Assassin’s Creed
Quantum Break’s TV video game setup gives players some quality time with the story’s villains, something that could work equally well for an Assassin’s Creed game. The last title in the series, Syndicate, had a strong cast of villains that main characters Jacob and Evie had to systematically take down in order to reclaim London.
Another Assassin’s Creed game, one with a strong host of villains, could weave in a TV aspect perfectly. After taking sections of the city or completing certain missions, an episode could flesh out the current adversaries and their hold on the city. There could be entire segments featuring these foes reacting to the hero’s actions, and how they’ll continue to drive conflicts that affect the citizenry. Seeing the struggles of the city’s people along with the reactions of the villains, would help flesh out the story in an Assassin’s Creed game even more and provide a driving force behind the player’s actions.
Assassin’s Creed will see its first foray into live-action later this year with the Assassin’s Creed movie. Perhaps Ubisoft can translate that production experience into future Assassin’s Creed games.
Persona
The Persona series has become well known for its complex and emotional character development. Persona 3 and 4 feature “social links,” which allow you to bond with your party members and other characters scattered across their worlds. These social links give you interesting bits of backstory or development on characters, and deepen the bond between them and the main hero.
A Persona game could benefit from even more character development brought by integrating some kind of TV show element. It could be either live-action or anime to match the game’s style, but the focus should be on giving players even more insight on the individuals that inhabit the game’s world.
Different episodes could be made for each party member and significant character, telling their stories when they aren’t actively interacting with the hero. Maybe you follow a character on their day off, while they struggle with every day high school life. The potential to cross the game its own high school, slice of life sort of show is huge. It’s just one more way the Persona games could develop their already intricate world and characters.
Uncharted
Each Uncharted game has a backstory that launches Nathan Drake on his current treasure hunting adventure. Oftentimes, this backstory is explained in flashbacks near the beginning of the game.
With a tie-in TV show, Uncharted could offer a creative and engaging way of introducing its main tale. The episodes could build up new characters and villains, while providing some plot twists and revelations down the line, in traditional Uncharted fashion.
Uncharted is already a series that’s grounded in reality, with strong performances from its actors in both motion and facial capture. A TV show is a sure fit for Uncharted, as the series can perfectly emulate a rollicking Indiana Jones-style adventure. Even if future Uncharted games don’t feature Nathan Drake, the tone of the games would adapt well to a show. Weaving the two together could create an interesting dichotomy between the past and present setting of an Uncharted story.
Halo
The Halo series has expanded over the years to many different forms of entertainment including books, comics and even live-action miniseries. At this point, Halo is crammed full of lore and branching stories. As live-action Halo is something we’ve seen in the past, adding a TV series to a future Halo game isn’t a huge impossibility.
Halo 5’s structure in particular lends itself to such a system. Commander Locke spends most of Halo 5 following in the Master Chief’s footsteps, while trying to hunt him down. A TV show weaved with Halo could easily tell the story of another Spartan team or even another ship in the UNSC. Master Chief and Locke are clearly the story focus now, but there’s so much happening in the Halo universe that a TV episode could shine a light on. Perhaps they show what the Arbiter and his forces are up to, or a human ship on some kind of secret mission; there’s a plethora of stories to tell.
The recent live-action series Halo: Nightfall itself works well within the context of a new Halo game. Nightfall tells the story of Locke when he was still an agent with ONI, and an in-game show could tell a similar story. Adding decisions and branching narratives might be an interesting wrinkle in the Halo formula as well.
Mass Effect
If there’s any game that represents player choice and consequence, it’s Mass Effect. The series helped define player choice and interaction, and even carried your choices over across three games. Mass Effect is a universe bursting with interesting stories to tell, and one in which Quantum Break’s TV show setup would really work.
As players travel the Mass Effect universe, they encounter many different factions and alien races, and the choices they make can have huge effects on entire planets and cultures. An integrated TV show to the game would allow Bioware to truly show the impact players are making on the universe. What happens to a planet or a city in the wake of Commander Shepard? What conflicts and machinations are happening in the universe outside of Shepard’s battle, or a new main character’s tale? There’s so many stories happening at once in Mass Effect, and up until now you may have only read about some of those stories in dossiers.
Choice would play a vital aspect in the TV show as well, with player’s decisions altering aspects of the show similar to Quantum Break. Mass Effect could even take it a step further than Quantum Break and make more strongly branched storylines for the show. It would be incredibly ambitious, but something that could work incredibly well if implemented correctly.
Everything depends on how the story in future Mass Effect games is framed, of course. If the Colonialism approach that we’ve heard rumors of for Mass Effect Andromeda are true, you could have episodes focusing on different alien races as they scramble to colonize planets. The beauty of Mass Effect lies in how much potential it has to tell diverse and meaningful stories, and a TV show could help the series do that to even more success. Regardless of its implementation, a Mass Effect show would help the series integrate its choice and player agency in a new and unique way.
What games do you think would be a sure fit for Quantum Break’s TV show scheme? Is it something that you’d like to see other companies experiment with? Let us know in the comments.
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