STACK #138 Apr 2016

GAMES FEATURE

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Timing is Everything You would have first heard of it back at E3 in 2013, and since then, Remedy Entertainment have been buried deep in development on their upcoming third- person-shooter Quantum Break . Responsible for killer releases like Max Payne and AlanWake, the Finnish studio are no strangers to live-action video game integration. Alesha Kolbe spoke with public relations director, Thomas Puha.

J ack Joyce is a man out of time. Literally. The victim of a lab experiment gone wrong, he and his partner both attain time-

altering powers, and must team up to save the future from the maniacal Monarch Securities. This is the basis of Remedy Entertainment’s new IP, Quantum Break . Public relations director at Remedy, Thomas Puha, enlightened us on the challenges of bringing this expansive new IP to light. “You have to figure out so many things," he says. "First of all, you have to figure out the universe. We’re doing a time travel story in Quantum Break , so just figuring out the rules of time travel itself takes a lot of time. And that's even before we started creating the characters and all of that stuff." Quantum Break is also Remedy’s first Xbox One title, and they didn’t take the move to Microsoft’s console lightly. "You have to rebuild a lot of your technology from the past generation," explains Puha. "You have the technology already, you usually have lot of ideas left over and you’re up and running a lot faster, but when you’re working on new IP with all new hardware, there’s a lot of things to figure out, and that just takes a lot of time.” As far as the time-stopping story goes, Quantum Break is a sort of spiritual successor to the studio’s previous title, Alan Wake . According to Puha, the game was spawned from a quantum physics-based idea, but was sidelined during work on Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. “We were talking with Microsoft about whether we should do Alan Wake 2 , and the timing sort of wasn’t right at that point, but

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the story, how it makes sense, [making sure] that there are no loopholes," explains Puha. "The central theme is really, 'can you actually change things?'” The difference is in the details. “With the time travel in Quantum Break, we talked to our scientist [They have a scientist? - Ed] about all the black holes and the like, so the actual time machine is very unique in the game. It’s not a DeLorean or anything like that," he laughs. “It’s very, very unique. Some time was spent on the hard science behind these things, but obviously they only go so far, and you have to actually make it interesting and fun." Given its lengthy development cycle, players were certain the title would undergo heavy gameplay changes; would what we saw at E3 three years ago still be in the finished product? Thankfully, Puha lays these concerns to rest. “All the stuff you saw in 2013 and 2014 is

Sam [Lake, game director] had an idea which then turned into Quantum Break ." You may find yourself thinking that time travel has been done to death, and Remedy agrees. However they’re certain this title will stand out. “Sam has a saying: ‘The things that people look at as clichés, Remedy looks at them as classics'," notes Puha. "Time travel has been done many times, but we take it and we put our own twist to it. Give the players and the audience something that’s familiar, but obviously add a new spin to it." This new spin had perhaps come pre- emptively when Life is Strange was released; the folks at Remedy were big fans of Dontnod’s episodic title, but development on Quantum Break began a long time prior to that. “Time travel stories are notorious for all their loopholes, so we really spent years figuring out

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