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.The dark fantasy art of Arkheron.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