Quantum Break to have “digital doubles” thanks to X1

As you may know, with Quantum Break Remedy is aiming to create a transmedia experience, which will have both the game and the live-TV show as the main sources. Today, speaking with Develop,  Oskari Hakkinen (head of franchise development) stated that the game will feature “digital doubles”  perfectly recreated thanks to the power of the Xbox One.

When I say we can tell better stories with the new hardware it means better facial animation, better, more realistic characters. In fact we’re actually using digital doubles.

That’s the future of what we have right now. The characters look exactly like the actor. Every performance and every nuance is now captured from motion capture and translated on screen directly. So we’re really capturing everything in the facial movements.

He admitted that the team was nervous until they were able to see the results of their newly developed technology, though.

We were worried, until we saw the results that the technology is doing.

We’ve been working towards this for a very long time. We’ve been building different types of techniques and technologies. Now that we have the power to actually achieve that, what we’ve always dreamed of, it almost feels like we jumped straight over the uncanny valley. Whereas we were on the edge before we went into there, with the next generation project for Quantum Break we kind of missed all of that, and we’re talking about now digital doubles

As weird as it sounds, sometimes it will still be needed for Remedy to “fix” a natural walk from an actor, once it gets translated into the game.

There are of course elements there that need fine tuning. One of the downsides if you like of everything being so accurate is that sometimes, a flaw, a natural flaw, can seem like a mistake. So if someone has, for instance, a weird walk, it’s his exact walk, but in the game because it’s not perfect, and none of us are perfect, it might look like it’s not correct.

So then sometimes we may need to readjust their walk cycle or we may need to adapt to certain things so people don’t look at it like it’s an actual mistake

Quantum Break doesn’t have a release date yet, but we’ll surely know a lot more during 2014. The game will launch on Xbox One as an exclusive, although all games by Remedy so far ended on PC as well, so it might not be too far fetched to imagine it on the platform some day.