Last year, Bonfire Studios unveiled its debut game, Arkheron, a dark fantasy adventure that looks strikingly similar to modern Diablo. Of course, that’s not a coincidence. Bonfire Studios is made up of Blizzard veterans, including founder Rob Pardo, who was the CCO of Blizzard until 2014.
Arkheron now conducts weekly playtests and is on its way to becoming a game you should definitely keep your eye on. I went hands-on with Arkheron, and it’s got some interesting features that separate it from its inspirations. I also spoke with Pardo about Arkheron’s dark aesthetics, gameplay evolution, and its future business plans.
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Arkheron Descends into Hell
Arkheron’s story basically breaks down like this: you’re a lone echo who’s just recently entered the afterlife. With all of your memories, you’re now in the abyss with no memories. There’s a tower in the background where everyone’s memories reside, and echoes constantly fight over them, hoping that the ones they stumble upon are actually theirs.
Most never find their way, but the select few who actually manage to gather memories of their previous lives become all-powerful beings called Eternals. While it may sound like they’ve reached enlightenment and have fully realized themselves, that’s not the case.
It’s more so that they’re cursed with knowledge, and that they’ll never be full again. It’s certainly an intriguing backstory that gives the necessary reasons that players, who are the echoes, fight against each other. The concept is also where the game’s name is derived from.
“The actual etymology of the word is ‘Ark,’ which is kind of like a sanctuary and a prison at the same time because it is an afterlife that is in between the living world and passing into darkness and oblivion,” Pardo explained. “Then ‘heron’ because our primary modes are Ascension and Spires, which are always about a climb to find answers.”
Furthermore, Greek mythology was a big inspiration, playing around with terms about the underworld. “It just seemed like a poetic way to bring that in, and another cool thing is that it’s also a homonym for the river of woe of Hades,” he said.
Many on Bonfire’s team had worked on Diablo III, and one of the most requested features was PvP. However, the abilities and skills fit more of a PvE-style game. That’s where Arkheron comes in. “One of the ideas was, hey, what if we actually made that PvP-first game that Diablo PvPers would love to have? The other thing that was happening at the time was, PUBG, which had just gotten popular, and the battle royale coming into vogue. So it just seemed like a cool thing to kind of bring those two things together,” Pardo explained.
Arkheron’s defining gameplay feature, though, is its reticle. Near the top of your screen, there’s a consistent reticle, similar to how a shooter like Valorant or Overwatch has with its crosshairs in the middle. In Diablo or other top-down action games, the camera is fixed. But in Arkheron, you can move the camera horizontally in order to line up your attacks and fire away.
As development progressed, Arkheron started feeling more like a shooter than an action RPG. But its dark fantasy and isometric aesthetics kept giving players an impression that it played like Diablo.
“The interesting place for us now is that when people see a screenshot or a video, they almost always are going to guess wrong about what the game is like and how it plays,” Pardo explained. “So if anything, it now probably resembles more like Overwatch than it does like Diablo, and that’s been our primary marketing challenge.”
Bonfire Studio’s Dark Ascent
Currently, Arkheron has two different gameplay modes, Ascension and Spire. The former is where the majority of the action takes place. Players will be placed in 15 3v3 teams against each other, and the match plays out similarly to a battle royale like Fortnite or Apex Legends.
By dropping into the map, players will then need to scour the area for weapons and gear based on different Eternals to take on other players and defend themselves. If you manage to retrieve a full matching gear set, you can transform into the corresponding Eternal and wreak havoc.
After gathering items, players must secure their spot in one of the multiple beacons that appear in order to reach the next level in the tower. That means killing off other players and executing them to steal their own items.
Arkheron originally had a shrinking circle, just like its battle royale contemporaries, but players became more strategic over time. They would learn how to ascend to the next floor while minimizing their chances of getting killed. As a result, the top floor would have messy battles involving 10 teams. It was clear that the development team had to find a new way to cull the herd.
“Instead of having just one shrinking circle on each level. What if instead we have these beacons appear, then players have a lot of agency on whether they want to go for the beacon that no one’s at yet, or to one where there’s one team or maybe with multiple teams,” Pardo explained.
There’s definitely a risk-and-reward system here. If you go to a beacon that’s unopposed, you’ll have a much easier time ascending to the next floor. But go to one that’s heavily contested, and you run the risk of dying. On the flip side, you could come out as a massive winner with rare loot drops from other players after eliminating them.
So Ascension plays out more like a bunch of mini King of the Hill modes similar to Halo rather than a traditional battle royale. “Once you accumulate enough ascension points, then you go to the next floor with your team, and that circle disappears,” said Pardo. “There’s always fewer circles than there are teams. So it ends up playing out, instead of a battle royale, it’s more like Ascension musical chairs.”
The other mode, Spires, acts like a tutorial. While playing Ascension, there are so many things to understand about Arkheron. You have to understand how the game actually plays. In Spires, you can pick the weapons to fight with rather than having to rely on random loot drops. Once again in a 3v3 format, this lets players have more agency while learning the ropes of Arkheron itself.
“It’s almost like a hero shooter onboarding until you get to draft mode. So in [Spires], you can start getting some repetition with the items and understand the control paradigm, understand the items, and start becoming effective at PvP. By the time you start playing Ascension matches, you have those foundations already,” Pardo said.
A Bright Future For A New Studio
Although Bonfire Studios hasn’t mapped out all the details just yet, the plan for Arkheron is to take the paid Early Access route. Players buy in usually at a cheaper cost than a traditional fully-priced video game, and this lets studios have a way of earning money while undergoing mass playtesting for valuable feedback on improving the game.
Players also tend to understand that Early Access games are still a work in progress and are usually more forgiving of problems. Whereas in a paid premium game, players show no mercy in ripping on it if there is a litany of issues.
There’s also the option to go free-to-play, but that requires a whole different plan for monetization.
“The reason we’re gonna do early access is primarily that we think there’s more development that we want to do on the game before we feel like it hits the standards of what we want to call Arkheron 1.0,” Pardo explained. “And fundamentally, we are an independent studio, and we do need to start earning revenue to be able to continue to support the development of the game.”
“We believe with the paid approach, we require a lower population to be sustainable, and it allows us to really focus on what we think is the best game experience, versus we have to aggressively monetize with lots of cosmetics and the rest,” he continued. “You need approximately 10 times as many players to support a free-to-play approach than a paid approach. But I think for both sides there’s good trade-offs.”
As for Arkheron’s future, the studio is open to implementing new modes like duos or a free-for-all. “What we really want to focus on, though, first is growing the community with the existing modes and really assuring good matchmaking quality,” he said.
With each mode comes the need for a whole new population bucket to support it. “So for us, we want to make sure to get Spires and Ascension really healthy,” he continued. “Then based on our community, we’ll probably lean into different kinds of experimental modes from there.”
