Gallery: How Dreamfall Chapters adds guilt and emotion to episodic gaming Gallery Gallery: How Dreamfall Chapters adds guilt and emotion to episodic gaming + 14

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The third game in The Longest Journey saga, Dreamfall Chapters has been a long time in the making. After the second game, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, a shift in focus at original developer Funcom left players with a brutal cliffhanger eight years long, with protagonist Zoe Castillo left in a coma after trying to protect two worlds -- Stark, our own world in the future, and mystical Arcadia, its dimensional twin -- from a threat that could destroy both.

Now, new developers Red Thread Games, formed from the original games' creators, are about to finally answer long held questions and move the fantasy/sci-fi fusion adventure game forward. Series creator and head writer Ragnar Tørnquist talks with WIRED.co.uk about the new game's development, the importance of story, and how he wants to make players feel guilty.


WIRED.co.uk: It's been eight years since the release of

Dreamfall and its cliffhanger ending -- where are you picking up the story?

Ragnar Tornquist: We pick up 12 months later. Zoe has been in a coma for just over a year. She's been trapped there -- put into a coma by her mother. On some level, she's also escaping real life. She doesn't want to go back because a lot of things fell apart at the end of Dreamfall, so she retreated into this dream-world where she has control. She can manipulate things. She can be the saviour she failed to be. Towards the end of the chapter she will come to terms with who she is, leave the story-time and rejoin the land of the living. In the meantime it gives us a chance to acquaint ourselves with Zoe, for older players to come back to what they know and newer players to discover what's going on.

The original Dreamfall was criticised in some quarters for adding fighting and stealth mechanics. Is

Chapters intended as a return to "pure" adventure gaming?

This game is about exploration, observation and interaction with the story. That's something we really wanted to focus on, so there's no combat, no stealth, no arcade sequences.

Read next Gallery: How Dreamfall Chapters adds guilt and emotion to episodic gaming Gallery Gallery: How Dreamfall Chapters adds guilt and emotion to episodic gaming

But there is a lot of information to take in. Looking at a picture of Zoe's dad gives you layers and layers about the characters.

Why does the adventure game genre tend to favour such micro-level detail and characterisation?

We know that's something adventure gamers love and it's something I always feel is missing when I play something like


GTA or Assassin's Creed. You go to locations and I want to dig into the details, but you can't. We try to go the opposite direction, making smaller worlds that have depth and detail and encourage exploration. My ideal game would be something like this combined with GTA 5, where you can wander around this massive world to observe it. Hopefully one day we can make something like that but until then we're working on a much smaller scale. Just being able to see things through the eyes of Zoe is something I think is very important.

How do you maintain dramatic tension in an interactive medium when there are few active threats?

We don't have any arcade sequences, but there are some areas where you have to act quickly because it's important for drama to sometimes have a fail scenario. It's something we discuss often and we made sure to put in frequent checkpoints so you're never losing more than a minute. It's just there to get the blood pumping.

You're also adding some degree of branching narrative to this game, correct? That's something a lot of adventures have shied away from recently.

Yes, choice and consequence is an integral part of the game. It's our theme, it's what the story is about. The choices we make shape our lives in ways that might be unknowable. A lot of games present it as "be good or be evil," and it feels more mechanical, like it's a stat. In this game, we make choices intentionally tough, with shades of grey and subtlety so that you never know what the right answer is. Consequences will come to the player further on down the line and they never know what it is. A consequence might affect another choice and they might come together in unseen ways. Sometimes two choices will lead to the same place in a kind of pre-determined way, and life is like that too, but it's really interesting for us to explore this mechanic of choice and consequence in a way we feel hasn't been done before.

We want to make it an emotional choice, we want the player to feel guilt. Guilt is something the gaming medium can do uniquely.


You can't make someone feel guilty for the actions of a character in a movie or a book because they are doing it. In a game, I am doing it. If I do something that has terrible consequences, I start feeling "Why did I make that choice?" I might want to go back and chance that choice, but if I do maybe something even worse will happen! Consequences might come far, far down the line. There's no right or wrong but some choices might have more dramatic consequences than others.

Adventure games are almost inherently an individual pursuit. Can they be made more social, as players increasingly embrace collaboration in their games?

Well, we've also built a social mechanic around Chapters.

If you want, you can see what everyone else playing the game has chosen, on every platform. We also allow you to connect to your Facebook or Steam accounts to feel like you're playing it with other people. When we play Dreamfall, we're social in the way that people play together on the couch. A lot of people play it like that because it's not about being the one holding the controller; it's about experiencing the story. Now it's like there are even more people on the couch than before. It's interesting to see your friends -- what have they chosen? Have you gone with the crowd or against it? At the end of the chapter we have a narrative wrap-up -- not like a stat screen, it's written as a first-person story shaped by the choices you make. It's very intergral, this mechanic. Every choice does have a consequence -- that's not marketing speak. We really wanted to give players as much choice as possible to shape their own experiences and their friends, their allies, people living or dead will change depending on their actions.

When Dreamfall Chapters was originally released, it was as an episodic game. The Kickstarter switched to a full game, and now you're back to episodic. In short: what happened?

Yes, when we started working on it originally, it was episodic, hence "chapters". When we designed our Kickstarter, we decided -- stupidly -- on going back to doing a full game. But as production got started and we got deeper into it, we realised that the game was becoming longer and more complicated than we first anticipated. That's mostly a good thing but we also realised that if we were going to do a full game, it would mean another year of development. We also think there's something so great about the episodic model from a publisher's perspective. There's something about the anticipation between episodes.

What was the player reaction to going back to an episodic release plan?

We thought it would be a shitstorm. We prepared for the worst. But I think we made a good statement about it and followed up on that well so that people understood why we made that decision. Nobody said, like "I want my money back!" or "I hate you guys!" Everyone thought it was fine. A lot of people thought it was episodic already, actually. They said that they relished the opportunity to play it in smaller chunks rather than binging the entire thing right away, because that gives them more enjoyment by talking about all the different choices, speculating on the consequences. They have the time between episodes to do that. People are coming to terms with it and because it's the way the game was designed, it makes sense.

What do you see as being the production benefits to going episodic with Chapters?

We've been watching forums for eight years, watching the people talking about Dreamfall there. With an episodic release, we'd love to see people talking and theorising, wondering what's going to happen next. There's also the production element, where we can spend time polishing and really focussing on each individual episode as it's released. That's going to benefit both the team and the players. Also, I think that more and more successful episodic games are coming out -- TellTale have made it an art form; plus the new Broken Sword and [DoubleFine's] Broken Age, although they were a little different. The episodic model is one we wanted to explore for the future. It's absolutely righteous.


You've also transitioned the game to console, with Sony announcing back at Gamescom that Chapters is coming to PS4. What made that the right platform for the game?

It's very indie-focussed and I think the PlayStation audience is right for us. It's a great game for the couch, to play together with friends. I really want to play the game on the PS4 myself. [But] Sony announced that Dreamfall is coming first to PlayStation, which caused a lot of confusion. People are thinking like "what about my PC?" Well, you can get it on PC, Mac and Linux -- it's just PS4 is the first console. For everything, it's a time issue. There's definitely a chance it'll show up on Xbox One but the PS4 is great for us.

What sort of length can players expect for each chapter?

How long the episodes are, I don't like to answer because I don't think game length should be something we talk about as developers. It should be about story, immersion and how much fun you have. It won't be super-short. It'll actually be quite lengthy for each episode, because we set out to make this a full game. Our initial estimate was around ten hours for the whole thing but now it's longer than that. So each episode is going to be sizeable. As for how long between episodes, we are going to finish the whole story in the next year. Of course, we're going to make sure each episode is as good as possible but we aren't going to spend a huge amount of time between episodes. I think TellTale are a good indicator of what we should be looking at.

Book One of Dreamfall Chapters is available from 21 Oct, through Steam or GOG.com.