Bonfire Studios announces its debut game Arkheron after 8 years – exclusively

Bonfire Studiosan independent video game developer founded in 2016 by Rob Pardo and other gaming veterans is finally coming out of stealth mode and unveiling its debut project Arkheron.

Founded by industry veterans responsible for iconic franchises such as Diablo, Overwatch, StarCraft and Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, the Bonfire team draws on the expertise and design principles of those titles to create an innovative new player-versus-player experience -Game (PvP) to develop. said Rob Pardo, CEO of Irvine, California Bonfire Studiosin an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

Private playtests for Arkheron are already underway and will be expanded with rolling invitations in the coming months. Players who enjoy fast-paced PvP (player versus player) combat are encouraged to register now for the chance to be among the first to play Arkheron and help shape the later stages of development.

I asked Pardo if the team has spent eight years developing the game so far, but he said it took about 1.5 years to build the studio and do the prototyping to find the fun. Actual work on Arkheron itself began in 2018, and even then it required a lot of ongoing gameplay testing to get everything right. And so the game has been in the works for about six years.

“We were thrown curve balls,” Pardo said. “We didn’t expect to be in the middle of development when a global pandemic broke out.”

As an example of a difficult situation, the team had to spend about nine months developing a backend architecture for the network to enable the kind of combat they wanted.

We’re not sure what this means yet, as Bonfire is slowly revealing the game.

The company has been playing and iterating on Arkheron behind the scenes for years, starting private playtesting sessions with a small community in 2024. While players will find familiar ideas and concepts in Arkheron, it’s not about combining genres, but about creating something completely new; a dynamic, fast-paced PvP gaming experience in a dark and foreboding world. The game is played top-down, as opposed to first-person or third-person games, Pardo said.

The game does not have a deep narrative and is therefore no different from games like League of Legends and Overwatch. But it has its own world and its own story to make it a better PvP game. The game will also be a live service game.

The team at Bonfire tests the game every day and credits this aspect of their development process with helping them create a fun and unique game that they believe will resonate with players. It was built using the Unity game engine, with modifications created by Bonfire itself.

“At the heart of our development philosophy is a simple truth,” Pardo said. “If we don’t love our game, our players won’t love it either. We believe that the best games come from a genuine love of gaming. That’s why we’ve put years of passion into developing Arkheron, constantly iterating and refining it to deliver something truly unique and exciting.”

He added: “We’ve been playing the game as a team every day for years and while we haven’t quite figured out how to describe it yet, we often say, ‘You have to play it to get it’.” We’re looking forward to it “To share the fun we’ve found in Arkheron with a larger community soon, and we hope players will love it as much as we do.”

Bonfire’s design philosophy focuses on entertaining and deeply rewarding gameplay, imaginary worlds that inspire self-expression, welcoming, long-lasting communities, and experiences that become a meaningful part of players’ lives.

Players who register through the website have a chance to be invited private playtestbut the easiest way is to find a friend who already plays – because Arkheron is best played with friends, the company says. Access is currently limited to North America, but Bonfire plans to expand playtesting to other regions later this year.

New funds raised

When the company was founded in 2018, Bonfire Studios raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) and Riot Games. He pointed out that investors had supported him.

Building on last week’s announcement of a partnership with Hybe IM to release Arkheron in Korea and Japan, Bonfire has also secured new investments from A16z, Founders Fund and Altos Ventures, among others, which will drive the remaining development of Arkheron as the team prepares it for global launch.

Pardo said he believes the company now has everything it needs to bring the game to market. However, he did not provide any information about the total amount of the last round of financing.

As Bonfire continues its work on Arkheron, the studio is growing with open positions across its engineering, art, audio and publishing teams. Interested candidates can learn more and apply on the Bonfire website.

Describe the game?

Arkheron is set in a dark fantasy universe that the team likes to describe as a “hauntingly beautiful” art style. However, he noted that it is still different from the style of games like the Souls-like or Diablo games.

Regarding the art style and gameplay, Pardo said: “With investors, publishers or potential players, we haven’t found the right way to describe it in a way that really paints the right picture for the game.” That’s one of the reasons why we conducted private playtests.”

He said: “The only way to truly know and understand the game is to play the game.”

But it’s a team-based multiplayer competitive game, and it has what Pardo calls an “innovative and different fighting style.” It’s not a shooter or like other genres out there, he said. And it’s one of those where you have to see it to understand it.

“It’s in this wonderful place where it has a lot of familiar concepts from other genres, but the core of the game is really unique and the combat is really unique. It’s presented a lot of challenges for us to actually explain it well to people. Because people always get the wrong impression. They get the idea of the wrong game,” Pardo said.

When asked about gameplay, Pardo replied that he wasn’t revealing it yet. The team only releases high-level information, but Pardo said that if you know its history, the same design principles and philosophies you know will apply.

“It’s very fast-paced and not turn-based or anything like that. It has its own unique fighting style. It’s not really a shooter. It’s not a point-and-click like Diablo,” he said. “We hopefully made it playable on the controller from the start. So it is actually very conducive to controller gaming. We plan to release it on current generation consoles in addition to PC.”

When asked about the roadmap, Pardo said the company had conducted a lot of testing among friends and family. Now it will happen with real players who have nothing to do with the company. This test will likely begin in the next month or so.

“From this point on, we’ll really continue to develop the game based on what we’ve learned from our playtesting,” Pardo said.

Make the game

Bonfire Studios has now grown to 70 people. Production began about a year ago and the art department has grown to 40 people.

As for the process, Pardo said the team tried to allow everyone in the company to pitch games, from the engineers to the business people to the game designers. The team then had to add more structure to this approach and limit the deck to perhaps five slides. This resulted in dozens of pitches and the team had to decide which one to pursue.

It started by prototyping seven different ideas and “growing the seeds into seedlings,” Pardo said.

The team created “mood boards” and worked on the ideas for a few weeks at a time. Then they decided which one to build.

“To be honest, I never set out to take more than five years to develop a game, but because the development style that I have always used and that we use at Bonfire has always been very iterative, I find “ A funny model, it’s not a straight line,” he said. “You have happy accidents and discoveries. You go the wrong way and have to start in a different direction. We build the game from the inside out, and once we start finding the fun, more momentum comes into play.”

In this sense, the game development process was very similar to what happened at Blizzard. He said that with every game you learn a lot, make mistakes and find wisdom that moves you forward. After Blizzard finished a game, it conducted a postmortem. However, he noted that next time, different challenges would arise in the creative process. The technology would change, the art style might need to be rebooted.

“The main thing I learned was to make sure you develop a belief in the game over time,” he said.