Possibly one of the most interesting aspects of this month’s upcoming release, Until Dawn, is how it will implement a Butterfly Effect system wherein player choices will affect how the story will turn out. This also means that the game has hundreds of ending variations, which should increase the replay factor, too.
In the trailer above, the Until Dawn Butterfly Effect is explained; where the player’s decisions can have “immediate or long-term impact” on the game’s outcome.
Here’s the rest of the explanation from Tim Hodges, Product Manager at SCEE.
The way we have implemented this system in game means there are thousands of potential branches to every player’s individual story. Some of your decisions might appear to be inconsequential – a conversation choice that makes a character come across as a bit of an ass, for example – but if you’d made a different choice that character might have ended up the hero. Everything you choose can affect how other characters react, potentially with dire consequences. Some choices are more obvious but much more difficult, like choosing which friend will live and which will die.
The thing is, you won’t always know what impact your choices will have until after you’ve made them – it was important to us that players shouldn’t second guess their path through the story of Until Dawn. It’s only after you’ve made a decision that you’ll find out the consequences of that choice, sometimes only hours later.
If that’s not enough to pique your interest, then maybe our latest preview will. So far so good, the title’s shaping up to be one heck of a ride.
[Source: EU PlayStation Blog]
