Optional Storytelling

One of our goals for Quantum Break was to create not only a new game, but a new game world—one with a degree of depth that went beyond what was happening to our on-screen characters at any given time during gameplay.

To that end, we seeded Riverport with as much optional content as possible. By definition, “optional content” is something the player doesn’t have to Interact with in order to complete the game—it’s there particularly for those players who’re interested in a deeper and more varied experience. Finding it may at times require exploration and an eye for detail. In the case of Quantum Break, with many of the game’s events determined by the Junction choices, not all of the optional content is available on the first playthrough—much of it changes depending on the decisions made during Junction moments.

There’s a great deal of written optional content in Quantum Break—over 50,000 words’ worth of discoverable notes, e-mail messages and other text-based content. There are also audio recordings, radio shows (hosted by the anti-Monarch Bobby Radford or pro-Monarch Theresa Sedmak, depending on whether the player has chosen the Hardline or PR path in the game’s first Junction moment) and a great number of signs, posters and other images that all serve to give a degree of detail and depth to the story.

Much of this content serves to illustrate Monarch Solutions’ operations in Riverport and give further context to the events we see in the game. To us, it was an opportunity to ensure that players who wanted to dig deep in our lore were rewarded with further information, whether it was about the characters’ backgrounds, fictional science and technology of Quantum Break, Monarch Solutions’ inner workings, or Riverport.

Perhaps even more importantly, it was also an opportunity to humanize Monarch. For all of the ruthless planning and clandestine scheming the company engages in, the majority of its employees are just people doing a job, and many of them are utterly unaware of Monarch’s true purpose. This creates an interesting, and at times uneasy dynamic between people who’re dealing with the end of time itself, and people who just want to know who keeps leaving a mess in the break room. That layer of mundanity isn’t something that automatically comes into play in the course of an intense action game. With optional content, we could explore that and other interesting topics, such as Monarch’s relationship with Riverport, or Serene’s secret history in the seventeen years he spent in hiding.