Fahrenheit

Preview - French developers Quantic Dreams introduce the world's first interactive 3d-adventure TV series.

I feel there exists a strange dichotomy in mass media entertainment. While films and television shows attempt to capture our attention and sometimes our minds and imagination for relatively short periods of time, computer games are getting longer and bigger than ever before. Some games proudly proclaim hundred of hours of game play, or online games that seem to have no end at all. While I enjoy some epic games immensely I sometimes wish the developers had opted for a stronger, shorter story and polished the game play. If you look at 'Max Payne' for example, the game could be finished quite easily within a couple of days but it was immensely enjoyable throughout. So imagine if you could take the format of a great tv show, with short great episodes delivered periodically, and apply those principles to a game. This is precisely what 'Fahrenheit' proposes to do.

The game is being developed by Quantic Dream whose debut title was the ambitious Omikron The Nomad Soul. With Fahrenheit they want to change the way games are released by releasing individual episodes of an ongoing story. Instead of buying the whole game at once you'll pay for just the first level, the pilot episode complete with cliffhangers and plot twists. If you like the game then you wait to buy the next episode in the series, which the developers plan to release monthly. So if you didn't like the game, you've not paid as much for it and need not waste any more money. It's a fairly simple idea as you can see.

Since Omikron the developers have been hard at work on their own proprietary engine called ICE. Looking at the screenshots it seems to be time well spent. The engine is very powerful and has some nice effects that will help in the games cinematic look. For example, being able to have a face half in shadow as someone walks by while the characters lips move in sync with the dialogue. Its lighting system is so powerful that they claim you will actually be able to see the shadow cast by the leg of a pair of glasses on the persons face, having examined a few screenshots it would appear the French developers are telling the truth. Sacre bleu! By developing their own engine the developers have also ensured that the game will have a distinctive feel (i.e. not play like a Quake 3 game) and will be portable to multiple platforms. So expect the game to be released on the PC, Xbox and Playstation 2 at the same time.

The game will be set in the not too distant future in New York. Omikron showed that Quantic Dream have the ability to make a city come to life. In Omikron the streets were filled with people and traffic that would drive around all over the place. The first level had a very dark Blade Runner feel to it. In Fahrenheit the developers also appear to be going for a dark film noir style, with a gritty urban look in a similar style to Max Payne. The story revolves around ritualistic murders taking place all over the city, the people seem unconnected, there is a chill in the air. The weather is getting unusually cold for this time of year. You start in a diner's toilet where one of these murders has just been committed. You just killed him. Now you must run from the police and try and figure out what is happening to you.