Death loop is set in the future of the world established in the Dishonored games, as revealed by developer Arkane Studios.
Director Dinga Bakaba of Deathloop and Arkane Lyon, as well as Arkane Austin studio director Harvey Smith, confirmed as much during an appearance on The Official Xbox Podcast.
Xbox’s Jeff Rubenstein posed the question to Bakaba, “Are you aware of any rumors or indications that suggest Deathloop is related to this bigger universe?” Bakaba went above and beyond only confirming that this was the case; he further explained the reasoning that went into making it so, which was not required of him by Rubenstein.
According to Bakaba, “not everyone has seen the same thing” in Deathloop. “There’s a good chance that you haven’t shared whatever secret tune you’ve heard with everyone else. Nobody has been in every closet, under every bed, etc. So it was great to see the fandom pick up on the hints we planted here and there that, yeah, we did plan for Deathloop to occur in the future, after [Dishonored 2’s standalone expansion] Death of the Outsider.”
Bakaba explained that the team avoided emphasizing this link because it wanted Deathloop to have its own story and personality apart from Death of the Outsider, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t use the game to speculate on what would happen in the aftermath of that story.
“While developing Deathloop, we realized that a tale like this could be a plausible continuation of events following [Death of the Outsider]. So, we may use a specific time frame to connect the dots, and the game itself has several hints “The sage Bakaba declared. “There are some that are abused, one of them is pretty spoiler-y, so wow, but there are a lot of little things and others that were under people’s noses the whole time, but people are just figuring it out.”
The Heritage Rifle shotgun features one of these allusions prominently. The newest Goldenloop update introduced “idle breaks where the character toys with his pistol,” which made the emblem on the side of the weapon more legible. The tower in Dishonored’s emblem is the Dunwall Tower, which is now instantly recognizable.
These threads, as Bakaba described it, are “this small scavenger hunt inside the scavenger hunt” that is Deathloop, and they are there for the taking of players who are willing to put in the time and effort to find them.
Bakaba explained, “We tried to look at everything as a development, but if they brought up the past, we were either imprecise enough or we masked in, I would say, natural ways the names.” “You can surely… if you know, you can unravel anything, even though they talk of the Motherland and not Tyvia. It is reasonable, after all. It felt satisfying to think out a plausible future for the Dishonored universe.”
We gave Deathloop a perfect 10/10 score regardless of whether or not we understood all of the hints of a wider narrative.
The following is an excerpt from our evaluation of Deathloop: “Its systems feel natural to use and easy to understand because of the elegance with which its novel, high-concept notions about time loops and non-linear research processes are implemented. Deathloop is an unprecedented video game that sets a new bar for Arkane and other studios in the genre.”