The re-announcement of Until Dawn on PS4 was one of the great reveals at Gamescom and we caught up with executive producer Pete Samuels to learn more about its premise and development.
"When we announced it for PlayStation 3 and Move we got such a great reception, but we also got a lot of demand, people asking for a non-Move version. And we took that very seriously from the community and we went away and had conversations with Sony and looked at what we should do with it and so PS4 was on the horizon so when we looked at that, it's such a great story, but we thought we could if we made some changes to it we could make it a much more adult, much more grown up version with the realism we could get on PlayStation 4. It was just too big an opportunity to miss."
The premise of 8 people that you take turn playing who can all either live or die as you journey through the game makes for an intriguing structure.
"Everybody can live and everybody can die in Until Dawn and we don't think it's a worse story, in fact it's an equally good story no matter how many people live or die," says Samuels. "And if you watch a horror movie an nobody dies it would be pretty dull, wouldn't it. So there's a little bit of conflict there for the gamer that would naturally want to keep everybody alive, but actually the deaths are pretty good as well."
"We talk about thousands of paths towards the ending and we talk about hundreds of different variations on end," says Samuels. "We believe we're using very conservative language in that. We don't want to pin a number on it, because a lot depends on what your definition of unique and different is. So we've been conservative when we say thousands of paths and hundreds of variations on the end. But it really is that well thought through, that well designed."