Nightholme developer interview: Arc Raiders 'validated' many assumptions

Alexandre Amancio, the studio head at Studio Ellipsis, has had a storied career. At Ubisoft, he was the art director on Far Cry 2, followed by the creative director on Assassin's Creed Revelations and Unity. Then in 2016, he founded Reflector Entertainment, which is now a subsidiary of Bandai Namco and is the studio behind 2024’s Unknown 9: Awakening. Amancio left in 2022, but iscredited as having created the adventure game’s world.

Now? He's using his experience to approach video game development in an entirely new way.

"I went from like 80 people in the studio, maybe 15 to 30 people on my team, to 3,500 at the studio, which grew to 5,000," Amancio told me in a private room in Studio Ellipsis’ central Lisbon office. "I missed those days where we were a small, scrappy team… When industries grow very fast, things become impersonal and people forget why they got into it in the first place, and sometimes you lose that sacred fire. I wanted to create a place where people wanted to be here."

Studio Ellipsis was founded in late 2024. While the team has a side project in the form of Cradle of the Gods, a pirate fantasy-themed comic series, Nightholme is its first video game in development. It takes plenty of inspiration from extraction games, but it has a heavy focus on horror, with MOBA-inspired match-by-match progression, and it strongly encourages stealth gameplay, lest you're swarmed by Lovecraftian-esque monsters known as grimspawn. The evening before this interview, I was one of the first in the world to play, and you can read my game-specific thoughts in Polygon's Nightholme preview here.

Image: Studio Ellipsis/FunPlus

Plenty of games have promised a unique blend of those that inspired it only to fall at the first hurdle though: attracting players. I asked Amancio what Nightholme needs for him to consider the game successful: "We need a strong community of people that think our game is awesome. I'd rather have a reasonably sized community of people that think we're onto something, that this is a game they want to play because it's giving them something other games don't. Having millions of people rush in and seeing the numbers go up means they inevitably go down and you get measured by that, which destroys the long run.

"With Nightholme, we're playing the long game, we know this can grow into something amazing. The first iteration of the game will be the core experience. We know where it's going to go, we need enough people to like that to allow us to continue building the game so that in two or three years, we've built the scope of the game that we want."

As expected, a lot of attention is being paid to other games in the genre, because extraction shooters are on the rise. Amancio was keen to stress Nightholme is not a shooter, per se, but it does share plenty of similarities with games that are: Arc Raiders, Marathon, Hunt: Showdown, and so on.

"Arc Raiders also does a lot of this stuff and it's actually quite funny, because when it came out, it validated a lot of the assumptions we'd made, like the idea of trusting players to let the social play out in the game. Will people help? Will people betray? This is something we decided on a while ago and when Arc Raiders came out and did it, and we saw the result, it validated something that we felt was risky on our end.

"So we pay attention to that stuff, but not necessarily in the sense that we want to copy anything. We have a solid idea of where we want to go and what we want to do, but when you see other well crafted games put stuff into practice, it allows you to question your own assumptions and course corrects you slightly."

Image: Studio Ellipsis/FunPlus

Amidst this multiplayer social dynamic is a narratively rich, detailed universe that Amancio wants players to appreciate. The team has created a 160+ page "lore bible," and he considers that "just the beginning." He wants players to discover things within the game — books, recordings, and the like — but rather than have them read them there and then, they connect to stories and elements outside of the game itself.

These will come on top of more single player-focused quests, but rather than approach those in the same way the hot extraction shooters do right now such as Arc Raiders and Marathon, the aim is to make quests feel "emergent."

"There are a certain number of cursed books on the map, so you take a 'cursed book' quest,” he said. “But when you go on the quest, the setup of the mission, the number of enemies, the number of ingredients, and the number of things that can go wrong are created procedurally in a way where every time something different can happen. So narratively, you get one book out of many, as opposed to there just being one quest about one book. This way, if you do it 10 times, you get 10 completely different experiences because the game has reconfigured itself, it's a different area and there are different setups."

Image: Studio Ellipsis/FunPlus

I’m someone who has spent over a hundred hours in Arc Raiders and a considerable amount of time in Marathon too. Even though some of the quests are enjoyable in those games, they're often formulaic. Nightholme seeks to solve that problem by creating more memorable moments.

"When I went to get the book, this happened and then this, and it was completely unexpected because these two things interacted and all hell broke loose, and that's my own personal story,” Amancio said. “I would rather focus on things that will increase the odds of players having personal stories than telling the story we have told."

Nightholme will be coming to early access initially, and Amancio confirmed that there will be a definite release date for that given this year, but the core product will be complete when it gets into the hands of the public. Too many early access games fail because they're available for players to buy before being mechanically complete, then updates roll out too slowly, and players lose faith in the product.

The Studio Ellipsis ethos is that when Nightholme is released, "it must be at a level of polish that makes it feel like a finished game. It might not be a final product in terms of scope, but the critical mass of things that will make the game what the game has to be, must be there. It has to feel like a finished product that still needs input so that it can grow."

As I conducted this interview, it was around 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, and Amancio was keen to highlight there were still folks milling around. Sure, this preview event means there's also a get-together happening upstairs with food, drinks, and karaoke, that we both attend once the interview has come to a close, but the scene could raise an eyebrow or two. After all, dedication and crunch can look the same at a distance. Amancio believes that it’s the former, and that players will see that passion in Nightholme when it launches.

"People are here, it's late, they're still here," he said. "You don't tell people to stay. They're passionate about it. Sometimes we have to go home, but it shows that what we're creating is not my game, it's our game."

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Disclosure: This article is based on a preview event held at Studio Ellpisis’ headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal, from March 16-17. Studio Ellipsis provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.