Life is Strange: Double Exposure Deck Nine has confirmed that they will respect the player’s final decision from the first game and will not declare any of the original end canon.
Following the game’s initial reveal at the Xbox Games Showcase last weekend, an extended livestream aired last night that included interviews with key developers and Max’s returning voice actress Hannah Telle, plus 15 minutes of gameplay. The stream went into detail about the new environment, Max’s new abilities, and most importantly, how the game wants to stay true to player choices from previous titles.
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Two generations of consoles and nearly 10 years since Life is Strange was first released, it’s no surprise that you don’t import save information from LIS1 directly into Double Exposure, but Deck Nine has a plan to ensure your experience of the latest game remains reflective of those long-ago choices. While previous sequels Life is Strange 2 and Life is Strange: True Colors asked you straight up what ending you got in the original game, Double Exposure will take a slightly more organic approach with this direct sequel.
The reveal stream showed a snippet of a conversation between Max and new friend Safi, where the latter asks about the photo of Chloe that the grown-up Max still has in her wallet. The player has the option to describe her as an old friend or high school sweetheart, giving you feedback on whether you’ve been following a romance between the two or keeping things platonic. It is assumed that setting up the eventual fates of Chloe and Arcadia Bay from your playthrough will be handled by similar dialogue choices.
This is good news for fans who were hoping that Life is Strange would not break its longstanding commitment to ensure that there would be no such thing as non-canon gameplay for any of the games in the series. But still, not everyone is thrilled, as this open-ended way of building a sequel means that even if Chloe survives 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 most certainly are No Chloe and Warren from the original.
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Instead, the stream suggests that Max will have the chance to pursue a punk librarian, presumably a colleague from her new job at the fictional Caledon University in Vermont — which I’m personally not totally against, but this new girl is going to be pretty awesome to win over all those avid Pricefield shippers. who have had almost ten years to invest extremely in their One True Pairing.
But be careful: even if your ship just sunk, Chloe is clearly still very important to Max if he keeps her photo close after all these years, and even the end of their potential romance doesn’t mean Chloe’s influence is all that important. missing in the latest game. It’s the people who put Max and Warren together who you really have to feel for – no one seems too concerned about explaining where they’ve gotten these days.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is set to 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 will include two weeks of early access to Episodes 1 and 2, along with a range of cosmetics and an exclusive side story about a missing cat – but has been criticized for costing a whopping £25/$30 more than the standard edition.