Life Is Strange 2 Isn’t Taking the Easy Route
Back in 2015, Dontnod Entertainment’s episodic adventure game Life Is Strange seemed to come out of nowhere. After discovering that she can travel back in time, players follow high-schooler Max on a tale of young love with fellow highschooler and outsider Chloe.
Now, Life Is Strange 2 is set for release on September 27, 2018 and follows two new characters, Sean and his younger brother Daniel. After a run-in with the police, the two flee from home and leave all that they know behind,
“…Michel Koch [co-director] and Jean-Luc Cano [co-writer], who came up with the original story, they wanted to move forward with this game,” said lead writer Christian Divine. “We all love Max and Chloe and all the other characters, but we wanna be ambitious and keep moving forward and expand the universe. It’s not just those characters. So the exciting thing is just to explore a different kind of relationship, the sibling relationship, which evolves. Education and experience, in a road trip format. We all love this kind of road trip format because it opens you up to all these really cool narrative experiences you can have, and other characters you meet along the way.”
“We all knew we were gonna do something different and weren’t gonna do the same characters, same story,” he added. “So I think it was not so much a challenge for us in that sense, but it was more of a challenge when it came to the players, because they love those characters so much, to get them to embrace these characters on this journey was the biggest challenge I think in terms of it.”
But despite the focus on new characters, the team is doing their best to capture the same magic that players experienced in the original.
“We also have the same core team from the original, and there’s a lot of trust among the different departments [at Dontnod],” said voice-over director Philip Bach. “But it’s a challenge in that we know how much Life is Strange 1 is loved and we’re pushing it. For me, I think we’re all beating up what we’re doing so much more now. So I definitely feel the pressure in the voiceover booth. I can feel the pressure from the team. But we’re taking it head on. I do appreciate the challenge. If it was to keep going the same way and we were gonna keep doing that, it’s like we can’t–but there is a threshold for everyone for a story. For one person it might be like, “Oh, I could have fun with Max and Chloe for 10 years.”