General Gaming With the impending release of Redfall, it's time once again to revisit Arkane's "lost" game: The Crossing

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Those of us who've been around for a while probably remember The Crossing, a Source Engine-based joint project between Valve and Arkane announced in 2007 that would've featured a blended single-player/multiplayer campaign that Arkane called "CrossPlay" set in an alternative history Paris.  The game featured in a pretty extensive cover story article in the old Games For Windows magazine which I've posted below that got me really interested in the concept.  Also, I've posted the game's original trailer, a compilation of gameplay footage from a Noclip documentary about Arkane from a couple of years ago, and a video from a Valve documentary series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, the project was cancelled in 2009 after Valve/Arkane simply couldn't find a publisher who was willing to give them the budget that they were looking for to complete the project ($15 million to $20 million) or would force them to develop a PS3 version of the game which was a non-starter because at the time the Source Engine had not been developed for that console.  As described by Arkane co-founder and former lead Raphaël Colantonio in the Noclip documentary:

 

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Arkane was faced with accepting a bad deal from a publisher to make The Crossing on an inadequate budget, or walking away - and chose the latter. “They tortured us for nearly six months, into a deal that got worse and worse and worse,” Colantonio says. “There were so many constraints. The most enjoyable part of all this process was to tell them, ‘No.’ They really thought they had us. They were kind of evil, frankly, as businessmen.”

 

In the subsequent years, The Crossing has surfaced whenever the gaming press turns its attention towards Arkane, usually around the time a new game of theirs is about to release, such as now with the impending release of Redfall.  The most notable discussions of The Crossing in recent years have been this extensive article from Polygon and the Noclip documentary.

 

The story of The Crossing, Arkane’s lost game

WWW.POLYGON.COM

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Before Dishonored, Arkane was making something quite different

 

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When asked about The Crossing, Raphael Colantonio and Viktor Antonov, two of the game’s leads, liken it to an ex-girlfriend. They were passionate about the project. They still have love for it. When they walked away, it was painful. But they’d never go back. Rather, they took the lessons learned and applied them to the rest of their respective careers.

 

The Crossing, at its core, was an experiment. It was a test to see if single-player and multiplayer could be one in the same, replacing a game’s AI with real-world players. It was also an homage to and examination of Paris — the city where both lived at the time. It was a risk, financially and commercially, that never came to fruition before Arkane Studios, on its own terms, cancelled the project. The team went on to develop the critically-acclaimed Dishonored series, and most recently Prey. The Crossing is in both the DNA of these games and Arkane itself.

 

 

With Redfall, just around the corner, RPS has followed tradition and published an article featuring an interview with  Raphaël Colantonio that focuses on The Crossing and references how the "CrossPlay" concept finally saw the light of day in Deathloop.

 

How Arkane's multiversal Parisian pipedream eventually gave us Deathloop

WWW.ROCKPAPERSHOTGUN.COM

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In 2007 Arkane announced an asymmetrical multiplayer game called The Crossing. Cancelled, it lives in the studios work - as explained by Raphaël Colantonio

 

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There’s an alternate world where Arkane made The Crossing, and it’s not necessarily a better one. Before Dishonored, the developer was looking down the wrong end of a bad publishing deal which, in the estimation of founder Raphaël Colantonio, would have ended in either The Crossing’s cancellation or a deeply underwhelming end product. In that timeline, there’s no telling whether the studio would even exist today.

 

Nevertheless, for fans of Arkane’s sophisticated and immersive first-person adventures, this lost project remains tantalisingly forbidden fruit: a foolhardy mashup of single and multiplayer in which teams of invading players would attack the protagonist of a solo campaign, against the backdrop of a multiversal Paris co-designed by Half-Life 2’s Viktor Antonov.

 

For years it was the source of Colantonio’s drive and inspiration, the idea he believed would be the making of his upstart French games company. And for several years afterwards, its abandonment was a painful wound he and the studio carried - one that only the eventual launch of Dishonored could help to heal.

 

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With The Crossing, Arkane intended to travel further down that path, building a full-on FPS in Valve’s engine. “Which was so shooter-oriented already,” Colantonio says. “And so that was a natural evolution. The tools dictate so much of what you do.” At the centre of this FPS would be an eight-hour campaign, like the one Call Of Duty had, and gunplay to match. But there the similarities with mainstream noughties shooters would end.

 

“It really started with a silly conversation,” Colantonio says. “‘Imagine someone was playing Half-Life 2, and you could choose to drop in and randomly incarnate the enemies.’ There was something beautiful about the idea itself. We didn’t know if it would be fun or possible. It became an obsession.”

 

After lending his inspired brutalist designs to City 17, Antonov had guided Arkane through Valve’s level design process during the making of Dark Messiah. Now he was returning from the US to France, where Colantonio and his team were based. He was quickly sold on the premise of The Crossing, and in particular the universe behind it. “Imagine if there were alternate realities that a group found a way to access and plunder,” was Colantonio's pitch at the time. “And there was this alternate dimension where the Templars had actually survived and created an entire world. They did not get eradicated by the Church, they were in power.”

The Crossing of the title referred to a collision between the Earth we know, and this other Earth ruled by the Templars. “Somehow a portal has been created by scientists who are just going there to scavenge,” Colantonio says. “Then it creates a backlash, where the Templars come to our world with their own technology and cool looks and gadgets.” As a special forces operative called in after a Templar attack, you would gradually come to understand that this multiversal crisis was of our own making. And you would ultimately cross over from the Paris we know - modern, rundown, riven by strikes and revolutionary feeling - to a parallel city built by the Templars, taking on their cool looks and gadgets in the process.

 

 

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And then, finally, there’s Deathloop, which entered development around a year before Colantonio left Arkane in 2017. It came together under the leadership of director Dinga Bakaba, level design guru Christophe Carrier and art director Mitton. “They saw it as an opportunity to re-explore some of the concept of The Crossing,” Colantonio says. “To all of us, frankly, The Crossing stayed as this kind of unfinished business.” Once again, Arkane was making a campaign FPS that could be interrupted by player invasions.

 

There you have it:  this has been your not-so-regular D1P reminder that an Arkane game called The Crossing once kinda/sorta existed!

[ThreePi]

I think I had a PC Gamer that had a preview piece on "The Crossing" and being enthralled by the concept.

[stepee]

I never knew about this actually, I really like the idea of Arkane taking on an open modern city with their art team. What’s here looks incredible for 2007.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

15 minutes ago, ThreePi said:

I think I had a PC Gamer that had a preview piece on "The Crossing" and being enthralled by the concept.

 

To the best of my knowledge, only GFW Magazine covered The Crossing - I really don't recall PC Gamer doing so or at least to the extent GFW Magazine did.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Just now, stepee said:

I never knew about this actually, I really like the idea of Arkane taking on an open modern city with their art team. What’s here looks incredible for 2007.

 

The art design for the in-game version of Paris is pretty much entirely from Viktor Antonov who created City 17 for Half-Life 2.

[stepee]

26 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

The art design for the in-game version of Paris is pretty much entirely from Viktor Antonov who created City 17 for Half-Life 2.

 

I just looked it up and he started a new company with some people and is developing a “AAA narrative driven single player fps” and I definitely am looking forward to seeing that now. Looks like the last thing he really worked on was Prey. I feel like I remember Dishonored being more City17ish in early previews too but I couldn’t find the pics I was thinking of.