Hands On: Dreamfall Chapters

[Babel-17]

Dreamfall Chapters opens with a series of nightmares, wasting no time before informing the player of the high stakes and gravity of its multi-threaded plot. It’s a personal story, of family and sacrifice, but the potential consequences are cosmic. In truth, it’s not a single story at all, it’s a collection of stories within stories and about stories, taking the disparate worlds of The Longest Journey and weaving a larger tapestry. I’ve played the first three hours and found something quite different to the point and click adventure I was expecting.

Dreamfall Chapters isn’t a traditional adventure game. Tørnquist and his new independent studio, Red Thread Games, contains several ex-Funcom members, but they’re looking to the future rather than the past. A key goal, for this and future games, is to explore ways to build an interactive experience in which the process of playing is structured around narrative and characters rather than puzzles and roadblocks. In Chapters, occasional hurdles require intellectual prodding but, based on conversations with the team and the time spent with the game, the main challenge is to integrate emotional responses into an interactive narrative.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/20/hands-on-dreamfall-chapters/

I got that link from the Kickstarter update I was sent. I'm pretty sure several Beyonders are interested in this game so here's the update in full (I didn't want to hot link the images so I cut them out). https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey/posts/849876

Hello, backers!
Here's a super-quick mid-May update for you, with some brand new screenshots and fresh links to the very first hands-on previews of Dreamfall Chapters. EXCITE!

Our alpha has finally wrapped and we've embarked on the (long and arduous) beta journey. In celebration of that fact, we invited a bunch of journalists to our offices in Oslo to test the game first hand.
In addition to a gaggle of local Norwegian journalists, we had Adam Smith from Rock, Paper, Shotgun — one of the best gaming sites in the multiverse — here for a whole day. We locked him in a small room, fed him solids and liquids, and let him play the first three hours of Dreamfall Chapters without any supervision or guidance.
An alpha version isn't necessarily representative of the final quality of the game. There are missing voices and sounds and textures and characters, there's broken code and broken art, there's placeholder music and placeholder gameplay, and at this stage the game is more of a blueprint of what it will some day become rather than a finished thing.
But we had enough confidence in our vision and work to let journalists loose in our worlds. We could only hope that they'd share our passion for and love of the game...

Here's what he wrote as a result of that exclusive play-through:
"There’s an ambition about Chapters that I hadn’t expected, a desire not just to tie up loose ends in a familiar fashion but to find out what a narrative interactive adventure can be if some lessons are forgotten and some new ones are constructed along the way.
"It’s also surprisingly emotional, even in these opening scenes (...) and a large part of that is due to the excellent score."

You can read the rest of the preview over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun — and there will be more on Dreamfall, Draugen and Red Thread Games later this week, so keep the site bookmarked.
For those of you well versed in our Viking tongue, there's also been a bunch of Norwegian previews today, including:
"...we're talking about a game that can become a big, international success."
-Aftenposten.no
"I'm looking forward to a good story. I'm looking forward to Dreamfall Chapters."
-Gamereactor.no
"Choice and consequence are a core aspect of Dreamfall Chapters"
-PressFire.no
LevelUp covers Dreamfall Chapters, Draugen and Red Thread Games over on VGTV
All of the above are in Norwegian, but if you're interested, Google Translate is your friend. And maybe our dedicated community can do some unpaid translation work over on the official forum. (Ask them nicely!)

We'll be back with even more lovely new stuff around the end of the month, but until then
LIVE LONG AND PROSPER!
Team RTG

Fwiw, I'm posting this on other forums.

 

[Babel-17]

Huh, http://www.destructoid.com/dreamfall-chapters-is-now-a-ps4-console-exclusive--279660.phtml.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/08/15/dreamfall-chapters-coming-soon-to-ps4/

 

[Babel-17]

We can't comment directly on what Sony has (or hasn't) done for us, but of course there is a reason we're "first on PS4" — there is an agreement in place and it is mutually beneficial. It's not like we're incredibly demanding: we're happy to be on the PS4, because a) it broadens our audience massively,

we can only really handle one console at a time, c) the PS4 is a pretty fantastic piece of hardware and d) I feel Dreamfall Chapters is a perfect game for the console, giving a large and diverse audience the ability to play our story from the comfort of their couch.

It's win-win.

But yeah, we're benefitting from this as well, of course.

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/topic/384-so-what-new-info-will-we-get-at-gamescon/page-3#entry21763

An interview, in English:

 

[joker454]

Cool, hopefully the pc version also has full controller support as a result, I love playing these types of games from the couch. Currently very much enjoying The Wolf Among Us that way.

 

[Malo]

Yeah this one will be great over in-home streaming.

 

[Babel-17]

A Message From Ragnar FAQ Compilation

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/topic/333-a-message-from-ragnar-faq-compilation/

Lots of new info, and I read every update that they send.

 

[Babel-17]

From my Inbox

Backers!
Today is the day when we finally announce the release date for Dreamfall Chapters Book One: Reborn. And that date is—
Nope. You’ll need to watch our latest video development diary to find out!
The official announcement and press release goes out to the whole wide world later this afternoon, but you, our backers, get the news first. So please keep it to yourself for another hour or two!
We’ll be back in a few days with another development update. And we will see you in the game, starting on—
Nope again. No cheating! Watch the video and then come join the discussion on our official forum!
Team RTG

They want us to watch the video, the announcement is at the end. But for total purists, those who want zero hints about the game, the date is October 21, 2014. Click and drag to see the text.