I’m chatting to Arkane Lyon as the studio celebrates its 20th anniversary in a world that appears a lot totally different to that of 2019.
The COVID-19 pandemic has modified how all of us stay, and now we’re making our connections digitally by way of video convention calls and messaging apps. I requested how the studio is dealing with the change.
“Well, right now I’m asking my daughter to wait for me to clean up a number two, so that’s that,” game director Dinga Bakaba laughed. “That’s the kind of thing that happens routinely.”
When the pandemic was introduced, ZeniMax and Bethesda rapidly enforced a work from home policy for all of its studios. When I converse to the staff at Arkane Lyon, they’re getting into their seventh week of this new regular.
“Of course, it was a surprise,” studio director Romuald Capron defined. “Like each studio, I feel it was a problem originally, as a result of primarily, one, we have now to set that up. But to this point, not that dangerous, I’d say. We’re most likely in one of many industries the place it’s best.
“We are all very digitally linked. But in fact, it slows us down a bit for various issues. We are transferring lots of knowledge right here and there to our servers, and so forth, and so web is a bottleneck, even when all of us have good connections. But morale is sweet.”
Video games are a technology-driven medium, so many of the work may be performed remotely. However, there are just a few triple-A particular challenges. Many of the massive games today use efficiency seize to translate an actors’ efficiency into the game. These periods are recorded in massive pcap volumes, requiring many individuals to be bodily current.
“Fortunately, we had already made some mocap before the lockdown for the current project [Deathloop], and we are trying to find other workarounds,” Capron stated. “Actually, we haven’t created animation only based on mocap for Arkane for a long time. We’ve always mixed that with keyframe animations, so it’s a mix of the two, and so far, so good.”
You can read our 20th anniversary Arkane interview here.
