The Ziggurat is an imposing presence in the lakeside hub town of Babylon’s Fall, its broad, horizon-spanning arches giving away nothing about the kind of fantastical beasts and secrets you’ll find inside. Based on the Tower Of Babel, the mythological birthplace of all the world’s languages, it’s perhaps ironic that Square Enix and PlatinumGames’ latest hack and slash started life with its own kind of miscommunication. When it was first unveiled at E3 2018, it looked like PlatinumGames were doubling down on all the good stuff they’d delivered just a year earlier with Nier: Automata, giving us another high-octane, single player action game with a dizzying array of weapons and over the top soundtrack, all wrapped up in an enticing layer of gothic high fantasy as players fight their way skyward.
A long silence then followed, release dates slipped again and again, and its single follow-up trailer during one of Sony's 2019 State Of Play broadcasts remained as inscrutable as its iconic Ziggurat. It wasn’t until E3 2021 that the game’s true nature was finally revealed. Rather than being a solo adventure, Platinum and Square declared that not only would Babylon’s Fall be a primarily online multiplayer game, but that it was also going to be a live service game in the vein of Destiny and The Division. It was surprising, to say the least, but when I put the question to the PlatinumGames and Square Enix’s joint development team, Square Enix producer Junichi Ehara tells me that this was far from a sudden change of heart on their part: “From the very start of the project, it was decided that Babylon’s Fall would include the elements of high fantasy, hack-and-slash, and live service.”