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Exploring Valve Archive, part 33 - Valve and Arkane's Dishonored precursor valvearchive.com>archive>3rd Party Developers>Arkane Studios>The Crossing (Cancelled)>Videos> Before Dihonored, Deathloop, or Prey, Arkane's earliest work was in collaboration with Valve, with their 2006 Source game "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic" being their magnum opus at the time. Seeing the promise in this studio, Valve formulated bigger plans with them, and between 2007 and 2009, the 2 studios collaborated on the world's first "cross-player" game: "The Crossing". This game would've pioneered a unique combination of singleplayer and multiplayer gameplay, weaving a story into multiplayer gameplay through player-controlled "VIP characters". These characters would appear in typical multiplayer matches, pivoting the sway of the match and bringing both teams' focus on them, either in an attempt to attack or protect them depending on their faction. The story of the game focused on a skirmish between parallel universes, focusing on two divergent timelines of Paris. On one side, you had our modern Paris, and on the other, a alternative Paris in which the Knights Templar rose to power, shaping a very different world to our own in which olden-style French buildings rose high and knights with modern technology would traverse them with ease using rope-swinging mechanics. This game never came to fruition, but even in its early state, it showed so much promise. The DNA of the game was carried over to Dishonored in artstyle and gameplay, and even the "cross-player" aspect of it was explored in Arkane's future title, Deathloop. Had they released this game, however, one can only imagine the impact it would've had on the industry at the time.

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Project Tau
Project Tau
Jul 12, 2024

my honest opinion. it looks like a half life 2 mod but I am a huge sucker of alt-history "what if X survived into the modern age"