#SAM LAKE MAX PAYNE FULL#
#SAM LAKE MAX PAYNE PROFESSIONAL#

These days I am a creative director at Remedy, so I’m looking at it from a broader perspective. I started out as a writer with Max Payne and that’s always been my focus. From my perspective, my background is in writing.

#SAM LAKE MAX PAYNE PROFESSIONAL#

And you know, professional writers coming in to work on games, and people from different storytelling backgrounds coming in has clearly boosted it up there. SL: I do think that storytelling in games has advanced a lot along the years. The chances that anyone would be competent at both is naturally very low which is, I think, reflected in the industry at large. Making a good video game and telling a good story are both incredibly hard things to do. GC: There are obviously examples of good story-based games but they’re such a tiny minority, it almost seems like statistical noise. GC: I’m sure you have a different perspective to me on this, but I’m often not convinced that video games are really a viable storytelling medium. So we do have cut scenes in the game, it’s not like taking the cut scenes out and having the show there. The show gives you a different perspective into the story. But this allows us to also have a different perspective. Jack’s story, more or less, is fully there on the game side.

#SAM LAKE MAX PAYNE FULL#

To your question, it does have a full story. There are certainly types of story elements that work better if they are in a cut scene, and you would need probably to tell a different kind of a story if you would not be using cut scenes. But I do feel that cut scenes can serve a purpose. And I really admire Valve’s approach, of taking that kind of principle. Half-Life is kind of the classic example. And we have good examples of really, really successful games where there are no cut scenes. The perennial problem with using cut scenes is of course the second they start you’re no longer playing a video game, it stops being interactive. GC: This is almost certainly the wrong phrase to use, but it almost sounds like you’re using the show to draw out the poison of having too many cut scenes in the actual game. I don’t think we would have ever have done that kind of a structure without having the show in there. Which is the game is the hero’s journey, you play Jack on his quest, and the show is about villains and gives you a different perspective into the story. Which is, for example, that the two different sides of the experience serve their own purposes.

If there was not a show we would never do this kind of a story structure, so I think that it also gave us an opportunity to do things that we wouldn’t have done otherwise. And because the core gameplay is very much action… we do have a lot of story and cut scenes, but nowhere near as much character drama as we can do by having a show on the side.

The game is a cinematic action game, it’s a big action spectacle. One important thing is that different mediums do have their own strengths, and I kind of feel that that is a big part of the idea here. A skilled player, which obviously we’re not yet, should be able to weave in and out of enemies at will while learning to deal with more advanced opponents that can also manipulate time in similar ways. We always felt Quantum Break looked fairly mundane and predictable in videos, but in practice it’s much faster-paced and more fluid than we expected.Īll the moves work on a short countdown timer but it’s very easy to chain them all together in useful and unexpected ways, to the point where we found ourselves using the (perfectly competent) cover system only as a last resort.

We knew about most of this from the previous previews we’d seen, but it makes all the difference in the world to go hands-on and see if they’re actually any fun or not. While there’s also a ‘Time Vision’ that is basically Detective/Instinct/Hand-holding mode for those too lazy to work out puzzles or spot enemies on their own.Īll of these powers (and no doubt more later in the game) can be upgraded with collected items, with the Time Dash in particular allowing a brief period of bullet time at the end of it – which can be extended to last longer and longer if you so choose. Within short order you also learn the self-explanatory Time Dash, Time Shield, and Time Blast. It only lasts for a few seconds, but that’s enough time to either get to cover or shoot multiple bullets into it so that they all explode at once when time starts up again. The most basic of the skills is ‘Time Stop’, which allows you to freeze an enemy or object in a literal big ball of timey wimey stuff.

Sam lake max payne