Bonfire Studios, an independent video game developer started by Rob Pardo and other game veterans in 2016, is finally coming out of stealth mode, unveiling its debut project Arkheron.
Founded by industry veterans responsible for iconic franchises including Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, Overwatch, StarCraft and World of Warcraft, the Bonfire team draws on the expertise and design principles honed on those titles to craft an innovative new player-versus-player (PvP) game, said Rob Pardo, CEO of Irvine, California-based Bonfire Studios, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.
Private playtesting for Arkheron is already underway and will be expanding in the coming months with rolling invites. Players who love fast-paced player-versus-player (PvP) combat are encouraged to sign up now for a chance to be among the first to play Arkheron and help shape its later stages of development.
I asked Pardo if the team had spent eight years making the game so far, but he noted that it took about 1.5 years to build the studio and do the prototyping to find the fun. The real work on Arkheron itself began in 2018 and even then it involved a lot of continuous gameplay testing to get it right. And so the game has been in the works roughly six years.
“We have been thrown curve balls,” Pardo said. “We didn’t expect to be in mid-development when a global pandemic hit.”
As an example of a curve ball, the team had to spend about nine months making a backend architecture for the networking to accommodate the type of combat it wanted to have.
We’re not sure what that means yet as Bonfire is slowly revealing the game.
The company has been playing and iterating on Arkheron behind-the-scenes for years and began private playtesting sessions with a small community in 2024. While players will find familiar ideas and concepts in Arkheron, it isn’t about combining genres – it’s about creating something entirely new; a dynamic, fast-paced PvP gameplay experience set in a dark and foreboding world. The game is played from a top-down view, as opposed to first-person or third-person games, Pardo said.
The game doesn’t have a deep narrative, and so it’s not dissimilar from games like League of Legends and Overwatch. But it does have its own world and its own lore to make it a better PvP game. The game will also be a live-service game as well.
The team at Bonfire playtests the game every day, and attributes this aspect of their development process to helping them create a fun and unique game they believe will resonate with players. It’s built with the Unity game engine, with modifications that Bonfire itself has created.
“There’s a simple truth at the heart of our development philosophy,” said Pardo. “If we don’t love our game, our players won’t either. We believe the best games are born from a genuine love of playing them, which is why we’ve poured years of passion into developing Arkheron, constantly iterating and refining it to deliver something truly unique and exciting.”
He added, “We’ve played the game daily as a team for years, and while we haven’t figured out yet exactly how to describe it, we often say ‘you have to play it to get it’. We’re eager to start sharing the fun we’ve found in Arkheron with a wider community soon, and we hope players will love it as much as we do.”
Bonfire’s design philosophy centers on fun and deeply rewarding gameplay, imaginary worlds that inspire self-expression, welcoming, long-lasting communities and experiences that become a meaningful part of players’ lives.
Players who sign up through the website will have a chance to be invited to the private playtest, but the easiest way in is to find a friend who’s already playing — because Arkheron is best when played with friends, the company said. Currently access is limited to North America, but Bonfire plans to continue expanding the playtest to other regions throughout the year.
New funding raised
Back when the company started in 2018, Bonfire Studios raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) and Riot Games. He noted the investors have been supportive along the way.
Building on last week’s reveal of a partnership with Hybe IM to publish Arkheron in Korea and Japan, Bonfire has also secured new investments from A16z, Founders Fund and Altos Ventures, among others, which will fuel the remaining development of Arkheron as the team readies it for global launch.
Pardo said he believes the company has what it needs now to get the game launched. But he did not disclose the total of the latest funding round.
As Bonfire continues its work on Arkheron, the studio is growing, with open roles on its engineering, art, audio and publishing teams. Interested candidates can learn more and apply on the Bonfire website.
Describing the game?
Arkheron takes place in a dark fantasy universe that the team likes to call a “hauntingly beautiful” art style. But he noted that it is still different from the style of games like the Souls-like or Diablo games.
In terms of the art style and the gameplay, Pardo said, “With investors or publishers or potential players, we have not found the right way to describe it in a way that really paints the right picture for the game. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve been doing private playtesting.”
He said the “only way to really know get to understand the game is by playing the game.”
But it is a team-based multiplayer game competitive game, and it has an Pardo calls an “innovative and different combat style.” It’s not a shooter or like any other genres out there, he said. And it’s one of those where you have to see it to understand it.
“It’s in this wonderful place where it has a lot of familiar concepts from other genres, but the core of the game is really unique and the combat is really unique. It’s created a lot of challenges for us to actually explain it well to people. Because people always get the wrong impression. They get a picture of the wrong game,” Pardo said.
Asked about the gameplay, Pardo said he was not disclosing that yet. The team is only disclosing high-level info, but Pardo said that if you know his history, it’s going to have the same kinds of design principles and philosophies that are familiar.
“It’s very fast-paced and isn’t turn-based or anything like that. It has its own unique combat style. It’s not really a shooter. It’s not point-and-click like Diablo,” he said. “We hopefully have made it playable on the controller from the beginning. So it’s actually very conducive to controller play. We plan on releasing it on the current generation consoles alongside with PC.”
Asked about the roadmap, Pardo said the company has done a lot of testing in its circle of friends and family. Now it’s going to happen with real players who don’t have anything to do with the company. That test is likely to start in the next month or so.
“Then from that point onwards, we’re really going to continue to evolve the game based on what we learned from our play testing,” Pardo said.
Making the game
Bonfire Studios has grown to 70 people now. The production started about a year ago, and the art department has grown to 40 people.
As far as the process goes, Pardo said the team tried to make every person in the company comfortable with pitching games, from the engineers to the business people to the game designers. The team had to then put more structure on that approach, limiting the game deck to perhaps five slides. Dozens of pitches resulted and the team had to decide which to pursue.
It started prototyping on seven different ideas and “grew the seeds into saplings,” Pardo said.
The team created “mood boards” and worked on the ideas for a few weeks each. Then they decided which one to build.
“I never set out to take five-plus years to make a game, to be honest with you, but because the style of development that I’ve always used, and we use at Bonfire, have always been very iterative, find-the-fun sort of model, it’s not a straight line,” he said. “You have happy accidents and discoveries. You go down the wrong path and you have to start in a different direction. We build the game from the inside out and then once we start really finding the fun, then you start getting more momentum.”
In that sense, the game-making process was a lot like what happened at Blizzard. He said with every game, you learn a ton, make mistakes, and find wisdom that takes you forward. After Blizzard finished a game, it would do a post-mortem. But he noted that the next time around, different challenges would emerge in the creative process. The tech would change, the art style may need to be rebooted.
“More than anything, what I’ve learned is to try to make sure you’re building conviction about the game as you go along,” he said.
