NoClip’s new documentary, called The Untold History of Arkane, features the two cancelled games of Arkane Studios.

Let’s start with The Crossing. It’d have been an action-FPS, running the Source Engine, with a twist by Viktor Antonov (the game’s designer and director, who also worked on Half-Life 2 and Dishonored). One of its unique features would have been the cross-player, fusing single-player with multiplayer. We could have checked this option at any time during the story to allow other players on a similar level to ours to join the game and take control of the enemies. (Does this sound familiar? Bethesda is using this idea id Software’s DOOM: Eternal in its Battlemode…)

The Templars (who you might also know from Assassin’s Creed) would have split Paris in half. One part of it, owned by them, would have evolved to have a tall landscape with gothic details, and the other half would have been the ordinary Paris with strikes and rebellions. The two halves would have been interconnected with portals. The regular half would have played like SWAT, while the Templar portion would have had special abilities (grappling hook to climb walls, throwing objects, integrated sword).

Arkane was ready to sign a deal with an unnamed publisher (…Ubisoft? They published Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in 2006, and it also used the Source Engine…), but they called it „a terrible deal.” The publisher would only talk with them once every one or two weeks, and each time they got a new proposed contract, the terms continued to be worse. Thus, the studio lost a million dollars, but they kept the hope that they could publish The Crossing via someone else.

They also had another project called Ravenholm, a Half-Life spin-off. In 2016, Warren Spector and his team, Junction Point, was working on a new Half-Life 2 episode, which never came to fruition – they handed over the prototype to Arkane, who were hired by Valve. Junction Point created a magnet gun that would be similar to the gravity gun: you could have fired spheres or magnetise objects.

Arkane started working on a script that would have placed the plot around Ravenholm. The protagonist would have been Lt. Shephard from Half-Life: Opposing Force, and we’d have met Father Gregory, who sought refuge in an asylum that acted as an experimentation centre. It was formerly used as a children’s hospital, which would have made the location creepy due to stuffed toys and the like left behind. The studio talks about a leak that happened in 2013, which is why many people thought it could have been Half-Life 3 or a new episode, but they thought differently: although Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 were in the build due to working together with Valve, Arkane considered it as a standalone spin-off, which can be seen at around 33:33 in the video below.

What a shame these games never got completed.

Source: VG247, VG247

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