It all started with a concept, scribbled on a post-it and set aside. The nature of the concept, Supermassive Games’ art director, Steve Goss, still refuses to tell me. But when he wrote it a decade ago, little did he know that the concept would be a key narrative pillar of a very special partnership. More specifically, this is the studio’s first collaborative project: The Casting of Frank Stone, an upcoming horror game set in the world of Dead By Daylight.
“As a writer, you need to hold on to 3 or 4 pillars,” Goss says of his holistic process. “There’s a presumption in the story of The Casting of Frank Stone: anything that’s on a post-it note for a long time. But this is only vanity. It’s an idea. There was no thematic narrative before we started publishing Frank Stone. Just a vanity, of course, but adaptable. Regardless, it’s figured its way into none other than Behaviour Interactive’s Dead Through Daylight universe, proving that there are more similarities between those two studios than meets the eye.
Eight years later, here’s how Dead Through Daylight continues to push the boundaries of horror
On paper, the two developers don’t seem to be compatible partners at all. The Casting of Frank Stone is a cinematic narrative horror game, featuring a set of actors whose lives hang in the balance while the player makes butterfly-effect decisions at the end. deciding the fate of each character. It looks like a classic Supermassive game in the vein of Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology or The Quarry. By contrast, Dead By Daylight is an online multiplayer horror game in which the story plays out a moment of confusion in a strategic and bloody cat-and-mouse loop.
But this set of worlds is exactly what Mathieu Côté of Behaviour Interactive, director of the game Dead By Daylight, was looking for when he and Goss started serious conversations. That’s exactly what The Casting of Frank Stone is all about: “a deep dive into the story and facets of Dead Through Daylight that wouldn’t possibly have appeared in the base game,” says Goss. ”
“Another aspect was the concept that there are a lot of other people who love Dead Through Daylight, but don’t play Dead Through Daylight, which I found fascinating. I actually get it,” Goss says with a laugh, comparing it to his own. interest in Formula 1 despite not being a driving force himself. “It would be a crisis if it was. So it was a literally attractive concept that there was an audience that likes the concept of the Dead Through Daylight universe, but who not play multiplayer games. So could [Frank Stone] do that? Would that be another way for this audience to access some other access point to the universe?
Given Supermassive’s reputation as a key studio in the single-player narrative horror scene, Goss is aware of the heightened expectations facing the team. “The story had to be painted on two levels,” he says of Frank Stone’s dual function. being a story that would work in the same way that a classic Until Dawn or The Quarry tale would work on its own, while still being interesting. And then there’s some other type of player, a fan of Dead Through to Daylight, who would get to that point and need some more of the experience?It’s a [question] of how to write those two elements as one.
“When we started crafting this story with behavior, with massive amounts of documentation and secrets that no one knew about Dead Through Daylight and was aware of, we started attaching those two narratives. ” It wasn’t an undeniable procedure for Goss, with or without her little post-it of narrative vanity. “I spent a lot of time reading poorly formatted text documents, and that’s the nature of research: putting it all together, choosing topics. And once I stumbled upon a couple of things, it wasn’t like I needed every single one of them. The vital thing about DBD’s story is that there are so many of them that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll remove the darkness from each and every nook and cranny. It’s all about picking out the key elements.
I’m looking to ask Goss for a little more data or main points about what exactly we can expect from our cast and their misadventures on set, but Goss is careful not to get into spoiler territory. “There are 3 mythologies in this game,” he alludes to the overarching narratives. “There’s this weird story about a sticky note I stuck on a wall, literally about 10 years ago. Then there’s Dead Through Daylight, which gave us all the reasons why this story is happening, the whole design around it. The story. And then there is a third narrative, and that is the hidden narrative of Frank Stone and what happened to him: who he is, where he is from, and where he is going.
Horror is very inclusive. It’s very different, and I think either value is offered in the Supermassive and Dead Through Daylight audiences.
These mythologies shape the basis of The Casting of Frank Stone, and the intrinsic importance of myth, lore, and analogue horror is where Supermassive and Behaviour find the most common ground.
“One of the things we really like about the games we make is a myth, a tale, or an existing reality, and we like to incorporate them into our game. So if you take a look at Supermassive’s work, the stories are rooted in one or the other legend or myth, and they all have a touchstone,” says Goss, using Until Dawn’s Wendigo as an example of the studios’ penchant for metatextuality. “To me, that’s what Dead Through Daylight gives us. It provides us with a reality. It provides us with a set of truths that we can then use in our story in the same way. “
But with Dead Through Daylight’s story-rich narrative underpinning its more mechanical gameplay, it makes sense that some Supermassive enthusiasts would possibly worry about the association with Behaviour and how it makes sense to the developer.
“I think I get two types of reactions,” Goss explains animatedly when I ask about the players’ response. “I get one that says, ‘Well, of course, why wouldn’t [this partnership] make sense? Obviously there’s a window into this universe that you’re opening that has yet to open. Great, it makes sense. ‘
“And then there’s another organization that says, ‘Do you take an asymmetrical player game instead of an online game and turn it into a story?How does that work?’ And I think a lot of other people who look at it superficially (and I think it’s a superficial view) don’t perceive that Dead Through Daylight built a massive repository of stories throughout its entire runtime. “Goss rarely gets much wrong, with more than 30 volumes of Dead Through Daylight’s story available lately and a few others accompanying both, a new bankruptcy release. “Because it exists, there’s a fact, a character, and a mythology in the world that rarely gets very exposed in either when you play it. It does not exist in the foreground. It’s at the bottom, and they just both came in and took it out. “
The vital thing about DBD’s story is that there are so many that it is about removing the darkness from each and every nook and cranny.
So, is Frank Stone’s The Cast just a supermassive game with a daylight twist?No, and steps have been taken to prevent that from happening, even though the form of the game itself will stick to familiar clues. This effort to root the player from the story of Dead By Daylight moves to the game’s interface.
“The way we provide some of our selections and skill tests will reflect Dead Through Daylight,” Goss says of the stylistic gameplay elements we can expect. “I think it’s vital to tell you that you are in Dead Through Daylight, not The Dark Pictures. Our user interface and everything has evolved. There are surely some new mechanics in the game around the interaction of the characters and the interactions between them” , he adds. A mention of the camera mechanic, one of the new features coming to the game via Supermassive, excites me; However, whatever that implies, Goss is rarely spreading much. “It’s probably a new system, and I’m not going to give it away because it’s a fun part,” he jokes.
“Within this system, within the mechanisms, there are moments that we surely recognize are part of everyone’s traditions. And so, when we use them and play with them, we hope that that resonates. ” Does this mean that supermassive players will then navigate uncharted waters if they are new to the strange and glorious global of a Dead By Daylight skill test? “From a Supermassive player’s point of view, yes, it’s evolving. And from a Dead Through Daylight player’s point of view, it’s another way to interact with things that may be familiar to you. “
Ultimately, Goss knows that Frank Stone offers a bold and unforeseen premise. “There’s a certain point of irreverence towards some of the things we do, which we hope will help other people understand that we appreciate this relationship. We understand that there is a dissonance here,” he said of the union’s nominal oddity. and the emotion we take there.
But then again, what is terror if not the irreverent?And what is an association like Supermassive and Behaviour if they are not those two things as well?
“My take on horror is that it’s a fantastic vehicle for stories about other people,” Goss says of his wonderful love for the genre, whether as an editor or as a fan. “Terror offers genuine contrast, genuine light and darkness, terrible conditions with terrible consequences, and therefore the possible choices that other people make in it are very appealing. But it’s also very transgressive. There’s a lot of other types of people with a lot of other interests, so horror is very inclusive, and I think any of the values provide the audience of the Supermassive games and the Dead Through Daygentle collaboration with an attractive combination. : You’re talking to other people with similar interests, who are looking for similar things in terms of gameplay experience. ”
As long as you don’t have to beat up four other people through a nasty nurse in The Casting of Frank Stone and Dead Through Daylight, it turns out that this partnership may actually be a marriage made in hell. most productive way imaginable, of course.
Here’s our pick of the most productive horror games of all time if you’re looking to have some really scary moments.
Jasmine is the editor of GamesRadar. Raised in Hong Kong and graduated in English Literature from Queen Mary University of London in 2017, her love of writing entertainment has taken her from reviews of underground concerts to blogs about the intersection between horror videos and browser games. After making the jump from broadcast TV operations to video game journalism during the pandemic, she started as a freelance editor at TheGamer, Gamezo, and Tech Radar Gaming before accepting a full-time position here at GamesRadar. If Jasmine is researching the most recent game feuds for writing a news article, writing how-to guides for The Sims 4, or promoting Veronica’s desire for a Resident Evil: CODE remake, you’ll most likely find her listening to metalcore at the same time.
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