The Quarry, the spiritual successor to The Undil Dawn, has a staggering number of 186 different endings. The director of this madness, Will Byles (Supermassive Games), has revealed this detail to the IGN medium in its IGN First program.
According to Byles, working on the game has been a “math nightmare“because each ending depends on all the decisions you make with each of the 9 characters from the beginning of the adventure to the end.
The director says that a normal script, to which the actors are accustomed, usually has about 100 pages. However, the script that they sent to the actors who will participate in The Quarry has the savagery of +1000 pages. A huge story. The actors and actresses responded with alarm because the document was huge.
“The script is over a thousand pages. We have to shoot about 50 pages a day, it’s unheard of. It’s a crazy amount of material. But obviously a lot of what they learn is the same thing over and over again, but in a branch different”.
Will Byles goes on to explain to what extent it is a craziness write such a long script with so many endings. The ways grow exponentially to decisions, something that ends up resulting in “a mathematical nightmare“. Byles tells that “when you carry 20 options, you already have ridiculous amounts of data.”
Supermassive Games is faced with a mathematical problem of a magnitude that has never been seen before in a video game, because no game has 186 endings. The study aims to solve this problem strategically using the decisions (small and large) to ensure that each choice creates a different story line. The more characters are involved in the decision, the more ramifications and complexity.
Finally, Byles confirms that it is possible to kill everyone. As you lose characters, the number of endings will decrease. “With a horror like this, my favorite way to do it is to have a good number of people die pretty horribly. But you can also play to the end and make everyone live.“
Bottom line: The Quarry will have 186 endings, though many of us will never see even half of them. Imagine the duration of the videos that show “all endings”. The Quarry will be released on June 10, 2022.