TIDES OF TOMORROW

Confronting the consequences of other people's actions

- 

Wherever you decide to go in Tides Of Tomorrow, one thing's certain: you're following in someone else's footsteps. As for who that person is, well, they could literally be anyone. After a creditable attempt at procedurally generating narratives in Road 96, DigixArt is now ready to tell a different story, this time turning to asynchronous multiplayer. In this dystopian adventure, you're always operating in the wake of another player, impacted by their decisions, their successes or failures, which determine the state of each location when you arrive there. In turn, your own behaviour will alter the game world for anyone who picks you as their forerunner.

For DigixArt, this is the latest foray in its mission to innovate with interactive storytelling. Tides Of Tomorrow's director, Adrien Poncet, may be a relatively new recruit to the company, but he grasps as well as anyone that this is the studio's raison d'être. “I will quote Yoan [Fanise], who is the studio's CEO,” he says of the Montpellier-based developer's goal. “Yoan is like, ‘There are already hundreds of thousands of movies and books telling stories, and videogames have uniqueness to them, which is interactivity. So we have to find ways to use that interactivity to make stories in ways you've never experienced before.’”

Producer Kevin Barb adds that innovation is DigixArt's means of distinguishing itself. “Other linear narrative games are focused on super-high-quality [production values],” he says. “We are a smaller studio, so we want to stand out with a different flavour and different way to play a narrative game.”