Arkane Lyon looks to be building Marvel’s Blade on the same game engine as Deathloop’s.
As reported by Tech4Gamers, Arkane Lyon Senior Lighting Artist Thomas Mothe updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he was now working on this very game, using the Void engine. The Void engine was internally developed by Arkane, but more importantly, it isn’t Unreal.
To be clear, Void engine itself was built from id Tech 6, made by id Software. Arkane first used Void Engine for 2016’s Dishonored 2, and it was also used to make Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, as well as Deathloop.
The engine is not particularly known for its flair or graphical fidelity. However, it is an engine that Arkane has mastered well, and have used for the best games the company has made. Rather than a high polygon count, what makes Void special is how it enables Arkane to make these games with heavily stylized aesthetics.
If we had brought up Unreal earlier here, that’s because that was the engine Arkane used to build their most recent game, Redfall. While that project was headed by Arkane Austin, let’s be clear that both divisions do work as one company, and the Austin and Lyon branches did make Redfall, and all their other games.
While Redfall had many development troubles, one particular issue was that Arkane had to learn how to use Unreal Engine 4 while making the game with it. Obviously, we all know the consequences of this choice on the game itself.
Bladethe comic book character had an aesthetic forged in 1970s horror comics, having been created for their flagship horror title, The Tomb of Dracula. In the 1990s, Wesley Snipes aesthetic was peak zeitgeist, from the black suit, to the Hong Kong film inspired action sequences, to the club music.
We don’t know how Mahershala Ali’s Blade will look like, but it will be absolutely fine for Arkane to imbue the dhampyr with their own stylized, semi cartoony spin. The characters in Dishonored don’t exactly have vampiric powers, but they definitely have the kind of abilities Blade has. It’s very easy to see why Marvel chose to give Arkane the keys to this black and red kingdom.
So that’s settled, but there are so many other questions about this title that we still don’t have answers to. To be fair, maybe Arkane are still making those choices themselves at the moment.
Marvel’s Blade is expected to be released on PC and Xbox Series X|S, but the studio has not officially announced platforms.
