Omikron: How Ideas from a Bad Game Led Quantic Dream Forward - Article

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It’s not something that happens very often but there are times when bad games, even truly awful ones, demonstrate so much potential that it’s not only difficult to fully hate them, but it becomes easy to imagine how greatness could be fostered from them.

There was a game released on the PC (and subsequently on the Sega Dreamcast) back in 1999-2000 called Omikron: The Nomad Soul. It was the first game from French developer Quantic Dream, a studio who would majorly switch gears and enjoy a surge in popularity and critical acclaim many years later, with the cinematic trio of Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, and most recently, Beyond: Two Souls.

But Omikron was not a game that would propel Quantic Dream to stardom. Though incredibly ambitious, it was also a game broken in so many ways that it would be difficult to list them all even in a major review. There is one thing, however, that this futuristic adventure without question does better than any Quantic Dream project since; it feels like a fully-realized game.

I mean that with no disrespect towards what would ultimately become Quantic Dream’s direction. I enjoyed all three of their “cinematic” games and found them, Indigo Prophecy especially, to be a breath of fresh air and something different and much-needed for the industry. These are games where story, dialogue, emotion, your choices, and their atmosphere trump all else, including the gameplay itself. While you have the ability to explore your immediate area, you have little control over your characters' journeys from a gameplay perspective, the majority of your impact coming from your interaction with these games’ many cutscenes.

Much of this takes on the form of button prompts (that dreaded “QTE” word) and dialogue trees, with Beyond: Two Souls going a little bit further and throwing in some minor shooting segments and combat, though these too were simply a matter of pressing a button (or moving the analog stick) when the game tells you to.

Omikron: The Nomad Soul is an entirely different beast. After a cutscene which breaks the fourth wall (someone informs you that you, the gamer, are about to send your soul into the body of the main character), you’re set free into the cold, concrete, futuristic world of Omikron and given the freedom to explore. More districts of the city are unlocked as you progress, expanding the scope of the game greatly as you go, and it's far greater than the size of anything Quantic Dream’s done since. While playing Omikron there are sections of shooting, hand to hand combat, item management, the occasional puzzle, and even a lot of Shenmue-like detective work to be completed, as you search out clues to solve the game’s mystery.

There are also bits and pieces of what types of games Quantic Dream would eventually set out to make. The dialogue trees and conversation choices, the story continuing after your death, a plot that starts out as a police procedural but then quickly steps into the demonic side of things and, of course, an incredible sense of atmosphere; these all exist within this first adventure of theirs. David Cage and his team know how to create atmosphere and the world of Omikron, with its eerily quiet and dark streets, its foggy skies and grimy strip clubs, a metal and concrete décor, and noisy robots, is one just dying to be remade. The PC version was certainly not a looker, the Dreamcast version even less so, but the idea of a next gen version of this setting, or one similar to it, is one that I’d find truly exciting.

I don’t want it to sound like Omikron’s a good game in any sense, however. Almost all of what it attempts to do, it does badly. The shooting's loose and unrefined, the graphics are awful, your choices in the conversations never seem to make too much of a difference, the writing's sometimes cringe-worthy, and the objectives can be ridiculously tough to figure out. Even after major boss battles you’re unceremoniously dumped back into the city to guess what to do next, with hardly as much as even a hint from the game to steer you in the right direction. And don’t get me started on the terrible controls and - in the Dreamcast version, at least - ridiculously bad framerate.

But as unpolished and flawed as it was, I’d love to see Quantic Dream try their hand at something like Omikron again. Their games today feature a very different form of exploration, letting you delve into the personalities of their characters, or picking up a guitar in your apartment and sitting down to play it. It’s something unique, but it’s also something that I don’t think has much room to grow. What was an incredibly new concept to me in Indigo Prophecy became less and less impressive with Heavy Rain and then Beyond: Two Souls. These super-linear, cinematic and QTE-heavy games are fun, but I don’t think they’re something that the studio can stick with for the rest of its existence.

If they could, with all of the experience and development knowledge they’ve picked up since, make an attempt at something like Omikron again - to create another free-roaming action/adventure where you were really in control of the main character and his journey through the world, where you still had an awesome plot and very cinematic conversations, but where they were in the context of a real game that wasn’t afraid to label itself a game instead of an “interactive movie” - then I think that would be such a promising step forward for the developer. In a way they’d almost be coming full circle, and backing away from much of the ideology that David Cage has embraced in recent years about wanting his games to be fully accessible to non-gamers, and not as much even be labeled “games” but rather their own interactive medium that all people can enjoy.

These were and are valid goals, but I’ve long felt that one doesn't have to sacrifice providing an actual gameplay experience to achieve them; most people who would buy a given video game would not be afraid to do so if they had to learn a control scheme. Doing something like this would require the studio to challenge itself to create a full-on gaming experience again, something they haven’t really done since their first game, but as someone who likes their previous three games but is beginning feel that there’s little else they can really do to take this type of gameplay forward, I’d love to see them take the best from both worlds and switch gears to something different. Something more like Omikron, but a far better quality product and with all that they've learned and incorporated since.

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