Arkane’s Favorites: Weapons & Abilities
Last time, we asked Arkane to pick their favorite characters, and a lot of voices weighed in. Now, we’re looking at weapons and abilities – the tools we use to make our way through Arkane’s amazing worlds. With a wealth of options to choose from, what were the top picks?
Wendy White, Principal Gameplay Engineer | Arkane Austin
I love the GLOO Gun. It’s such a unique weapon and it was so difficult to get everything working properly. For the player, though, it’s a pretty easy weapon to use and it’s extremely versatile. That provides it with a lot of personality. It’s the single most problematic and hard to solve feature I’ve ever worked on and took up way too much schedule but it was so much fun.
Ali Amezziane, Dev Tester | Arkane Lyon
The GLOO Gun from Prey is amazing! I have always loved weapons like the Gravity Gun in Half Life that aren’t just there to kill, but are also very useful outside of combat. Weapons that promote creativity. It’s so satisfying to reach a location by creating your own stairs or platforms with the GLOO Gun.
Sebastien Mitton, Art Director | Arkane Lyon
The Howlers’ swords are my tribute to my elders, whose snipping scissors created the soundtrack of my youth. We love to take ordinary objects and transform them into something new, giving them a surprising new purpose.
The Howlers are a gang living mostly in the Dust District in Dishonored 2. They have a taste for fashion, and the inspiration for them comes from the Mexican photographer Agustín Víctor Casasola. The tailor’s scissor-shaped sword fits them perfectly.
Pawel Kroenke, Lead Narrative Designer | Arkane Lyon
The Recycler Charge is my favorite weapon. There’s something extremely satisfying about watching your enemies turn into cubes of material that you can then use to make more Recycler Charges. And if you ever have qualms about your actions, you can always recycle yourself.
Stevan Hird, Director of Technology | Arkane Austin
That’s a tough call. I'm torn between the Bend Time and Blink abilities. I'd probably go with Blink because it had an influence on other games that came out later and it made fast stealth fun. It went through so many variations including using pathfinding, teleporting you in sudden steps, adjusting where you were looking... It ended up taking a lot of work behind the scenes to make everything as smooth as possible for the player.
Rosa Dachtler, Narrative Designer | Arkane Lyon
This is more of a gadget, but the Heart is my favorite usable item in an Arkane game. It changed how I thought about so many of the environments and the people around me. It brought real humanity to characters who otherwise could have felt sidelined and expendable.
Thomas Mitton, Senior Sound Designer | Arkane Lyon
That’s a very difficult question… The Possess ability is one of my favorites. It was fun to design at the time, mixing some droning tones and fluid noises so you can really hear the inside of the body you possess, while muffling the sound around you too. There’s also a build up at the end to warn the player they’re about to be ejected from the body. Very cool.
