Supermassive Explains Script Process for ‘The Quarry’ and Its 186 Endings

There’s a lot that goes into the script for narrative horror titles by Supermassive Games, and The Quarry is no exception. IGN sat down with the game’s director, Will Byles, to chat about the game’s story, and its 186 endings. And no, that’s no typo.

Clocking in with a script at over 1000 pages, the story for The Quarry does lend itself to having that many endings. After all, you have nine different playable characters in the game, and the ending you get depends on the choices you make. Not to mention that the story shifts and changes depending on your choices. Still, Byles referred to the process as a “mathematical nightmare”.

“Writing a branching narrative is a really interesting exercise,” says Byles. “We write a full, hundred page screenplay as if it were a movie. We develop our character styles, and once we’ve got that, then we can start looking at how we break that out into a full 10 hour experience.”

When you take into account the branching paths players can take in a game like The Quarry, you can start to see why you would need a beefy script. Again, having two possible outcomes with nine different characters really adds up.

So how did the team do it? Byles breaks it down into two parts. First, making use of large and small decisions to ensure that not every choice creates an entirely different storyline. Second, smart placement of those choices.

“The big choices we have are these things called Paths Chosen, and those will significantly affect the story. We’ll announce it to you. You never know when that’s going to come up. You’re never warned about it and it might seem trivial, but it’s a big, big deal.”

Of course, one of the big questions is who will survive, and what will be left of them (to borrow a familiar tagline). The Quarry does make it so that you can basically kill everyone, if you so choose. “With a horror like this, my personal favorite way through it is that a fair few people die quite horribly. But you can also play it right through and you can have everyone live. It depends on what you want to play.”

You can delve more into the game’s story and the intricacies of its writing from the link above. The Quarry, starring genre vets Ted Raimi, David Arquette, Lance Henriksen, and Lin Shaye, arrives June 10 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Xbox One, and PC via Steam.

And check out our own interview with Will Byles.

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