#SAM LAKE MAX PAYNE UPGRADE#

Potentially, under the right conditions, it's endless. It is this strange place of power, this shifting place that seems to be this skyscraper from the outside, but when you get inside, it turns out to be much bigger than the outside would lead you to believe. This building is a mystical, unexplainable place in itself you can chase and discover bits and pieces of why that is the case, but it is the case. The Bureau investigates and tries to contain and use the unexplainable phenomenon it discovers. She goes in, and it's like, buckle up and liftoff, and it starts to get crazy. It's part of the inspiration, certainly, yes. Is The Oldest House based on the Titanpointe Building on Thomas Street? It's this bleak, brutalist architecture, concrete, windowless skyscraper, kind of hiding in plain sight. The game is set in present day Manhattan, and we start, essentially, from a very ordinary New York street with yellow taxis driving by, and our hero, Jesse, has come here because she has these unresolved mysteries in her childhood that she's been trying to understand all her life, and now she's been brought here, to this building that is the headquarters of this secretive bureau, a building called The Oldest House. The idea here is that, at the core of the mystery, is this very secretive clandestine government agency called The Federal Bureau of Control. What is the story of Control? What is The Bureau? Maybe we are not force feeding the answers and holding the player's hand, going 'Look, this is the next clue,' but it's out there it's there to be discovered. You can chase the mystery, you can try to find answers. That was our starting point: let's lean in more on exploration, choosing different missions, what to take and where to go, and maybe, with that, came the idea that it can be challenging and it can be fragmented in some ways that the players can go in and piece it together and do their own interpretations of what this possibly means, and ask a lot of questions. That was a requirement for us to serve the gameplay, and be able to do all of these fun and crazy cool gameplay ideas that we had. Let's just embrace it and go as far as we can, and trust that the gamers will follow and want to understand this mysterious, trippy world we are creating. Let's go all the way, and if it ends up being weird and strange, we don't worry. That was our take on mainstream! (laughs) Yeah it had time travel and it ended up being complicated nonetheless, but here we just decided to, ya know, let's have no stops. With Quantum Break, the vision we had for that led to a mainstream experience. Early on, we decided what we wanted to achieve in gameplay, and then it became more like, 'Okay, now let's create fiction and story that makes this possible and creates a world that elevates these ideas and makes these things possible.' You can throw around dead ragdoll bodies. You can levitate, you can use telekinesis in different forms to break the surroundings and use them as a tool or a weapon. With the supernatural powers that Jesse has, there's a lot of physics-related things.

We've gone as far into that as the current-gen tech allows, and dynamic destructibility of the environment is a big thing for us.

Max Payne 2 was revolutionary for its realistic and stylized ragdoll physics. On the gameplay side, we have been investing a lot in physics. So we combine these elements to give you more of a sandbox action experience where you can customize, you can try out different things.

#SAM LAKE MAX PAYNE UPGRADE#

It's this changing, shifting thing that you can also upgrade and customize, depending on the situation. Kind of a supernatural version of an agent's service weapon, the Director's Pistol. Jesse, our hero, has this mystical service weapon. Slightly different from our previous games, we wanted to try out an approach of 'gameplay first.' We wanted to create a more sandbox type of action game experience, with these strange supernatural powers that the main character has, to get different upgrades. World-building has been a big focus in this one. We're expanding our world so that the player has more to discover, more to explore, and can go in again and discover new things. We are a bit more focused towards taking steps into a game that's not just a linear experience, like our previous games have been. It's a supernatural, third person, action adventure game with a really deep world.

Sam lake max payne