Gaming is about to get a shot in the arm. Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break is a pioneering example of interactive storytelling taken to the next level.
The timing for innovation is perfect. We’re living through a golden age of movie-quality episodic shows — streamed to our sets and our digital devices, however we like it — and we’re also in the middle of what some say is poised to be a new golden age of video games.
Now, with Quantum Break, Remedy and Microsoft ask the question: What if you bring both narrative platforms together in one immersive experience? The answer is, you just might be writing a new chapter in the annals of action gaming and entertainment.
Quantum Break is groundbreaking not just because it includes developed narrative elements -- video games have been doing that forever with animated, sometimes even filmed, cut scenes. Examples such as The Last of Us and Resident Evil are outright classics in their genre; the latter instance has its own movie crossovers to prove it.
No, Quantum Break goes way beyond the cut-scene. Quantum Break incorporates a series of four 22 minute live-action episodes that stream right into the game itself. It also features a renowned cast of actors, including Lance Reddick ("The Wire"), Aidan Gillen ("Game of Thrones"), and more. The episodes are lovingly crafted. You’re looking at thoughtful writing, strong performances and high-quality production. Meanwhile, the same actors not only lend their voices to their in-game counterparts, but using Remedy Entertainment’s high-tech capture system, also have their likeness imported into the gaming experience. Leave it to a time-travel game to bring that kind of continuity!
And so, Quantum Break slips back and forth between the worlds of live-action and gaming. It’s a remarkable blurring of lines. Let’s look at what Quantum Break is about, and how the choices players make in the game interact and influence the events of the live-action episode.
At its heart, Quantum Break a third-person shooter. Most of the time, players control Jack Joyce, who finds himself at the center of a time-travel accident. Jack gets time-manipulating powers from a science experiment gone horribly wrong. In the same accident, antagonist Paul Serene gets the ability to see the future. And everybody else gets pretty much screwed, because the experiment has ruptured reality and is threatening the end of time.
The race is on. Jack and his allies want to fix the rift. Serene wants to use it to leverage his own nefarious plan.
As the two sides fight their way across the story, players must use Jack’s powers to battle Serene and his private army of Monarch soldiers — some of whom can leverage the same powers as Jack. Narrative objects along the way add more detail to the game’s backstory, fleshing out Quantum Break’s unique world and giving players more insight into its complexities.
And then there are Junctions. At these pivotal moments in the game, the perspective switches to the game’s antagonist Paul Serene, and players must make key choices about his actions that will impact the events of the show and ultimately the entire game.
For example, while trying to clean up the fallout of the failed time experiment, players can choose to take a hardline approach — in which Serene orders the death of all witnesses — or take a more PR friendly route (Serene coerces witnesses to provide false testimonies that turn the public against Jack).
In each case, Paul’s precognitive powers allow for glimpses of how the choice will work out. Once the player chooses, the game proceeds — and an episode of the live-action series unfolds, showing the results In addition, players can also discover “time ripples” — small elements in the game world that modify scenes in the live-action show.
Between the choices you can make at these Junctions and the discoverable time ripples, Quantum Break’s story unfolds in numerous different ways. Its multilayered narrative potential, as different combinations of choices and ripples add up to new nuances and outcomes, adds substantial replay value. Every play-through of Quantum Break potentially provides a unique narrative experience.
Quantum Break’s innovative hybrid of dramatic gameplay and live-action entertainment is a pioneering effort within the video-game industry. It’s a sign of things to come, too, as the silos between in-game narratives and live-action media start to dissolve.
With games such as Quantum Break, we are all participating in the next generation of storytelling — playing and shaping the stories we love.