To date,
Life is Strange has sold
more than 1 million copies. It's a financial success that's had a large impact on Dontnod: It's given the company a more prestigious profile, and made for an easier time hiring new talent. At the studio, developers speak as affectionately about the game as a parent parading good grades would. The game's heavy focus on emotional narrative and its staying ability in the minds of players exemplify some of Dontnod's goals.
That's something Guilbert has on the brain as attention shifts to
Vampyr. Unlike with previous titles, there's been no pressure to change the game's vision. Guilbert credits this freedom to trust between Dontnod and the game's publisher, Focus Home Interactive.
"We [had] a lot of pressure after
Remember Me, because the game was not as successful as we expected," he says. "So yes, we had really a lot of pressure to do a game which worked and was sellable. But who knows that? No one has the recipe to know what will be successful and what will be not. We decided to do really what we wanted to do, what we liked, and push it as far as possible.
"[
Vampyr] brings the same kind of surprise with
Life is Strange in a totally different universe."
DOOMED TO BE A VAMPYR
Vampyr surfaced in
early 2015, a mere week and a half before
Life is Strange's inaugural episode launched; at the time, Dontnod was still best known for
Remember Me.
Dontnod had little to say about
Vampyr then. The vampire RPG was set to star a doctor, a man turned against his will, after returning home from the First World War in 1918. As 2015 wore on, the developer
dropped some details about the project: a city in the grip of the Spanish flu; choices on who to kill and who to spare that will affect the game's story. Duality — the struggle between protagonist Jonathan Reid's desire to be a humanist, a man of science who wants to heal, and a creature of darkness compelled to survive by taking the lives of others — is burrowed deep into its themes.
Stéphane Beauverger, the game's narrative director, often describes
Vampyr's story as a gothic one: dark, despair-filled and full of melancholy. It's a romanticized tale of immortals, without the romance.
"Very far from Twilight," Beauverger says.
Twilight, in case you were wondering, has worked its way into the cultural fabric of many countries, including Dontnod's home of France. Beauverger addresses the sparkling elephant in the room without provocation, eager to dispel any ideas that the team's creature of the night might shine in the sun.
"There is a whole genre of pop culture [that focuses on the] not very frightening figure of the vampire for the teenage [audience]," Beauverger says. "That's not at all what we're going to do."
Vampyr is dark, both in the context of its story and the nature it wants to convey. Jonathan is turned into a vampire and abandoned in a mass grave; when he attempts to return to work, he learns he must kill to survive. It's a tale of choice and damnation that hearkens back to the fiction established by Bram Stoker with
Dracula, or even Anne Rice with her Vampire Chronicles novels.
"A vampire is a doom creature," Beauverger says. "It's a human who has been condemned to live eternally, but he has to take lives, to kill, to survive. It's very interesting for us because it's one of the very rare creatures who is conscious of what he's doing. Zombies, mummies, ghouls, werewolves are, most of the time, just stupid killing machines. A vampire is seducing his prey. He is totally aware of what he's doing, but he's compelled to do so.
"As a vampire you just go deeper and deeper and deeper into hell ... there is no escape. You are doomed from the very beginning. You can just decide the speed of your slow descent."
Jonathan Reid's evolution, and by extension the game's, is intimately tied to the number of people you feed on. The more you kill, the stronger you'll become. You can advance your character's strength and skills through fighting — hunters, other vampires and so on — but feeding on humans is the fastest, most effective way to advance Jonathan's abilities.
Dontnod plans to include a stack of RPG features in
Vampyr, including skill trees to better tailor the vampire experience to the player. During an early demo, the developer showed off a few of Jonathan's supernatural skills. While some give him strength and speed, like a spring attack that allows him to quickly close gaps, others are more insidious. The doctor has the ability to mesmerize citizens and manipulate those with weak minds.
In the demo's case, this led to one character revealing information to Jonathan that he wouldn't have otherwise. Players have the choice to mesmerize even further, during which Jonathan leads them off into the shadows and feeds on them. Unfortunately for his victims, there is no such thing as a quick bite; players will either feed and kill, or not feed at all.
According to game director Philippe Moreau, however, players are never forced to feed on anyone.
"It's really up to you," he says. "You can decide to feed on nobody, or to kill everyone. It's your experience. ... The death of a citizen will impact, in a meaningful way, the game's world."
Players have to make hard choices. Specific moments in the game will ask them to either kill or spare a character, and "depending on if you choose to do it or not — because you always have the choice to not kill someone — it will change the story," Moreau says.
In one ominous image, the city of White Chapel appeared to be burning — a consequence of attacking too many people. Death is part of
Vampyr, and so is murder, but it's not glamorous, says Beauverger. It's aggressive, with players killing quickly and with power suited to a damned being.
"You take a life," Beauverger says. "You kill someone. It's a murder. We already knew we will be rated [M for Mature], and we hope for that. We want to tell an adult story about vampires, immortality, honor, responsibilities."
The idea of responsibility — in both a sense of morals and consequences — is the thread that ties all of Dontnod's work together, says Beauverger. Players must face the same dilemmas as the hero and find a way to overcome it.
"We like to put the player in a situation where they are confronted with the consequences of [what] they do," Beauverger says. "This was true in
Remember Me. This was very true in
Life is Strange. It will be true again in
Vampyr. You are going to take lives in order to survive. The decision is, who will you kill?"
.
