Fahrenheit archived preview
There's been a lot of talk in the industry about the viability of episodic games. Niche games, such as the AGON series, have been testing the waters for a little while. Now Quantic Dream, creators of Omikron: The Nomad Soul, will be the first big league developer to take the plunge. They signed a deal with Vivendi in late 2001 to bring their ambitious episodic adventure to PC, X-Box and Playstation 2. A dozen Fahrenheit games are planned to be released over the course of a year, with the potential of another series if the first is succesful.
Fahrenheit is set in present-day New York, where mysterious events cause temperatures to drop every day. As life in the frozen and snow-covered city slowly grinds to a halt, ordinary people begin randomly killing strangers in a ritualistic fashion. The central character in this paranormal thriller is Lucas Kane, a man who becomes a murderer against his will. You won't be controlling Lucas Kane all the time, though; parts of the story will be told from the perspective of other controllable characters, such as police inspector Carla Valenti, and a number of Kane's relatives. The plot's omniscient structure should be very reminiscent of ensemble TV shows that zoom in closely on different characters. In fact, Quantic Dream's goal is to bring the television and game paradigms closer together. Fahrenheit will be divided in "seasons" and will play on the classic mechanics of TV, such as cliff-hangers and red herrings. The episodic nature of Fahrenheit also makes celebrity guest star appearances a possibility. With Quantic Dream's collaboration with David Bowie on Omikron in mind, we speculate something will be announced closer to Fahrenheit's launch.
Specifics on the gameplay are still few and far between, but supposedly a lot of the game will revolve around making choices in an interactive story. As project leader David Cage explained to GameSpot: "Fahrenheit is very different from most of today's video games. [There's] no life gauge, no ammo, and no big guns to get on the floor. [It's] just a real-time 3D movie where each action you perform with each character affects the course of the story. Interactive storytelling will really be one of the key points in Fahrenheit." For example, Lucas Kane will find himself in a bathroom of a restaurant, just having committed a brutal murder against his will. At this point you can choose to do a number of things: hide the murder weapon, wash off the bloodstains, drag the body into a corner, or just hightail out of there.
Since Fahrenheit focuses completely on storytelling, and not so much on action, the interface has been kept very minimal -- so much in fact, that there will be no superimposed interface elements of any kind. The actual control method may sound a little unusual. One set of buttons are used to move around the game world, and another set of buttons to more precisely control individual parts of the body. In some circumstances, the game will allow you to stretch out an arm, a leg or the whole body, which has been compared to the lock-picking gameplay in Thief 3.
Quantic Dream has understandably spent most of the last two years creating reusable assets and developing an extensive toolset. The ICE engine was built to streamline the scripting of events and virtual cameras, and the team is rather enthusiastic about their in-house motion capturing studio, which will be used for recording all the character animations. So far it's taken three and a half months of shooting with more than 30 actors for 140 game characters to produce a total of 12 hours of animations -- which is quite a lot, we agree.
Fahrenheit will not be a downloadable series like AGON, but will be a regular boxed product that you can buy in any store. The price of a single installment is said to be comparible to a "two-year-old budget game", though it is unknown how much gameplay will be contained within an episode. Vivendi plans to also regularly release bundles of three or six episodes together, for those who don't want to bother buying them seperately.
Whether the team has the ability to fulfill all of its ambitions remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Fahrenheit is undoubtedly a radical experiment that deserves to be high up on everyone's Hype-O-Meter. The concept of having a brand new game to talk about every month is music to our ears, and in the coming months we hope to cover Fahrenheit to an extent that is worthy of its lofty goals. Remember to stay tuned to Adventure Gamers!
