Tørnquist refers to wanting to tell stories such as what Red Thread wants to do with Dustborn in a TV show format. Red Thread’s aims for making games with appointment gaming And that includes, you know, single-player games, linear games in some way, but with what we call emotional branching where people have some impact on the story and games that explore storytelling in sort of that shape and form as sort of, you know, like the 10 hour, standalone stories about interesting characters and interesting worlds.” So yeah, I mean, I think we have a sort of very clear idea of what we want to do and how we want to evolve. “It’s a game about lots of words, and we’re good at that, we’re good at putting lots of words into our games. But it’s something that we’re going to be hopefully showing in the near future where you look at it and go like, ‘yep, that’s definitely Red Thread Games doing a thing which is very different from what other studios would have done’. So with Dustborn, for example, we’re doing action, we’re doing combat, but we’re doing our own narrative twist on that, which I can’t talk about now. He continues: “But that doesn’t mean we’re bound to a single game mechanic or a single genre. And it allows us to experiment with new gameplay mechanics because we want to tell stories, that’s what we want to do with our games.” “They allow us to explore new worlds and new themes without being bound to something that we’ve done before or to player expectations. So Dustborn and the games we intend to make in the future are meant to be more focused. “I play them, but I get like a tenth of the way through them and then I’m like, ‘okay, I don’t have time for this anymore’. One personal example Tørnquist provides is Assassin’s Creed. It arguably proves a point made last summer by former Sony Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden about the need for more shorter games. This is in contrast to mammoth 100-hour efforts that are taking more and more time as they become commitment gaming. I think we all feel that a three, four-hour game is interesting, but we want to tell stories that are more like a season of a TV show,” he tells Play Diaries as part of the first episode of Season 5 of My Favourite Game.īy offering that ten-hour “sweet spot” with Dustborn, it allows the player to “dig deeper into lore” and “dig deeper into characters” within a timeframe that won’t be dragged out. And this line of thinking will be Red Thread’s philosophy going forward beyond Dustborn too. The way he puts it, Red Thread Games want to put out games that can still tell stories and narrative with the same amount of depth and meaning you’d get within much longer games. The reasoning for Dreamfall Chapters being that long at least was mostly down to Red Thread feeling it “had a responsibility” to tell its story for series fans but also partly because of a decision to “increase the scope of it to reward our players and to bring everything to a proper conclusion for that saga.”īy comparison, the game after that from Red Thread, first-person mystery effort Draugen was a much shorter effort at around four hours.ĭustborn, the Norwegian developer’s next game, has been in pre-production since last year, but its concept dates back to the anus horribus of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election that was 2016, a year that Tørnquist admits was one that “made me feel like, ‘what the hell am I doing making games? I mean this is not helping the world’”.ĭustborn is looking at a running time of at least ten hours, Tørnquist says. It instead winded up being a 25-30 hour game. After establishing Red Thread and after a successful Kickstarter campaign, he got to revisit that world with Dreamfall Chapters, Red Thread’s first game as a studio as part of a licencing agreement with Funcom.ĭreamfall Chapters was supposed to be a ten-hour game, according to Tørnquist. Specifically, 1999’s The Longest Journey and 2006’s Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, both single-player games. In November 2012, he founded Red Thread Games after an 18-year stint at Funcom to focus on single-player narrative games after the latter’s heavy focus towards multiplayer-centric games following respectively the then-ongoing success of Age of Conan and the launch of The Secret World that same year with EA via EA Partners, the latter project he was integral to as its creative director.īesides The Secret World and other projects, Tørnquist’s other charge while at Funcom was the Dreamfall saga. That mission is providing unique and meaningful single-player stories with a focus on time conciousness.
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