick shenanigans. Once, a player invaded me but didn't realise I'd already hacked some of the nearby turrets. They spawned, I heard a turret start to fire, and moments later the game told me Julianna had been killed.

Colt is more heavily favoured in these encounters, because Julianna can't respawn when killed. Ultimately that imbalance is for the best. For Colt, the stakes are higher. Dying during the loop means losing access to any weapons or upgrades he gathered during that level—as well as any picked up earlier in the day that haven't yet been infused. As Julianna, meanwhile, your progression is tied to feats performed during your hunts. Even if you don't end Colt's day, a decent performance will still net you points towards unlocking more weapons, powers and upgrades.

Ultimately, most Julianna encounters are resolved in an open firefight, which is the key to why so much of Deathloop is constructed the way it is. Why can I only equip a handful of weapons and powers? Because building a loadout is more interesting if Julianna is a potential threat. Throughout the game, I made heavy use of Shift—Deathloop's version of Dishonored's Blink—and Nexus—Deathloop's version of Dishonored's Domino. Both were invaluable for reaching high-up spots where I could easily and silently take down groups of Eternalists.

But as I progressed, I started to favour slabs like Aether, which turns Colt invisible, or Havoc, which makes him tougher and more deadly. These were picks specifically designed to counterplay an invasion. One of Aether's upgrades stops it from draining your power as long as you're standing still. It's the perfect tool for turning hunter into hunted—I've caught more than a few invaders who decided to sprint across a section of the level, not realising I was near.

Certain gun perks make more sense with Julianna in mind too. At first I wasn't sure why I'd ever need a version of the Fourpounder—an absolute cannon of a handgun—that creates a gas cloud at the point of impact. It can already dispatch Eternalists with a single headshot—anything more seemed like overkill. But Julianna is tougher, and the damage-over-time causes players to panic. That can lead to funny interactions, like the time an invader shot at me through the flammable gas cloud, blowing themselves up in the process.

For the first few hours of Deathloop, I was more interested in it as Arkane's response to Dishonored—a series that I love. I was enjoying myself, and looking forward to uncovering the mysteries of the island, but was more intrigued by what Arkane was saying about the genre as a whole, and about the way people played its previous games. It wasn't until another player invaded my game that it all clicked together, and I started enjoying Deathloop on its own terms.

After around 25 hours, I may have completed the story, but I'm still not done: I want to complete the remaining puzzles to see what new weapons and upgrades are out there, and learn how they can help my fight against Julianna in the future. And I want to see how the hidden routes I discovered as Colt can help me be a better invader against other players less familiar with the levels. Colt might be determined to break the loop, but—at least for now—I'm not in any rush.

THE VERDICT
89

DEATHLOOP
A thoughtful response to Dishonored that makes for an entertaining stealth shooter in its own right, but it's the multiplayer invasions that make Deathloop sing.
 

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