Life is Strange Community Thread: Arcadia Baes

Before the Storm has one of the best queer love stories I've seen in games. What kind of research went into that?

A lot. I think when you're writing anything, research is important. Anytime you're talking about experiences not your own, and I'm speaking about myself in this, research is absolutely vital. Research and humility. But I do think there's a gentleness that's required and a recognition of boundaries, perspectives, and biases. I'm not a 16-year-old girl – I've never struggled with those experiences or my sexuality in that particular way. So, I'm writing from a place of immense ignorance in that. But we have a writer's room. I'm not the only writer – there are four of us. Half of us are female and there are members of the room and of the studio as a whole that identify within the LGBT community. We leaned on their perspectives and insight. We read a number of things online and just thought really carefully.

We chose not to tell a coming out story, and we did that for a lot of reasons. One of the most consistent pieces of feedback I got about this was people really wanted to see gay characters, queer characters, whose queerness was the least interesting thing about them. There's a story we could have told about that, absolutely, and that could be a really fruitful story but that's not the story we were going to tell. We were going to treat queerness as incidental, as matter-of-fact. Not casually and not disregarding the intricacies, but we let that not be the most important thing going on. When they kiss, it's just going to be a romantic kiss. And we set it up to be as lovely and as crazy and awesome as it could be and just not care about the fact that it's two girls. That resonated with fans and members of the community in a way that we're all just really grateful for. We wanted to tell a story, we wanted to find the boundaries of where games are intersecting with these communities and really push them. And anytime you do that, there's a risk of insensitivity, there's a risk of a mistake, there are all sorts of risks. And I think that's okay – we should take these risks.

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In terms of feedback you received on that topic, do you look back and think that there's anything you would have done differently?

No, I don't think so. There are questions I still have. Choosing to end the story with Rachel's fate was a very deliberate thing that we did. [Some fans] reacted with pain about it. And we thought that would happen. The game itself really is a pleasant fiction, because we know Chloe's fate. We know Rachel's fate. What we wanted to explore with this love story, in this little window of time, was the brilliant joy that Chloe had in Rachel but at the end, we remind you that it was temporary and that it wasn't going to last. We made a spectacle of her grief in episode one, by the end in that final scene, maybe you're feeling it in a way you wouldn't have just from her telling you that she was grieving. We wanted to see what the medium could do with that. And I'm proud of what we accomplished, and at the same time, I don't love that it hurt people because it was such an intense experience. We just want to think about the kinds of connections we're building with the interactive stories and how to be mindful. I don't think we did anything wrong, I just want to continue to be thoughtful about what we're doing because as an industry, we don't really understand what we're making still. We're still figuring it out.

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The last episode felt a little rushed. Was there anything that you regret or anything that ended up on the chopping room floor? Did you ever consider showing how Chloe and Rachel had their falling out?

Yeah, we did consider that. We considered all sorts of moments in their lives. Ultimately, we decided to confine it to this very specific few days. And yeah, things always get cut, things always get chopped. Production is frenetic and insane. There's always darlings that don't quite make it. I'll share one that we never really talked about. We had a backtalk scene where Chloe was backtalking herself in the mirror to really explore the vulnerability she was feeling and the self-doubt, and how we can be our own worst critics and our cruelest opponents. Just for production reasons, we had to cut it, but it was one of our favorite pieces of content. It would have been really beautiful and interesting.

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