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Even during the cut scenes you see through your eyes and some of them are just nightmares. Basically, before you sleep you have this strange vision, and you wake up and it's gone. It's a good way to give you information in a dramatic way, not by forcing you to look at the game for five minutes und go: "Ahhhh, that's boring." It fits with the drama, with who you really are, with what's happening to you etc.

4P: But these nightmares are not going to happen in the game, or are they?

Le Breton: No. Usually, there's just something happening in the game and then you have a nightmare

Gentle adventurers won't have an easy time: Much blood flows in Dark Messiah.

about what happens, which adds another flavor to it.

4P: Talking about first person shooters and especially stories: I know it's being asked a lot these days, but what do you think about episodic content?

Le Breton: I think it's the way we should all start to plan the future in the industry, because I can tell you games are becoming more and more costly, harder to do, and not doing it that way means there will be fewer and fewer games and fewer and fewer studios. Also, I think what happened with TV series in the last five to seven years is really interesting. Before that TV used to be secondary to cinema and now TV series are becoming more and more interesting, high quality products but cost less. A lot less, because they reuse their assets and have less special effects and so on.

And I think video games could benefit from that. Let’s say we will do a game in three or four episodes, we'd basically use the same assets but patch, tune, tweak, add new content etc. It will be cheaper in the end and we have four games instead of one and the general quality, especially in terms of drama, emotion, character building is easier to do in a series than with a single game. Even with Dark Messiah, which lasts for ten to 16 hours we felt we didn't have enough time to build the characters. Because there is a lot of action going on and character building through action is fine, but it's not enough. You need some more dark twists, more drama, crucial choices etc., and that I think is easier to do in an episode or an episodic format.

4P: So, hopefully we can look forward to more and more depth of story

Le Breton: Yes, because that's not what is expensive. It's more finding the good people to do it. What is expensive right now is producing an enormous amount of content with the graphics that are expected for a Next Gen game. Gamers are very demanding, I am demanding too when I buy a game. I want it to look really great, perfectly tweaked etc. But when I

The Source engine makes for some beautiful perspectives and impressive views.

see the amount of work it requires to just put a character in a single room and make it look great… And especially when you go for photorealism like we do in Dark Messiah, every time you do an animation that is not really perfect, you see it. Because your character looks like you and me, like a human being, a real-life character. So when he performs something that doesn't look like real life, it's ugly, it's crap. The number of animations we're making for the secondary NPCs – it's just crazy.

I played Oblivion and I was a little disappointed, because the characters look like actors and they have great eyes, but the rest is just stiff. I prefer World of WarCraft, because they look like comic book characters, the move like comic book characters, but at least it fits the overall picture.

But I think it's too early for episodic content, because you still feel like: If you pay 30 Euros for a game, it means it's a bad game. We got this psychological mindset which tells you: If it's not 50 to 60 Euros then it's not a triple A. Episodic content is to make games cheaper but to sell them cheaper, too. Right now the idea is that if I don't pay a lot I get a game that's not worth it. I think eventually people will say: "Yeah, I got less content and it's the same engine as former episode, so that's not a big leap, but I know there's quality inside.