Last updated on September 21, 2025
Rob Pardo hasn’t been a headline name in years, but his fingerprints are all over some of Blizzard’s most iconic games — StarCraft: Brood War, Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft. After leaving Blizzard more than a decade ago, he quietly set up Bonfire Studios, a team that’s been working behind closed doors on a new project. The game is called Arkheron, and while it borrows familiar ideas from Diablo, MOBAs, and battle royale shooters, it twists them into something that feels both recognizable and strange.
A Tower Instead of a Dungeon
Arkheron doesn’t drop you into a dungeon crawl. Instead, matches play out inside a tower, and your team is fighting to climb higher and higher. Fifteen squads of three start at the bottom, unarmed. From there, it’s a scramble for weapons and Relics — magical items that define your abilities. As Pardo himself put it, “You are your items.”
Loot is everything. Weapons range from spears and daggers to crossbows and elemental staves. Relics can turn the tide of a fight, whether by creating a shield wall, blowing up groups of enemies, or even making you briefly invisible. Collecting full sets gives you even nastier powers, but most players will be mixing and matching depending on the situation.
Deadly Musical Chairs
The climb up the tower is broken by showdowns called Ascensions. Think of them as violent checkpoints: beacon zones with shrinking circles that force teams to fight. There are fewer beacons than teams, so someone is always left out. If your team loses the fight, you’re done.
The action narrows until only two teams are left standing at the very top. The final fight decides the winners, though reaching that stage already feels like an achievement on its own.
A Blend of Familiar Influences
If Arkheron sounds like a mash-up, that’s because it is. It takes cues from Diablo’s loot obsession, the arena chaos of Battlerite, the tension of Dark Souls 3, and sprinkles in some battle royale DNA from Apex Legends or Fortnite. Bonfire’s own description of “deadly musical chairs” might actually be the most accurate.
One detail that helps it stand out: Arkheron doesn’t lock you into a fixed camera like Diablo 4 or League of Legends. Instead, you can freely spin the view, giving fights a bit of a third-person shooter vibe.
Sound, Surprise, and The Fury
Another layer of strategy comes from sound design. In one demo, a team heard footsteps from another squad exploring just above them. A portal connected the two floors, and both sides knew a clash was coming. The ambush that followed was more about nerves and communication than raw damage numbers.
The tower itself isn’t just a backdrop, either. Random monsters pop up, and one in particular — called The Fury — can’t be killed. It’s the kind of creature that can ruin a plan or be used to bait your enemies into disaster. In one match, an unsuspecting team stumbled straight into The Fury, basically handing their rivals an easy win.
Who Is Arkheron For?
It’s clear Arkheron isn’t chasing the casual crowd. Between the steep learning curve, the reliance on PvP, and the genre-blending design, Bonfire seems to be aiming at competitive players who love building strategies and living with high stakes.
So far, Arkheron is confirmed for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC. There’s no release date yet — which means plenty of time for hype (and theorycrafting) to build.
