June 12, 2013 by Paul Curtin
Most people were left confused with what they saw after Microsoft revealed Quantum Break at their Xbox One event three weeks ago. With all the talk about TV at the event and the mix of live-action cutscenes and CGI cutscenes in the debut trailer, it really wasn’t made clear what exactly Quantum Break was. Was it a game? Was it a game with live-action cutscenes? Was it a TV show exclusively on Xbox One? Nobody but Microsoft had the answers, and Microsoft wasn’t talking.
After some Q&A with Remedy Entertainment (the developers also behind Max Payne and Alan Wake), it’s now clear that Quantum Break is in fact a game that won’t include live-action cutscenes, but it will be in a new episodic format that we haven’t seen done much in gaming. The episodic format is probably a good thing considering how long Remedy usually takes with their development of new games.
Still, even with one of the best looking trailers at this year’s E3, the latest teaser has pretty much created even more questions than it has answered. We’re still not clear on exactly how the gameplay mechanics work with players being able to pull characters out of some sort of time-travel mechanic and even more importantly, it still wasn’t made clear just how much control the player actually has over characters in the trailer shown.
With how good the teaser looks, I’d suspect there’s some typical E3 smoke and mirrors going on to rick everyone into getting more excited when the final game won’t look anywhere near as good or allow the player as much freedom as the teaser leads us to believe. However, if I’m wrong (and I hope I am), then Quantum Break seems like a great reason to invest in the Xbox One, and hopefully Remedy will share some of their secrets with other developers so we can get more visually stunning games that look like CGI trailers sooner than later on the next-gen Xbox.
