its really interesting looking at people you hit with the time bubble bullet combo. Their corpse as it rag dolls possess the same distorted time effect for awhile even after the bubble bursts.
I really don’t think they’re even trying to keep the fact that we’ll be coming back in time to this point hidden. Also, I noticed the device underneath the window in the courtyard is gone now. I’m sure that’ll be important.
And come on! Make the Alan wake sequel, clearly they’re thinking about the game still.
1 Like
It made me laugh when in the first part that protester was going on about the hundred-years old ‘historic’ library building. I suppose that’s an American perspective, here in the UK every other building is over a hundred years old!
Also it’s well funny when you’re talking about how it takes more shots to kill the enemies with body armour, when your character isn’t wearing any armour at all and just shrugs off loads of bullets without even saying “ooooow”. Computer games!
Gawd I absolutely love HZD… Was so psyched to see Lance Reddick in it! I’ve finished this game and the DLC. I’ve also played Quantum Break but honestly, I missed most of the stuff that YET is so thoughtfully pointing out for us, I really appreciate the game more now!
1 Like
Over here anything is historic if it’s older than you.
1 Like
considering as a country the USA as a country is barely just over two centuries old, with many colonial buildings not even being three centuries old. This is not counting from the time where the USA expanded to stretch from east to west coast, some buildings are even younger than that to count as historic. Its definitely a location thing overall. I’ll stop now, history major and archiving minor make this an area of interest.
For giggles I can recommend looking up the town of Deadwood in south dakota which was declared overall historic, meaning most of the buildings in the main area are deemed of historic value.
1 Like
October 9th, 2016, 4:31am
Separated from his brother, Jack fights his way through the campus to find him and rescue him from Monarch goons.
Collectibles
Narrative Objects for Act 1 Part 3
The VARG Heavy Pistol is twice as powerful as the standard Pistol, but has half the ammo capacity, using magazines that hold just 4 rounds. It also has a huge amount of recoil, so you need to wait between shots to fire accurately. The Heavy Pistol’s best feature is that it can kill any normal enemy with a single headshot. The slow rate-of-fire makes it a poor choice for Time Stop bullet stacking, but it is great for headshotting enemies, especially when combined with the slow-motion Focus Time at the end of a Time Dodge. The Heavy Pistol also has the ability to blow up explosive canisters and barrels almost instantly, unlike other weapons that cause them to catch fire and detonate a few seconds later. Like all pistols in Quantum Break Jack has an infinite supply of reserve ammunition for it.
The Heavy Pistol has a weaponlight attached below the barrel, though neither Jack nor the enemies ever use it. Presumably Remedy added it to make the weapon look beefier and more distinct from the standard Pistol. The Heavy Pistol’s design is based on the FN Five-SeveN handgun, a weapon named for its specialist 5.7x28mm ammunition that is smaller and lighter than conventional 9mm pistol ammo, and is better at defeating body armour. These small bullets allow the real FN Five-Seven to have low recoil and a large 20-round magazine. The game’s Heavy Pistol bears little similarity to this, as it is a hand cannon with high recoil and low ammo capacity. Markings on the side indicate that it uses a fictional ‘5.7x15mm’ calibre ammo. My guess is that Remedy did not want their high-powered handgun to look similar to the typical Magnum or Desert Eagle featured in most other shooters, so they chose the appearance of an FN Five-SeveN and took quite a bit of creative license with how it works.
The Semi-Auto Shotgun briefly appears at the end of Act 1 Part 3, but with little opportunity to use it. We will take a closer look at the Semi-Auto Shotgun when it is next encountered.
Jack’s Time Dodge ability allows him to ‘warp’ or ‘blink’ a short distance. While Max Payne’s ‘shootdodge’ allowed him to leap across a room in slow motion, Jack shifts from place to place by creating a time warp. The resulting shockwave knocks back enemies and briefly staggers them, making Time Dodge a great offensive power as well as a way of evading enemies.
It is not teleportation, however. Although Jack might seem to be an insubstantial blur during a Time Dodge, he does actually travel through the intervening space. This means Jack will still take damage if he dodges towards an enemy who is firing at him.
Pressing and holding the Aim button at the end of a Time Dodge will trigger ‘Focus Time’, a second of slow motion that can be used to precisely aim a weapon at an enemy. Upgrades can extend Focus Time to last 1.25 seconds and then again to 1.5 seconds. Although these small increases may seem barely noticeable, an extra 0.25 seconds of slow motion is just long enough to allow a couple of extra rounds to be fired from the SMG or Assault Rifle before time returns to normal.
Time Shield surrounds Jack with a spherical time distortion that deflects enemy bullets, while allowing Jack’s to pass through. This protects Jack from enemy fire when no cover is available, and gives a chance for his health to recover. With upgrades the shield can also accelerate healing, and can slow time outside the shield to allow Jack to carefully aim shots.
Activating Time Shield near to enemies will shove them outside the area of influence and leave them staggered and vulnerable, similar to Time Dodging into them. However once the shield has formed enemies can step inside of it, and also the shield does not protect against grenades, so it is not a completely impenetrable barrier.
It is important to note that although the Time Shield forms around Jack, it does not travel with him. It is possible to take a few steps within the shield, but if Jack steps outside of it (or tries to use it while on the move) the Shield will immediately dissipate. At least one third of your Time Shield meter must be full to activate this power. The shield will stay up for as long as you have energy available, assuming you do not voluntarily deactivate the shield or step outside of it.
4 Likes
it really seems like every new power seems to break how reality/time is supposed to work even more. The visual effects on the dodge in particularly are distorted reality, its actually similar to the effect Jack had on frozen objects in the beginning of the game visually. The time shield and overcharge of bullets really look similar to a glass pane that has been cracked.
2 Likes
Yes all the time powers, phenomena and anomalies all have a shared ‘prismatic’ visual style, like shattered glass. As you say, it’s not just the big, obvious distortions… even the bullets that are ‘overcharged’ by Bullet Stacking in Time Stop bubbles have those effects.
Which makes sense given that they are all using the same kind of time energies (‘chronon particles’ and the ‘Meyer-Joyce field’), but it does also give the impression that Jack is smashing time whenever he uses his powers!
When I first played I wondered whether there was might be a twist that Jack was worsening the Fracture in time by using his abilities. Time is breaking down due to a shortage of chronon particles, resulting in Stutters where time stops… and there’s Jack creating mini stutters all over the place, which presumably means he’s creating bubbles of low-chronon density. That sounds like a terrible idea when the fabric of time is already weak due to low chronons!
But I guess Jack’s powers are like a drop in an ocean compared to the damage caused by the malfunctioning time machine. (Jack’s powers only influence a few seconds of time, in a very localised area; the machine created a tunnel that connected the past and the future.)
2 Likes
The dash seems almost more like items are disintegrating or spaghettifying instead of the shattered glass bit.
Heh, yeah I guess the powerful distortion around Jack could be likened to black hole spaghettification. And then when the time warp collapses it does create the impression that the world is disintegrating. It’s certainly a violent-looking effect.
1 Like
Fortunately he can do it again.
1 Like
It is certainly interesting to see Paul come back in this way. I suppose he had to come out at some time, I just wasn’t really expecting the past like that.
October 9th, 2016, 6:12am
Paul Serene has to choose whether Monarch adopts the brutal hardline tactics or the insidious PR approach.
COLLECTIBLES
Narrative Objects for Junction 1
4 Likes
I choose PR going only on gut feeling. There has been enough killing for now.
Yeah, PR seems to be the more sensible, less super-villain-y thing to do. You’re the head of a fairly large company, you should know the best way to put out a fire is to smother it, not to make more, smaller fires.
PR definitely seems the more practical approach. Jack is already an enemy, and monarch’s relationship with the public is already not so good. Leveraging this incident into not only putting more pressure on Jack, but turning the public into allies for awhile is an extremely good outcome for Monarch. Jack is already an enemy of Paul and monarch, him knowing the secrets of monarch will not change his status there.
On the other hand if Monarch and paul are working towards the end of time, then going hard-line seems like a good option. Causing more devastation, or disruption of the timeline seems like a boon in that case. Additionally resources that would be spent on maintaining public image can be set redirected into the other projects and Monarch’s private army.
The PR approach definitely strikes me as the option that Paul Serene is likely to take. Even if Amy shares Monarch’s secrets with Jack and the public at large, it should be fairly easy to discredit them. Besides, it’s easier to fight a small, rag-tag group headed up by a chronon-enabled soldier than a large rioting mob who has that same chronon-enabled soldier fighting with them.
Thanks for voting everyone! Here are the results:
PR: 76% (98)
Hardline: 23% (30)
Total responses: 128
Paul Serene chooses the PR approach, which leads us into the fifth and final part of Act 1, ‘Monarch Solutions’, the first episode of the live-action television series.
October 9th, 2016, 6:19am
When tasked with finding Jack’s missing transport, Liam Burke starts to discover the truth behind Monarch’s long-term plans.
4 Likes
I’m surprised with how well done that was. It’s actually more put together and better acted than a lot of TV shows I’ve seen. I’m also surprised with just how good the ripples look in live action. I was really worried that it would look fake and cheesy but no. I’m really looking forward to more of this, and kind of wish they could have done a full TV show.
I guess then it couldn’t have branching paths then.
2 Likes
The only bit that I thought looked a bit fake was the bird, there’s something about it that looks a bit… cartoonish, or photoshopped.
Other than that, I agree, they did a great job implementing the time anomaly effects in the live-action. They even included the occasional distortion shockwaves being emitted from groups of people, that I pointed out back in part 2.
In fact, they actually improve on the game’s stutter effects, by having that running boy and the schoolbus (and the bird) juddering back and forth. In the game, some moving objects oscillate back and forth during a stutter, such as the debris during the time machine accident, and later we’ll see cars and trains that are looping in time. But for some reason PEOPLE are always completely frozen in the game’s stutters. So it was cool to see that boy and the schoolbus caught in a split-second timeloop, rather than rock-solid frozen.
I have mixed feelings about the branching paths. There are cool differences between the versions of the live-action episodes, but for the sake of efficiency / cost-effectiveness those differences rarely carry over to the next episode. Choosing Hardline or PR changes several things in the first episode, and has a bunch of consequences throughout the rest of the game… but makes no difference to any scenes in episode 2.
There is an exception though, the choice you make at junction 3 affects scenes in both episodes 3 and 4, and the choice you make at junction 4 causes even more variations for that particular live-action plotline. I guess they couldn’t afford do that sort of thing for the choices at junctions 1 and 2 as well, as that would be a hell of a lot of work to produce alternate scenes that might only be seen by a fraction of players.
I’d have loved it if Liam stayed loyal to Monarch in one of the timelines. It would make sense if choosing Hardline (killing innocent people) would turn him against Monarch, but in the PR timeline he’d still on board. Would be a hell of a selling-point - “your first choice of the game determines whether a major character will be Jack’s ally or Jack’s enemy!” But that would mean producing two radically different versions of the show, as it would alter the events of episodes 2, 3 and 4. That would practically double it’s cost!
I guess a more affordable alternative would be if the show course-corrected and still had Liam turn against Monarch, but not till episode 2, and for different reasons.