Life is Strange Double Exposure devs on bringing back Max: "everybody now has the Max in their heads that we have to compete with"
Aug. 20, 2024“It’s definitely something we thought about a lot”
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Life is Strange Double Exposureis set to see Max Caulfield make a comeback back in a new adventure after 10 years. In an interview with GamesRadar+, developer Deck Nine spoke on the pressure and challenges the team faced when it came to bringing back a beloved character in a “different life stage”.
“[The portrayal of Max] definitely something we thought about a lot,” writer Aysha Farah says, “because whenever there is a big gap in time between things coming out, everybody now has the Max in their heads that we have to compete with. So I think having the distance helped too, because getting to know her in a different life stage, and she’s a different sort of person. But yeah, we definitely did have to talk a lot about how we’re gonna evolve her. What has she been doing in the meantime? What sort of personality would she grow into? What does she still do that’s the same from the first game? We talked about it a lot.”
While Max had a rewind power in the original Life is Strange game that gave her the ability to reverse her decisions before committing to a path, she’ll have a new Shift power in Double Exposure that will let her jump between parallel timelines. This power also presented the team with an opportunity to both honor what came before and go in a fresh direction.
“The new power gives us kind of an on ramp to not a new Max, but Max gets to have a different outlook and perspective on things via the new power,” game director Jonathan Stauder adds. “And so that lets us tell this particular unique Max story that honors the first, but then also lets us do something new with Max. So we’re not directly competing with a rewind heavy story. The new power lets us, I hope, kind of defy those expectations and that pressure.”
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I started out writing for the games section of a student-run website as an undergrad, and continued to write about games in my free time during retail and temp jobs for a number of years. Eventually, I earned an MA in magazine journalism at Cardiff University, and soon after got my first official role in the industry as a content editor for Stuff magazine. After writing about all things tech and games-related, I then did a brief stint as a freelancer before I landed my role as a staff writer here at GamesRadar+. Now I get to write features, previews, and reviews, and when I’m not doing that, you can usually find me lost in any one of the Dragon Age or Mass Effect games, tucking into another delightful indie, or drinking far too much tea for my own good.
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