If you want to hear me drunkenly walk my two friends through the full story of Quantum Break (and Remedy's other games!) check out Lore Dump 👇👇 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-j1Vxxv9ebB4.html
I went to a pop up for marketing this game at a downtown spot in the city I m from. it was weird because at the time I think I was one of the only people attending who knew what the game was actually about. They converted a space that once hosted a restaurant into a "fake" restaurant that was frozen in time. Everything, all the props, etc were set up to look like they were moving but stuck in place. You'd walk through the place to get to the basement where you could play the game. But again, the whole time I was there no one on site really explained what the game was about, like they were under instructions to just let people wander around and figure it out for themselves. The amount of design that went into the pop up was pretty impressive.
You can actually find Hatch's eyedrops early on in the room Amy gets interrogated/killed in, I'm not sure which timeline variant it is anymore, but the point is Hatch's eyedrops say that they contain chronon particles. So basically he uses them to keep his eyes from phasing through timelines. A small detail but so cool.
I usually don't lore hunt, but two big things In the game that shook me when I stumbled upon them were and entry about a naturally forming cave that had the properties of the time machines, and seeing the whiteboard to the true end of time just taper off into nothing was so so chilling.
I also hope this game is remembered. I really feel for Sam Lake who pours his heart into his creations only for the company who helped him to realize them to keep a stranglehold on parts of the universe. Then again maybe that’s why he made quantum break is to explain why histories can be the same and certain points will never change. Alan Wake does exist just like Max Payne did exist and all of his creations were made and did happen. They were and are still part of reality just maybe not this reality. Fixed points that will never change in his heart and will never be forgotten. Mr. Door. Are you there?
Max Payne 1 was a masterpiece especially with all the occult symbolism and conspiracy theories on secret societies and such. Everyone plays Max Payne 1 every winter like it's a ritual. Even symbolic of the snow storm that's coming up.
I played this recently on PC and I think it’s a beautiful single player experience. I think the mistake was it was an Xbox One exclusive, and at the time Xbox One wasn’t selling very well.
Excellent video ! As a Quantum Brake defender I have never been more pleased with 2 hour video of somebody shitting on the thing I love, But just as with Shammy's Surge video - I can just tell all this critique is coming from trying to love this tough to like game and I absolutely respect that. Ah yes, and your editing and writing skills are top notch too I guess
I love how you contextualize the game's development and company/industry influence to give these games justice (for all your vids). It's no guarantee but it helps keep things fair and reminds audiences that these things aren't done in a vacuum..
@@cerealvapist333 Will agree with the previous comment, but they are notably similar which is neat. don't think this will mean anything for the future of Remedyverse, though
I'm happy that Quantum Break was a visual powerhouse in 2016 and it's still a visual powerhouse now in 2022 when you can run the game now at higher resolution, higher fps AND turn upscaling off. A 5700 XT can either do maxed out 1080p60 native rez or 1080p120 with upscaling and a really fast CPU.
I've never heard of Defiance so in the beginning of the video I thought it was just a working title for Quantum Break. Shows how well that experience worked out for them.
Not sure if this is new information or not, but Kyle Rowley - the Lead Designer on Quantum Break - is now co-directing Alan Wake 2! He went to work on Cyberpunk 2077 while Remedy made Control. Promoting an SLT member to game director of AW2 means that - you could argue - we'll see if it truly was Microsoft meddling and difficulties with Lifeboat Productions that made Quantum Break miss the mark. I have faith. Just thought it was worth noting here. ALSO - Have you played Quantum Break? The launch numbers weren't too bad back in the day but I have a feeling most have forgotten about it.
Really cool to see someone doing a deep dive analysis of this game! Great video! I never played Quantum Break but I did watch a lets play on RU-vid and thought it was pretty good. Which probably just (sadly) underscores its problems and lack of interactivity - it is something that is good/interesting to watch, //not to play//. And even that was likely in part because it was augmented by the RU-vidr adding commentary as they were trying to figure out stuff in the story and talking through their own theories, which would especially be the case during some of those longer pseudo-walking simulator and lore dump sections. Also them basically fawning over Lance Reddick's performance was pretty hilarious (and they were right too, he plays a fantastic villain - Sylens in the Horizon franchise is another great example). PS: 100% agree with being disappointed at no Shifters :P
I still wonder why Finnish companies have such high trust with Microsoft. Microsoft first killed Nokia and then they killed Quantum Break. Something tells me Remedy is making the same mistake all over again. I wouldn't trust Microsoft at all personally.
I would say this is my favorite game experience rather than favorite game. I would have so loved to see a multi-perspective gameplay a la Nier Automata than the live action episode's. it's a time travel thriller, let me be thrilled!
As a lover of Alan Wake and an absolute fanboy of Control, I really WANT to play Quantum Break. I recognize that it has some serious flaws, but Remedy's success lives in it's presentation. Which is always on point, successful game or not. The thing that's holding me back is the TV show aspect. One could say that you've already basically shown and explained it to me, so why would that be an issue? Haven't I already watched it by proxy? But no, it was literally built in to the experience. So to play the game with the full experience, so too would I also need to watch the show. Preferably in recommended watching order, as the author intended. The issue is the show itself. It looks... So, so bad. Like, CBS tripe (USA side, not sure what the equivalent is in the UK... BBC Minus?) I can't force myself to sit through it, even if it is just a mini, mini-series. And so I'm caught in this terrible crux: because of the way it was developed, I feel like I NEED to watch the show to get the full experience of the game. But the fact that the show exists and looks awful is actively preventing me from doing either. I think it cycles back to the novelty of the idea itself. I'm glad they embraced it fully and went to such lengths with it. But sitting in 2022 as I am, it really just makes the whole thing seem... Dated. Like a novelty of a snippet of time. But who knows? Maybe someone will crack the code and manage a full, successful integration of the two mediums, and my comment will seem like the thing that's dated poorly
This game was outstanding. It was......an experience. I played it over over a month. Would play a chapter. Make a choice, then watch the TV show and let it sit for a week. Fking loved it.
I’ve watched 3 of your critiques now. They’re second to none and they are as entertaining as they are thorough. Most important they are creative. Fantastic work sir.
Thank you, another awesome analysis. This game does feel like such a missed opportunity, not for TV / Games crossovers, but for a cool sci-fi universe. Thank you for taking the time to go in depth on a game I left alone because of the reviews.
I definitely want a sequel for this one (all of the remedy's games honestly) but this one has some good story foundations especially if they give us a bit more Controll on the gameplay side of things
“How would u feel if a corporate monopoly was taking a huge dump all over your personal history” …I truly feel like this was Remedy’s way of telling everyone what Microsoft and Xbox were doing to them by forcing them to make this game.
I gotta give Defiance credit where credit is due. Devs stuck with it, and it was reasonably playable near the end of the game's life. Josh Strife Hayes did a solid video on Defiance there in their 'Worst MMO Ever?' playlist. TV show was actually really good, and i kinda wish they had the budget to expand it.
Came for Noobus Humanus, returned for the entirety of the Kingdom Hearts Lore Dump (Keeping my fingers crossed for UnionX), staying for the analysis videos. Amazing stuff. Would love to see this continue on to Alan Wake and Control. Control is a seriously great game. One of my favourites.
I've done full critiques of both! Also have no fear on Union X - we're doing it in September (and once we've finished Kingdom Hearts I'm going to guide Chase and Neil through the Remedy verse!)
I want a sequel it would be nice to see a new jack with a changed outfit and more character make the gameplay faster and use time in combat more.Hell it would be cool just to see a revamped jack in one of the control dlc and seeing him help Jesse and the foundation somehow
I will never get this period of time where they wanted to combine tv shows and games, like... it's one thing to just put in small clips like Night Springs in Alan Wake, but to ask the player to just stop what they are doing, put down the controller, and go watch a 20 minute episode? That feels so... antithetical to the idea of gaming as a whole. It especially sounds bonkers to someone like me who has such a hard time starting and stopping things, if I had to watch an episode of a show after playing for a while, it might be hard to pick back up where I last was. Also just... maybe this is another "me thing", but I also don't feel like players would want to go between an interactive experience, to a passive one, back to interactive, (at least, long form passive experiences, bits and pieces of passive stuff in games is fine) it feels like it would be jarring... I definitely wanna play this game at some point, it's in my back catalogue of games, but I'm not sure I will watch the TV stuff as a play, or maybe I will binge it later on on RU-vid lol
@@stuglife5514 yep the TV show was decent no where as good as the books, but still good. You can probably find the episodes online somewhere if you wanna give em a watch
Damn, talk about Synchronicity: In Act 5, where he mentions the radio call-outs about Jack being all over the place suddenly making sense reminded me heavily of an early section from "Titanfall 2" (haven't finished it yet, but it's super fun and uses the time stuff in such a cool way). So I went ahead and checked which game came first and they both released in 2016! "Quantum Break" in April and "Titanfall 2" in October. After a bit of googling, I was able to find a Wikipedia article that said they wanted to use the concept in the first Titanfall game but didn't have time to implement it. So there ya go, Multiple Discovery in all its glory? Lawl.
Great video as always. I haven't seen/played Quantum Break, but I'm here for narrative experimentation. Control was a great experience for me and I jumped in blind. Enjoyed everything. Remedy seems wild and bold with their stories, almost like when Soul Reaver 1&2 were new (Amy Henning wrote these games I think). Not necessarily in structure, but in innovation for its era. Soul Reaver brought Shakespearean stuff into games proper. Remedy seems to go full James Joyce or maybe William S. Burroughs since there's scifi stuff. Again, I'm here for it. Would love to hear your take on The Surge series. That song playing in the save rooms is worth analysis in itself.
Frankly, I loved all the slow burn sections, including the prologue. I spent a lot of time reading documents and drinking in the world, while the shooty shooty bang bang often felt a bit too much like a drag, like it's distracting me from the worldbuilding. It took me 17h to 100% the game, on hard mode, and I feel like the time spent in combat (especially in one late game area with an elevator, which had a checkpoint all the way *before* said elevator, with the next not until after beating a mini-boss, with a bunch of collectibles in-between) was much more than calculated in the video. I think it's very different depending on how aggressive you play, and difficulty. I actually loved that we never actually saw Beth's experiences properly, though. Only getting her depression, and diary, reinforced just how deep that despair must've been. I didn't need to fill her shoes in a gameplay section or cutscene, or TV episode - I needed to *imagine* the hell she has lived from words she wrote to herself. Coupled with her present-day actions and words, that was more than enough to make me empathize with her, and understand how broken she has become.
Not gonna lie, this video reminded me there were upgrades in this game. I played through the whole game in 2017 without knowing there were any skill upgrades
Thanks for the video, again excellent as always. This essay videos are amazing, and luckily you like Remedy's work, so we get a a couple of them about their games. I think I just feel happy we're going to be able to see Remedy being Remedy with Alan Wake 2, and after seeing how happy Sam Lake was when giving the news of the new AW, I cannot but hope for the best.
@@MontyZander Why not play both? The original and the remake? Mainly just to see where they differ, because recent remakes like Final Fantasy 7 and RE3 have massive things they change, like in FF7 Arieth or Areith, I dunno how it's spelled, she doesn't die in the remake and in RE3 they leave out an entire section of the game, the clock tower. It would be cool to see that from you, I've binged all your video game critiques, including the ones where I disagree with your political stance. It's always fascinating to see how peoples politics change the way they view media they consume, like your BioShock Infinite and Watch Dogs 3 critiques, I might have disagreed with portions of it but they were still fun to watch!
Absolutely amazing breakdown, and it is truly a shame of what this game could've been. Literally just finished playing it yesterday, and it was a quite enjoyable game after all. A lot of stuff that you described is exactly how I felt about a lot of elements of the game, especially the episodes stuff. I think Quantum Break quite successfully executed the concept of the tied together game and TV show experience, with the moments from game influencing show, and moments from show influencing the game, but it doesn't remove the fact that this concept is just bad and flawed from the start (which you mentioned in the end of the video with that article), and that this "game experience" executes them fairly well and still fails just further hardens this point imo. The biggest issue for me also with the episodes (apart from B-line story and quite cheap production) is how immersion-breaking it is, for basically no reason. They don't really provide "relax" moments between action moments, because those already exist as those "walking simulator" sections, as you called them, and it's ends up being just distracting more than anything. One more thing that I think you missed (very minor, but still) is that in couple of places they "teased" a bit Bureau of Control: in game after finding one of the quantum ripples, you can check the document composed by Monarch scientists, who tracked and found the events that this ripple caused, and in that document is mentioned "Bureau of AWE" (Altered World Events), which is neat I think, even though it's not exactly the same name, but it's easy to understand what's being referenced. Also a question, what do you think about if Remedy made a "remake" of sorts of this game, fixing basically most of the stuff (and ditching episodes completely, obviously) and expanding/bringing to the game all the stuff which was cut? I think this game's world and story are just too good for the game with which we ended up. Obviously the fact that Microsoft owns the IP, that the game is very new (from the point of making a remake) and also that Remedy is already working not only on AW2, but also remakes of Max Payne 1 and 2 for Rockstar, means it probably won't be even considered in the next 10 years or so, but I'd really like to see the return of Quantum Break, in some shape or form.
Hey thanks! I totally missed the Control teases - my bad! I'm not sure I'd be keen for a remake. But I would like to see Jack eventually cross into Jesse Faden's realiy in the future. The end of time could still be an interesting threat for the FBC to handle, and one thing I didn't really give QB credit for was how engaging its cutscene direction was. Similar to Alan Wake, typicaly the cutscenes are really engaging. That's something I'd like to see Control adopt a little more of if we get a Control 2.
@@MontyZander Well, maybe not a remake then, but yeah, some sort of crossover of those games lore, and agree on the end of time, but I guess it's just same thing about it being Microsoft's IP, meaning probably unlikely that they'll do that crossover, considering also that QB is definitely not the fan's favorite. I really lacked that cutscene direction in Control you mentioned, so hard agree on that, too. And well, I think there's just not that many of them in the first place, and most of them are character dialogues or even monologues (if considering hotlines or videos from Darling as cutscenes, for example). But at the same time, I guess it's sort of "grounds" the game a bit, which could've as well been a conscious choice, same as making Jesse "hidden in plain sight", or something like that, if I remember correctly from your Control critique. Not saying it's necessarily good, but at least I think I get what they were trying to do. On a side note, I watched your videos on Avengers and GotG, and wanted to ask, did you play Outriders? Not a superhero title, but also published by Square Enix, and it had the, let's say, interesting marketing campaign, mentioning everywhere that it is not a "Game as a Service", while being literally a looter-shooter, and being sort of in the same direction and feel as Anthem/Division/Destiny etc. Personally I think it's somewhat underrated, and the game is quite good, but it had very rough launch and fixing it took them like 6 months, or something, but despite that, would be cool if you checked it out.
@@ReptVlad I haven't played Outriders - no - but I followed the rough release! I'll consider putting it on my list if there's another content release though
I originally found your channel because of your video on Control and I have to say, I pretty much love all your videos. The Noobus Humanus ones are definitely a lot of fun but I'm glad that the popularity of those hasn't deterred you from making these longer critiques of games
@@MontyZander I heard you say you're reading Atlas Shrugged in preparation for that and I have to say it's the depth with which you approach these projects that I'm really into and I can't wait for the video
Could we get a video about Returnal? It’s a rogue-like that really took advantage of the PS5 and was quite challenging, and much like Souls games, had a divided response that either loved or hated the challenge. My gfs cousin is currently staying with us, and he loves the souls games, and he really took to Returnal. I think it’s a very refreshing take on the genre. Thematically, it hits all the right notes for me.
What is interesting is how well Remedy learned from the mistakes of Quantum Break and integrated the most potentially impactful aspects in their later titles. The frustrations around the live action feeling cheap or disconnected was solved by scaling it down, choosing a very grounded aesthetic for both aspects, and involving characters that are more central in the game. Even the junction ability is somewhat revisited with the plot board in Alan Wake II where the potential outcomes are central to narrative progression and gameplay. It is a shame that a sequel done without Microsoft is impossible due to the IP ownership.
I love how this essay itself jumps around from event to event, disjointed from linearity. Out of place. Out of time, perhaps? It's a very nice editing touch, Monty, even if it isn't intentional.
Perhaps, this is my own personal nostalgia shining through, but I feel like that "dream cat with bear claws" remark made by Emily in the first episode of the show is meant to be a reference to Brooke Nevin (the actress playing Emily), who is known by many as Rachel from the Animorphs TV show. Two of Rachel's signature morphs are a cat and a bear. Given that Shawn Ashmore played Jake in the same show, I can't imagine that's a coincidence. Of course, does this mean the Animorphs are part of the Remedy extended universe as well? Eh, probably not.
Omg that's Rachel! That's how I know the actress! I know this is a year+ old but thanks for this comment, so cheesy but perfect for a Remedy product lol
Unrelated to your video, but I still hope they figure out some way to connect Quantum Break to the bigger Remedy universe, especially seeing as Alan Wake does appear at the beginning in the university on some tv show or something. But I think that's just me hoping, because I love time travel media and really like the time travel mechanic in this game and I'd be super interested how they solve that whole "end of time" thing since it can't be changed. Plus seeing the end of time would be super cool too. Also some boards near the end of the game in Paul's office I think, where Paul is like planning out what the timeline is, have mentions of some weird stuff that was never explained anywhere else in game and I'd love to know what Remedy was planning with all that. (idk if this should be it's own comment, guess I'll just add it as a footnote to this. I was always a bit confused on how it's said in-game that events cannot be changed, yet Paul and anyone with those powers can see into the future and change the future... But I guess thinking it over, it makes a little bit of sense? Just like real life, the past is set in stone, but the future is subject to change. It's just that in this story, some people have their personal pasts set in the future. So events that are not in anyone's personal pasts, are the objective future, so can be changed, whereas the past cannot be, which includes anyone's personal pasts. I think... lol )
i cant help but feel like this game was a exciting vision strangulated by a meddling publisher trying to enforce their corporate board idea of the consumer ( not player ) wants P.S also they were not far off with the end of times being in 2021 just food for thought
It's even more interesting to hear Phil Spencer talk about the launch of the Xbox One today. He cites Microsoft's handling of Quantum Break as a low point for the execs
The Xbox One I bought in 2016 was the Quantum Break bundle, it came with codes for the game for both xbox and windows 10 and then after setting up the console I got a message from Xbox that sent me another pair of codes which was hilarious. I didn't start the game for a couple months but when I did I really enjoyed it. I really liked Shawn Ashmore as Iceman over the years so having him as the protagonist of a game with a tie-in live action show was pretty nice. I 100%ed the achievements and then did it again in 2019 and I still really enjoy the story, especially the character of Beth and her story
I worked at Trion for their first launch, Rift and through Defiance. It was a fucking nightmare. It was terrible. It was so broken at launch and because it failed so hard there were MASSIVE layoffs at Trion that I got swept up in. It was one of the worst game launches I ever worked. There was one point where the game was so broken I had to train the QA department to fix issues to help the support team keep up with their tickets.
I actually really liked Defiance. The show was a genuinely good sci fi western, and the links to the game where very surface level and shallow, but it was still amusing to see the start of the show have the main character carry around a mcguffin that, having played the MMO, He stole from me! and in some later episode where they are dealing with a pandemic, I was the one to initiate the airdrop that saved the town. (obviously by me, I mean anyone playing the game and doing the appropriate quests but thats the experience I got). The actual game isn't very fondly remembered but It was an ok Destiny/Warframe like MMO shooter. I had put in a decent bit of time into. As for Quantum Break, it too was an interesting experiment, and I enjoyed the gameplay, what little there was of it. Its definitely the Remedy game I'm least likely to replay, but I certainly don't regret playing it.
hey :) just wanted to say that your channel is a god sent! i discoverd your channel because of your noobus humanus series a few month ago . i really love your critique videos and binched the whole lore dump playlist so now im here to fulfill chases wishes :D please give us the kingdom hearts union x lore dump! thank you for the massiv effort you put in your videos
I've been thinking on how to rewrite or reword the "Time can't be changed but there is still multiple streams" thing that the game bables about, and the main thing I am thinking about is math. You know that you can to multiple different "arrangments" of math to get the same valid conclusion- example is that you can shorten the long line of adding numbers to each other just to two numbers multiplying each other, or sometimes enven shorten it to a one number to the power of a number, essentially havint 3 ways to achieve the same (for sake of simplicity) unchanging result. You could use this example to explain the timeline shennanigans of Quantum Break- the result of the equasion will be the same, but you to the steps to get there a tad bit differently, you shortened the multiple step proces of additive actions with multiple people to one multiplicative action with one person because you for example killed an important person, or went a different street
Thank you so much for this video! I'm simple. Any Remedy related content I see, i click on. I really hope that after this next phase of Remedy titles, (Alan Wake 2, Control 2, and project condor/vanguard), the company will revisit rights to the Quantum Break IP and bring it back into the fold.
I always considered giving this a try as I love any sci fi that has to do with time manipulation so maybe after watching this I finally will, also love the videos keep up the good work.
I've always had a soft spot for Quantum Break because I do find the time travel story really good. The "TV show" aspect is silly but it doesn't destroy the gameplay sections. It does however fall below the likes of Control or Max Payne 1 or 2.
Completely unrelated to your video, but I could imagine a game set in the end of time, where someone is sick and tired of dealing with the horror that is seeing time frozen and the Shifters and everything, just deciding to take off their equipment. In a sorta sad "I will freeze and either time will never restart and this will basically kill me forever, or as soon as I take this off, I will experience time restarting and get out of this mess" Which reminds me of this reddit nosleep story I read once, something like "Time travel isn't what you think it is" where the characters get stuck in a timeless void as a result of a time travel experiment, and the only way out is to stare out at the endless abyss which puts you into a trance and causes you to lose your sense of time, so they basically have to hope that staring out will let possibly millions or billions or trillions of subjective years of time pass without them realizing it, and maybe get them out of this mess and return back to normal time.
I think Jack inabitily to grasp anything has hands down one of the best payoffs in anything ever "I'll come back for you" is such a deliciois piece of dramatic irony, I adore it. Like, holy shit, IT'S ALL HIS FAULT. He ultimately will kickstart all this mess. He will create 2023 end of time in attempts to save Beth, and in doing that will kill her and destroy everything. Jack is one of my favorite twist villans ever, and the fact that it flew over the head of so many people is killing me.
Hey love the channel amazing commentary and editing. I was wondering how do you capture the game audio without the music. Are you pulling clips and editing the audio out or are you playing the game capturing game play and and Turing music audio off ? If you are editing the music out what program are you using
I play twice - once with default settings (music etc) turned on, and then a second time with the music off! I capture both times. It’s not always perfect though - I need to get a lot better at capturing footage! For mic recordings I use a Yeti mic and Audacity. For video editing I use Filmora. For background music I typically use copyright free songs from artlist. I’m thinking I’ll make a video documenting my process next year so will walk through it in as much detail as possible!
@@MontyZander wow thanks for such a detailed reply. screen capping this for when you have millions of subs. Seriously though im not the first or last to say this but your videos are extremely well made. Ive worked on a dozen or so video essay projects with friends and collaborators over the years and by far your videos are a cut above the rest.
So I played this at release, and yes the pacing is awkward and there isn't enough gameplay on offer here. However, I had just gotten an Xbox One that year and at the time I really liked it. This game felt very "next gen" especially in the realm of the graphics for me when I could finally get a new console. Great video about a flawed game that I have a huge soft spot for.
What if Quantum Break's events (or a version of them sufficiently distinct as far as IP laws are concerned) is what kicks off the Remedyverse, and is what creates at least some of the AWE and other "realities"? I think there is some potential to it based on themes and some general ideas. The many worlds interpretation of Quantum physcis would be particularly intersting here as it would fit perfectly with many of the themes and ideas of Quantum Break. Sparing everyone the lecture, the main point is that any decision creates a fork in the timeline in two realities from that point on (i.e. their past is entirely the same; not identical, the same, and neither is the "real" one, they both are). Timelines/Universes created by quantum phenonema aren't parallel or distinct. There is no timeline, just a time tree. And time travel is funky because going to the past it is uncomplicated (singular common past, it is a line going back up a branch). Moving forward is messy, in every subsequent fork (which there should be bajilions every instant from each of the bajilion of things that count for quantum "choice"). And if you're trying to go back from the past to your original present, you best make sure you never altered enough of your parent branch's past so that your branch was never created but rather others. Imo this angle could be quite interesting to analyze the game, but let's focus just at the the end of times here. Maybe "times" end because something manages to travel back all the way back to the big bang, right before any quantum "decision" happened, when there wasn't even a primordial timetreetrunk from which all other fork from, but a singular timepoint. But now instead of haivng the universe go bang as thought it has, it go bang a bit differently. With this new observer forcing earlier forks in the timetree, you end up with a branch that resembles most of the universe we know/people in QB knew. But also other branches where their laws of physics consolidated complitely different from ours, like Polaris'. That is, to the characters in QB, times (as they knew) do end - the old timetree they came into existed in is gone, _rewritten_ out of reality from not just a _dark place_ but a "dark" nothingness so complete not even space itself yet existed there, replaced by this new one with its uncanny similarity to theirs in some ways and gross differences.
I always joke that "Quantum Break" is Control's very rough first draft. Quantum Break had a very cool look. The abilities were awesome. But the whole thing was squandered by a messy and uninteresting story. A very boring protagonist. The antagonist was just as boring (and he's played by little finger!). The only character that was interesting was this character "Beth". I thought the actress who played her should have been the main protagonist as she had something special going on about her. Imagine my surprise when a few years later the bring out "control" which has the actress who plays Beth is the main protagonist.
still in the first quarter of the video but yeah I recall when I went through it the first time, it was kinda confusing as to why the game would offer choices that change the story when the entire point of the game is that time cannot be changed. Though I will say that a TTRPG called Continuum at least offers some answer to this, which is the idea that only what is "known" cannot be changed. Essentially anything that is your subjective past is fixed, even if through time travel that past is technically in the future. But anything you haven't experienced yet is still up in the air as to how it exactly plays out. Which would explain why certain things like say 9/11 and whatnot are unable to be changed, because the characters already lived through it, but other things like whether certain characters live or die can be changed, because they hadn't actually experienced them yet. Essentially this empowers time travelers to, intentionally or otherwise, create fixed points in time by going to the future and back. This is pretty much the core problem of the End of Time. Because one of the time travelers already went there, they've effectively locked it in as a fixed event that has to happen and now there's nothing that can be done to change it. But events between the present and that point haven't been visited yet, they're not yet in anyone's past, thus things leading up to it can still change. I know that this is mostly me applying external logic to the story that isn't explain very well in the game but it at least makes sense to me I guess lol
I myself found you through this content, and it's what I'm here for, as I fell off the souls like a long time ago...mostly because I want From Soft to make me more giant robot depression simulators...armored core, I want more armored core. All that said, this was the one I found boring. i mean, it's not bad from a purely technical perspective, it even looks really good in some places, and the idea of short breaks using the live action episodes to fill in some story gaps, and even allowing you to influence them is kind of a cool one, and the little things you can do like the formula, the standee, or about half a dozen others are neat. The problem is...I'd seen this done before. I'm an old hand at scifi. My mother read Red Planet to me and my sister when we were kids. I was raised on things like Sliders. Multiverse theory and time compression is easy for me to get behind, but this is...simple is the best word for it. It pretends at being complex, because to the layman it actually is since there are people who have trouble wrapping their head around effect being the thing that initiates its own cause, along with predestination and worlds outside of time. I'm not one of those, so the premise bored me quickly, not helped by the milk toast protagonist, or the lackluster portrayal of time travel. The Eternity Organization of Issac Asimov would have been so much cooler to have here, people screwing this time to 'benefit' mankind, but doing so in the most dickish ways possible because they're a bunch of assholes. Or Robert Heinlein's Time Corps. which would have just walked in and shot people, because they take the direct most route to what they want, and while they like to minimize damage along the way, they don't pussyfoot around. Heck, Timeshift from just a few years earlier had more time travel abilities and things to do with them, allowing for a few interesting ways. It even said that reversing time before the current era on living beings causes them to go nuts, which is a neat idea. Or, for a bit in the future, Re:Visions on Netflix is an anime that does a 'Time War' better even than Doctor Who, as it was more than just people blasting at each other. In that, the antagonist and protagonist are outside of time, allowing them to screw with their personal timelines, trying to create circumstances where only one of them exists anymore. Watched in episode order, there are the odd moments, and strange happenstances that just pile up and up. Watching again after they'd given you the final revelation, and everything clicks. Heck, Pulllea Magi Madoka Magicka(I probably mispelled that), deals with the idea of a time reset, and even of time loops causing changes due to building, 'Karmic Destiny' around the one whom the timeloop is based. All of those are more complex than, Time Travel is possible, but it can't change anything because predestination is a thing. That, I think, is the problem. This world is not interesting on its own, not enough anyway. The characters NEED to be the driving force here, especially once they establish that the time crash is coming. But none of them can carry that load, and even the revelation that 'shifters are people and always have been shifters because they exist in all points in their own personal timeline simultaneously' isn't good enough, especially since, well, like you said, we know little to nothing about them, and never will given everything else. It would have helped if our protagonists in this picked up on stuff easier, but they couldn't assume all the players could wrap their heads around the concepts, again remember when people were confused by the MCU's multiverse? They were aiming for that same audience, rather than a more hardcore scifi audience., even though that was who Remedy targeted with Alan Wake. They wanted the Max Payne audience though, and so they went for a wider net. Obviously, given what happened, we know it didn't work. I'm rambling now, but suffice it to say, of the 3 'Remedy-verse' games, this was the one I sold. Yes, that's right, after bitching about him, I still own my old copy of Alan Wake. I haven't played it since I beat it when I first bought it, and never played the DLCs, but I kept it. Quantum Break though, it didn't deserve to be kept, and so I shipped it off. Sad I did given the prices now, but eh, it happens. I still have copies of some old SMT games worth more. IMO, what this game needed wasn't to drop the Live Action stuff, as that was it's Unique Selling Point, but more...lean into them as the book ends of each idea. Those are the places where you have the viewer just watching and listening, so use them for that. Make our protagonist a man of action, not a man of words. Heck, maybe go Silent with him, like he himself is already a shifter when the game starts, because he will have been going to become one, and thus explaining his powers, and 'future flashes' he gets because he's seeing all of time play out at once. Have the live action bits give us backstory for the world. Heck, make them flashes he's having to characters he's seeing, or shaking hands with, giving him info he wasn't supposed to have, at least he thinks so, until the end, he gets to the Liferaft, and discovers the Contingency is someone absorbing the Time Crash into themselves, and thus becoming a sort of 'split-shifter'. Add in them being stalked by a shadow for most of the game, that turns out to be themself from a later point in the timeline trying to stop them, something you figure out only as you turn on the thing, ensuring both your own damnation and the time crash to come, and you have a nice lead into others trying to fix this later, as you become the big bad for the series, above and beyond the idiots who made this device.
On the inevitably of time - I took that as "a tragedy is a tragedy because of the characters" kinda thing Nothing can change because Paul keeps making the same choices because he knows best - the doors are being closed because paul can't help himself. He's burning and closing choices for everyone. But Jack could make different choices and change time - ie the companion character
It really is funny thinking about how this game all about time travel uses rewind in such a limited and fixed way, meanwhile now we have TotK actually implementing a systemic time rewind ability
i think the reason juncture choices exist, is to sow doubt in the player wether changes are possible. plus the post credits ending, the nature of shifters as i understand them, and hatch as i understand him, heavily imply that parallel timelines exist and that the zero state (end of time) happens because those parallel timelines colapse into eachother.
One thing I remember from this is that the sci fi suits and accoutrements looked good in the game, but goofy as fuck in the tv show. EDIT: I think you could download the episodes originally, not just stream them. Obviously it made the package pretty big.
If you're, like me, a big fan of Lance Reddick (in all his forms), I can't recommend the show "Fringe" highly enough. It's an amazing show all on its own, but Lance Reddick brings that gruff exterior/heart of gold energy to it. And I know the Resident Evil show on Netflix got (deservedly) poor reception but Lance Reddick is fully worth watching it - he's (no joke) Albert Wesker and where they take it is genuinely a blast to watch for that alone. He also did voice-acting and one of my favorite roles of his is in Rick & Morty "Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender". Thank you, Mr. Reddick, for your work and talent. The world is a little less fun without you.
Finally.. You know I've waited a long time for someone to do this but properly! Congrats man! We all love Luke Stephens but that guy has changed so much with his content that it's very cringe to watch now. You have blown me away with this upload man! Very well done Sir!
such a great concept with visuals to back it. sadly it’s potential wasn’t even scratched. would love to see what other directors could build from this world
Something I can say about QB is that it makes big promises. The powers used in combat were pretty cool, even if it was at mercy of poor gun play. And I’m sad I’ll never get a second instalment. Where they can forget the 20 min episodes, maybe they could have given 10min action and story pieces. Jack could be exposed to the truth of the impending fracture and find some weird way to save Beth. But as expected Microsoft got greedy and stole an IP with infinite potential to put it on a shelf and forget about it. I laugh a little at the irony of parallels of Microsoft and Monarch, stealing something to secure their future. When it belongs to someone else, someone who could do something better with the IP.
I didn't mind Quantum Break though I feel that the hardline path makes no sense because how is a private company able to shutdown an entire city in the US they could have at least made it so that Monarch had a security section of their company which offers their services to hunt a "terrorist" which in hardline they brand Jack as. As for the TV show as a whole they should have worked closer with the game's writers or made it so that show characters don't cross-over with game characters that way we see the overall story from two prospective views and we see that there's someone inside of Monarch helping Jack without his knowledge though if cross-overs what they wanted then that could have been saved for the last episode of the show and last chapter of the game where things would converge together in a climax that's satisfying
I always thought that the obvious interpretation was that the only two people who ever traveled to the future and saw "the end of time" were the ones that would die in the story. Metaphorically or physically they saw their own death and couldn't understand it so they became desperate to avoid it. Anyone else thought that or just me?
Im sure someone has already pointed this out, you are not forced to stream the live action bits. You can download them all in a single download. At least on xbox. I know this because i recently played through the game.
I enjoyed the game. It was just short and lacked any real reason to play it more than once. The TV side stuff with it was eh, probably should have just been in engine cut scenes.
Gameplay is great in Quantum Break. Problem is the game is fun when you get all collectibles to max out the power AND play it agressive. Without upgrades and playing it as a cover shooter, it's really tedious.
@@raresmacovei8382 Ah. The classic case of "you're playing it wrong" that the next game had to reteach (Demon's/Dark Souls shielding-> Bloodbourne attacking to get health back)
Paul, Beth, Will: "You can't change the past" Jack: *changes the past, constantly, doesn't realize it* "Yeah, only the future. But I kinda want to change the past" (I mean, Quantum Ripples are affecting the future. If Jack doesn't do this - it will cause that. But if you can't change the past, he shouldn't be able to do that, by doing this.) #JackCantRun SPIRAL INTO DEPTH! That's why it's Alan Wake!
ALAN WAKE 2 SPOILERS BELOW!!!!!!! So there are two characters in Alan Wake 2 who are supposed to be references to Quantum Break. Sherriff Breaker, who's played by the same actor as Jack Joyce, and the previously hyped up Mr. Door. I've heard that the role was originally going to be for Lance Reddick, however due to scheduling conflicts and the actor's unfortunate passing last year, it did not happen (David Harewood still crushed it). It's heavily implied through clues like dialogue and the word "shifter" written on the ground of the "Herald of Darkness" section that Breaker and Door are alternate universe versions of Jack and Hatch, intrinsically connected across timelines. This makes me love how Remedy was able to connect their connected universe with Quantum Break while getting around the legality of it.
I recently tried to play this game after going through Alan Wake 1 and Control again and loving the hell out of both of those games - man, the pacing in Quantum Break can be a _real_ slog. I enjoyed the somewhat basic, but visually exciting gameplay as such, but those bits genuinely do make up only a tiny fraction of the experience. What a bizarre, heavily flawed idea. I love Remedy, but this one absolutely did not click for me at all. It certainly doesn't help that the TV show elements just come across as sort of inept either. They had a handful of fantastic actors available, but the cinematography and colour grading could not be any more bland and really undercuts any and all attempts at drama in those bits to me.
When I played through, I think that the show and the game were mismatched at the end. I would meet up with a character in the game that had died in the show. Not deal breaking but it threw me off
Haven’t played this game yet, but only 40 minutes in of the video, listened to both “remedy lore dump” videos and the other remedy videos on this channel, and the weird consistency of the world rules, the “bland/blank slate protagonist “ in QB and control make since in the theory of Alan Wake trying to write himself out of the lake. More of the “hit Alan Wake Expansion game” idea of escape. The “sexy ladies at each building” in that game were one dimensional kinda like the protags. The writing Rule in Alan Wake being broken and him being trapped, while in QB the “time is a flat circle” but choices in game change stuff feel kinda the same. Just a theory though… a Remedy Theory?
