Quantum Break Critique | Beyond Ambition

like i said the shows are the show and the game are going to evolve together that means the universe is going to evolve together so something that happens on the show will um appear in the game this is rob hill senior producer at tryon worlds it's 2011 and he's just wrapped up an e3 presentation on an exciting new ip he and his team have been working on defiance tryon have partnered with sci-fi to develop a video game and a tv show which tell one big simultaneous story it promises to be a thrilling science fiction adventure which bridges the gap between tv and gaming creating an entertainment experience which will give them storytelling opportunities outside of the limits of video games and if that just sounds like buzzwords to you it's because it is it's phraseology we'll hear parroted by rob the development team and particularly tryon's executives over the game's development defiance is going to redefine storytelling it's a third-person shooter mmo where events which happen in the game influence the tv show that airs alongside it the player will be both participant and director of the episodes but as the release date defines straws near there's suddenly a shift in how the creators talk about the melding of the game and the tv show so you're gonna have a show and um the game obviously running at the same time can you tell us a little bit about that well let me tell you first about the game let me tell you first about the game the sentence which starts to trump curious questions from interviewers about how exactly defiance's tv connections will work suddenly the development team don't want to talk about the show anymore they just want to talk about the game world about the guilds the factions the gun play the more involved sci-fi become in the architecture of defiance's story the more tryon tried to shift the conversation away from the small screen either because they're losing faith in the show or because they're being kept out of the loop something has happened to change their messaging and then in april 2013 the game releases dull quest design swarms of festering bugs a complete lack of agency over a game world players were promised they could shape plummet review scores whatever turbulence took place behind the scenes it suddenly becomes clear that the show and the game aren't as interconnected as they first appeared relegating tv connections to imaginatively dubbed short episode missions the game gets panned the tv show chugs along but ultimately gets cancelled sci-fi collect their losses and a few years later tryon tries his whole sorry mess again with defines 2050 a soft reboot without a tv show which dropped to less than a thousand players just a month after its release and shut down its servers in 2021 a small hardcore fan may still occasionally rally for a defiance comeback but try on and scifi's experiment becomes background noise a weird little story for freaks like me to bring up whenever a friend muses you know video games might replace movies one day but let's go back to 2013 for a second it's may one month after defines has released i am holed up in my bedroom bashing my head against my keyboard because the game servers have kicked me out for the third time in one play session i take a break jump onto youtube and see that the xbox showcase has started streaming watch tv tv tv and tv remote tv experience tv tv tv tv sports tv tv tv yeah that one the hour-long descent into madness has xbox sealed its own fate for the eighth generation of consoles by cutting gamers out of the equation and what do you know one part of the showcase sounds a little bit familiar remedy are world-class storytellers they have created a revolutionary entertainment experience that weaves a cinematic action of intense gameplay with the tension and drama of scripted television creating a world where each has a direct impact on the other microsoft had partnered with remedy to develop a video game and a tv show which tell one big simultaneous story it promises to be a thrilling science fiction adventure which bridges the gap between tv and gaming creating an entertainment experience which will give them storytelling opportunities outside of the limits of video games you get the idea after all time is a flat circle but i'm not done no less than 10 seconds after the reveal of quantum break remedy's youtube channel posted this message from the studio's creative director sam leek i wanted to take a moment to talk to all alan wake fans that's you guys we are working on something new something big which of course means that the next big game from remedy won't be alan wake too even though we worked hard on it the sequel was not happening the time wasn't right for that sure we could have gone ahead and created something less ambitious but we felt that that wouldn't have done justice to you guys to us we want to be really proud of everything that we create and certainly wouldn't have done justice to alan wake with a shaky voice and what sounds like a lump in his throat he addresses alan wake fans directly lake tells us that for now at least the long-awaited sequel has been shelved something else has taken priority see remedy was still owned by microsoft making xbox and pc exclusive games it wouldn't shrug off those shackles until 2017 which means any game developed had to get approval from microsoft executives and the execs wanted an entertainment experience what was shown to us at the xbox showcase wasn't indicative of what quantum break would become a little girl clutching a teddy bear speaking to a government agent being sent away because of her supernatural powers and giving the agent a premonition of a disaster yet to come it looked cheap hashed together at short notice to showcase the entertainment experience which encompassed the brand of the xbox one worst of all none of it would be in the game quantum break in in many ways first and foremost it's a game it's a it's a big story driven cinematic action adventure kind of and and in many ways we're taking everything that we have learned from previous games and just raising the bar much higher what we did get was ambitious and weird and fascinating and very little about it works the way remedy hoped it would in hindsight the combat serves as a tech demo for what control would later refine despite the likability factor of sean ashmore jack joyce is a potato of a protagonist despite the game's visuals being slick and cool and the machinations of its time travel having aeons of potential the sum of its parts undercut it at almost every turn but unlike defines quantum break doesn't deserve to be forgotten to time yes it wasn't the first game to try meld television with gaming but the ambitious way it did that is a cut above just having a compromised vision playing every monday while you shoot stuff upon revisiting it it's hard not to think that this was an accidental but very necessary evil to show that this idea of replacing a video game with an all-in-one entertainment experience is quite frankly a bad one no matter how well it's executed so that's what we're going to look at here just like a fracture we're going to tear the game apart to see what's good what's bad and to ask the question does remedy's techno thriller go beyond its ambitions this is a commentary and critique of quantum break [Music] the number one killer is time it destroys us all the first six words out of jack joyce's mouth are as poetic as we'd come to expect from a remedy game we pick up at the very end with jack being interviewed by head of monarch security clarice ogawa recounting the events which led them both here cam lee sipping coffee in a conference room ogawa is looking to learn everything she possibly can about jack's journey about his powers about the death of her former boss but as soon as the tape starts recording jack starts waxing lyrical going too fast for you no jack you're going too slow she brought you here to gather intelligence so here you recite poetry you melon max payne and alan wake the heroes of remedy's previous titles both saw the world through an exaggerated lens max because he's a hard-boiled crime noir detective in a story that's so meta you'd expect deadpool to crash through a window at any second and alan because he's a writer something he loves to remind people at any given chance but jack joyce is a nobody with a capital n he's the least interesting character in a story he's at the center of and even his look his design is the least distinctive of any of remedy's protagonists in my critique of control i claimed that i think jesse faden's design worked against her role as an outsider her pedestrian clothes and haircut were both missed opportunities to visually present her as the explosive catalyst she ended up being when she reached the fbc i still stand by that claim but at least jessie had her red hair to print her in the player's mind jack joyce makes jesse faden look like a picasso painting the brown jacket jeans and sneakers make him blend into the environment to enact a sense of realism and believability primarily so the transition to live action isn't too jarring but this sacrifices any chance jack ever had of becoming iconic his colours are muted beige forgettable and unfortunately these are all characteristics that describe jack himself there's nothing exaggerated or whimsical about him so as badass as this opening line is it's both out of character and nonsensical in the scene and ironically it may seem like i'm going too slow here rambling about six little words but they set up the foundation for quantum break's future fumbles jack's interview with the gowa is simply here so the pair can regularly inject the story with hints at things to come wetting the player's appetite and creating a sense of mystery however just like a lot of quantum breaks tone it feels incredibly forced foreshadowing can be a powerful tool to engage your audience alan wake's structure understood this all too well finding the manuscript pages you were teased with future events told from different perspectives and wrapped up cozily in the prose of a fiction writer it gave the player more information about the story but through dint of being pages of a novel remedy's writers were able to keep up a palpable sense of suspense by the time the credits roll there's no reason to believe jack would ever cooperate with monarch no reason to think he'd put himself in a position where he'd sit quietly in a room with a woman who tried to kill him no reason for why jack and agawa are being so vague and cagey when they're trading information other than to force a false sense of mystery around the story and quantum breaks premise is interesting enough that it doesn't need this narrative device because the hints are so vague and so open that they come off as meaningless platitudes rather than specific teases we're jumping ahead here but there's a perfect example of this in act two nothing prepared me for the weirdness that was waiting there and even that was just a prelude to the bad stuff that would follow in that same place later at this point the player is about 10 feet away from entering ground zero we're about to see the weird stuff jack is discussing with the gowas so slowing us to a light jog so we can hear the full dialogue of there's weird stuff ahead isn't economic or impactful it's time wasting pun intended but let's rewind again back to act one the start of the game here we are quantum breaks opening is slow very slow the slowest opening in their development history involving 20 to 30 minutes of exploring riverport university and drinking in the world remedy have meticulously designed jack is here to visit his longtime friend paul serene who wants to show him some scientific marvel he's been working on but there's an effective overcast of tension as soon as we take control of our hero the attention to detail that remedy games are famous for is in full force especially on a second playthrough the physics building is looming and garish the side of it modelled after william joyce's countermeasure like a rye joke we journey through the aftermath of a protest gone wrong finding snippets of information regarding what happened and setting up our big bad conglomerate monarch as our villains martin hatch is looking suspiciously near the entrance without explanation liam burke is armed dangerous and waiting to spring into action near the lab pretty much every site we see relates to monarch as a villainous threat almost all of the collectibles connect to the planned demolition of the university library the tents littered like a refugee camp passed out frat boys splayed on the ground abandoned signs are all a light-hearted way of connecting monarch's existence with disaster and chaos and as intrinsic as the setting is it's jack's response to it which stands out most how would you feel if you knew a corporate monopoly was taking a massive dump all over your personal history that's quite an opener what's frustrating is jack joyce doesn't stand for anything he has no opinion on monarch's tight grip of riverport or on the protesters when amy tries to engage him to learn about the terrible stuff monica's doing to the campus he shrugs it off we're still in the first hour of the game the player is trying to figure out who they're playing as what makes him tick what his beliefs are and when faced with an abject situation which most people would have a take on he moves on with his day we'll notice this a few times as he trundles through the game's story aside from occasional bursts of vengeance rage he's decidedly neutral on so much of the world he inhabits here after years of globetrotting he has one sole focus to speak to paul and in fact the only piece of characterization we can be sure of is that he's reckless and naive evidenced by the back and forth between the two friends when they finally meet protests against monarch are going strong i see yeah i'm kind of surprised you didn't join in i thought that kind of trouble was your forte well it used to be our forte you're the one that's sold out paul serene on the other hand should go down in remedy's hall of fame as one of its most interesting characters if jack is a faceless mould that takes an entire game to become engaging serene is captivating from the offset as he very much should be jack describes him as a showman and we can see that in the presentation he gives when we crack a joke during his speech he snaps at us to not interrupt his flow despite the nickname of moneybags paul puts that money where his mouth is studying enough quantum physics in his spare time to follow the research on time travel he's not just a rich [ __ ] he's incredibly fond of jack and he's made likeable by his openness to admit he doesn't know everything he makes a sincere point at a few moments in the story to credit william joyce for his research but just like this game he's ambitious arguably too ambitious in a vacuum the slow pace of quantum breaks opening isn't a bad thing it's here to ease us into the time travel of it all one thing you can't call the game is simple its handling of space-time is imperfect but it's thorough and complex in fact remedy collaborated with a quantum physicist at cern to ensure their science fiction had enough well science in it in an interview with wired sam lake said we worked with a brilliant physicist siskiy raznam he was talking about rotating black holes and particles and gravity wells and how at a certain point if you move through space you're actually moving through time and that's our time machine essentially there is a core there is a corridor it was a nice thing to me that our design is unique i've never seen anything similar in time travel pop culture the process of setting up the time machine is slow yes but there are a lot of concepts the game needs the player to become familiar with before the wam's app superpower stuff can kick in how the corridors work chronome particles how far back can we go can paradoxes happen and most importantly of all can we change anything we return to this time machine again and again over the course of the story and quantum break tries to front load its really important lessons early so it's not beholden to lore dumps every 15 minutes but there are two problems with this the first is that these lessons are taught to us through the most boring way imaginable walking from console to console pushing x staring at incomprehensible diagrams without a comment from our player character there's no puzzle here nothing to figure out we're given all of this information and expected to just absorb it and the second problem is that jack hears none of it serene throws a bunch of info at him information which is laid out simply enough that it's pretty easy for him to understand the player is expected to understand it but jack's responses are dense and by act four it's like he's forgotten what happened in the previous three exhibit a of this comes when william joyce our estranged brother enters the scene you have to help me with this we have to shut this thing down now no no no no no stop it shut up hold on we can't shut it down paul still in there the trio are finally gathered the time machine is about to break down paul is about to be blasted back to the past all because william has frantically tried to stop the experiment filled with the knowledge of the apocalypse that will cause and knowledge is what separates jack from his fellow main characters if you strip back the tiny whimey wibbly wobbly stuff the burden of knowledge is quantum breaks thematic focus i don't think it's any accident that the game is bookended with a university somewhat synonymous with knowledge neither do i think it's an accident that this opening is set to the backdrop of a library being destroyed or that later will a character who has all the answers to our questions seemingly dies at the same time that this library is destroyed there's a lot of really strong thematic focus in this opening that just can't go ignored different characters are granted knowledge about the end of time and it impacts them in significantly different ways will becomes a recluse isolating himself from his family paul's moral compass gets corrupted martin hatch loses all humanity beth wilder falls into a depression charlie wilcott struggles with his self-preservation liam burke spirals out of control the only character unburdened by the knowledge of the end of time is jack joyce like every other remedy protagonist he's motivated by family ties but his personality his character is unchanged by what he learns revelations crash into him like waves off a ship's bow but he's a static character through to the end rarely asking questions would hardly ever understanding what he's learned what why is there an egg in this he's too dumb for a character early in development remedy initially planned for quantum break to feature four playable characters splitting the story across different perspectives we haven't managed to grasp any further details but i think that would have made for a much more engaging tale the plot of quantum break is incredibly interesting the questions it asks are fascinating but putting the player in the shoes of a guy like jack joyce counter balances a lot of the game's intrigue he's most interesting when he's with will beth or paul mainly because they suck up the scenery with how they think how they hypothesize how they use the knowledge they've learned the dissonance yup we're using the d word comes from what we're doing during those conversations because unlike in say alan wake nothing mechanically interesting ever happens while we're traveling with an npc let's take a key example with the destruction of the time machine jack and will try to escape from the university together jack gets a gun develops a couple of his time powers the two brothers come across a jammed door now this is our first in-game obstacle that we need to overcome bear in mind we've just unlocked two abilities one stops time and the other unlocks people from being frozen in time there's a lot you could do with these two basic functions so how do jack and will get past the blocked door do we freeze will rewind time to a point when the doors open unfreeze him and push him through do we use our new time blast to just blow it open nope he barges through it with his shoulder and trust me when i say this it will not be the last time why are you helping me you're with them it's more complicated than hey look it's jesse exhibit b of jack's frustrating inability to ask questions comes with the meeting of beth wilder the relationship between these two carries much of the human drama in quantum break primarily because she's with us for so much of our journey beth immediately recognizes jack calls him by his name which raises so many questions but jack doesn't care he ditches her in this hallway off to shoot up some more henchmen in his quest to find will and when the brothers finally reunite someone else is waiting for them think about this you don't know what's at stake i know exactly what's at stake that's why i'm here you believe you can stop what's coming i'm giving you one chance to change your mind this path it's already said it can't be changed the past the future i've seen now i've lived it paul serene returns 16 years older gray in his hair and powers similar to jack's and for all of my criticism so far i love the nuance here despite being so convinced that he can't change what's to come paul is still conflicted about shooting will adding a little colour to that grey moral compass he's developed yes he has a gun to will's head but there's a real sense of respect here he knows if will lives he's going to be the ultimate obstacle to his plan he's seen this and yet he still can't bring himself to murder his old friend in cold blood instead he blows him up along with the library in the run-up to the game's release the marketing justified the inclusion of a tv show with the banner the games about the heroes the shows about the villains like just concentrating on the game would limit their vision but we learn more about paul serene through the junction episodes than we ever do from the live action stuff to almost bridge the gap between running around as jack and occasionally playing a video game remedy applied short 5 minute inserts where you get to play as paul serene instead all this really involves is walking up a thinly failed corridor while dialogue happens and then making a choice but by themselves they're tightly structured glimpses into monarch and the way it works in just a few moments we learn a whole bunch of things number one paul can see into the future at will number two he's ill and whenever he uses his powers it gets worse number three when the time machine exploded he got sent back to 1999 and has spent the last 16 years creating monarch our evil capitalists number four how heavily paul relies on his right-hand man martin hatch number five the fact that martin hatch is ruthless more so than paul himself and number six monarch's mission at the university was to steal the core of the time machine that's not six little details either these are all big additions to the story and despite the junction being so short it's effective both of the writing and character work undertaken by aidan gillum playing paul and lance reddick playing martin hatch my point is this tells us everything we need to know without a television show and worse yet when the writing transitions from in-game to live-action there is a dramatic dip in realism and humanity that feels pretty cruel to say i know writing is hard who do i think i am so let me put my time where my mouth is let's take a quick intermission to talk about episode one monarch solutions so uh you're doing you have these episodes essentially episodes that are live action yeah and then you have game play why bother you doing that why not just do game play throughout well i mean the television show brings our attention to a few characters but its main focus is on liam burke a thuggish monarch enforcer charlie wilcott a weasley monarch hacker and fiona miller a monarch scientist that i can't think of an adjective for these three form our main tv trio to contrast our in-game one liam was conceived as a dark reflection of jack fiona is a discount beth and charlie fills whatever gap is left by either amy ferreiro or nick marsters depending on one of your choices it's no secret that remedy encountered a lot of challenges when devising the tv show microsoft offered up both funding and the resources of its entertainment division to make it remedy opted to take the funding but not the resources reaching out to the production company lifeboat productions instead this proved to be one of the smartest choices that the team made because in 2014 microsoft completely shut down xbox entertainment studios laying off 18 000 people in the process and discontinuing major projects across the organization like a halo tv show thankfully remedy had already started working with lifeboat so this mammoth shutdown didn't impact the development of quantum breaks tv shows too much what did impact the development however was the separation of writers so what the what's the 4-1-1 what the hell's going on out there 4-1 yeah the 4-1-1 the overall story of quantum break was developed by sam leak the creation of monarch the overarching structure of the plot concerning the lifeboat that was all him mikhail kassernan miko rottalatti and tyler smith but the scene to scene dialogue was handled by lifeboats writers ron mybauer terry hughes burton and josh corbin and there's an awkward stiltedness which comes from how our characters speak to each other seems your work's been undone we just lost communication with jeff joyce's transpo like here none of the people who work for monarch know what the word transport is it's always transpo highlighted by the awkward apostrophe put into the subtitles contrast that to the game where we at least get entertaining moments like i just watched a ship fast forward through a [ __ ] bridge what a great line episode 1 follows charlie doing some of his hacker magic while developing a crush on fiona we're introduced to an upcoming gala that monarch is hosting and she invites him along much to his surprise paul serene and martin hatch clunk along in a warehouse together for barely 60 seconds discussing a potential traitor which is cropped up in monarch and introducing us to the tension which lies between our two big bads but this scene the one which should be the most entertaining most enthralling moment of the episode teaches us nothing we don't already know about the two characters or the plot we've already seen this tension during the junction episode we've already learned the paul serena can see into the future [Music] you've been the face of monarch for all these years martin but let's get clear on something this is still my ship and it's not helped that all potential tension is defused by aidan gillan and lance reddick's working their way through the entire argument like they find every word they're forced to say utterly laughable meanwhile liam burke spent seven full minutes floating around his house hearing about his pregnant wife's bizarre dreams this scene is the first hint that we have the burke is beginning to doubt monarch's work questioning if maybe they're secretly up to some bad stuff but that's rushed away in one line of dialogue while we're forced to listen to this i dreamt you were a cat what is happening it's clear that the television writers thought this was some beautiful haunting setup to a later scene in episode three when emma burks sees her husband for the brutal henchmen he is her dream about him being a huge animal is capitalized on when he grabs her in a bear hug and explains his entire character to her after violently murdering a hitman in a hospital i'm telling you i never felt good doing this i never i never felt good doing this but it's the only thing i knew the one new piece of information we learned in episode one is that after jack joyce was captured by monarch someone drove his truck off to a warehouse to try and rescue him all set up for act two of the game burke tracks down the truck and finds beth wilder in the midst of rescuing our hero she tells him the time is coming to an end and monarch has been preparing for it with something called the lifeboat protocol and with eight minutes left in episode one and burke deciding to turn on monarch we're introduced to the tv show's favorite word across the one hour 40 minutes of its dialogue [ __ ] you how the [ __ ] does that happen shut the [ __ ] up bernard what the [ __ ] is that what the [ __ ] is it doing on my desperate get the [ __ ] out of my office [ __ ] anyone who's watched my other videos will know i'm hardly a tight arse when it comes to swearing but what i just played you was barely 10 of the [ __ ] we get across the tv episodes in fact episode one has more f-bombs in the entire game combined i know i checked so when your high octane time babble techno thriller is fused with an edgy teenager's action script you begin to disconnect from the characters it's really tough to take liam burke's redemption arc or descent into darkness seriously when it's coloured with scenes like this if i have to come in there you're gonna [ __ ] regret it listen this is just a big misfucking understanding i'm gonna be out tomorrow oh wouldn't a good word for you i will help you climb this ladder all i'm asking is please let me take a [ __ ] [ __ ] there's so much more to talk about with the episodes the effects the action scenes remedies struggles cooperating with lifeboat but we're going to save that for now and focus on choices and consequences instead because as ambitious an idea as this is it comes with some necessary technical limitations which completely diminish the impact of the tv show so first back to the game [Music] hello helsinki how are you doing i'm sam lake the creative director of remedy instead of doing a boring presentation about music in remedy games we decided to slow jam it to you this clip doesn't have anything to do with what i'll talk about here i just wanted to include it because i love it so much samlik is so cool man act two rolex along with a collection of warehouses and baddies to fight we get a new enemy type unlock a new time power and experience a visually striking set piece as jack hunts for paul across a dockyard covered in conveniently placed chest high walls but i'm not interested in all that what i'm interested in is how the games just evolved because of the choice paul serene made back in junction 1. when faced with a captured amy ferrero paul is able to look into the future and catch a glimpse of what happens next choice one is to let them go but force amy to record a false pr message labeling jack joyce a terrorist and ensuring the city of riverport rallies around monarch choice two is to kill amy and her friends it means there will be no witnesses to their stealing the time machine corps but the city or riverport will turn against monarch this happens four times over the span of the game kill amy or don't kill amy give a speech or don't give a speech trust sophia amaral or martin hatch given to paranoia or stay rational this first choice however is probably the most impactful one in the game if we keep amy alive jack meets her while exploring the warehouse the two team up work together and she eventually joins our team and helps fight monarch a radio host who is critical of monarch back in act 1 is suddenly replaced by someone who just loves paul serene and martin hatch and thinks time traveling capitalists are good actually if you think about it actually later when jack is on the run bystanders will alert guards to his location because they think he's a criminal alternatively if we kill amy she dies erased from the rest of the game she doesn't join team joyce instead a new character the incredibly funny nick marsters joins the fray the radio host keeps calling out monarch and the bystanders well they still alert the guard to your location they just do it by accident but the details of quantum breaks world reflect your choices too anti-monarch graffiti covers walls if you turn the city against them the email correspondence you can find is altered as well referring to different events hell the music on that radio station i mentioned switches up depending on who's hosting the show the guards we creep by will discuss how uncomfortable they are with the death of the students most of these are injected so fluidly into the game world that you likely won't realize these are direct consequences to your choice and some collectibles are even locked behind different choices it's all optional flavor text but it does mean the true depth and understanding of the story requires two playthroughs all of this is incredibly impressive and a testament to the narrative rabbit holes remedy can send the player down as they lead you through their story but the world's own rules cause one weird problem when it comes to choice and consequence how did you you're the taxi guy you drove me to university what is all this the killing everybody in this playthrough i sacrificed amy meaning i got to spend time with my new best friend nick he's a conspiracy theorist who believes that riverport is haunted by a ghost uprising or something and bless him if control is anything to go by there's a solid chance he's right but allying ourselves with him goes against everything we have learned and everything we will learn about time travel nothing can be changed that is the mantra of quantum break we're reminded of it again and again time is a flat circle what happened will always happen no matter what we try to do sometimes the game raises questions about the validity of that mantra about whether or not it's true but the game provides an overwhelming amount of evidence to fix it as the ultimate rule in act 5 when jack thinks that he's gone back in time to save will he learns that will always survived he changed nothing everything pulsarine sees during the junction episodes comes true none of them deviate when beth goes back to 1999 she tries to change a whole heap of stuff from 911 to the death of jack's parents but they happen every single time monarch already exists prior to paul traveling back in time to create the company there's a set loop hall always creates monarchs and side note for some reason paul made the logo of his company a monarch butterfly as a cute nod to the butterfly effect this is the idea that one small change like killing a butterfly can have far reaching consequences and change the future which makes no sense because paul's defining philosophy is that nothing can be changed but anyway according to quantum break the journey might deviate slightly but the destination will always be the same there are set big moments which will always come to pass but paul's choices raise a problem with this or rather the first choice does our choice directly changes amy ferrero's future if we choose to kill her then her time is cut short she dies her death is a big moment for her this is the end of her existence dying during jack's adventure isn't something which will always happen either she survives the events of the game or we kill her through our choice paul and the player look into the future and we don't change one small detail like whether or not to give a bloody speech we change the entire destination of a person's existence it would be different if amy dies by the time the credits roll regardless that would follow the rules but she doesn't she jogs off to live out her life after monarch is taken down for amy ferrero junction 1 changes everything about her future concur and the others to the ground zero operation make it quick painless in my critique of guardians of the galaxy i discussed how not every player choice needs to have far reaching consequences which spread tendrils into the fates of characters sometimes the illusion of choice is enough to encourage a player to climb into the headspace of who they're controlling but unfortunately through dint of being a time travel story quantum break is an exception to that if you're inviting a player to pick up a controller and make a life or death choice in your plot about how time can't be changed then that puts the player in a position of god-like authority separate from the game world we're not experiencing these junction choices as paul we're experiencing them as the writer or director of the story we clearly see what the consequences will be of what we choose and that does detach us from the emotional stakes at the end of this act we have to choose if paul gives a speech or if he interrogates jack because the death of amy or nick has conditioned us to not be empathetic with our decision-making we start to think about the consequences in a meta-sense rather than what will be best for jack what do we want to see i bet watching sean ashmore and aiden gillen locked in a room will be cool let's pick that worse yet the final two junction moments typically ask the player to ignore what they've already learned when we need to decide to trust martin hatch or sophia admiral the game and tv show have made it 100 clear that hatch is a baddie and sophia is loyal to paul the only reason we would choose to trust hatch would be to see what happens or to make paul's life harder the same goes for the final choice we choose if we want to give paul his medicine or not and if you're anything like me you'll choose not to because you think it'll increase the chance of seeing one of the monstrous shifters in action spoiler alert it doesn't i don't want to harp on about immersion breaking in a time travel game but the way choices and consequences are engineered means just like the tv show their inclusion was kind of doomed from the outset because of the nothing changes mantra it's always fun to pick a or b and see how the game reacts but any chance of resonating emotionally with our characters is sacrificed as a result and that's a damn shame fighting through the dockyard jack learns about the monarch gala later that night he speaks to paul who reiterates that no matter what jack's going to hand himself over to monarch before the day is over and we finally get to see one of the corporation's big secrets ground zero the source of their time travel tech and the prime example that nothing can be changed and it's here that jack sees both the future and the past captured in one moment he sees beth and paul pointing guns at each other trapped in 2010 but he also hears himself two days from now in 2016 begging paul serene not to hurt beth bizarrely both moments are happening simultaneously and as we'll learn in act 4 they will always happen they cannot be changed we wander through an infinitely looping room time fast forwards rewinds pauses leaps ahead jumps back all dynamically and without a cut scene will a shadow of will from the past desperately tinkers over cluttered desks and screens to complete his design of something something we'll later learn is his countermeasure to the end of time the one thing that will be able to save the world the visual language of time is quantum break's greatest achievement even with how critical i've been there's something truly awe-inspiring about how the team were able to shape and shift its landscape to create such a consistent art style and feeling from when time breaks down even though the world will regularly freeze around the player it doesn't feel static there's constant movement in how the ground ripples beneath our feet or spaces start to shatter and reform at a moment's notice this is all purposeful while paul serene and monarch form our antagonists to shoot a machine gun at it's time the tangible force of time which is truly the enemy here when it loses control it becomes an unhinged monster devouring everyone it's like jack said at the start of the game the number one killer is time and when we experience the stutters we feel that there's an aching sense of danger in how time is visually presented to us because it's not just that the world freezes it's how reality flits in and out of being remedy turned to photographs for inspiration after all how else do you capture something trapped in time than through the tiny portable lenses we all carry in our pockets the color grading changes influenced by infrared photography objects which were once round suddenly have jagged sharp edges bursting out of them like they're disintegrating jack and the player feel so displaced and isolated because the audio was filtered giving us a sense of being trapped underwater now if only the gameplay lived up to the visuals oh [ __ ] all of the meticulous craftsmanship that was poured into making the time fractures look so ominous and threatening gets thrown out of the window when you usher jack through the game's set pieces with a straightforward corridor and thinly veiled quicktime events moments like jumping over a crumbling bridge or racing through an exploding dockyard suddenly expose themselves to what they are walking simulators follow the yellow brick concrete press y to remove an obstacle occasionally freeze an object so you can jump on it it doesn't matter how many times jack shouts oh [ __ ] and something stutters into place the lack of thinking required from the player during these set pieces is what holds them back there is never combat while you try to navigate a perilous environment there's never a puzzle to be cracked before time resets jack joyce is caught in the middle of time folding in on itself and the player puts as much thought into navigating the wreckage as they would pushing nathan drake up a cliff the visual language is all about chaos and danger but the gameplay language is all about pushing up on the analog stick you could argue that this is on purpose remedy would rather the player absorb the twitching angular breakdown of reality than overthink what they need to do but the puzzle design in other parts of the game don't help that argument but we'll get there in a later act because jack beth and nick have finally united and formed our trio they're off to the bradbury swimming pool to see what will hid there before his death and we've got 30 minutes of walking to clock in before the act is over i know your brother built the one thing that can stop the fracture i know we're meant to find it then i know monarch doesn't want us to and yet you're wearing their beautiful i like the way their pants fit in 2016 at the nordic games conference gregory lowden the senior narrative designer of quantum break discussed the process for designing the game's narrative because of the complexity of the story he designed a game timeline to help map out the pacing of jack's adventure quote i used this to look at the game look at the gameplay variety and look at the pacing pacing is the most important thing in a story and i could look at my chart and see the issues i could see if there was too much combat back to back and if we needed to put in a story level where does the combat go are there enough puzzles in act 2 is there enough down time for the characters to collect their thoughts does the player experience stutters enough to make them feel like a looming threat all relevant questions and questions that gregory loudon regularly asked but at a fair few moments in the game the answers have made things worse the swimming pool is the perfect example it's the final third of act two we've had some combat heavy battles to wade through the player has geared into the shitty tutti bang bang part of their brain for almost an hour now so the story decides to slow right down this allows us to trace the distinct lack of trust between jack and beth the two clearly have distinct opposing philosophies and are reluctantly working together beth believes we can't change the past jack disagrees we find a spooky tape from will where he addresses beth directly addressing her as a friend despite the fact she's never met him and it clearly bothers jack that will was able to confide in someone other than him but this isn't the most interesting part is that yeah i think so second time machine this changes everything the environmental artists at remedy really get to flex their muscles with the design of the swimming hall everything is in contrast to pulsarine's own high-tech lap the machine is a skeleton of pulse ropes and tubing skirt the shot of this grand reveal that popping yellow color which appears over and over is peeled and aged baked into the walls rather than shiny and new it's a space which tells us something we already know but that something is still powerful when it's shown as confidently as this that jack and his friends are the underdogs but as cool and designed as the swimming hall is it just strengthens the disconnect between the game's visual storytelling and its mechanical storytelling just like paul's experiment in act 1 just like the fracture set piece in act 2 the 20 to 30 minutes spent in the swimming hall is a long slow slog through an unnecessary lore dump and according to gregory lowden it's like this to balance out all the action so far but structure-wise it's so [ __ ] boring it's interesting that gregory louden used the term story levels in his talk because the most effective game stories are the ones which aren't so obvious when they separate their gameplay from their character beats i'd argue that as a design philosophy story levels shouldn't be anywhere near a game's development alan wake bookended its episodes with slow paced walking sections to set up a slow crawl of tension before night hit and madness descended on allen they formed about 30 minutes of an eight hour game total quantum break doesn't seem to understand what tension is or why it's important the initial buzz of excitement a player might feel that finding the time machine gets cut to pieces when it's followed with walking around will's lab shoulder barging a door reading emails and interacting with four terminals to try and get the machine working you're not allowed to use your powers here which clearly slices the lower bits from the game bits and means that you can't just dash across the hall to the next terminal need to clumsily angle your way around the swimming pool instead this happens three times during the span of the game three doing it once at the start of act one was already too much but it could at least be forgiven because of all the time travel rules it was teaching us stretching it out a second time and then a third in act four shows that remedy poured all of its storytelling ambition into other places and hoped that the plot would carry through its slow beats but i'm sorry to say it doesn't no no no no what god damn it i don't know we're so close and after all this the time machine doesn't even work remedy's game timeline overcompensates meaning that when quantum breaks seven to eight hours are up you have passively experienced the game more than you've played it writing this script i can see into the future so i can tell you don't believe me but don't worry with act 2 coming to an end and jack handing himself over to paul so he can get close to sofia amaral we can take the slow story dump of junction 2 and calculate the game's engagement factor with maths you were right my visions of the future aren't always clear but they don't lie here's a spreadsheet i made sexy i know quantum breaks entertainment experience can be divided into six camps cut scenes i just watched a ship fast forward through a [ __ ] bridge combat the tv show walking sections solving puzzles and fracture set pieces each tv episode runs for an average of 24 minutes four of these makes 96 minutes i know mass but let's round it down to 1.5 hours to simplify and add on the in-game cutscenes a clock in at just over two hours there are two fractured set pieces in the game the dockyard and the bridge which have a combined play time of about 10 minutes according to my footage and the playthrough of youtuber radbrat using that same playthrough we can calculate how much time is spent on combat approximately an hour and 20 minutes with dying included i know maths but hey let's say you're worse than brad and me at action games so let's chuck in an extra 10 minutes in there to form a nice cozy hour and a half then we need to look at the puzzles there are 15 in total in the entire game making up 12 minutes of play time but monty you say that's less than a minute per puzzle and you'd be right we'll talk about the puzzles in part four but so you keep following me let's break away from the maths for a second to show you why quantum breaks puzzles take less than a minute roll the clip riveting stuff let's total up our play time one and a half hours for the tv show two hours of cutscenes 10 minutes for set pieces one and a half hours for combat 12 minutes of puzzles we're hitting five hours and 22 minutes but wait i thought this was a seven hour game where does the rest of the time go here it goes here two hours and seven minutes of walking around while lore is dumped on jack this isn't even the full extent of it i'm not factoring any of the reading that's expected of you while you're walking around and not including the fact that an easy five percent of your play time is spent standing in elevators yet still the majority of your game is spent strolling around at a leisurely pace i know this because i counted it all up and put it in a spreadsheet i know maths we don't need to get as granular as this for quantum breaks glaring pacing issues to become obvious but hey it's my video let me have my fun combat and puzzles are the only two camps which could fairly be considered as thought-provoking gameplay here and when you combine them they still make up less than a third of quantum breaks runtime hell even if you cut out the tv show altogether there's still a gross imbalance of player involvement despite remedy's emphasis on player choice and consequence so let's check in on the tv show and discuss those choices and those consequences [Music] the treatments they're losing their effectiveness specifically showing us how weak paul's illness makes him and his affinity for his doctor sophia amaral adds a lot of much-needed empathy for our villain up until now he seemed completely in control of every scene from will's death to his debate with martin hatch so it's important that we see him on the back foot to add more grey to our big bad of course a tv show wasn't necessary to show us this but it's nice that it's here episode 2 mainly follows the monarch gala introducing us to our party island before we blow it all to hell in the next act charlie wilcott is on his date with fiona and liam burke is locked in a bunker nearby arrested for turning against monarch if you choose for paul to give his speech martin hatch will interrogate jack with a good old-fashioned villain monologue while our hero drools all over the cell yet surprisingly after said monologue hatch lets jack go with a sly wink and a nod fully aware the jack is going to blow the gala to hell he's a regular sci-fi iago to paul's othello showing us clearly that hatch is working against paul but his motives aren't clear to us yet originally the live-action stuff was kept completely separate from the game there wasn't going to be any crossover jack and paul wouldn't appear whatsoever and instead we'd follow a secondary story disconnected from the main one this seemed sensible but it was a little too close to what trion had attempted with defiance and we all saw how that turned out so sam lake ambitiously pushed to make the game the tv show have direct connections so it can form one seamless experience the most obvious way to do this wasn't just to have characters which crossed over but to have our choices impact the tv show directly according to remedy there are over 40 variations in total for the tv episodes a combination of your junction choices and finding little environmental tidbits during gameplay for example jack can find this dinosaur cut out at ground zero during act two interacting with it makes it glitch out and vanish flying across time and space to end up on the outskirts of the party during the tv show to return to greg louden the senior narrative designer described them as unlocking deleted scenes for the live action stuff giving the audience momentaria sights or unique shots they would otherwise miss these are cute but that's the extent of it in act one we can find a formula on a white board that will correct our reward for seeking this out is over the lab at the university this morning someone saw the equation huh yup a five second scene where one guy tells another guy that someone changed my formula last night and the story moves on but thematically these are further proof that nothing can be changed and the butterfly effect doesn't operate in quantum breaks universe as for the junction choices these are much more impressive a lot of them have expected immediate consequences like if we force amy to make a pr statement we witness a full scene of it being filmed and then it pops up on news reports later that choice then ripples into the day-to-day workings of each of the characters like how charlie needs to hack the mayor's pa because monarch are now struggling with public perception but the coolest part is how these choices culminate the fate of sofia amaral doesn't rely on one choice but a couple if paul chooses not to trust her at the end of act three and then gives in to his paranoia in act four we retreat it to a violent scene where he murders the woman he loves however if we combine these choices in pretty much any other way sophia's life is spared of course this raises the same problem as amy's death does but you've got to admire the level of work that went into making our decisions feel impactful and it does make the tv show feel more seamless with our gameplay over there where the woman with the necklace my money is on that it's a pretty good choice but i might have to go with ryan gosling down there talking with george clooney wearing his nice cufflinks chatting about stacks so in a few minutes charlie and fiona are going to leave the party and go for a nice woodland walk in the dark where liam burke will ambush them and force them to take him to monarch's secret lab but before we get to that let's jump back to this scene because i need to ask what drinking game are they playing so they're just sitting with martinis people watching they clock a glamorous woman with a costume shop necklace chatting to some old guy fiona bets that she'll do something but charlie disagrees he puts his money on some ryan gosling guy with nice cufflinks they take a second the glamorous woman checks her phone and fiona loses her [ __ ] she's so happy about this and makes charlie down his drink why what game is this what are the rules fiona why is the writing so wait uh what's what what's happening why did my footage freeze well this at least brings me on to the big fat technical limitations which are inevitable with a project like quantum break because of the 40 variations and the gameplay and the episodes and the expensive graphics rendered to make the transition between cutscene and tv less jarring quantum break forces the player to stream the live action stuff rather than package it into one game file so guess what happens when the episode stutters and dies because your internet's having a bad day that's right you need to come out of the game wait for a more stable connection jump back into the game and then skirt through the episode to find your place xbox watch tv as the episode comes to a close quantum break plays its most interesting hand burke fiona and charlie break into the lab of dr kim a leading physicist who was working on monarch's doomsday protocol the lifeboat kim mysteriously died in 2011 and since then his lab has been shut down but what the gang find is fascinating and terrible and opens the door to so many interesting ideas that unfortunately were saved for a sequel that never came through exposure to cronon particles time travel radiation dr kim has been transformed into a shifter from this point on these creatures will be teased and teased until there's nothing left to tease when the end of time comes some people will be transformed into them and they'll stalk their prey freezing them in time and tearing them apart in the process the suspense around these monsters is palpable we read research documents on them we see one trapped in a chamber in the show we hear paul and beth talk about them with such visceral fear that any player even vaguely invested in quantum breaks story will be excited for the inevitable boss fight to come and if you've played the game or followed along with this video you know that that never ever comes reviews were kind to quantum breaks combat when it first came out but in retrospect it feels like a stylish slick and incredibly clumsy tech demo for the power fantasy we would eventually get with control much like other facets of the game the problem here can't be boiled down to one issue but rather a consistent sprinkling of underbaked and sluggish ideas thanks for showing up here i thought this was gonna be a rescue quantum break was delayed a full year unfortunately nudging it out of 2015 and into 2016 pitting it as the xbox exclusive to match playstation's uncharted 4. this meant the comparisons were abound and while both are explosive action adventures quantum breaks movement and battles unfortunately felt stuck in the past when compared to his competition that quarter the shocking thing is remedy has never stood still when it comes to his creativity it's always been an ambitious studio the max payne sequels iterated upon each other alan wake formed a fresh new experience unlike anything they'd ever created and quantum break tried to fuse the two to form a brand new action game with a twist i never thought i'd make this comparison but jack joyce despite being a time travelling superhero feels more like alan wake to control than max payne or jesse faden there's a bizarre delay in trying to angle him around the battlefield meaning he comes across as sluggish and wonky when what you want to feel is fast and powerful i'm definitely not the first to comment on this but there's no crouch button despite arenas being littered with cover to duck behind it's all automatic relying on jack to be reactive enough to hunker down when you want him to and leap out to attack when you're ready to be aggressive he takes a full tv episode to clamber over walls and his jump simulates a lack of responsiveness that could be forgiven in alan wake just because clumsy controls don't always hamper a horror experience but quantum break isn't a horror it's a superhero origin story and most of the time jack doesn't feel very super [Applause] act three is the most combat heavy part of the game so it reinforces all of this jack has found himself on paul serene's private island the gala is in full swing half a mile away he needs to fight through what can only be described as a badass bond layer to reach sophia amaral because she has a way to fix the good guys time machine barely a minute into the act we're given our final power time rush and it's awesome but it's also the only sprint function that we have unless we're using our powers to dash or rush jack is stuck lumbering about the battlefield like a donkey on valium and you don't want to waste your powers just to hurry forwards a couple of feet that would be both a waste and you can't control the distance of the dash so you'll always overshoot this is fine but what isn't is that you can't jump during time rush and your dash won't carry over holes in the floor adding to just how unagile jack feels in our hands and agility isn't the only problem with combat but if i had one wish in six months in an oven it's definitely where i'd focus my attention remedy clearly got the memo because control solves this problem tenfold and if you want to hear more about that the link to my critiques below and hey while you're at it fancy dropping a like and subscribing jack has a full handful of powers at his disposal so it's not like remedy or being stingy with what superboy can do he can freeze pockets of reality dash time rush bring up a shield and time blast to blow enemies away but there is a lack of variety in what these powers do on the battlefield and almost all of them are in service to the lackluster gun plate because jack's lack of versatility ranges to melee combat as well a sprint function isn't the only thing locked behind time rush punching someone in the faces as well careening into slow motion so we can get a nice satisfying crack to the jaw but there are so many moments during fights when you wish you could just smack a soldier in the face with a butt of your gun but the game doesn't let you meaning you need to aim down your sights when they're close enough to kiss when it comes to the shoot em up aspects monarch's guns are incredibly spongy some of the standard soldiers can take a full magazine of bullets to the face before they go down and this is all to force the player to use their powers for example using time freeze and then shooting into that freeze increases the amount of damage you can give but it doesn't change just how sporadic the gunplay is adding to just how cumbersome jack feels to control firing a gun is pure unbridled chaos shots will skitter off at 90 degree angles if you're not careful and less than 50 percent of your shots will hit enemies unless you're breathing down their necks it's like jack is eternally hip firing which is ironic because that isn't something he can do either regularly you'll be down in cover hiding from lethal sniper shots and soldiers will flank you fantastic the natural reaction here would be to stay crouching and cut those soldiers down but because there's no hip fire and no ability to toggle when you crouch jack will always pop up from behind his cover to shotgun a guy in arm's reach worse yet the ammo capacity of every gun is so low and jack's reloading animation is so long that you'll spend more time retreating to refill your weapon than you will blasting behind enemies and blowing them away [Music] it's in the bowels of monarchs labs that we meet our final enemy type the juggernaut these guys are walking tanks forming the closest thing to boss fights the game ever gets they're invulnerable at the front but luckily have exhaust vents in their back that we can shoot at to knock them down better yet they're wearing cronon harnesses so you can't freeze them in time relying on the dash and time rush to speed around them instead this use of enemies is something quantum break gets so so right that i just wish they did more with it the enemy variety is frustratingly lacking overall with just four types to fight grunts heavies strikers and juggernauts despite monarch clearly working on new experimental tech mech suits and drones and don't get me started on the shifter but the combat scenarios we do get feel distinct and focused you can't just run into each fight and use time blast to blow the baddies away strikers and juggernauts are immune to being slowed down so you need to rely on your other powers to get around and blast them from the back some arenas have two levels so your spatial awareness is key using time vision to check if any henchmen are lurking on the walkways above there are snipers which sit so far away that you need to use time rush and dash to run up narrow corridors and hide out of their line of sight remedy do a lot with the little enemy variety they give us meaning that combat will often be frustrating and clumsy but never ever boring but there are still so many missed opportunities to raise these fights to remedy's best there are some slick sections during battle where time will occasionally freeze meaning monarch soldiers won't be able to move but you are free to galvant around the arena for a few precious seconds these are as stylish as any other part of the game with gravel and concrete rippling around jack but we can't do anything with these moments we can't use them to our advantage if an enemy is caught in a fracture then they become invincible there's a promise of being able to rewind objects in motion to have them crash into bad guys over and over again like back in act 2 with a truck that crashed through a gate or maybe we could blow up one of these conspicuous red barrels for a big boom and then rewind time to make it explode a second time or maybe we could freeze a grenade and enemy tosses at us and then unfreeze it so it blows up in their face or maybe there could be mechanisms like cranes or pulleys which we can fast forward to collide with monarch soldiers or maybe or maybe the opportunities are endless but what jack can interact with what he can capitalize on is always entirely contextual one spanner the game throws into the works to keep things interesting are the kronon dampeners and for all of my bitching so far this is the most annoying part at a handful of moments these devices will be set up in arenas and prevent jack from using his powers so here's a riddle for you what happens when you take a super power action game combined with a terrible third person shooter and get rid of the super power action game that's right you demote the game to a terrible third person shooter now remember there isn't a lot of combat and quantum break just 90 minutes worth so you can't justify taking some of those minutes and turning them into full combat scenarios where you don't get to use your very cool powers but that's exactly what quantum break does three times you need to kill all the minions and then deactivate the tower oh sure you can deactivate the tower before you kill the bad guys if you want if you can find five seconds where you're not being shot at later in the game the enemies can throw dampener grenades at you which momentarily cancel out your powers or there are big heavies with small ranged dampeners attached to their back these are really really cool they force jack to keep moving and not rely on staying in cover but full situations where the chrono dampener is the central focus of the fight end up feeling both lethargic and annoying and you end up cursing remedy for designing it this way more than enemies you're meant to be fighting oh why are you like this i know how negative this section has been so far i really want to love quantum breaks combat but every time i look for something to assess all i can find is tedium and shortcomings when jack has a gun in his hand there's gotta be something in here and hmm well while i find something let's pick the story back up jack reunites with beth at the gala a fractures happen so everyone including beth is now frozen in time but don't worry jack managed to get his hands on one of the cronon harnesses which stop me from being affected by time so he unfreezes beth and she puts it on so she can be more present during the cool time set pieces the pair set off for sophia amaral's high-tech bungalow and find her frozen moments from being gunned down by a combat drone hijacked by martin hatch you're jack joyce you're here to kill me no but you're coming with us we need your expertise this is one of the cutscenes remedy and microsoft paraded at conferences to show how gorgeous quantum break looked on next-gen hardware it presents jack and beth as a partnership now not necessarily working together reluctantly anymore but instead united in their mission to save the world oh wait wait i found something i like about combat each time power has a separate cooldown rather than share their use across one force bar like control did later remedy made a point of managing each of jack's abilities independently i love this because it forces the player to experiment with a range of options during combat and it also means that you should always have a time power ready to use should you want to even when you're facing enemies like the strikers who render your time stop useless you can still rely on more than one power to take them down despite the separate cooldowns for example both time rush and time dash offer up similar outcomes you can momentarily lose the enemy and skip around their back for a couple of good shots but that's the extent of it because while we're talking about the powers is another issue i've got to raise the skill tree unlike control quantum break thankfully doesn't rely on a garbage loot or goot system to force the player to spend hours in equipment menus crafting useless upgrades which give you feeble boosts to your character build i appreciate the simplicity in having one skill tree to focus our efforts on but simple doesn't have to mean unimaginative and unfortunately that's all your upgrades are here they can vary from making your big time blast slightly bigger to increasing the range of your time vision enhancing jack's powers requires a player to seek out time shards during gameplay these little buggers are refractions of light that the player might miss if they're not looking for them and they're regularly found off the beaten path the issue is that the limitations of the upgrade system don't exactly incentivize incentivizes to hunt down the shards most upgrades require a minimum of four to unlock and some even require six there's a frigidness to the game's upgrade economy even if it's only as deep as a puddle this thing growing inside me [Music] i've been fighting it for six hard years with beth and jack capturing sophia and taking her back to their lair at the swimming pool paul starts to crumble sophia wasn't just a woman that he cared for deeply she was the only one who could manufacture his treatments to keep his cronon syndrome at bay this explains why martin hatch hacked that drone to kill her with no treatments paul would continue to deteriorate and it's already begun we see a flash of what a dangerous creature he could be if he transformed into a shifter when he attacks hatch furious that they let jack and beth get away were reminded of the cool calm detachment of his right-hand man refusing to hurt paul even though he obviously could but the key reveal of this junction happens right at the beginning we see will's countermeasure the one thing that could prevent the end of time is actually with paul he's had it this whole time this isn't explicitly stated until later but if you've paid attention to the world design to some of will's files and diagrams a discerning player should be able to recognize it as our big fat macguffin that we have been looking for and as excited as i am to talk about quantum breaks world design we're gonna return to the tv show first so let's look at the action and direction of episode three then we get the finished live action like raw footage to the remedy office and we're looking at like so why is there like a white boxed lamp in the live action because they they literally thought that this untextured white lamp in the content we sent to them is something that should be in the live action so you see this beautiful live action then there's like a blank white lamp there it actually looks like it kind of should be there but we're like that's that's just why why is that there it is a god damn miracle that the game and the show managed to seam together like it did when you hear about the friction behind the scenes every interview with the quantum break team written or otherwise has a clear tone of good naturedness they understood the mammoth undertaking of combining television with video games but the final product indicates that the tv side didn't really understand how to overcome that undertaking regardless of the funding from microsoft the tv show looks cheap and even the in-game clips directed by the television team have a real dip in quality like here in act 3 where we can watch paul serene's speech and they forgot to edit out the moment where aidan gillan forgot his lines and so tonight is a celebration celebration face of darkness we celebrate for some of you this means nothing remedy designed game spaces and concept art and sent that over to lifeboats during production this meant that any sets which crossed over between the game and the tv show were digitally created with actors laid over them most frustrating for the remedy team was that they had to reconfigure a lot of their design to fit the tv show after the fact the cfr chamber which houses wells countermeasure looked completely different in the original build of quantum break after the team saw the live-action footage they had to go back and remodel that space in one of her live-action scenes courtney hope who played beth was wearing an e-ring so the character artists had to return to the game before shipping and add that same earring to her character model there are lots of stories like this but it paints a picture of a remedy who were doing their damnest to make live-action mistakes look like purposeful cohesion between the game world and the show we've already covered a few places that energy could have gone instead episode 3 deception is a slow burn for the first 15 minutes it's the aftermath of the gala and we get a quick update to martin hatch's scheme this is the episode where he fully embraces his villain role complemented by his ominous eye drops in a third villain monologue to a dazed and confused charlie wilcott before we move over to dr kim's lab i've come to free you my friend this imprisonment it's unsettling unfortunately the episode barely fleshes out our understanding of hatch beyond he wants to take down paul and while episode 4 will give his motivation bones you can barely taste the meat that's missing in kim's lab he has a moment of recognition and understanding with this shifter including us into the fact that he knows a lot more about these monsters than he's letting on when he blows the lab to hell framing sofia amaral and continuing paul's descent into madness you'd think that might release dr kim to the world potentially ready to stalk jack in act four but if you stuck around this long you know that this doesn't happen i guess time monsters are weak to a pack of c4 the rest of the episode returns to liam charlie and fiona back again on a whirlwind adventure through a secret tunnel to escape the gala while it's on lockdown charlie gets liam shot fiona calls him a piece of [ __ ] liam wounded and on the cusp of death rushes to his wife's hospital and violently murders a monarch soldier there who's been ordered to kill emily because reasons i guess paul serene meanwhile has a very bad no good day and is told that he needs to initiate lifeboat protocol if you're asap to proceed now would be the time to decide the dip in quality is most on show in scenes like this the stutter effects simply look less impressive in the tv show and that's mainly because of the sheen of the north light engine and quantum breaks angular art style complement the fractures so much more than they ever could with live action remedy went for style lifeboat went for realism and there's a jarring transition here monarch branded plastic bags coffee cups water bottles walkie-talkies don't look like they were manufactured by a conglomerate they look like yellow tape has been stuck over amateur theater props christ i'm pretty sure in this scene paul serena is staring at a jpeg of a seagull the fact the whole thing is brought to us by nissan it doesn't help either i'm curious to know how much they paid for their sponsorship because it's bloody everywhere to the point where it's not just distracting but you could believe it's the only car company in riverport in act one when four nissan cars are chasing each other through a parking garage the only damage we see is when one of them nicks their headlight and this is in a scene where a soldier fires a machine gun at liam burke's window which brings us to the action shaky cam isn't inherently bad the bourne movies weren't the first films to use it but in the world of action they definitely popularized it because of the crunch and sense of chaos they added to fight scenes sparingly it can ramp up the tension of the action but hollywood in its infinite wisdom learned the wrong lessons what they learned was that shaky cam was cost effective made badly framed shots look purposeful and hid her stunt choreography quantum break does not use shaky cam sparingly almost every single shot in the show is swaying or shaking there's one exception to this any scene featuring martin hatch is still and motionless conveying his stability and strength this contrast is really effective but the rest of the show suffers by comparison because the camera won't stop take this scene from episode two fiona and charlie are wandering through the woods having a cheeky wee flirt and chatting about work it's barely four lines of dialogue and the camera is already having minor spasms while it follows them or what about a scene we already looked at back in episode one this is a quiet contemplative scene where the focus is on two characters in love emily is reassuring liam with her story about a cat with bare hands and the camera is tight in suffocating the actors struggling to focus on them and swaying from side to side like the whole scene was filmed on a bloody cruise ship this is both distracting and nauseating when you see it but the show's greatest sin isn't in the handheld camera or even the shaky cam they're only a small part of the problem on their own a viewer wouldn't go cross-eyed but if you chuck in some cuts that's where the budget rears its small wailing head take the hospital fight again cut cut cut cut cut god stop it [Music] i had to get to the mainland but i couldn't do it by car needed a new plan all right let's go [Music] beth i think i'm gonna need a ride the streets are too hot so after raising hell at the gala jack is now on the run desperately trying to make his way back to the swimming hall to reunite with beth he rumbles through an abandoned building tries to cross a bridge and is rudely interrupted by a fracture set piece where i just watched a ship fast forward through a [ __ ] bridge god that never gets old this breakneck speed forms less than a tenth of act four the rest of our time is spent interacting with computers and reading emails broken up by a half-hearted puzzle and a two-minute combat sequence is the most contemplative part of the story with some of the strongest character beats and plot elements in the game but just like elsewhere player interaction doesn't mesh with how the story wants you to feel so let's rewind from the bridge back to the derelict building and get a bit more detailed with the world design and environmental storytelling because there's something very interesting in here sam lake would be the first person to admit that the shared remedy universe wasn't something they were seriously planning in 2016. he's discussed how it was a fever dream waving a spooky hand at his team from some far off horizon but there wasn't a strategy in place to combine separate stories into one overarching narrative until control started to take shape but there is the essence of this idea in quantum break particularly in reference to alan wake which means i get to theorize about alan wake again yeah if you want to avoid spoilers for alan wake please play it it's amazing jump to the time stamp on screen now there is a novel's worth of alan wake easter eggs and quantum break but the ramifications of these easter eggs rise above surface level nods to remedy's favorite sun in this rundown building for example we find a cute behind the scenes feature for night springs the creepy twilight zone show that you could find while exploring bright falls all ponies are made of butter in night springs this isn't an episode of night springs it doesn't tell us a story it sneaks a glimpse into the creation of that show a show which was created in the world of alan wake the narrator has gone mysteriously missing and the director is taking auditions for a replacement at the time of quantum break's release we all knew that allen was desperately trying to write his way out of the dark place night springs existing in quantum breaks world tells us the jack joyce and alan wake exist in the same reality this isn't the only hint we get we can also find a signed copy of the sudden stop alan's book during act two but then there's the other stuff you can find riverport university has a blackboard in one of its lecture halls where the professor has drawn up diagrams and analyses of the themes of remedy's game you can find a trailer for return a bizarre tv show which documents two fbi agents oh hi samlic searching for a missing alan wake and encountering his alter ego mr scratch in the process return appears in a bunch of ways across remedy's universe always the title of allah's latest failed escape attempt if control is to be believed there are potentially hundreds of versions of this story out there so surely this means that jack joyce exists in a different reality from alan a reality where alan wake the man never existed but a fictional version of his story was released but wait there's more one more piece of set dressing to find the video game remedies video game the one i played and loved we see an office worker playing it on her computer barely 10 minutes into allen's nightmare so does remedy exist in jack's universe do jack joyce and paul serene and monarch exist in our universe is that what we're led to believe every allen wake easter egg contradicts its own existence in quantum breaks world there's one just one reference to max payne in here is a fun joke but the prevalence of the allen wake nods make them feel less like banter and more like potential lore which never add up it might be unfair to make this comparison but in hindsight the release of control makes quantum breaks world building look even weaker the beauty of control was at every joke every tease every moment of levity added to the world building given to us by the fbc in the oldest house a sticky note which duplicates and overtakes an office no smoking memos because staff are talking up on a basement level that feels like it's outside but quantum breaks humor is more random and less smart god that feels artsy to say quantum break has three jokes and they're all hidden in collectibles so he said here we are you're gagged and helpless an erotic audiobook you can listen to some guy's script for a terrible time travel movie he's writing and nick marster's conspiracy theory the only joke that doesn't feel forced is the conspiracy theory because it groans arms and legs and it relates to our central conflict of the game monarch solutions and the secrets they hide who is the meat man who is he but what this means is the game has two tones the wacky goofy tone of the optional collectibles we can find and the grim oh so serious doomsday tone of the main plot i just watched a ship fast forward through a [ __ ] bridge returning to the swimming hall sophia admiral reluctantly agrees to help jack and beth get their time machine working this is the third and thankfully final time where we're forced to wander around and turn some monitors on beth tries to explain to jack that time cannot be changed causal loops are in effect here they cannot use the time machine to go back and save williams so instead she wants to jump back even further to 2010 steel will's countermeasure and bring it back to the present jack goes cross-eyed and says no but the decision is stolen from both of them when sophia admiral sabotages the time machine and sends beth all the way forwards instead to the end of time this is awesome it adds further complexity to the history remedy have designed for this world after hearing about the end of time so much we're finally going to learn more details about what it actually is what it looks like what it feels like to exist in that state it's quantum breaks most carefully shrouded mystery in setting up the reveal with a slow pregnant build up while we turn the time machine on suddenly feels like it might be worth it you're the reason you built the countermeasure and you've been here ever since 11 years why why didn't you come back we should get ready no we don't get to see the end of time ever potentially it was being saved for the sequel it never came but the end of time and the shifters are the ultimate blue balls the quantum break could have played and that's exactly what the game does we don't know how long beth was in the end of time she barely knows herself she spent potentially years lost in an apocalyptic wasteland with only a young paul serene the paul from the start of the game for company the two played an intricate game of cat and mouse battling and hiding from shifters while trying to hunt each other down until at last they managed to find the time machine to shoot back to 1999 from there the rest is history paul started up monarch and terrified of what he saw and armed with his new foresight started to develop the lifeboat protocol beth unable to get the time machine working again endured 11 years of hell waiting for jack to come and get her we learn about all of this through two diary entries not short ones either and they expertly capture beth's voice the self-doubt and the enduring will quote i watched the birth of a monster i can't escape the feeling that my actions helped shape what he became maybe i could have guided him maybe if i hadn't tried to hunt him down that can't be my part in all of this there has to be more if i can turn your attention to the nordic games conference one last time greg louden made a comment on the depth of readable material we can find in quantum break for such a short game there are layers and layers of emails research documents journals and news articles we can find which build a greater understanding of what makes this world run when asked why he said the cheapest and easiest things to change in a game are words everything wrong with quantum breaks identity is wrapped up in this one sentence the story changed numerous times we know this remedy constructed a ticking clock of a game world with stories and happenings occurring off-screen rhythmically filling out any blind gaps remember there were four playable characters at one point providing us with different viewpoints and angles on our time travel story so when the attention had to turn to the focus of the tv show and the plots had to be streamlined to jack's story parts had to be cut and those parts it seems were transformed into diary entries every line crumpled up and stuffed into beth's diary can be unwoven and reformed into a whole new game or even a whole new tv show her experience at the end of time isn't shown it's told to us forcing the player to use their imagination in a deeply unsatisfying way her experience of meeting will convincing him she's from the future helping him create the countermeasure builds the strong emotional bond between two of our main characters that we never get to see the moment where she chooses to visit her younger self and pass on a journal full of future events all in an effort to make a sad scared child believe that she's some chosen one who will one day save the world is just referenced in a cut scene and through some graffiti it's hidden from the player it was sacrificed for a mediocre tv show about charlie wilcox getting drunk at a party and as deeply crafted as the optional collectibles are they're mainly in the form of emails between monarch staff as we've discussed this was the most cost effective way to form smooth connections between the tv show and the game characters monologuing to each other about whatever just happened in the world of live action leaving their laptops unlocked and their email passwords on show a suspension of disbelief is always needed when it comes to this stuff nobody writes about the history of a world as transparently as a video game character but there's one email one in particular that i need to highlight from act three here's an email from martin hatch it's sitting in a random cubicle on the second floor of a monarch lab there are employees wandering about with tps reports and playing the alum wake video game so clearly this floor doesn't need high level clearance to access it houses the grunts of the organization i have aided in jack joyce's escape why his evil genius martin hatch written out a full evil email detailing his evil plan and then sent it to samantha in accounting why and why samantha opened it on her traceable work laptop read it and then left the room while it's still on screen it's just sitting here let's talk about the good stuff whatever happened to you change it it's done we can fix this don't we can undo this you still don't get it it can't be changed no matter what we do the pieces fall in all of the exact same places i've tried over and over hatch's email is an indicator the quantum breaks environmental storytelling isn't going to win any awards anytime soon but there's still some really cool stuff littered throughout the world that's worth noting when jack follows beth through the time machine he arrives in 2010 just like the originally planned but beth is a shadow of her former self weighed down by the knowledge of the end of time and the proof that it's an inevitable doomsday which can't be stopped stepping out of the machine and into a swimming hole six years younger is breathtaking especially how it contextualizes our first visit back in act two during that first visit we're met with red stains splashed on the ground in a corridor initially looking like blood until we see the pake cans lying nearby suspicious wooden targets with bullet holes cracking through them sit off to the site suggesting that will was training while he worked on the time machine but hearing beth's story about how she lived here for 11 years suddenly paints the swimming hall in a whole new light we're seeing represented solely through the junk and the trash time looping back on itself and the breakdown of beth wilder in the process gorgeous bizarre and sometimes terrifying graffiti is splattered on the walls throughout the game depicting events which have just happened or soon to come these are quantum breaks version of the manuscripts from alan wake wetting our taste buds when they reference stuff that's waiting for us in the story it's likely most players will assume these are just cute meta nods from remedy more of a storytelling device than something which has true relevance in the world but it's in act 4 that we learned these have been beth the whole time watching jack from a distance unable to reach him she's left him hints and clues to the future while also tapping into our artistic side so she doesn't go mad beth has my favorite character arc in this story even if it is an incredibly tragic one and the emotional core comes from the environmental storytelling together beth and jack set off for will's workshop the night sky giving character and flavor through the 4th of july decorations scattered on the rooftops to truly immerse ourselves in this tense heist their goal is to steal his countermeasure and use his time machine to jump back to present day the workshop is so cluttered overflowing with technology and cables and piping that his true identity is cleverly hidden from us if you're paying attention you'll be able to put the links together that we're in the dockyard from act two will's workshop will later become ground zero but through something as simple as filling an empty fractured warehouse with junk quantum break is able to conceal the looming threat with subtlety that the rest of the game has been missing and it's in here that we get one of our handful of puzzles which means i can't be nice anymore and we gotta go back to the criticisms [Music] i think a lot of the game's pacing issues could be resolved with a full reworking of its puzzles there are just two types holding y to rewind time or shooting time stop this means there's little satisfaction to be gained from overcoming these challenges because the answer is always the same we need to open a door to will's office we follow a flashback of him for a few feet and find a switch which only powers up the door for a couple of seconds the solution is simple use time stop and run through the door we need to open a gate to a train yard we find a switch which only powers up the gate for a couple of seconds the solution is simple use time stop and run through the gate we need to get up a walkway the solution is simple hold down y and rewind the lift to carry us up we need to get over a walkway the solution is simple hold down y and rewind to before it collapsed and the most frustrating angle is that rewind puzzles have so much potential rewind is a story based power rather than a gameplay-based one we can only use it when jack chooses to it's unavailable in combat or while generally exploring which makes it feel contrived and that's the only word i can use to describe the slightly more complicated puzzles in act 3 there's a frozen truck blocking our path to the gala jack's jump sucks but it's definitely good enough that he should be able to clamber over this truck he could do it on this one no problem barely two meters away but nope he needs to rewind time freeze the truck run out some stairs and jump on top of it from this gas station the rules of rewind are never accurately told to the player can jack turn back time by eight seconds five seconds two seconds what's his limit what's stopping him from rewinding the truck just a little more so he can squeeze by it to get to the party in the effort to form an entertainment experience it's as if remedy are desperate that the player never stops moving never stops jogging along to the next x position dump so they don't want to stump the player or make us think for ourselves i understand the mentality behind this but it severely limits the gameplay variety that quantum break is capable of and i've saved the best until last time vision okay what is all this quantum breaks greatest asset is how beautiful it looks and how artistically its environments have been shaped so it's absolutely beyond me why remedy want the player to regularly mask that beauty with time vision's ugly filter you're encouraged to use it during combat to see enemies it's required in some cases to find the time shard so we can upgrade our powers and if you're a lore hunter like me is the best way to find all of the interactive objects but look at this the sheen and shades are cut out of the world reduced to a globular black and white strangely blurred screen whenever you need to use it aside from the ripples that wave out from under jack there's nothing visually appealing about using this power in fact it looks like we've just turned the accessibility options on instead with a wealth of time abilities at our fingertips remedy plucked detective mode out of arkham and threw it in here and by 2016 detective mode was already oversaturated come with me we can survive this together you know it can't be stopped the conclusion to beth wilder's story is incredibly sad this entire scene is some of the strongest writing in the whole game and in just a couple of lines it almost justifies the inclusion of jack being interviewed by ogawa the events of the game come full circle jack comes to the same realization as the player that he beth and paul were directly responsible for ground zero when they clashed in will's warehouse with jack being blasted to the present he can only watch helpless unable to change beth's fate as paul shoots her capped off with the grim imagery of paul shooting through a vision of jack's past self to end beth's life and this transforms jack he's angry and bitter at paul the scene solidifying the monster that his old friend has become despite just spending a couple of days with beth their relationship has grown dynamically and organically and witnessing the pain she went through just to set him on this path makes him cynical and callous he sets off to take the counter-measure back from paul and we get this beautiful couple of lines to cap off act four you claim beth wilder's death had no impact on your behavior but like i said i barely knew her so what you did next it wasn't personal no good stuff flashing into our final junction we see paul sealing the countermeasure away in his chamber his hand has been forced needing to activate the lifeboat protocol earlier than he hoped without his treatments the cronon syndrome has gotten worse limping through to his office to make our final choice in the game keep control or surrender to his paranoia if the first junction gave us our most impactful choice the final junction gives us our most important one time still cannot be changed so no matter what the final moments of the game remain the same but we get some variations in the error leading up to those moments our choice defines paul serene the man allowing the player to define his attitude his outlook his behavior in the game's last hour will he stay rational in the end or will he embrace his dark side let's see what the finale of the tv show has in store for us i knew you wouldn't listen to me it was a simple fail safe when's the crowd i know what it was it can't be undone that was always the point wasn't it it wasn't for you to decide when there's a lot of depth to paul in the control choice it's much more interesting to see our villain continue to be empathetic and conflicted especially with the anger an invested player will have for him after the death of beth wilder despite not trusting sofia amaral he sends her to the mysterious lifeboat resigning himself to the fact that his cronon sickness means he won't be able to join her later when he gives a mournful speech to his friends and colleagues we see him be somewhat noble wishing them luck and surviving the end of time and then leaving them to get on with the job if we're paying attention we can infer that he does this because he knows that as soon as his sickness transforms him into a shifter he could endanger them all if we choose surrender paul embraces his rage and fury if combined with other choices he murders sophia and goes on a rampage he believes the rest of the company is secretly working to bring him down resulting in an unhinged rant to those inside the lifeboat and then ordering their death episode 4 is the most paul centric content we get in live action and it's all the stronger for it but unfortunately the show does dip away from him so we can pick up with charlie fiona and liam so let's talk about them again i guess jack joyce we he can use the cfr to fix the fracture we need to get it to him it's cfrs what's powering this place right now with time breaking down charlie uses his hacking skills to secure a place for him and fiona on the lifeboat meaning through the tv show not the game we finally get to see what all the fuss is about what paul's plan has been from day one and unfortunately it's here that all the previous problems with the live action stuff are solidified right up until the credits roll the dialogue is stilted and mumbly the camera doesn't know what to look at and the cheapness of the show is particularly etched in the design of the lifeboat itself monarch solutions this billion dollar company created with the sole purpose of preparing for the end of time offers up their solution a couple of bunk beds and a tunnel somewhere up until now the lifeboat has been described as this bastion of hope bringing about ideas of some great impressive spaceship ready to protect the last remnants of civilization and all the tv show can give us is a corridor with plastic sheets hung up you could argue this is purposeful maybe it's supposed to be a disappointment but tell that to the actors standing in awe some bed sheets imagine a world where quantum break didn't have a tv show and instead jack joyce's time warp took him on a scenic tour of locations like the lifeboat imagine remedy got to design a full stylish complex for us to fight through seeing the preparations monarch had made for ourselves instead it's a room with paper cups on a desk fiona sends charlie out of the lifeboat i didn't realize he was allowed to leave but okay and he scurries off to the chamber which holds the counter measure preparing to help jack joyce meanwhile william burke arrives at monarch planning to break into the lifeboat before time runs out what happens next is solely dependent on the choice the player made and the impressive amount of variations that lifeboat productions filmed gets to be shown off here you're one of monarchs elite the one they tell me is a traitor i'm not a traitor i know what you want you're protecting what's yours i want to protect what's mine in the control choice liam and emily run into paul desperately trying to find ways to keep jack from stealing the countermeasure liam has evolved over the past three episodes to see through monarch's lies to let himself be more doubtful about the power structure he's a part of he's as anti-monarch as you could get by this point especially because the company nearly killed his wife so when paul serena arrives and asks him for help asks him to risk his life and fight jack the natural response for this hardened mercenary who's witnessed firsthand how untrustworthy paul can be is to send a pregnant emily off with a bad guy and stood up for a boss fight i understand that paul promises a place for emily on the lifeboat but liam burke of the past two days wouldn't trust this guy with anything especially not the woman he loves and it's all a result of choosing to keep paul rational lean into the characterization the video game has been building to basically the player is forced to trade liam burke's character arc for paul serenes and that's not fair or satisfying you're gonna have to [ __ ] kill me because right now liam i'm thinking about more than myself you don't know what joyce is gonna do no i don't but i have faith in filming and she believes in joyce so i gotta believe too the final moments of the control variation of the episode have liam and charlie confronting each other once and for all in the countermeasure chamber charlie plainly yells about his character arc before martin hat shoots him in the head and he and liam get into a fist fight i think i honestly couldn't tell you because of the cuts in the shaking their battle ends with liam stabbing martin hatch in his left eye suiting up in striker gear and preparing for his boss fight with jack in the next act the music dramatic emphasizing minor notes and swelling to show how tragic his evolution has become remember this it's important later in the surrender choice liam and emily join charlie and the three of them head off to the chamber together united in their plan to unlock the countermeasure and help jack save the day when martin hatch arrives he kills liam and emily but not before he's shot in his right eye so before we wrap up on the tv show and jump into the final act of the game let's talk martin hatch there's going to be a really minor spoiler for controlling here so just like when we were theorizing about alan wake here's the time stamp for where to jump to if you want to avoid that you ready let's go martin hatch is a shifter something we're clued into through a collectible in the next act and we see firsthand during jack siege on monarch this makes it truly bizarre that during his battle with liam burke he doesn't transform like we know he can but hey maybe the budget had ran out by that point something that is really really cool when comparing the two versions of this episode though are the ways in which martin dies whether it's through liam or emily both timelines involve his eyes being gouged out by a berk liam gets the one on the right emily gets the one on the left throughout the episodes we regularly get to see martin use eye drops in some scenes the whites of his eyes are slightly discolored and bloodshot because shifters exist at all points in time it's fair to believe that the reason martin needs to use these eye drops is because he constantly feels the physical pain of the two timelines where he dies how cool is that for all my bitching in this video and i'm aware that some of my criticism is just bitching that has to be one of the most subtle clever little through lines remedies ever brought to its games it's never directly referenced never directly explained it's barely a character detail to give hatch a gimmick but the focus his death gets in this final episode really caps it off as an incredibly clever piece of writing and then we turn our attention to control there is one just one connection between quantum break and control and it comes in the form of dylan faden i was in a dark place and there was a dark man there his name was mr dorr and he told me that there are many worlds side by side on top of each other some inside of others mr dore a being that crossed realities crossed timelines and spoke to dylan through his dreams and what better synonym for a door than a hatch that's all there is and there's not enough information given to us to infer this really is a connection but there are weird parallels between quantum break and control cronon harnesses are very similar in concept to the hras that casper darling designed to protect the fbc from the hiss the countermeasure looks like a tiny version of hedron it even has the same number of sides i'm pretty sure quantum break is more interested in timelines rather than realities its core philosophy behind time travel and causal loops doesn't dip into alternate universes rounding them kind of irrelevant here but maybe martin hatch isn't just a shifter maybe he's something more maybe he's an entity the kinds we learn about and control this is hardly that important after all remedy doesn't even own the rights to quantum break anymore if they wanted to incorporate it officially into control's universe they would need to buy it back from microsoft meaning martin hatch is probably never going to be seen again but just in case he is i wanted to note it here anyway enough theorizing stop having fun back to quantum break [Music] the end of time was closing in and you still believed you could fix it the solution was inside monarch tower a counter measure our grand finale picks up minutes after the tv episode jack has made it to monarch headquarters the fractures are ramping up their frequency but he's got a bone to pick in a timeline to save time to battle up to the top of the building depending on which junction choice we made we're either helped by fiona or charlie who unlocks security gates for us as we clamber up each level what this means is a lot of standing around fiona is that you yes the idea behind this is solid it continues to ease the transition between the tv show and the events of the game but it's yet another example of how the involvement of the show minimizes the impact of the gameplay there's no other reason for us to be standing at these [ __ ] gates than to have the idiots from the tv show parrot lines at us in an effort to seem relevant irrespective of the chaos of the fractures the monarch building is clean and white occasionally broken up by that yellow glaze that coats so much of the scientific locations we've previously explored this makes the carnage we find left in the wake of martin hatch's shifter rampage more shocking and terrifying when we see what it can do it's reminiscent to final fantasy vii that haunting moment when out of nowhere we wander through shinra hallways seeing dead bodies littered in corners building up a sense of suspense for sephiroth's power and ruthlessness just like back in 1997 this moment is extremely effective in highlighting the terrifying potential of this universe's big bad in fact much of our exploration through monarch is concentrated around building martin hatch up to astronomical heights we see him from a distance tearing soldier's limb from limb we find correspondence detailing how frightened monarch workers are of him he crosses jack joyce in a cut scene as a formless shadow looming over us considering cutting us down but leaving us alive because he thinks we're useful in any other game you'd expect all of this build up this dedication of an entire section to pay off with a confrontation of some kind but if you're this far in the video you'll know that that's not the case with quantum break martin hatch vanishes from the story being reserved for the post-credits scene and i've got to ask why we'll get to quantum breaks final bosses in a moment but there's categorically no reason why martin hatch shouldn't be in there i understand that lifeboat productions killed a version of him in the tv show already and remedy wanted to keep him around for sequel bait but even a set piece where he needed to survive exposure to him rather than take him down altogether could have made him one of remedy's most fascinating and memorable villains instead the game plays it far too safe waiting for a sequel that never came [Music] reaching the counter measure jack and liam finally go toe to toe for their epic battle pasty time hero versus his dark reflection action man following liam's fall rise and fall again with the epic music of episode 4's finale ringing in our ears this feels like the culmination of tv show and game finally clashing finally meaning something always dead burke isn't the worst boss in quantum break we'll get there shortly but i can only really say that because he's barely a boss at all he's just a striker enemy that uses a dampener so our powers don't work we shoot him while he flits around the room putting him down like the wounded dog he's become any emotional residents the game wants to bring out of us is cast aside because he's so easy and after four episodes of build up it just feels disappointing grabbing the countermeasure jack has a sudden awkward realization that after all of this he doesn't know what the hell to do with it so we fight through to monarch's time machine he taps a quick date in and charges back a couple of days to riverport university the plan is to get to will before his death and have our dear old brother explain to us what we need to do to save the world and this is awesome the earliest i could go back to was the time that the corps was first activated at the university not much time to rescue your brother i didn't have a choice just like when we flashed back to the early days of the swimming hall returning to the start of the game completes the time travel circle remedy has set up everything no matter what leads back to will paul and jack in the crumbling library the catalyst of jack's adventure is given even more power because it becomes the defining moment of the end game as we tear through the campus having unlocked all of our time powers now the structure of the game reinforces how much stronger we are than our opening hour even if the moment-to-moment combat doesn't live up to its own potential bringing everything back to the start simulates a power fantasy for us the radio calls we overheard in act 1 of soldiers claiming jack was in different parts of the campus now make sense because they weren't just hunting one jack they were hunting too honestly act five's journey back through times when quantum break feels like it's starting to enjoy itself it's just a bloody shame that arrives with less than 45 minutes to go jack reaches will seconds after the library collapsed it turns out as will happily explains he never died future jack the jack we're playing as now always saved him we just didn't get to see that because we were knocked out and stuffed in a truck this is a nice clean explanation all in keeping with what we've learned so far time cannot be changed the only way to stop the fracture here in this time now and jack despite everything he's seen everything he's learned everything he's experienced still believes that time can be changed he's got beth on the brain desperately trying to search for a way to save her life and i want to reach the tv and give him a slap because this is the 50th time you've had this conversation jack get it into your thick skull a fracture interrupts jack and will as they trek on to the time machine and remedy twist the knife when jack spots beth from across the car park frozen in time he sees her considers trying to unlock her from the fracture bringing her with them back to the present but the words of will still ring in his ears it seems at last for a second he understands he can't save her he can't change the past and then in the space of a loading screen the game falls apart paul serene's boss fight is the worst that remedy has ever devised we've covered their shortcomings with bosses in the past but quantum breaks last section feels like it dipped into my brain pulled out a checklist of everything that makes a crappy boss and decided to implement that just to mess with me a bunch of desperate people sitting around in a bunker somewhere waiting for the inevitable jesus paul you stole the cfr jack i stole it and the plan depends on it so i'll take that back now please so let's go down the list item one a boss that can only be hurt at certain scripted moments paul hunkers down in a time shield surrounded by strikers who overwhelm the player he's invulnerable in this state we couldn't hurt him if he wanted to only able to get a crack in when he stands up and lets us item two a boss with an attack that can kill us in one hit one hit kills by themselves aren't an immediate problem but when that's your big bad's only move it makes them both uninteresting and frustrating to fight paul summons this bizarre area of effect attack which spreads across the entire arena forcing the player to just run away it always starts at one side of the room so we just need to mumble over to the other side but the whole fight is such a cacophony of noise that sometimes you'll miss where he's starting the attack meaning a death feels cheap the result of sensory overload rather than a powerful villain item three setting your checkpoint to before the cut scene if paul does kill us then the game doesn't reset us to the start of the fight we need to sit through a loading screen listen to jack say bigger than two of us for the 20th time then skip that cut scene and sit through a second loading screen before we can leap back into action and finally item four and this is the big one a boss fight where you're not actually fighting the boss you're fighting his minions paul summons a handful of strikers during each phase we need to kill them first so he'll open himself up it means that this final fight friend versus friend is actually friend versus friends henchmen an hour ago we saw paul kill beth we liked beth her downward spiral tugged at our heartstrings we want to sink our teeth into paul serene time travelling hyper capitalist not pulsarine's stupid mates and so with a caved in head and no last words paul serene dies splayed on the tiles of the swimming hall jack barely sniffs at the death of his old friend no pain in his next words as he and will carry on to the time machine slotting their macguffin into place and in their own words saving the universe jack pours all of his power into the countermeasure and supercharges it blasting a stabilizing field throughout time and fixing the fractures he and will have stopped the end of time from happening right which raises the question in the end did jack joyce in fact change things he averted an apocalypse that both beth and paul saw with their own eyes that shouldn't be possible if nothing can be changed how did jack prevent a pre-ordained doomsday well simple he didn't there are plenty of clues we can find to tell us this the end of time that beth witnessed that paul and monarch were preparing for didn't happen in 2016. it will happen in 2021 beth notes this date down in her journal paul has it up in his office but through the manipulations of martin hatch and the increased frequency of the fractures he started to doubt himself believing that the end of time was happening much sooner than he believed jack didn't change anything in five years the end of time will hit just as it always had was he right or is it possible to change things no clarisse we've been over this in the game's closing seconds jack's interview comes to a close and the game gives us a nice long tease for what would come martin hatch is now the formal head of monarch he's so impressed by jack's power that he offers him a job and jack realizes he's inherited paul's junction ability seeing two realities branching off into the future sequels that were lost to time in the run-up to the game's release sam lake pitched quantum break to audiences of the first season of one large story spanning gears and timelines and characters but even before we got to play as jack one thing was clear remedy's ambitious project wasn't going to combine tv and games after quantum break won perhaps there would be spin-off shows but whatever form a sequel would take it wouldn't look like trans media there's a brilliant quote from ben salter of phoenix bazaar that sums up the biggest problem with microsoft and remedy's experiments so rather than try to bastardize it i'll just read it for you here verbatim consisting of around 100 minutes of content the tv show wasn't a tv show it wasn't even a mini-series quantum break will be remembered as a game that included four 20-minute choose-your-own-adventure live-action cutscenes i would argue that the only successful thing that came from this hybrid was how necessary the tv show was to the story that remedy crafted yes it retread territory that was better explored in the game yes we followed three characters who had very little bearing on jack's adventure but the tv show filled in gaps that the game refused to forming one big entertainment experience but refused to is the operative phrase there everything we got from the tv show would have in fact benefited from being part of the game instead and it could have been the lifeboat should have been a level for us to explore we should have been allowed to experience a shifter through a boss fight rather than watching some smoke in a box on live action the junction episodes could have been extended with more choices and more influences to give us a deeper understanding of the poll we shape you can see how much potential is ingrained in quantum breaks ideas time is presented as such a colossal force of nature complemented by remedy stellar visual and audio design philosophy that it will be a shame not to see these concepts return in the future when act 5 opens with a subway train crashing and shifting through a skyscraper you get just a fraction of this universe's possibilities but when those moments are fleeting replaced with a focus on shaky cam fist fights or conversations about dream cats it's hard not to feel distracted and deflated with the controller in your hand how would you describe quantum break in one word exciting out of all the games you've made which one are you most proud of alan wake is this live action stuff gonna be dumb no i said at the start of this video the quantum break does not deserve to be forgotten to time it deserves to be remembered so titles like it aren't wasted in the future thanks for watching there's a chance that some of you were a little confused when this video popped up in your subscription feed seeing as a lot of you came here from noob's humanist elden ring if that's the case and you stuck around to the end thank you these are normally the videos that i make the noobs humana stuff comes out every couple of months um and would you consider dropping a like so these longer videos can get a wee boost um i had to ask special shout out to my patrons currently scrolling up the left-hand side order of thanks go to gin rummy ross hop unholy biscuit greg greed spade games uzair leon matthew sinclair thompson justin 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Channel: Monty Zander

Views: 82,924

Keywords: quantum break, quantum break review, control, alan wake, alan wake 2, remedy connected universe, remedyverse, mr hatch, mr door, quantum break theory, quantum break story summary, paul serene, jack joyce, aidan gillan, sean ashmore, microsoft, xbox one reveal, xbox tv tv tv, tv, quantum break walkthrough, quantum break tv show, quantum break 2, defiance, syfy, lifeboat productions, quantum break analysis, quantum break longform critique, monarch solutions

Id: mK7gV2rL7cs

Length: 119min 59sec (7199 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022