Life is strange: double exposure will respect the player’s final decision from the first game and will not reveal either original final canon, Deck Nine has confirmed.
Following the game’s initial reveal at last weekend’s Xbox Games Showcase, an extended livestream aired last night, featuring interviews with key developers and Max’s returning voice actor Hannah Telle, plus 15 minutes of gameplay. The stream went into details about the new setting, Max’s new powers and, crucially, how the game aims to stay true to the player’s choices from previous titles.
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Two console generations and almost a decade after the first Life is Strange release, it’s unsurprising that you won’t be importing your save data from LIS1 directly into Double Exposure, but Deck Nine has a plan to ensure your experience in the latest game continues always reflects those choices from long ago. While previous sequels Life is Strange 2 and Life is Strange: True Colors both directly asked you which ending you got in the original game, Double Exposure will take a slightly more organic approach for this direct sequel.
The reveal stream showed a snippet of a conversation between Max and new boyfriend Safi, in which the latter requests the photo of Chloe that adult Max still keeps in her wallet. The player has the option to describe her as an old girlfriend or a high school sweetheart, allowing you to specify whether you pursued a romance between the two or kept things platonic. Presumably, determining the ultimate fate of Chloe and Arcadia Bay from your playthrough will be handled via similar dialogue choices.
It’s good news for fans who were hoping that Life is Strange wouldn’t break its long-standing commitment to ensuring there’s no such thing as a non-canon playthrough for any of the games in the series. Still, not everyone is happy about it, as this open-ended way of constructing a sequel means that even if Chloe survived in your game, her absence suggests that she and Max have gone their separate ways in the intervening years; especially since it’s also been confirmed that Max will have new optional love interests that are almost certain not Chloe and Warren from the original.
Instead, the stream implies that Max will have the option to pursue a punky librarian type, presumably a colleague from her new job at the fictional Caledon University in Vermont – which I’m personally not exactly against, but this new girl will It would be pretty awesome to win over all those avid Pricefield shippers who have had almost a decade to invest extremely in their One True Pairing.
But rest assured, even if your ship has just been sunk, Chloe is clearly still very important to Max if she keeps her photo close after all these years, and even the end of their potential romance doesn’t have to mean that Chloe’s influence has completely disappeared. is. absent from the latest game. It’s the people who brought Max and Warren together that you really have to feel for – no one seems concerned with explaining where he’s going these days.
Life is strange: double exposure will release on October 29 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Nintendo Switch port planned for an unknown later date. The Ultimate Edition offers two weeks early access to episodes 1 and 2, alongside a slew of cosmetics and an exclusive side story involving a missing cat, but has been criticized for costing a whopping £25/$30 more than the standard edition.