ACHILLES' WEAKNESS WAS supposed to be a secret. After a prediction that her son would die young, Thetis dipped Achilles in the river Styx and granted him immortality.

In game development parlance, Thetis’s design had a bug. Every inch of her son’s body was invulnerable except for his ankle, which his mother had held while submerging him in the river.

Deathgarden’s Hunter had no such bug. It was impervious to all attacks. The problem was that the Hunter could still be incapacitated, reduced to the plaything of skilled Runners. Deathgarden: Bloodharvest’s design team believes they have nullified the glitch by making a significant change to Scavengers, the Hunter’s enemies. “You could blind the Hunter, stun the Hunter, reveal the Hunter. We made the decision to cut all of those out of the game. Now the Scavengers can only use tools that benefit them,” adds Ash Pannell, creative director.

“In the past, the Hunter could be opposed because [Scavengers] had offensive powers. Now that we've taken those away and there's only defensive powers, the Hunter is unopposed,” says Geneviève Forget, senior product manager.

To drive home the lore dictating that all those who live in the Enclaves breathe rarified air, there are fewer Hunters to choose from in Deathgarden: Bloodharvest. Few have what it takes to; the ones who made it are cutthroat. The Inquisitor tortures his prey. Stalker blends into her surroundings by wearing a deer skull and earth-colored garments. Then there’s Poacher, whose Glasgow smile and sadistic nature evoke Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight.

“You down Scavengers by shooting them,” says Forget. “When they're on the ground, you can execute them by holding a button, or you can actually choose to let them live, and you'll get a multiplier, encouraging you to put on a good show,” she continues, inviting Hunters to play up the game’s lore of Deathgardens being a depraved form of entertainment.

Downed Scavengers can crawl away, and Hunters can either leave them be, or tail them and wait for them to either receive healing from an ally—playing right into a clever Hunter’s trap—or wait for them to drag themselves to a healing kiosk and revive themselves only to immediately down them again. More adoration from a virtual crowd, more XP to beef themselves up.

“Every second a Scavenger is down, a Hunter gets more score, and they also get score multipliers. We've noticed that so far, Hunters don't often do executions because they want more XP,” explains Matt Jackson, design director.

“The only thing Scavengers can do, really, is try to survive: run away, accomplish their mission, open the gates, and exit,” Forget says. “We really embraced asymmetry. As a Hunter, you're going to have this feeling of utter dominance. The depth of your dominance depends on your skill, but in theory, you should never lose this feeling of, ‘I'm in control. Nothing can challenge me. This is my domain.’”

Behaviour’s designers hope Hunter players discover a new way to progress: Not by winning matches, but by completing goals that benefit their avatars. After all, the odds are against them. A good approach as any of the game’s three Hunters would be to harvest experience points, going after Scavengers only when they’re brave or foolish enough to show their faces. Like Scavengers, Hunters are free to do whatever they want to in a match; virtually every action reaps XP.

Back in the locker room after a match, Hunters can take stock of their experience points and in-game currency, and upgrade themselves accordingly. “I think that's really indicative of our new mindset with this new version of the game,” Jackson says. “We're giving players tools to make the choice of how much risk they want to take, and how far they want to push things. It's more inviting for a lot of players, and it allows you to test your skills at higher levels.”

Kirk Sandiford, Behaviour’s director of animation, says he and his team embraced Deathgarden: Bloodharvest’s new direction by giving careful thought to how Hunters perceive their surroundings versus how opposing players perceive them. “I think this is where we've succeeded--the fans will tell us, ultimately--because we haven't diluted the Hunter's power, but we have put blockers in their way so they can't just wipe up the Scavengers,” Jackson explains. “For example, we have these bushes that essentially make the Scavenger invisible if they're crouched. That's how we kind of fixed that problem.”

When looking through the eyes of the Hunter, the game is still played from a first-person view, but more emphasis has been given to animations that reinforce feedback. Some Hunters have a shockwave-type stun; when they perform the move, they’ll see their avatar’s fist raise and clench, a strong visual indicator that it went off without a hitch. “It's very important that you feel that you are the Hunter and that you don't get taken out of that. That's the main focus right now as we animate the Hunters. Anything that takes you out of that immersion, we need to fix,” Sandiford says.

Scavengers who spot a Hunter coming at them should experience a stab of fear that would not be out of place in horror games like Dead by Daylight. Hunters combine an intimidating appearance with maneuvers such as a vault-like jump that closes huge gaps quickly at the cost of some stamina. “They should look like a beast. Moving through the environment, it's like a rhino going through, or a lion going through,” Sandiford continues, stressing that smart Scavengers will hide or run away. “You just want to stay away at all costs. That's what we're trying to cultivate with the Hunters: These are not your friends. Don't play with them. Stranger danger.”

Little touches, like the cloth of their robes flapping in the wind, drive home the Hunter’s intimidation factor. “A lot of people don't realize it, but secondary animation is very key to characters, like all those little flaps that are jingling and jangling around,” says Sandiford. “We're trying to make sure each character has that so they have their own personalities as they're running through the environment.”

Whether players choose to play a Hunter or one of the five Scavengers, all of the systems in Deathgarden: Blood harvest coalesce neatly. At first, new Scavengers will want to avoid the Hunter. As they earn experience points and upgrade their abilities, their tolerance for risk will grow higher.

“You can't stay still; that's the one thing you can't do,” says Ash Pannell of Scavengers. “As players get more confident, we know they'll take more risks, which creates more [fun opportunities] for the Hunter. And the Hunter has counter mechanics, which is one of the big changes in the game: The Drones.”

Besides guns, Hunters have access to implements that aid them in spotting and bringing down Scavengers. Proximity mines can be planted anywhere, but are especially handy in key areas such as near Blood Needles or, say, close to a healing station that a Hunter could herd players toward after downing them. Drones can be activated to spring to life and emit a red glow that oozes outward like blood. Players who step into the glow will alert the Hunter to their presence. “The drones are a lot like in battle royales where the walls are closing in, except it's controllable, because the Hunter is the one activating zones that close in. It's a controlled zone-closing,” says Geneviève Forget.

“And the Scavengers can take out the drones, but only for a limited time,” Matt Jackson adds. “Once they're up, they're around for the rest of the match. You can take them out, but they're only down for 12 to 15 seconds; we're still tweaking the values. But that's enough to allow a Scavenger to harvest some blood or save a teammate.”

Each gameplay system in Deathgarden: Bloodharvest is a tributary that flows into the confluence of accessibility. Hunters who wiped out Runners quickly in the original Deathgarden now have ample reason to play with their food before going in for the kill. While they wait, or while they hunt, they can dispatch drones, drop mines, and tinker with other abilities and items to transform the garden into a giant booby-trap.

All of that give-and-take, that yin-and-yang synergy makes for a game that’s been a bear to balance. Still, Deathgarden: Bloodharvest’s team is confident the effort will have been worthwhile. “It's something we have talked about almost every day,” admits Jackson.

“I think it's going to be interesting out there,” Pannell says. “There will always be a little bit of a learning curve for the Scavengers. It's good we're not releasing immediately because everyone will get to learn at the same pace to begin with, and I expect Hunters to dominate for the first weekend. Then we'll see where things go from there. It will either stabilize and it'll be fine, but I expect we'll be looking at the Scavengers' escape rate as something we either want to deal with or not.”