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Remember Me's 'Neo-Paris' was a 'late choice,' US / AU both considered
The art style of Dontnod Entertainment's "Neo-Paris" in Remember Me is stunning, and the vision of a futuristic Eiffel Tower glimmering in the background of many images gives the game a distinctive look – not dissimilar from the beauty of modern day Paris. The city may be a staple of the game now, but Remember Me's development saw Nilin potentially memory jacking foes in the United States or Australia before settling on the dev team's home base."Since the beginning, I really wanted to have Remember Me not being all French, for instance," Dontnod creative lead Jean-Maxime Moris told us in an interview this week at Gamescom. "Neo-Paris was a late choice, because we wanted to stay away from it. We had that global warming element to the game," Moris added, a reference to the concepts we saw last year when the game was still known as "Adrift.""First we thought about Australia or the US, and then we were like, 'Well, let's just stick to Paris, because we have all the material, it's a great city, and it hasn't been done in the way we wanna do it,'" Moris said. Beyond just a thematic shift, the choice of Neo-Paris fits with the game having an international feel, he said."There are French elements to the game, but we wanted it to have some American appeal – kind of really extending the scope of the city, and the characters, and the scope of the robots. And at the same time, there is definitely a Japanese feel to it with the cyberpunk theme. Japanese have been eating cyberpunk for breakfast for 30 years now. Ghost in the Shell, and Akira and all those things," Moris added.We might've followed up to that question, but we were too busy thinking about Japanese people eating cyberpunk for breakfast. What a dangerous proposition!
'Spun (God is a DJ)' and Remember Me's memory remixing are cut from the same creative cloth
When I first saw Remember Me's "memory remix" sequence play out during Capcom's press conference at Gamescom, my first thought was another Capcom game: Ghost Trick. Creative lead Jean-Maxime Moris agreed that Ghost Trick is a fair comparison, but he denied that that was where Dontnod drew inspiration from when crafting its memory remixing. In fact, Remember Me's memory remixing was "already in place" when Ghost Trick launched in early 2011."We tried it, and we played it, and I liked it very much," Moris says. "The main difference is that we are carrying realistic narrative states in the memory remix, and there will be key revelations about the storyline within the memory remix, or in the way things are gonna pan out before and after the remix ... that's very different, 'cause Ghost Trick was very gamey. And I don't mean that in a negative way at all, but it didn't try to achieve what we're trying to achieve in terms of scenario."Rather than Ghost Trick, Dontnod took inspiration from another source entirely: 2007's YouTube short by Double Edge Films, "Spun (God is a DJ).""Have you seen the short movie on YouTube, 'Spun (God is a DJ)'?" Moris asked me. I hadn't, but, watching it this morning, it was easy to see the inspiration shine through. "In the beginning, it was a massive inspiration for us, and one of the first things I did when I started to design the game was to go back to that and say, 'Well, this is the feeling we want to achieve. And how do we do that in the game?'" Moris admitted that Dontnod failed "two or three times" before the studio figured out the current version. "I'm confident we found the right way," he added.In case you haven't seen the short, it's a clever riff on a DJified deity remixing the world around him, slightly altering events to create alternative outcomes (take a look above). In Remember Me, the game's protagonist Nilin commands that same deity-like power over others, remixing memories to elicit outcomes of her choosing (seen in a video after the break).Like in "Spun," Nilin must first identify the "glitches" in her target's memory that allow for tweaking before she can begin altering the future. "One thing you didn't see in the video yesterday is that she first needs to identify where she's gonna be able to interact. And then, she can try out various combinations of objects," Moris said."Spun" mirrors this concept, where the all powerful DJ must first see what his remixing effects have on the world before he can correctly re-engineer the scenario. The only difference in the case of "Spun" is that the DJ, unlike Nilin, isn't trying to get someone to kill themselves.%Gallery-162365%
Remember Me's unforgotten past with Sony is just water under the bridge
Dontnod and Capcom's collaboration on Remember Me is a relatively recent occurrence. The two came together in the last year, following a falling out between Dontnod and Sony in February 2011. Remember Me (formerly Adrift) was originally headed exclusively to Sony's consoles, it seems, given a publishing arrangement that the two companies worked out in February 2010."The Sony deal was signed February 2010 and ended a year later. We were totally independent, and had no publisher, but we were looking for one," Dontnod creative lead Jean-Maxime Moris told Joystiq in an interview this morning. So, what went wrong?"I won't go into too many details, but basically they cancelled a bunch of projects, and we were just one of them," Moris said. "It felt bad at the time. And now, in retrospect, it's just one step toward where we are now."Moris added that he's "very happy" to be working with Capcom today, and that Remember Me is a good fit for "the Capcom DNA." And as for what went down with Sony? "It's just the way things went."%Gallery-162365%
Why Remember Me isn't Adrift anymore
As of just "three or four months ago," Capcom and Dontnod's "Adrift" – first revealed during 2011's Gamescom Expo – wasn't yet named "Remember Me." Beyond "Adrift" being a code name, there's more to what precipitated the name change – a tonal shift for the game, for instance. "At the very beginning, memory wasn't even involved. We wanted to have a game of politics, economy, environment going 'adrift,'" Dontnod creative lead Jean-Maxime Moris told us in an interview this morning."And then, when we started the technology aspect of it, we decided to focus on social networks, and explore the memory theme," Moris added. As such, the name "Adrift" no longer fit into Dontnod's vision for the project – though we'd argue that it's still a pretty boss name, and certainly more interesting than "Remember Me."Given the approximately four years of development Remember Me has thus far been lavished with, why change the name so late in the project? "Thinking of bringing the game to market, it wasn't a good fit anymore," Moris said. It also wasn't just up to Dontnod. "The proposal actually came from Capcom," Moris said. "We found it really together with Capcom."Moris added that Remember Me fits as a name, "because it's personal, and that's what I really wanted for the game ... I want people to see our game as more about intimacy than about just hyper powers and enhancements." He's certainly not joking about that last claim – Moris took to Capcom's Gamescom press conference stage yesterday to relate a story of his first date with his girlfriend, where he tied the perception of that experience to the themes explored in Remember Me. He felt he was a failure during the date, and he wondered how things would've played out had he only done a few things differently. Thankfully for Moris, his lady friend saw things differently.Dontnod and Capcom's Remember Me launches in May 2013 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.
Introducing Adrift, the first game from Dontnod Entertainment, for 360/PS3
In a cramped meeting room hidden amidst dozens of others at Gamescom's very busy business center, three of Dontnod Entertainment's founders were hiding out with the company's art director, Aleksi Briclot. Just before my appointment this afternoon, the quartet were attempting to woo an unnamed publisher with their first project, an action-adventure game named Adrift for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. As seen above, they weren't showing off anything more than a concept art-filled teaser, but I was later told that "half of the game is playable." What that game is, however, remains to be seen. Creative director Jean-Maxime Moris, formerly an associate producer at Ubisoft, described Adrift as combat-heavy, but refused to go into any specifics. Adding to the game's mystery is its main concept: the year is 2084, you're in "Neo-Paris," and human memories can be sold, bought, and traded. Wait ... what? "There will be a lot of the memory element, but how you interact with it I'll have to keep a secret for now," Moris teased. And it could be a bit of a wait before we know more -- Moris added that we'll see more in the coming months, but the next big showing won't be until E3 2012. Adrift is set for a fall 2012 launch window on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and, as previously mentioned, has yet to find a publisher. We'll have more info from our meeting with the Dontnod folks soon, but for now we've got several concept shots from art director Aleksi Briclot below.%Gallery-130885%
