A Blade game from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Arkane Lyon was announced at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Game Awards last week. "Blade" and "Arkane" are two incredibly cool proper nouns and putting them in a sentence together should be exciting. But isn’t Arkane abandoning its immersive sim roots? After rumors that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dishonored 3 was in development, isn’t it bad to see that Arkane is actually making a licensed gꦉame? Doesn’t this represent the end of the triple-A immersive sim as we know it?
My answer to all those questions is: not necessarily. Our own Eric Switzer wrote an insightful piꦅece about how conflicted he feels seeing Arkane step away from its original IP🧸 for a Marvel paycheck, and I relate to that. Eric compares it to the feeling of seeing exciting directors get hoovered up by the MCU to make projects that don’t show any signs of the unique voice that made them exciting in the first place. I share Eric’s feeling about the MCU, but I think that Marvel has taken💮 a fundamentally different approach in the games space, and that might mean that this is a win-win situation for all involved.
Marvel's approach to games is different from its approach to film because it can't really treat games the way it treats its cinematic universe. It's possible for Kevin Feige to micromanage multiple movie and TV productions, and it's possible for the Marvel pipeline to have VFX-heavy scenes done before a director even steps on set. That studio-level control often prevents the personality of the directors from making its way into their work.
But, games don't really work that way. The closest comparison would be if Marvel had an in-house game developer that could do the bulk of the work before it brought on a big name studio to finish off the less technical bits. That would be a bizarre way to develop a game, and games tend to work the other way around, with high profile studios doing the showier work while support studios handle the less sexy stuff. It also is fundamentally more difficult to rework something in a game than it is in a movie. If a studio doesn't like a scene in a movie, they can demand reshoots. If a mechanic or system or level isn't working in a game, it can have much more far-reaching implications. You couldn't just remove the card system from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Midnight Suns, for example, without r💎adicallyꦏ reworking the entire game.
The other factor to consider is that Marvel's gaming output has, largely, been good recently, and driven by the strengths of the developers it chooses for projects. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Avengers is the big outlier, with Crystal Dynamics, a team known for single-player action-adventure൲ games making a live-service brawler. Th꧋e mixture felt wrong, and the game was a commercial failure.
But, the other recent examples have paired studios with IP they were well-suited to adapt. Marvel picked 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Insomniac for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man after the studio had proven it could develop a traversal-focused open-world game with Sunset Overdrive. With Midnight Suns, Marvel basically let Firaxis make the kind of game it already made, but with Marvel characters instead of XCOM recruits.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guardians of the Galaxy might be the closest analogue for what Arkane ends up doing with Blade. Eidos Montreal, a studio known for immersive sims, pivoted to linear action games with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, entered the Marvel ecosystem as a support studio on Avengers, and made a Marvel action-adventure with GOTG. Guardians of the Galaxy was a departure from Eidos Montreal's roots in developing new Deus Ex and Thief games. It was largely a linear action game, but it did include choices and multiple routes through certain levels that showcased a small amount of the studio's immersive sim chops.
That could be what Blade ends up being, too. During the show, Arkane's Dinga Bakaba announced that the game is in third-person, which is a major departure for Arkane. But perspective isn't everything. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom and Hitman 3 play like immersive sims despite being in third-person, so there's no reason Arkane can't make an interesting, systems-driven game despite a shift away from first-person.
Whatever it ends up being, I'm happy that it's giving Arkane a path forward that doesn't involve delving deeper down the multiplayer rabbit hole it started digging with Deathloop and which became an artistic grave with Redfall. Arkane's style of single-player game hasn't often sold well, and incorporating more commercial elements like co-op and loot has seemed like the studio's attempt to recapture the mainstream attention it got with the first Dishonored. If Marvel is providing a different route to success, one that allows Arkane to keep making single-player games, I'm all for it.
