QUANTUM BREAK
Quantum Broken
The flagship UWA game is a hot mess
Developer Remedy enteRtainment publisher micRosoft price $ 89.95 AvAilAble At WindoWs 10 stoRe www.quantumbreak.com
The Finnish developer, Remedy Entertainment has a long history of developing high quality PC games that not only investigate interesting new ways of telling stories but also contain innovative and engrossing gameplay mechanics. Although not the most prolific of developers, with only five PC games developed between the company being founded in 1996 and the release of Quantum Break. While the developer’s first game, Death Rally, was well received, it is now mostly forgotten, but the following four games are all, Max Payne, Alan Wake and their sequels are all lauded as classics and make frequent appearances in best of lists. While the same could be said for Quantum Break on Xbox One, the shoddy nature of the PC port and the myriad problems with Microsoft’s UWP (Universal Windows Platform) render Quantum Break on PC a fundamentally flawed and ultimately unsatisfying experience.
There is a good, perhaps even great game hiding under the poor porting, and a fantastic, well presented story (if you can see it - more on that later). Players take the role of Jack Joyce, a man with a slightly shady past (early information shows that he has a criminal record and small arms training), a man brought home to the city of Riverport by his best friend Paul Serene. Despite the fact that Jack’s meeting with Paul is set for 4:15am, Jack isn’t suspicious of his friend’s motives for flying him to a city he hasn’t returned to for six years, so what comes next isn’t that much of a surprise. Paul want’s Jack’s help to test a time machine that Serene and Jack’s brother William have developed. Things go wrong. Time breaks and starts to fracture, causing “stutters” and Jack himself is bombarded with Chronon particles, enabling him to manipulate time in small ways. Paul Serene is also bombarded and through some time hanky-panky that is slowly revealed through the 10 or so hour campaign, becomes the villain, a fact that will come as no surprise considering the character is voiced, mocapped and modelled on Aidan Gillen (Petyr Baelish/Littlefinger from Game of Thrones).
The action that follows the impressive opening can best be described as a cover
based shooter crossed with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with players alternating between Jack Joyce and Paul Serene during the story chapters and then seeing how decisions made during gameplay pan out in 22 minute live action TV episodes that stream between the chapters. It’s an intriguing format. The lengthy Jack Joyce levels feature some tense shooting, with the hero having to use his time based powers - creating a shield, freezing an area or enemy for a short while, dodging (and launching into Bullet-Time style attacks) and seeing the past - to fight off the forces of the nefarious Monarch Corporation and learn the truth of what has happened with the time machine, why Paul has become the bad guy and how to stop time from shattering altogether. Paul Serene levels are much shorter and revolve around making game changing decisions rather than shooting faceless private army goons to death. The conceit for Serene’s big decisions is a clever one and adds some weight to what would otherwise be some pretty binary choices. Paul’s time powers are more advanced that Jack’s, enabling him to see the general result of decisions before committing to a choice. Once the choice has been made, players can then watch what amounts to an episode of live action TV that details how choices made in the chapter pan out. Due to the number of variables, these episodes stream from a central server rather than reside on the HDD. There are reportedly over 70Gb of video files.
It’s an interesting and mostly successful approach to storytelling that certainly fits comfortably in the Remedy wheelhouse, but the videos break up the flow of action a little too much to make them fully satisfying, and skipping them to keep the momentum flowing makes the game feel disjointed.
Matters of pacing aside, the fundamentals of the game are solid, but everything is ruined by the shoddy porting and presentation. No matter how powerful your machine, Quantum Break shows erratic frame pacing. What this means is that the timing between frames is not in the least bit stable so no matter if you have the game rate running at 100 frames a second or have it frame locked to 30, the animation stutters and looks janky. The game is a resource hog, so only the most powerful POCs can run it at high settings and get a consistently playable framerate. This is partially due to the way the game is rendered and partially due to the fact that it can fill up and fragment video memory. Rather than simply outputting the game at the resolution shown, Quantum Break instead renders each image as it would on the Xbox One, rendering the final image from four buffers rendered with 4xMSAA at two thirds of screen resolution. A 1080p image, for example, is rendered from four 720p buffers. While this should technically make the game easier on PC resources it appears to have the exact opposite effect, leading to significant slowdown during some scenes.
Many of the fundamental graphics problems with Quantum Break could be fairly easily fixed if it weren’t for the fact that Windows 10 Store games function as apps, meaning that even when displaying in what appears to be full screen, they are actually run
in a borderless windowed mode. This means that anything the runs behind the program or as an overlay has no effect. As such, the variable controls and minute adjustments that can be made using the Nvidia Experience interface or Radeon Crimson have no effect on the running of the game. As it stands, Quantum Break doesn’t support Crossfire or SLI, so end users with dual graphics cards get no extra oomph from their machines.
Even without the ability to tweak graphics settings, testing done by a number of outlets has shown that Radeon cards show markedly better performance than similarly specced Nvidia cards. As good as that sounds, it’s not cause to celebrate for Radeon owners, as there are a number of problems that are unique to Radeon users. There seems to be a problem common to many R300 range cards that means that causes anti-aliasing to cause to screen to be covered in black bars and heavy pixel snow, making the game unplayable. Turning off anti-aliasing fixes the problem but makes the game look much worse and really highlights how janky the erratic framerate really is. During testing we also had problems with the streaming episodes while using an R9 390, with the image being obliterated by bands of colour that resemble test patterns from the days TV stations used to close for the night.
As something of a defacto flagship title for UWP and the Windows 10 store, Quantum Break needed to be a knockout hit, lauding the new platform and distribution method to PC gamers everywhere. This is definitely not the case. If anything, Quantum Break simply highlights the flaws of UWP and the idea of cross platform development. What works on Xbox One isn’t working on PC, because the game has not in any way been optimised for PC, and the Windows 10 store and treating games as apps does nothing but treat PCs as consoles, taking away one of the fundamental features, and joys, of being a PC games - the ability to tweak performance and settings until things are just how you want them.