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Inside Vampyr, the follow-up to Life Is Strange
What does it mean to be a vampire in a human’s world? We find out.
Can you live a moral life as a vampire?
© Dontnod
At first glance, a roleplaying-game revolving around a human-hunting vampire doesn’t seem like a natural progression for Dontnod, creators of both Life Is Strange and Remember Me. The French studios has thus far concentrated on female protagonists struggling to work out where they fit in their worlds through the building of new memories and the reacquisition of existing ones.
By contrast, Vampyr is a game that puts you in the shoes of a male hunter of night who exists in early 20th century London and must make constant decisions regarding how often, and who, to kill to satisfying the need for blood.
Look below the surface, however, and the links between Vampyr and Dontnod’s previous games start to become clear and a strong sense of continuation emerges. Whilst combat and typical levelling up of the sort associated with RPGs is present here, everything we’ve seen and heard so far indicates that the focus is very much on the tough choices that come from being a vampire who still remembers their life as a human.
“Life Is Strange is about becoming an adult, making sacrifices and accepting the consequences of those,” explains Stephane Beauverger, Vampyr’s narrative director. “Vampyr invites you to kill, but it questions whether it’s a good thing for you to do and forces you to live with the consequences of whatever you decide. Most video games give players huge powers but they don’t couple that with consequences; you’re simply asked to win and overcome obstacles put in your way.”
In Life Is Strange you have the ‘huge power’ of being able to rewind time and replay events in order to see the initial outcome of your decisions, but your power is limited in that you don’t know what the long-term outcomes are going to be. In Vampyr you have the ‘huge power’ of being able to kill humans, but you need to get to grips with both the long-term impact of doing so and your own ideas as to what you ethically believe to be right and wrong.
Neither game is necessarily about winning, they’re about facing up to the results of your actions and coming to your own conclusion as to whether what you’ve chosen is the path you would ideally have liked to tread.
Dark, moody streets are a staple of Vampyr
© Dontnod
“In Vampyr we provide a more ambiguous idea of what is right and wrong and that allows the player to react to events in their own way and without worrying if they’re playing ‘correctly’,” says Beauverger.
To this end, Vampyr offers multiple conclusions depending on the decisions you take throughout the course of the game. None of these are what Beauverger describes as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ending, however. The end result of your actions is left purposefully indistinct, on an ethical level, in order to give players the space to decode events as they choose to.
Narrative reactions to your decisions come in the form of altering the lives and relationships of people around you, rather than the main plot itself changing. The London shown here goes through certain alterations no matter what you alone decide, but it’s your personal vision of the world that can ultimately become wildly different to that experienced by other players.
“There’s a case in which you can decide to kill bar owners Tom and Sabrina,” describes Beauverger by way of example of how it’s the things immediately around you that change. “You can kill both or just one of them, and there are a lot of different ways this can impact the future of your story.”
“If you kill one before the other than that has different consequences, and if you eventually kill both of them their bar will close down and that will fed into the lives of the people who used to visit and hide out there. I think that’s a good example of how your decisions have a big impact without necessarily altering the way the main story plays out.”
Vampire hunters are dedicated to killing you
© Dontnod
Supposedly, it is possible to go through the entire game without killing anyone. However, given your vampirism and the need to drink blood, it’s incredibly likely that such a course is going to represent the most difficult of paths. Beauverger is also teasingly vague in his declaration that a third option, above and beyond simply killing someone or not, exists in most cases of a victim coming into your menu.
Positioning targets as victims is one of the key pillars to Vampyr’s narrative framework. You are a vampire, after all. You are not a hero within this world and you are not the good guy. You are a monster who, whether you choose to embrace it or not, kills those around him and, biologically, seems to have little choice in this regard.
By having you embody a character that relies on performing socially damaging acts to simply survive, Vampyr has the potential to delve deeper into grounds of morals and ethics than games that position you as a typical hero intent on treading the straightest and narrowest of paths.
Is it evil to kill if your life depends on it? Is it right to spare one person’s life over another? At what point do you give in to nature and be the creature that you physically are? If the player is human inhabiting a vampire’s body, are you acting as a human or as a vampire?
Facing your enemies is inevitable
© Dontnod
All of these questions and more come out of our conversation with Beauverger and what we’ve seen of the game in action up to this point. Vampyr’s challenge now is not to answer such questions, but to make sure they are served up in interesting enough ways to encourage players to think about their own answers and engage with them on a philosophical and emotional level.
In order to bring these questions to the forefront as strongly as possible, the environment of London itself has been designed in such a way as to act as a reflection on your own role as a vampire. You play as a newly converted vampire struggling to grasp the concepts that now dictate your life and trying to figure out if there is a way to cling to your humanity in the face of having to become a killer.
“London struggling to contain an epidemic and it’s crumbling down and people are surviving in very difficult circumstances,” Beauverger says when quizzed on whether there was explicit intention to have the city resemble the character. “At the same time as these difficulties are occurring it’s also a place and time where great scientific discoveries are being made: the microscope, batteries and all kinds of things.”
“Suddenly science seems to be the answer to everything and every problem. Just as the character has to answer the question of what it’s going to do with this new power and new life, the city of London has to ask itself the same question and how it’s going to put these powerful discoveries to use.”
The more Beauverger opens up about the intent behind the design of Vampyr the more you come to realise how many layers are going into its narrative production. It’s these layers that represent the most exciting element of the game, the potential existing to touch upon and explore a wide range of notions in a way that isn’t patronising or one-dimensional.
If Vampyr manages to ask as many questions as it promises then it could well wind up being the kind of successor to Life Is Strange that we all want it to be.
Vampyr is out during Q4 2017 on Xbox One, PS4 and PC. For more gaming coverage, be sure to follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
