Arkheron is an enigmatic blend of a fast PvP action game and a dungeon crawler that's all about competing with other players to reach the top of an evolving tower. That enigma element is a key part of Arkheron's core narrative, along with its wild mix of loot-driven action-RPG combat and competitive knockout action that feel equal parts Diablo and Hades. But the developer's lengthy journey to create this quirky, high-stakes mash-up of genres is also something of an enigma, and their concept is steadily building an audience.

During a recent visit to developer Bonfire Studios ahead of Arkheron's crossplay beta starting on September 25, I spoke with Bonfire Studios CEO Rob Pardo (former Chief Creative Officer of Blizzard Entertainment) about the making of Arkheron. Along with some time diving into the game, we heard from Pardo about the studio's nearly 10-year journey to make a new type of arena PvP dungeon crawler. It's got loot and a large lobby size, but it's very much not trying to be a battle royale Diablo.

"I would say the years were absolutely worth it," said Rob Pardo, CEO of Bonfire Studios. "What's always tough is that 20/20 hindsight; you always wish you didn't go down so many dead ends where you could have made smarter choices at the time, but I think for me, because I've been through so many product cycles now at Blizzard, I think it comes with the territory of trying to innovate in a new direction creatively."

Arkheron has the look of a traditional isometric action-RPG focusing on loot, but it leans into more competitive, real-time, precision-based combat that feels especially inspired by Hades. But unlike a roguelike, you're racing alongside your team to loot up and fight rival squads, the strongest of which ascend to the upper levels of the tower. It's a refreshing, energizing spin on often slower-paced dungeon crawlers, and that competitive edge makes the dives feel chaotic and exhilarating.

But one thing Arkheron leans into is its strange, alluring setting, with a style that feels like a dark-fantasy spin on the Backrooms. Arkheron is set in a mysterious purgatory that draws individuals from across time and space. Players take on resurrected spirits known as echoes as they journey through a massive, evolving tower built from the memories of vanguards and other lost souls. As the echoes climb the tower, they collect loot, battle other echoes, and even take on the roles of the lost vanguards to learn more about the mysterious tower and its secrets—but only one team can reach the top.

Over the last year, Bonfire has steadily been rolling out early playtests, giving players an early crack at Arkheron's unique competitive format. Those playtests generated useful feedback that led to the creation of a new mode called Spires, a smaller 3v3 variant that will coexist with Arkheron's standard 45-player format.

According to Pardo, the steady pace of development and the rollout to players have helped the game take shape as it approaches its eventual launch.

"You can't get rid of the trials and tribulations and going through the wrong paths in game development—I sometimes say that one of the reasons why it's so hard for a great game to come out, and for a studio to be able to replicate that success, is because all the learnings and the mistakes are no longer in the released game," said Pardo. "But when we did the alpha test last year, it was the first time we put the game out for people, and it was really validating for a lot of the developers who had spent five to six years working quietly on Arkheron. It was just across the board really positive, and I think after that we had to start rolling up our sleeves and do the work of hearing the harder feedback and figuring out what we want to change in the game."

Preparing for beta

The upcoming crossplay beta on September 25 will make Arkheron's larger offerings available to players on PC, along with the first hands-on for the Xbox Series X and PS5 builds of the game. It's also a big moment for Bonfire, as it turns its focus toward building a lasting audience across multiple platforms — a common struggle for multiplayer-only games like Arkheron.

Speaking to Pardo about his time at Blizzard Entertainment, he explained that he's not only leaning into his experience making Diablo, World of Warcraft, and StarCraft, but also letting go of previous concepts to adapt to today's market.

"I think what was important for me in my Bonfire journey is just being clear. I'm not in the creative driving seat, but my role needs to be about taking care of the whole team and the studio," said Pardo. "But I do have a creative background, and I totally want to carry forward the knowledge and wisdom of development processes that I had from Blizzard. I may not be designing character kits, but what I can do is offer a lot of perspective on how we should approach development.

"There are a lot of things that Blizzard did really well while I was there, which is like a really good iterative development process, or how do we bring the community around the games?" he explained. "We're making the game better and better, and I think there's a lot to like in terms of design principles. I think all those we try to bring forward and continue to evolve them, but it's more about: How do I create the right development culture and support our team to make that possible?"

Arkheron's release date is still to be determined—especially in light of a chaotic release schedule for the remainder of 2026. Still, despite the extended development period and nearly a decade since its founding, the developers at Bonfire Studios are steadily building a new type of PvP action game that leans into its strange but alluring concept. It's a fast-paced, squad-focused dungeon crawler that's all about peeling back the layers of its weird world.

For the developers, it's a concept that's taken time to bring into shape, but one they're especially keen on bringing to the finish and into the hands of players.

"It's very much been an odyssey; there's just been ups and downs [with developing Arkheron and a new studio]," said Pardo. "It can be like this with any game, right? So I've been through enough cycles at Blizzard on new games and new teams, but then you layer on that it's a new studio and it's going to be a new IP, and you're going to go through a global pandemic and all the things we went through. I think it's been, overall, a journey of joy, terror, and a story of resilience."

As we get closer to the release of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, it's been revealed the series was almost a complete non-starter. Developer Shift Up struggled to gather enough investment to ship the first action game, with the company's boss saying the financial runway got perilously short at one point.

Speaking to Inven, as translated by Automaton, Hyung-Tae Kim, CEO of Shift Up, talks about the timeline for the first installment. Essentially, investors and publishers believed the project was too big a risk for the studio and denied requests to get monetarily involved. According to him, some even suggested if the team pivoted, they'd be more interested. Several major publishers, who are unnamed here, apparently turned the game down.

"While we were developing Stellar Blade, there was a time when the company was in a situation where we could only pay salaries for about three months," he mentions. The sequence of events is murky here, but it seems likely he's talking around 2020 to 2021.

Stellar Blade had been revealed as Project Eve, but was still years away from coming out. The 2022 release Goddess of Victory: Nikke, a free-to-play RPG with gacha mechanics, brought in tens of millions of US dollars soon after hitting the market, providing plenty of help in keeping Shift Up afloat.

After rejection upon rejection, Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios and head of PlayStation Indie, got his hands on a playable build, and offered a publishing deal. The rest is literal history; Kim was given a presidential commendation in December 2025 for services to the South Korean games industry.

He pins the company's prosperity squarely on that of the players who enjoy its games. And rightly so, it's those communities that are ultimately keeping the lights on. Stellar Blade's Switch 2 port is on the way, and Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is in development.

There's at least one other, untitled project happening as well. Thankfully, it seems the people making it have a lot longer than three months to get it done.

Stellar Blade boss offers to help PlatinumGames make Bayonetta 4.

Crusader Kings 3 will finally let us play as the pope in the By God Alone expansion, launching on September 30. The power! The pageantry! The blood boys! Wait, what?

OK, so history has given us a lot of weird pope stories. One of them relates to the declining health of Pope Innocent VIII. As the story goes, in 1492 three boys were hired to bring the pope back to health with their blood. All of their blood. It went badly. All three boys died, of course, and so did the pope.

This was long before physicians understood the circulatory system, or even knew it existed, and some versions of the tale have Innocent VIII literally drinking from the lads. It's apocryphal. Obvious nonsense, and likely propaganda. But the story has gone from a tall tale full of inconsistencies to the first example of blood transfusion. It's not true, but it is compelling.

One of the reasons for that is the modern trend of wealthy psychopaths hiring blood boys to claw back their youth. The idea that the rich and powerful, the Silicon Valley execs, are literally feeding on us.

As The Guardian put it in 2024, "What history can teach us is that finding a miracle cure for ageing has long been one of humankind’s most cherished dreams. And wealthy, white men have often been at the forefront of this quest—despite the dubiousness of the effectiveness or safety of anti-ageing treatments."

Now, Paradox games can get pretty weird. You can, for instance, eat the pope. And with the By God Alone expansion allowing you to play as the pope, you could theoretically turn him into a cannibal. Justice at last. But blood boys? Nope, that's not on the cards.

A trio of Paradox devs were asked, and while they did have to check—implying that it's not outside the realm of possibility—this is not a feature in By God Alone. But there's a practical reason. "Innocent VIII is at/past the end of the CK3 timeline, so they wouldn't be appropriate anyway," Paradox says.

"Inappropriate due to realism," joked Paradox PR manager Jesse Henning, who had to ask the devs this absurd question on my behalf, "not due to atrocity."

Maybe Europa Universalis 5 will add the feature.

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