Given Time has made The Far Shore blossom beautifully into its final form.
Jett: The Far Shorewas, like the jagged colossi that roamed its lavender skies, an odd beast.
Instead, I could only replay previous chapters.

If only Jett had embraced a rhythm as organic as its inspired ecosystem.
When the Jett team read that review, they didnt disagree.
And internally we were like, Yeah, it is.

Its the satisfying fulfillment of Jetts initial promise.
But why such a meandering route to get there?
That was always the destination for Jetts design, says Adams.

Everything about the game was a little bit odd.
And so the Jett team decided they needed to add something else to the mix.
And that might be a ramp up to getting them involved in that more immersive sim thing.

And so that format had been in place and thats what we were driving towards.
As Adams notes, there is a poetic upside to the clean break the team made between campaigns.
But I could also see that there were some loose ends.

Youve made something good, this is a lot of work, its tiring.
But after playing Given Time, I was like, You have to ship this now.
Because it’s really good and its almost done.

And that throughline between the two pieces was very present.
After the pioneering momentum of The Far Shore, the new campaign picks up in an intentionally odd place.
And we wanted it to have that kind of a shape.
It took 1,000 years, thats true in terms of making the trip to The Far Shore.
Its a bunch of good people struggling against adversity to win the day as best as they can.
Adams created mind maps that positioned specific characters somewhere between Tolstoy, Tom Wolfe and Moby Dick.
These specific words and phrases that suited.
But they also talk of Boombuds and Polypops, giving their new discoveries memorably playful names.
Tsosi bless is a common phrase in the QA Slack channel.
For Given Time, the British writer Dan Berry took on that role.
My idea was to come in and leave none of my own fingerprints on it, he says.
It couldnt start being something else as soon as I started touching it.
But its a balance Adams is more than content with.
I think that the ideal story experience is in Given Time, he says.
Its an experience I can attest to.