Everyone loves choose-your-own-adventure stories, right? Supermassive sure does, as The Quarry will have 186 endings in total.
During an interview with IGN, director Will Byles discussed The Quarry’s various branching paths and how each will lead to one of many conclusions.
“Writing a branching narrative is a really interesting exercise,” Byles said via IGN. “We write a full, hundred-page screenplay as if it were a movie. We develop our character styles, and once we’ve got that, then we can start looking at how we break that out into a full 10-hour experience.”
“Actors are used to, on a feature film, a hundred-page script,” Byles continues. “So when we send the actors the scripts they get very alarmed because they’re huge. The script for this is over a thousand pages. We have to shoot about 50 pages a day, which is unheard of. It’s just a mad amount of footage. But obviously a lot of what they’re learning is the same thing again and again and again, but a different branch.”
Summer camp is over. Your choices will shape the fates of 9 teenage counselors as they struggle to survive the night. Welcome to Hackett’s Quarry. You won’t believe what you’ll become.
Published by @2K, #TheQuarry releases June 10.
🏕️ https://t.co/LUROk7gQok pic.twitter.com/LDcsXQtP7Q— Supermassive Games (@SuperMGames) March 17, 2022
1000 pages for one script is astounding, though totally believable given what The Quarry is more-or-less asking if you could survive a horror movie. In life-or-death scenarios, things can go south fast. Sure, we all laugh at goofy character decisions in classic films like Evil Dead or Friday the 13th, but going through it yourself is another matter entirely. Every choice you’ll make carries a degree of weight — some more than others.
“When it comes to branching it really is a mathematical nightmare,” Byles explains. “It’s just exponential. As soon as you branch, that’s two completely different routes. You branch again, and [it makes] two more and two more. By the time you’re 20 choices in, you’re in ridiculous amounts of data. We have to look at how we make a genuinely branching game without making it so ridiculously huge that it’s unplayable or even unmakeable.”
“The big choices we have are these things called Paths Chosen, and those will significantly affect the story,” Byles concludes. “We’ll announce it to you. You never know when that’s going to come up. You’re never warned about it, and it might seem trivial, but it’s a big, big deal.”
The Quarry is coming out June 10, 2022, for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The cast list for this one is ridiculously stacked.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
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