Bonfire Studios reveals its first game – nine years after it was founded by ex-Blizzard CCO Rob Pardo

Nine years after the company’s foundation, Bonfire Studios has formally revealed its first game, Arkheron.

A team-based, isometric, twitchy PvP multiplayer action title that blends elements of MOBAs, battle-royale, and ARPGs like Diablo, Arkheron aims to break new ground in the multiplayer space.

Its director, former Blizzard chief creative officer Rob Pardo, describes it as an “Ascencion Royale” – a name that derives from how teams are whittled down as they ascend the floors of a gigantic tower.

Arkheron is the product of a long, long period of ideation and iteration. When Pardo last spoke to GamesIndustry.biz, he said Bonfire intended to take its time formulating its debut game. That was in 2017. Did he expect it to be another eight years before revealing Arkheron to the world?

“Obviously not,” Pardo says. “You never start a project with the expectation that it’s going to take eight years. However, what I’ve also seen in my career, when you’re trying to do something creative and new and you’re doing it in an iterative way – which is how we approach things – you end up going on a bit of an adventure, and sometimes it takes a long time.”

A changed industry

Arkheron’s prolonged development means it enters an industry that is radically different from the one it was conceived in.

We’re now in a time when a growing number of developers are struggling to both make and sell games. With investments drying up, an increasingly crowded release calendar, and competition intensifying year-upon-year, this has led other long-gestating startups like ProbablyMonsters – founded in the same year as Bonfire – to change their plans dramatically.

Has Bonfire also felt these external pressures? Pardo says not especially. “I’ve been in the industry now [for] over 30 years. The thing that has always been the case in the games industry is that it has always changed a lot.

“[It] changed a lot through technology in the early days, then platforms and distribution tools. Now, it’s the rise of platform publishers [and] the democratisation of content tools.”

Given this background of constant momentum, Pardo is adamant that the type of games people make must change as well. “You can’t just keep on making the same genre over and over again. You keep on being responsive and innovating and doing new things.”

It’s this latter motivation which has been the source of Arkheron’s protracted development, rather than any external pressures. Following its foundation, Bonfire spent two years figuring out what kind of game it wanted to make, having developers pitch internally before settling on three key influences that Pardo refers to as “seed references” – Diablo, PUBG, and Dark Souls.

Through iteration upon those key seeds, Bonfire built a game with the perspective and gear-based skills of Diablo, but with real-time, twitch-based melee and magical combat, and open-ended, knockout-style multiplayer that allows its three-player teams to both out-think and out-react one another.

“You can’t just keep on making the same genre over and over again”

Rob Pardo, Bonfire Studios

Bringing all these elements together and figuring out how they fit and mesh into something new took a while, Pardo says, with several bumps along the way.

“We were working with Unity, for example, working with their ambitious DOTS roadmap, so we were having to build that out at one point,” he says.

Getting Arkheron’s shooter-style aiming to work from an isometric perspective also proved tricky. “That ended up costing us a bunch of time to rebuild the network layer,” Pardo adds.

Another key reason for Arkheron’s lengthy gestation was building out the depth of the experience. Just like Blizzard’s keystone games, Pardo wants Arkheron to provide an experience players can invest long periods of time in.

“If you want the game to be really deep and last for hundreds of hours, thousands of hours, the types of players that play those games [are] highly skilled, highly invested,” he says. “They’re gonna find every edge case, and every way to min/max the game.”

Indeed, getting the depth right is a priority for Bonfire over accessibility. “The part of the game that you want to last for hundreds or thousands of hours is going to take a lot longer, and it’s a lot harder to build than, let’s say, how to onboard people or get people to have fun for their first 10 hours,” Pardo points out.

The turning point for Arkheron, where Pardo says it went from feeling like a bunch of other games mashed together into something new, came during the COVID pandemic, as the studio’s decisions to rework the camera and the combat fell into place. “The other thing that happened, again somewhere in that time period, was leaning away from it being a hero game [like Overwatch] and leaning into being an item game [like Diablo],” Pardo elaborates.

All of this took shape through Bonfire’s iterative approach to game design. The studio conducts playtests of Arkheron every morning, with meetings and design work happening in the afternoon. “Somewhere in that [pandemic] era, I think everyone started seeing it, and it was very clear like ‘Okay, we have found the heart and soul of this game’.”

Asset management

Pardo says Bonfire has been able to operate for so long without shipping a product through careful deployment of its investments, which began with $25 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

“When we did the first investment back in 2016…we weren’t trying to spend all that money. Even though at that time period it was a very large series A cheque, that lasted us by itself over five years.”

On top of this, Bonfire received a series B investment last year. Pardo doesn’t specify the figure, but he describes it as “significant” and that it will “definitely get us through launch.”

While Pardo stresses that there’s still a long way to go before release, Bonfire feels like Arkheron is in a good place internally. The challenge now is to begin rolling it out for larger-scale public testing. This is partly to assist with designing some more practical elements of Arkheron.

“Good examples are we need to start figuring out how our matchmaking systems are going to work. We need to figure out what’s going on with onboarding,” Pardo points out. But he also says it’s about building an audience for the game. “We need to figure out how to socially onboard people.”

“Most Western companies don’t really treat Korea as a tier one [audience]”

Rob Pardo, Bonfire Studios

While Bonfire is still largely guided by the design philosophies Pardo learned at Blizzard, one thing Bonfire doesn’t have is a ready-made platform to release Arkheron onto.

“When I was at Blizzard, we came in the early days with Battle.net, so we had the ability to build our own platform and really aggregate our community. Now that I’m outside of Blizzard in Bonfire, we don’t have that advantage,” he says.

“We have to really think about ‘Okay, what’s it like to be on Steam, like all the other games that are on Steam, and how to we build an audience?'”

It was partly with one eye on its potential audience that Bonfire signed with South Korean publisher Drimage. “Most Western companies don’t really treat Korea as a tier one [audience], but we feel like this game might be a really good map for them,” he says. “When we made StarCraft, we had no idea that it was going to be really popular in South Korea.”

Bonfire spoke to several South Korean companies when searching for a publisher, but Pardo says Drimage proved the best fit with Bonfire’s ambitions. “They just got the game pretty quick. They really saw what was cool about the game and that really mattered to us.”

A crowded market

But how does Pardo feel about delivering a new title into a heavily calcified multiplayer market? Competitive multiplayer fans tend to be more entrenched than cooperative gamers, sticking with one or two titles they’ve spent years, possibly even decades mastering.

Pardo believes Arkheron will stand out on account of its originality, and the fact that it can appeal to fans of more than one genre. “It’s definitely not a game where, like ‘Oh, we’re trying to be the next MOBA, so therefore we want people like that.’ But I do think there’s a lot of player motivations in common with a lot of these competitive games,” he says. “What we’re really asking for is maybe people try it out and put it in their rotation.”

Arkheron’s viability to be the next big competitive multiplayer game will become clearer as more people play it. But with a current team size of 70 developers, Pardo says that Arkheron does not need to be a sensation to be successful.

“We’re not a small indie studio, but we’re also not like a big AAA studio either. So it’s not like we need a massive success to be able to go on and support the product for a long period of time,” he explains.

“What we want, fundamentally, is just enough of a success when it comes out to the market, so that we can roll up our sleeves and grow the game and the community.”