The live-action episodes that follow each act of Quantum Break aren’t included on the game disc or initial download.
This probably requires a little bit of an explanation, so let’s get you up to speed. Each act of Quantum Break is followed by a live-action “TV show” episode that, apparently, plays out differently depending on your in-game choices. The end result is that the TV show apparently has some 40 or so permutations, meaning it takes up an absolute ton of hard drive/disc space. Remedy’s solution? Stream the episodes to the player’s Xbox One or PC.
“I can’t give you an exact size, but it is big, so we wanted to create this high quality game experience and use all the disc space to maximize the visual effects qualities of the animations and all that stuff. So for us, it was kind of like a natural choice,” narrative designer, Greg Louden, told Game Informer. “Also, our desire to really make it change… I think if we only had one show, it probably would have fit, but we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to do this active experience where you negotiate the story and change it, so this was the only real solution to our problem. When we figured out how big the data was, we had to backpedal and think of some good solutions and this made sense.”
That honestly sounds less than ideal, most of the gamers I know are more worried about their monthly bandwidth restrictions than they are about running out of space on their Xbone hard drives. This also effectively makes the game online only, which is still an issue for many. Those of you with unstable connections can download the videos in full, assuming you’re playing the Xbox One version. Windows 10 users are stuck streaming the footage, apparently because the PC episodes offer resolutions up to 4k. Ironically, Remedy and Microsoft aren’t offering full downloads on the platform where hard drive space is cheap and plentiful. Go figure.
According to this tweet from Remedy, there’s 4 episodes running approximately 22 minutes each, plus or minus some footage depending on your in-game choices. It should be noted that the episodes aren’t essential to the game’s story, but are being pushed heavily as part of the full Quantum Break package.
Quantum Break is set for launch on Xbox One and Windows 10 on April 5th.
Source: Game Informer
