There’s a lot going on in the script for narrative horror titles by Supermassive Games, and The quarry is no exception. IGN sat down with the game’s director, Will Byles, to chat about the game’s history and its 186 endings. And no, that’s not a euphemism for something else.
Bells in with a manuscript of over 1000 pages, the story for The quarry lends itself to having so many endings. After all, you have nine different playable characters in the game, and the ending you get depends on the choices you make. Not to mention that the story changes and changes depending on your choices. Yet Byles referred to the process as a “mathematical nightmare.”
“Writing a branching narrative is a really interesting exercise,” Byles says. »We are writing a script on a hundred pages, as if it were a film. We develop our character styles, and once we’ve got it, we can start looking at how we divide it into an experience of a full 10 hours. ”
When you take into account the branched paths that players can take in a game like The quarry, you can start to see why you need a powerful script. Again, having two possible outcomes with nine different characters really makes sense.
So how did the team do it? Byles divides it into two parts. First, make use of big and small decisions to ensure that not all choices create a completely different story. Second, smart placement of these choices.
“The big choices we have are these things called Paths Chosen and they will affect the story significantly. We will announce it to you. You never know when it will come up. You will never be warned about it and it can seems trivial, but it’s a big, big deal. ”
Of course, one of the big questions is who survives and what is left of them (to borrow a familiar tagline). Quarry makes it so that you can pretty much kill everyone if you choose to. “With a horror like this, my personal favorite way through it is that quite a few people die quite horribly. But you can also play it straight through and you can have everyone live. It depends on what you want to play.”
You can dive deeper into the game’s history and intricacies by writing it from the link above. The quarry, with genre veterinarians in the lead role Ted Raimi, David Arquette, Lance Henriksenand Lin Shayearrives June 10 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Xbox One and PC via Steam.
And check out our own interview with Will Byles.