14 DAY TRIAL // Remedy Entertainment seeks to improve its game narrative by looking at established TV drama recipes, intending to develop a solid storytelling technique for its Xbox One title Quantum Break.
Quantum Break is an upcoming Xbox One exclusive title, a third-person cover-based shooter with time manipulation powers that will blend live-action videos with regular gameplay.
The Finnish studio experimented with different ways to deliver powerful stories, since its 2001 title Max Payne, famous for interweaving action sequences with the noir comic delivery of exposition.
Oskari Hakkinen, head of Remedy Entertainment, said that developers can learn a lot from television, citing an instance when the studio's creative director was trying to perfect game narrative beyond the three act movie structure employed in Max Payne, as Develop informs.
Oskar Hakkinen further commented on the TV-gameplay convergence planned for Quantum Break, stating that “the game and the show are designed to be built as one experience, to be experienced as one package.
“So you play an episode of the game, then you can unlock an episode of the show, play another episode of the game, and unlock another episode of the show, and so on.”
The idea is to alternate between episodes of the game and episodes of the TV show that players can unlock and view later, whenever they choose, even on mobile devices, in an attempt to separate gaming time from the linear media presentation of the storyline.
Each chunk of gameplay is being designed to be around the same limited length, in an effort to provide the episodic feeling they portrayed with Alan Wake, where the company noticed that their community was playing the game both in binges and episode by episode over a longer period of time, much as is the case with popular TV series.
It is then that they got the idea that the three-act structure and cliffhanger ending recipe of traditional media shows such as Lost would be a perfect fit for a story-driven video game with more than ten hours of exposition.
Remedy is trying to use the lessons they learned with Max Payne and Alan Wake and take things even further with Quantum Break, by allowing the player to also play as the main villain in the game and experience the story from both sides, in a unique meshing of entertainment media that may set the bar for future next-gen titles.