How Life Is Strange 2 Is Changing The Way Player Choice Impacts The Game

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Player choice is an important part of narratively driven games like Life is Strange, but the upcoming sequel makes some pretty significant changes to the way those choices affect the game. Traditionally, the choices that you make in these sorts of games will help to direct your character on a certain path or they will change the way NPCs react to you later in the story. However, as Life is Strange 2 voice director Philip Bache explained during a recent press event CinemaBlend attended at PAX West 2018, the new game isn't really about making choices for yourself, but about how making those decisions affects your little brother. According to Bache...

It's one thing to have player choice, it's one thing to make a choice for yourself, or for your character. What's really great about this game that's, for me, incredibly interesting just also a gamer myself is, you're making choices that are also directly affecting your younger brother. The choices you make are not just for you, you're also making choices for how your brother is going to end up interacting in the story too.

Life is Strange 2 follows a pair of brothers, Sean and Daniel Diaz as they make their way south from Seattle, on their way to Mexico to find their father's family. The player controls older brother Sean, and he's the one that makes whatever decisions the player chooses to make, but as Philip Bache explained, it's not really Sean that the player needs to worry about, its Daniel. As with all sibling or parental relationships, and for the purposes of Life is Strange 2 Sean is both, when an impressionable mind sees what you do, it can change them. Commit a "bad act" and it tells a kid that committing that act is acceptable. Potentially meaning the kid could do the same thing down the road.

The other reason that this is important is that the structure of Life is Strange 2 is that of a "road movie" according to writer Christian Divine. Sean and Daniel will continue to move south throughout the game. This means that it's unlikely that your characters will interact with the same people more than once. You'll meet people and interact with them, but then you'll move on and leave them behind. The only person Sean's decisions will likely have game-changing influence over is Daniel. Treat people a certain way in one location and perhaps Daniel will react differently when meeting different people later on, fundamentally changing the way this interaction happens.

Daniel is clearly designed to be a character that players want to protect, potentially making them reconsider taking the easy way out of certain situations because they don't want to teach Daniel the wrong thing. This will certainly put a new spin on things when the first episode of Life is Strange 2 arrives September 27.

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