A French video game company hopes to do what no gaming company has done before: successfully launch an interactive episodic title that hooks gamers like The Sopranos hooks television viewers.
Quantic Dream, which saw some success with its PC and Dreamcast game, Omikron -- The Nomad Soul, plans to introduce the first episode of Fahrenheit later this year, with subsequent episodes to be released every four months.
CEO David Cage describes the real-time 3-D game -- which follows the story of two detectives working to solve a series of murders -- as an attempt to "invent a new format merging cinema and interactivity." Fahrenheit is being written, produced and directed like a real TV series, with recurring characters and an ongoing story throughout the episodes.
If Quantic Dream can pull it off, it will have succeeded where other episodic titles, like Electronic Arts’ Majestic, and Origin’s Wing Commander: Secret Ops, have failed. Both games were discontinued after neither attracted significant numbers of players. Mainstream gamers bristled at both the pacing and the intrusive quality of online conspiracy game Majestic, while the large download size of each episode of Wing Commander: Secret Ops (about 120 MB) prevented the game from catching on at a time when most people used 56K modems to connect to the Internet (the game was released in 1998). Plans by Arush to sell single episodes of its Duke Nukem game were eventually dropped in favor of bundling all the planned episodes together in one package.
In order to accomplish what others couldn't, Fahrenheit will have to navigate the fine line between open-ended role-playing games like EverQuest and carefully scripted cinematic first-person games like Max Payne -- something that no game has yet successfully done. Instead of being one character throughout the game, Fahrenheit players are able to assume various roles, guiding the development of the plot. Cage compares the role of the player to that of a director.
"Our plot is like a rubber band," Cage says. "It has a beginning, a middle and an end, but the player can affect it by their actions, changing its length or its form. At the end, the experience of two different players can be quite different, but they both have the key information needed to play the next episode."
The company is currently in discussions with two video game publishers plans to release the game for the PC and one or more consoles.
It's not a surprise that no one has been able to do this before, says John Taylor, a video game industry analyst with Arcadia Investments. "Speaking as a consumer, I would be too impatient to wait around. A few months is a long time to wait for each new episode."
But he adds, "A lot of people are talking about the attractiveness of the business model, even though it relies on customers sticking around for long periods of time. There is definitely a lot of creative enthusiasm for the genre though, since it enables you to tell stories that are difficult to tell with other media. Still, people are experimenting, though nothing has defined the category, and whoever gets it right will make a killing."
Quantic Dream hopes it has the goods, and Cage is confident that Fahrenheit storylines will be compelling enough to keep even soft-core gamers coming back for future episodes.
"No one ever claimed that all the episodes of The Sopranos should have been released on the same day to avoid frustration. Waiting for the next episode is part of the experience. We’ll try to re-create this feeling with our episodes, and make the time in between part of the experience. I’m convinced that people will want to play on a regular basis."
Quantic plans to release installments every four months. The company is currently in discussions with publishers, so it's too early to say which platforms the game will be on, and how much it will cost exactly. Cage said that each installment will cost considerably less than what a full title costs, but he couldn't say how much yet.
