Omikron Game

PlayFrance: interview David Cage

2009-09-23T20:14:00.001Z

interview David Cage PlayFrance
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Autor: staff
Source:
Language: French

[FJV 2009] Heavy Rain : Interview exclusive P3L de David Cage

2009-09-19T12:09:00.002Z

C'est grâce à la présence sur les lieux de notre éminent collègue et rédacteur Drummerbart (et bien évidemment de Grégory Delfosse, RP Sony France qu'on ne cessera de remercier pour l'attention qu'il porte à notre site), que la rencontre a pu être, après celle de l'E3, encore une fois possible entre la rédaction P3L et David Cage, le papa de Heavy Rain, et évidemment de Quantic Dream.
Sans plus attendre, voici l'interview confectionnée par nos soins, et comme d'accoutumée de la part de David Cage, sans concession :

P3L : Quand a débuté le processus de création de Heavy Rain ?

David CAGE : C'est vraiment sur la fin de Fahrenheit, j'étais un peu déprimé et un peu partagé : on avait travaillé longtemps sur ce projet dans lequel on croyait beaucoup, ça a été un peu chaotique pour des raisons indépendantes de notre volonté, on a été pris dans la tourmente Vivendi et surtout, lors de l'E3, j'ai vu Fahrenheit présenté au milieu de jeux qui n'avaient rien à voir et je me suis senti complètement étranger à tout ce que tout le monde faisait à l'époque, du coup j'étais vraiment convaincu qu'on s'était trompé de voie et que ce n'est pas ça qu'il fallait faire. On commençait à parler d'autres projets à d'autres éditeurs et c'est à ce moment là que sont sortis les premiers tests, qui furent dithyrambiques et les premiers chiffres de vente furent également très bon, puisque le titre entrera en tête dans les charts Anglais et Allemand. Donc ça c'est finalement plutôt bien passé. On arrivait face à des éditeurs en leur proposant un Nomad Soul II et eux nous répondaient qu'ils avaient joué à Fahrenheit, qu'il l'avaient trouvé super et nous demandaient donc de poursuivre plutôt dans cette voie là. On s'est donc dit que finalement on n'avait peut-être trouvé quelque chose, qu'on ne s'était pas si trompé que ça et nous avons donc choisi la continuité.

D'où te vient ton inspiration ? Quelles sont tes influences ?

L'inspiration on ne sait jamais d'où elle vient vraiment, sans doute de films ou autre mais parfois c'est un truc que tu as vu il y a 20 ans qui te revient alors que tu es en pleine écriture. Donc c'est toujours difficile à expliquer d'où viennent les influences. Mais en tout cas, c'est le premier jeu que j'écris dans lequel il y a des choses personnelles et vraiment une envie de raconter des choses qui me rendent plus proche que ce qu'on fait traditionnellement.

Tu as parlé, en cours de développement, d'un début et d'une fin immuables, seules nos actions entre les deux rendraient la progression différente, mais avec le même point final. En est-il toujours de même à l'heure actuelle, ou peut-on s'attendre à plusieurs « fins » possibles ?

Il y a toujours une logique de fin différente mais de toute façon Heavy Rain c'est bien plus que ça. Ce n'est pas un ligne droite avec au bout 3 fins différentes, il y a vraiment différentes manières, différentes routes pour atteindre différentes fins. Mais cette fin est vraiment la conséquence logique de tous les actes du joueur, pas simplement d'une action, puisque certaines ne vont pas avoir de conséquence directe, ou alors limitée dans le temps ; alors que d'autres auront vraiment un impact fort sur le cheminement. Ce n'est pas un choix qui va donner un chemin, mais la narration que choisira de donner le joueur à l'histoire qui le conduira vers une de la quinzaine de fin possibles.

Heavy Rain étant avant tout une histoire qui se prend dans sa globalité et une expérience personnelle, est-ce un jeu facile à présenter dans un salon ?

Le problème c'est qu'Heavy Rain n'est justement pas un jeu de salon. Un jeu d'action c'est facile, tu prends le pad et en 5 minutes tu sais si tu aimes ou pas. Heavy Rain est un jeu qui repose sur la narration, sur l'émotion, on a besoin de temps pour apprendre à connaître les personnages. Qui sont-ils, d'où viennent-ils, où vont-ils, pourquoi sont-ils là, quels sont les enjeux ? Là on a rien de tout ça, ce sont vraiment des samples, ce sont des échantillons du jeu qui sont un peu jetés en pâtures et on ne sait jamais vraiment ce que les gens en retirent en mal ou en bien.

Entre 2 entretiens tu observes peut-être les réactions des joueurs, qui parfois semblent un peu déstabilisés par le mode de contrôle du jeu. Quel est ton ressenti par rapport à ces réactions ?

Heavy Rain est un jeu dans lequel on change le mode d'interaction, on avance de manière inhabituel, le switch de caméra n'est pas classique, c'est un jeu qui nécessite de rentrer dedans. C'est pas comme un shooter dans lequel on connaît les codes parce qu'on a joué à une dizaine de jeux similaires. On teste le jeu comme il doit être testé, c'est à dire que nous organisons des cessions avec des gens qui n'ont jamais joués, on leur fait découvrir le jeu chronologiquement et on a vraiment des retours extraordinaires sur la manière dont le jeu se joue. C'est pour ça qu'il ne faut pas se baser sur les réactions dans un endroit comme celui-ci, même si globalement on se rend compte que le contrôle du jeu devient vite spontané après quelques minutes de jeu.

Beaucoup de joueurs ont peu apprécié le « renforcement » des cinématiques du dernier Metal Gear. Doit-on s'attendre à une omniprésence des cinématiques aussi sur Heavy Rain ? Ou ces dernières seront-elles distillées avec parcimonie tout au long du jeu ?

Il n'y a pas de cinématiques dans Heavy Rain, où alors elles sont très courtes puisqu'elles ne durent pas plus de 20 secondes. Tout l'intérêt du jeu, on ne l'a peut-être pas assez expliqué, c'est justement de ne pas raconter l'histoire à travers des cinématiques mais bien à travers des actions du joueur.

Lors du GamesCom tu t'étais justement un peu énervé sur la place des cinématiques et surtout des QTE ...

Jusqu'à maintenant, nous avons montré 4 scènes du jeu et 2 trailers, il y a peu de jeux qui se donnent autant de mal. Sur ces 4 scènes, il y en a une qui comprend des QTE qui représentent 1/3 de la scène en question et c'est la proportion qu'on retrouve à peu de chose près dans le jeu. Mais ce n'est en tout cas pas un jeu à la Dragon's Lair ou je ne sais quoi, Heavy Rain est très rythmé, dans lequel on a un retour immédiat sur ses actions et que nous voulons spectaculaire. Pour le moment nous avons de très bons retours , notamment aux USA où il y a beaucoup de hardcore-gamers qui étaient dubitatifs avant de prendre le pad en main et qui, une fois aux commandes, ont pris pleinement plaisir à jouer.

Penses-tu que, justement, certains joueurs sont dubitatifs parce qu'ils ont moyennement appréciés l'expérience Fahrenheit, s'attendant peut-être à plus d'action ?

Les séquences d'action sur Fahrenheit ne fonctionnaient pas comme nous le voulions. Nous avons essayé beaucoup de choses et n'étions pas particulièrement heureux du résultat final, mais justement, on apprend de ça, il ne faut pas jeter le bébé avec l'eau du bain. Nous sommes repartis d'une page blanche sur ce point et je pense que nous avons trouvé une solution qui me donne beaucoup plus de satisfactions sur Heavy Rain.

Quoi que fasse le joueur, pourra-t-il toujours finir le jeu ? S'il fait une succession de très mauvais choix, pourra t-il se retrouver en game over ?

C'est un jeu dans lequel il n'y a pas de game over, j'ai vraiment voulu me débarrasser de cette notion qui sous entend que, puisque le joueur n'a pas joué comme le développeur l'a pensé, il doit recommencer jusqu'à ce qu'il réussisse. D'un point de vue narratif, ça n'a pas de sens, ça crée une rupture temporelle qui fait revenir en arrière et revivre les mêmes choses. J'ai donc souhaité que la mort des personnages soient un événement du scénario, le joueur à perdu le personnage, a perdu sa piste mais ça ne doit pas être vécu comme une sanction. Ok, le personnage est mort mais en même temps ça permettra sans doute au joueur de découvrir des scènes qu'ils n'auraient pas vu de son vivant.

Heavy Rain est sans doute l'aboutissement du croisement entre jeu vidéo et cinéma. Penses-tu à ce titre qu'une adaptation soit possible ? Pourrais-tu en prendre les commandes ?

Non, honnêtement non et ce n'est pas quelque chose qui me fait rêver particulièrement. Il faut beaucoup de temps pour apprendre à faire un film et on ne s'improvise pas réalisateur du jour au lendemain. Je suis content d'être ici et de faire ce que je fais, comme je le fais. Bien sur, si demain quelqu'un proposait de faire un film d'Heavy Rain, j'en serais heureux mais ça ne sera pas moi qui le dirigerait, ce n'est ni un rêve, ni une envie, ni un aboutissement.

Vous avez voulu un titre résolument adulte, avez-vous une idée de la classification PEGI ?

Heavy Rain sera classifié M (18+).

Quantic Dream a développé trois jeux depuis 1995, comment le studio fait-il pour « vivre » dans un environnement économique difficile ?

On vit très bien, on vit même mieux. A une époque, au moment du développement d'internet, plein de monde me disait « pourquoi tu ne fais pas des sites internet ? », les gens qui me disaient ça ne sont plus là pour en parler, ou encore « pourquoi tu fais pas des jeux Wii ou DS ? », les gens qui me disaient ça, souffrent aujourd'hui parce que le marché est en train de changer. J'ai la chance depuis le début de l'aventure Quantic, de trouver des gens qui me donnent les moyens de développer mes idées et qui me donnent le temps de le faire. Au nom de quoi je devrais faire la course et me dire « il faut que je sorte 10 jeux par an » ? En quoi faire 10 jeux par an serait mieux que faire 1 jeu tous les 4 ans comme je le fais actuellement ? 4 ans, c'est le temps qu'il faut pour développer une technologie propriétaire, développer un nouveau concept, avoir le temps de l'écrire, de le développer et de le réaliser. C'est le temps jusqu'à présent qu'on m'a donné, donc j'ai pris. Honnêtement, je n'en tire pas de fierté, je n'en ai pas honte non plus, c'est simplement comme ça que je vois mon travail.

Le studio consacre t-il 100 % de ses ressources à HR ou a t-il d'autres projets en cours, un Nomad Soul 2, par exemple ?

A Quantic nous sommes des artisans, comme dans un atelier nous avons l'amour du travail bien fait, en tout cas nous avons une vraie implication, une vraie envie. Nous n'avons pas vocation à devenir demain une usine à jeux, nous n'avons pas derrière nous des actionnaires qui nous menacent si ça ne va pas. Nous sommes juste des gens passionnés. Donc toutes les ressources de Quantic -nous sommes actuellement une centaine- sont concentrées sur Heavy Rain et y sera tant que ça sera nécessaire jusqu'à la dernière minute. A aucun moment il n'y aura un calcul pour envoyer une partie de l'équipe travailler sur un jeu DS ou un jeu Wii pour rentabiliser je ne sais pas quoi, nous ne sommes pas du tout dans cette démarche là.

En parlant de rentabilité, quel regard portes-tu sur le marché du jeu et plus particulièrement sur les déclarations d'un Kotick, qui montre peu d'estime pour les joueurs et pour la créativité ?

Je crois que dans toutes les industries il y a différentes manières de faire son métier, différentes logiques. Il y a des gens aujourd'hui pour qui faire du jeu vidéo est un placement financier comme un autre et c'est respectable en soit quand on est clair dans sa démarche, et il y en à d'autres qui ont des ambitions plus artistiques, à chacun de se positionner clairement en fonction de ce qu'il a envie de faire. Quantic est une entreprise dont le but est aussi de gagner de l'argent, nous ne sommes pas une association de bienfaisance non plus. Mais nous pensons que le meilleur moyen d'y arriver c'est en faisant des jeux originaux et en explorant de nouvelles voies. C'est un vrai projet d'entreprise de penser que nous arriverons à la profitabilité en faisant de la qualité, plutôt que de se comporter en esclavagiste ou de déménager les studios dans je ne sais quel pays …

Comment Sony a t-il contribué au développement du jeu (Outils ? Part financière ? Savoir faire ?)

Sony a énormément contribué au projet d'abord en nous faisant confiance, ce qui n'est pas rien par les temps qui courent. C'est un projet qui à un coût élevé, comme tous les projets next-gen, qui a un risque à la fois industriel et éditorial parce qu'il sort des sentiers battus. Ils ont également bien sur totalement financé le projet, en tant que producteur et éditeur exclusif sur PS3. Sur le plan technique, notre technologie est totalement propriétaire mais l'avantage de travailler avec une entreprise comme Sony est d'avoir accès à des pré-kits et surtout nous avons la possibilité de donner notre avis sur des features software ou hardware et ça, c'est un vrai bonheur.

Que penses tu de l'évolution des consoles (reconnaissance faciale, PS-mote, 3D) et comment t'inscris-tu dans cette évolution ?

Tout ça est très intéressant mais tout ça va très vite, on a pas encore eu le temps de digérer la PS3 et on a déjà des nouveaux « devices » qui arrivent alors que nous n'avons pas du tout fait le tour de la console, nous avons encore beaucoup de marge pour progresser. On regarde bien sur tout ça avec beaucoup d'intérêt, y a des choses très intéressantes, notamment le contrôleur motion de Sony que nous suivons depuis les premiers prototypes avec beaucoup d'intérêt. Pour l'instant nous restons concentré sur Heavy Rain et nous nous pencherons sur tout ça quand le moment viendra.

Pour finir, à l'approche de la sortie du jeu, ressens-tu une pression particulière autour de la sortie d'Heavy Rain ? Quelles sont tes craintes ou, au contraire, es-tu plutôt optimiste et pourquoi ?

Ni l'un ni l'autre … Je suis très concentré sur ce que nous faisons actuellement, je suis très attentif à l'équipe qui travaille très dure depuis très longtemps, cent personnes c'est quand même une grosse machine. Surtout, ce sont des humains, il faut gérer la fatigue, la pression et les échéances. Tout ça sans perdre de vue la qualité du jeu pour faire en sorte d'arriver au niveau que nous nous sommes fixés. Je ne suis pas quelqu'un d'ultra confiant pour me dire « c'est bon, c'est gagné, ça y est c'est dans la poche », il ne faut pas être comme ça dans notre métier. Mais en même temps je ne suis pas quelqu'un de défaitiste non plus, j'ai confiance en mon produit, je sais que nous faisons le jeu que j'avais envie de faire et maintenant ma tâche est de le terminer. Après, mon travail est fini quelque part, une fois que j'ai remis mon master, les gens pensent ce qu'ils en pensent, écrivent ce qu'ils veulent écrire et c'est un peu à chacun de se positionner par rapport à ça.

A Los Angeles tu avais dit à nos lecteur de rester connectés, qu'il y aurait des nouveautés à voir. Effectivement, ils ont vu. A l'entrée de la dernière ligne droite, quel message souhaites-tu leur adresser ?

Avant de répondre je voudrai ajouter que j'ai le sentiment qu'il y a eu un déclic à Cologne, c'est en tout cas vraiment le moment dans la longue campagne que nous nous sommes donnés avec Sony, où nous nous sommes dit « ça y est ! Les gens comprennent vraiment ce que nous sommes en train de faire ! ». Nous avons montrés de nouvelles scènes et des teaser et les gens ont vraiment compris que nous étions sérieux quand nous parlions d'émotions, de mis en scène, d'ambiance etc. C'est un moment vraiment important et charnière dans la campagne du jeu.
Ce que j'ai à dire aux lecteurs de Play3-Live c'est qu'il va y avoir encore au moins une annonce et qu'il faut donner sa chance à ce jeu qui est intrigant, qui est décrit comme risqué, je ne sais pas ce que ça veut dire exactement, c'est un jeu ambitieux, différent et il faut donner leur chance à ce type de jeux. Je crois qu'on peut soutenir les gens qui ont un jeu de foot tous les ans, qui vous revendent le même jeu tous les ans, mais il faut aussi soutenir les gens qui font des choses différentes, nous en l'occurrence, mais c'est aussi le cas d'autres créateurs et c'est le cas de Sony qui sait prendre des risques et je pense que cette expérience vaut la peine d'être vécue. Donc voilà, restez branchés et guettez les prochaines news.

Toute la rédaction Play3-Live remercie encore une fois David Cage pour sa disponibilité, la passion qu'il porte en lui et qui se dégage à chaque interview. Et Merci à Grégory Delfosse pour nous avoir permis cette première rencontre au FJV mouture 2009.

Autor: moz
Source: Play3-Live
Language:French

Podcast: Kombo Breaker - Episode 45: Heavy Rain Interview

2009-09-18T01:41:00.001Z

This week's show is all about Heavy Rain. Sony Producer Petro Piaseckyj joins us to talk about the project. We cover everything from gameplay, characters, script size (2000 flippin' pages) and all that's in between.

If you're a PS3 owner or you plan to pick up the Slim, this episode is for you. Heavy Rain will be hitting retail at the onset of next year, download this episode for a taste of what's to come.

As usual, once you've gotten your fill of Kombo Breaker goodness please head over to iTunes and write up a review of the show. Tell us we're awesome, tell us we suck, we just want to hear what you think. Also, if you're one of those tweeting types then please follow the show (@KomboBreaker). That's the place where we announce new guests, solicit questions from the fans and let you know when the show goes live. You can also shoot us an email at kombobreaker@kombo.com.

Download directly 30.9 MB

Autor: Joey Davidson
Source: Kombo.com
Language: English

CVG: Heavy Rain delayed because it "needs space"

2009-09-02T08:22:00.000Z

Autor: CVG Stuff
Source: CVG
Language: English

IGN: new video and interview

2009-09-01T20:53:00.000Z

More Heavy Rain News & Previews

Heavy Rain at IGN.com

Autor:
Source:
Language:

EDGE Online: An Audience With: David Cage

2009-08-30T20:34:00.002Z

David Cage has a sombrely held desire to push the industry to new artistic heights – but are his methods those of a videogame visionary or a more Quixotic figure? Here, the windmills in question could be labelled ‘narrative’ and ‘maturity’, goals that some might argue are often overvalued by our nascent medium, imported from older art forms simply out of a sense of insecurity. With Heavy Rain, Cage hopes to prove detractors wrong, offering a rich, story-driven experience that sets the player in pursuit of a serial killer through control of multiple characters, any of whom may die and be written out of the ongoing tale.

Like its predecessor, Fahrenheit, it describes the player’s interactions partly through QTEs – success or failure potentially leading the story in a dizzying number of directions, all of them significant. We spoke to Cage to discover how an adult, murky thriller will hook our emotions and haul us towards gaming’s future.

What would be your response to the reaction to the game so far? Do you think everyone completely understands what you’re making?

Describing the experience we’re creating with Heavy Rain is something challenging. It’s probably easier to talk about a firstperson shooter or a fighting game because we’ve all played one at least once. When talking about narrative and emotional involvement, there are less obvious common references, and it even seems that these words mean very different things depending on who you talk to.

I remember having pitched Fahrenheit about a year before the game was released and I got a clear sense that no one had a clue of what I was talking about until the game could be played.

The approach taken by Heavy Rain is quite unique: it is a narrative-driven and fully interactive experience, it features four playable characters, the interface is entirely contextual, the story itself is unusual for a game – and we don’t want to reveal too much about it.

If you add the fact that the game has a very unusual approach to interactivity, not based on challenges but on the journey, not relying on traditional mechanics but on contextual actions, with no Game Over but a continuity in the story when characters die, you can understand the challenge of explaining this game before anyone can actually play it.

Showing only select scenes is another difficulty: in Heavy Rain, each scene is different and unique, and features bespoke and contextual gameplay triggering different emotions. Also, like in a movie, emotional involvement emerges when you play the game in its entirety, something that is difficult to communicate just by showing pieces of the game in isolation.

In spite of all this, I’m really happy with the feedback so far. It seems there is a high level of expectation. The game was heavily applauded during Sony’s E3 conference, which is always a good sign. I don’t think it is yet possible to understand the scope of what we work on and how different it is going to be, but I think there is a growing awareness that Heavy Rain is a truly ambitious and unique experience. The game received many awards at E3 and is now regularly listed amongst the five most anticipated upcoming titles. When I was working on Fahrenheit, no one paid attention to us until the game was released, so I think we are making some progress here.

Do you think it’ll be difficult to sell Heavy Rain, because it’s so unlike other games being produced today?

Being different has pros and cons. You obviously need to spend more time explaining what your game is and why gamers are going to like it. If you work on a shooter, you just need to show a screenshot and announce the number of levels, weapons, enemies, and everybody knows more or less what you are talking about. But at the same time, there are many shooters made every year by very talented teams, and there are only a limited amount of them that will be commercially successful. When your product is unique it is easier to stand out from the competition and explain that you are the only one to offer this type of experience. If the promise sounds exciting and the game holds it, you have a chance to be successful.

I never asked myself what was easier to make or sell, I just work on ideas that I strongly believe in. This is what has driven my work so far. It is also why I go to the studio every morning with the same excitement and enthusiasm as on the first day. Having said that, I must confess that I am always very surprised to see how conservative our industry can be regarding new ideas. CPU power doubles every 18 months according to Moore’s law, but new ideas seem to follow a much slower curve. It seems computers evolve faster than minds. Suggesting that certain rules established 20 years ago in a certain context may not be fully relevant today is still a considerable challenge.

I can give you a concrete example. The first videogames were coin-ops. The objective of the coin-op manufacturers was to make a game that would be more and more difficult level after level so that players would have no other choice but to insert more coins to complete the game. It was also based on the idea that people would want to reach the next level to see a new set, which would be their reward. Today, games are available at home and you don’t need to put in a coin to play, but the logic driving the design of many games remains identical: the difficulty ramps up continuously until the end, reaching the next stage is the objective, losing means dying, dying means starting again. There is no longer a reason for all of this, but ramping still remains for many a golden rule of game design.

There is no necessity for a game to become more and more difficult to the point sometimes of discouraging gamers. Maybe the time has indeed come for us to explore new ways of making games, and it’s our responsibility as designers to imagine new answers and to dare taking risks. Heavy Rain is an attempt at changing some of these old rules and to see if it is possible to interact differently based on new paradigms.

Gaming as a medium has its own unique qualities, and it’s often said that it shouldn’t be relying on film or television for its inspiration – what’s your take on this particular view?

There is no example in the history of mankind of a new medium created from scratch and not getting inspiration from anything else. The first photographers were inspired by painting, the first movie makers by photography and theatre, the first TV series by movies, and you can take every single creative art and find its roots in other arts. There is nothing wrong about that, just a simple and logical rule: nothing is created from nothing.

This idea about games existing by themselves and not getting inspiration from anywhere else is a little bit naïve. Interactivity, like literature or cinema, is a platform to trigger human emotions. Human emotions don’t belong to any medium, and if there are effective ways discovered by a medium to trigger specific emotions, I cannot see why I should not use them. The visual language developed by movies is very effective and complex. The narrative structures they have developed – inspired by storytelling rules established from the Antiquity, as demonstrated by Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces – contain some valid answers beyond movies.

When I work on a game like Heavy Rain, I don’t try to copy movies, I try to create something original and unique for our medium. I feel free to borrow codes from movies, comics or TV series, but most importantly, I try to invent a language allowing us to tell stories and to trigger complex emotions through interactivity.

So what sort of sources have you used for inspiration while making Heavy Rain?

Inspiration comes from everywhere – comics, painting, theatre, novels, movies, TV series, music, poetry. Most of all, it comes from my everyday life: what I think, what I feel, inner fears I have – in short, who I am. Like for any art form, inspiration comes from life.

The game contains mature content, including sexual scenes: do you expect players to be aroused by these sections, or do you think their reaction will be more like an appreciation that you’re handling subject matter more commonly associated with movies and books?

Heavy Rain is a dark story about real people in the real world. Sex, violence, empathy, love, hate, sadness are parts of our lives. I can’t see why as a writer I should not use any of these if they tell something about my characters, their feelings and who they are. Why should I refrain myself from talking about a specific aspect of human nature? Are there things that you are allowed to do or not to do when you are a game designer? Why should there be subject matters that are improper for videogames? Why are such questions asked only to game designers and never to novelists or directors? What’s wrong with games?

The answers are simple: through their history, videogames were attached to childhood and some people still think that only ten-year-old kids play games, although all surveys show that the average age of gamers is between 30 and 35 years old. There is also this idea that because games are interactive, they could have a greater impact on the audience. As far as I know, there exists absolutely no study demonstrating this fact. To be honest, I must say that some videogames have gone very far in a quite stupid way, and they gave good reasons to politicians to believe we are a bunch of immature teenagers who must be kept under control. That being said, the rule I give to myself in the matter is very simple: whatever serves the story and triggers complex emotions can be used; whatever can be done in a movie should be allowed in a game, with the appropriate rating.

I am prepared to face issues with Heavy Rain because the game tells a very strong and controversial story, but I hope people will understand that everything in the game serves the purpose of telling the narrative. Nothing in Heavy Rain is gratuitous – everything is done to tell a strong story that I hope will leave a long- lasting imprint in players’ minds.

Game creators should be treated the same way as movie creators or book writers, with the same level of creative freedom, because interactivity is now a creative medium and should be treated as such.

When we played the game at E3, there didn’t appear to be many ways for the scrapyard scene to play out differently. We now understand that there were three or four different points at which the player character, Norman, could die, so is this the sort of narrative branching involved in the game? Will it be mostly a selection of different ways to die?

This is a good example of how difficult it is to explain this game. There are two types of consequences to your actions: some are local to the current scene and won’t have any other consequence beyond that point, others have long-term consequences. Short-term consequences will alter the way you play one specific scene, will allow you to see or miss specific actions or sequences, or do things your way. Long-term consequences will be decisions that will greatly impact the story itself. One of the events having long-term consequences will be that your character can die, which will of course greatly impact the rest of the story. It is the most spectacular long-term consequence, but there are many others in the game I can’t really talk about now. It will be impossible for people playing one scene to draw conclusions about Heavy Rain because the game is not based on mechanics. Each scene works differently and holds a surprise for the player.

What happens if you let all four of the playable characters die? Does this finally represent Game Over? How quickly could a game finish in this way? And are all of the possible endings satisfactory in terms of narrative?

When all of the characters die, the story ends – that’s quite a sad ending. There are movies with happy endings and sad endings. In Heavy Rain, it is up to the player to tell his own story and decide what story he wants to tell. This kind of ending cannot happen before the last third of the game, so the experience won’t be too significantly shortened.

We have been particularly careful about the fact that every single route and ending offers a satisfactory story. That was in fact one of the challenges – not only to tell one good story, but many different ones, all being consistent and interesting.

What do you think of the criticisms that are often aimed at QTEs? And what about the danger, in a narratively driven game like this, that taking direct control from the player with QTEs is going to have a detrimental effect on that narrative?

Traditional game mechanics are based on repetitive patterns, and stories hate patterns. Our action sequences are fully contextual. I am not limited to ten different moves in shooting sequences that I will have to fit in my story – even if it becomes absurd at some point that my character finds people to shoot at on his way every three minutes – I can create any type of action sequence I can think of, knowing I have a unique interface allowing me to do whatever I can imagine.

What I like about it is the fact that it is entirely contextual, spectacular, with a sense of cinematography. It is not like in many videogames where you always do the same thing the same way with the same animations. In Heavy Rain, each action is unique, each action sequence is different, and you allow the player to focus on what is important in the scene. This is the dream of any interactive storyteller – not to have to force unnatural action sequences. Many games have killed their stories precisely because of that.

As with any interface, everything is about implementation. We don’t use QTEs as they were implemented in old games; we tried to rethink the system, keep the good parts and improve them to make the player really feel in control. The first thing we changed is the pacing: instead of having one symbol appearing in the middle of the screen every five minutes between two cutscenes, we propose a control for every single action. Each time your character does something onscreen, you triggered it. We gave an immediate consequence to every single move: if you succeed or fail, you see the result immediately onscreen, and each consequence uses a unique animation. Of course, missing a move won’t make you fail the entire sequence – it is just an event in the course of action letting you create an action sequence that is unique to you.

We integrated symbols in 3D and animated them with what they relate to, which adds to the immersion by merging the interface with the action. We also got a real feeling that they were strongly supporting the narrative because of their contextual nature. We got rid of the repetitive action sequences and offer sequences that perfectly fit the narrative needs. These sequences are really varied, spectacular, fast paced and surprising, and I think that players will really enjoy them.

Will there be difficulty levels so that absolutely anyone can play the game, or do you think it won’t be suitable for very casual players?

We have implemented difficulty levels to adapt the game to different profiles of gamers: some gamers are more interested in the challenge, and others more in the journey. I don’t make games for a specific type of players, I want anyone who owns a PS3 and is interested in thrillers to be able to enjoy the game and find a challenge corresponding to their aspirations. Making the game accessible to a wider audience is something important to me. I believe anyone can enjoy the story we tell in Heavy Rain, and I don’t want anyone to be pushed back by the inappropriate difficulty of the game.

With Fahrenheit, we discovered that buyers were mainly males but that almost all of them played the game with their wife or girlfriend. It’s even become a joke now: whenever someone tells me he played Fahrenheit, I say he played it with his wife before he tells how he played the game, and I’m rarely wrong. Women enjoyed the game because there was a story, because it was based on characters and not on shooting. They watched their husband play but most of the time did not play themselves. With Heavy Rain, I hope we will see more women take the controller and play. That’s a difficult challenge but I think it is an interesting one.

Your partner at Quantic Dream, Guillaume de Fondaumière, has said that this is the biggest motion-capture project attempted in a game to date – what are the implications of this from a development perspective?

We bought our in-house mo-cap system in 2000 and we’ve had a full-time team working with it since then. We developed proprietary technologies, tools and pipelines to produce high-quality data in a very limited time frame. Heavy Rain was more than 170 days of shooting with more than 70 actors and stuntmen, plus 60 days and 50 actors for facial animations. We recreated most props on the set to allow actors to know what’s around them and to have the right contacts with their environments.

Given the amount of animations to shoot, we had a very strict production pipeline and a very effective team on the set knowing exactly what they had to do. It has been a long, exhausting and fascinating process. Without an in-house mo-cap set and a very experienced and effective team, Heavy Rain would have been impossible to make. Investing in mo-cap was a major strategic decision for the company ten years ago. I’m glad it now participates to make Quantic Dream’s products unique.

What about other challenges you’ve faced while making the game?

It seems to me that I had one impossible challenge at each stage of the development. The first one was to write the game, finding a way to tell this complex story in a fully interactive way, trying to get a good idea for every single scene both in matters of narrative and interactivity. Then came the burden of producing the massive volume of assets in all departments that was required while keeping the consistency of the overall vision in a team of 200-plus people.

Now that I reach the last stages, my two last challenges are the importance of details and the difficulty of having contextual scenes. Every single scene is unique in the game, which means that there are almost no recurrent mechanics. In short, it means that each new scene offers a new and different challenge that requires specific answers. The level of details we need in this game is another challenge – nothing should distract the player from the emotional experience. And it is true that the more details you add, the more details you need to add.

Art direction becomes key in every single department because every aspect of the game contributes to trigger emotion. It means everything needs to be consistent and to pull in the same direction in order to create emotional involvement. This is definitely the most challenging aspect of the game, but also the most exciting and interesting.

Does Heavy Rain have anything in common with your first game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul? What were the things you were looking to achieve back then that you’re finally able to realise nowadays?

I was always interested in emotions. In Omikron, if you’re old enough or geeky enough to remember it, in the first scene, you were in the body of someone else, and the wife of this character wanted to make love to you, thinking you were her husband. You could be reincarnated in the body of someone else, you could have access to many different actions such as exploring, talking, using weapons. Most of these themes are still present in Heavy Rain: I’m still obsessed with schizophrenia and multiple personalities, I don’t want to be limited to repetitive patterns in what I can do, I love to create situations involving the player on an emotional level and questioning him as an individual. The difference is that I am now 15 years older than when I designed Omikron and my approach to these topics is different. I understood that I did not want to make toys but journeys with games, that I was not interested in creating games for kids but for adults, and that I wanted to explore new areas that most people consider impossible. Of course, there is better technology today at all levels, but technology is just the pen to write the book. No one cares about pens – all they judge is the quality of the book.

I may come back to some ideas of Omikron in the near future, revisiting them with what I learned and who I am today. But that’s a different story.

This article originally appeared in E205.

Autor: Edge Stuff
Source: EDGE
Language:English

PlayStation.Blog: Heavy Rain’s David Cage And I, Tellin’ Stories

2009-08-24T20:07:00.002Z

I’ve always wanted to write a videogame – it’s on my list of things to do before I lose interest in writing videogames. Therefore, I look forward to interviews with the Heavy Rain writer and director David Cage and I’m always keen to listen to his storytelling philosophies. I managed to catch up with him outside the showfloor at gamescom, away from the gunfire and heavy metal that is still ringing in my ears.

I didn’t get to play the new scene in the end, partly because I acted like a headless chicken and partly because I want to take in the whole game in one sitting when I get hold of a copy, but it looks stunning. If you want to check it out for yourselves, head on over to US PlayStation.Blog to see David Cage walk you through the new level.

Autor: James Gallagher – Content Producer, SCEE
Source: PlayStation.Blog
Language: English

Gamescom: Heavy Rain developer walkthrough

2009-08-22T20:42:00.001Z

Autor: Unknown
Source: Gamescom
Language: English

Gamescom Heavy Rain Live Demo

2009-08-21T20:28:00.000Z

Quantic Dream's Guillaume de Fondaumiere demos a brand new character and game sequence from Heavy Rain -- a convenience store holdup.

Autor: Unknown
Source: 1UP
Language: English

Joistiq: Heavy Rain features 13 voiced languages, subtitles in 5 more

2009-08-20T14:31:00.009Z

Heavy Rain will be fully voice acted in 13 languages, with subtitles also available for all spoken languages, plus five more languages. These details were disclosed during a presentation at GamesCom this afternoon, when Quantic Dream founder David Cage introduced Pascal Langdale, the actor playing the English-speaking version of Heavy Rain's Ethan Mars (pictured right), and talked about the extensive voice work necessary for the game's many branching scenes.

Knowing a single Blu-ray disc can store language data in bulk, we were curious about how many language options would be available in the game. As it turns out, if Cage had brought out all of Mars' voices the the room would have gotten pretty tight. Check out the confirmed list of languages after the break. (We're still waiting for official confirmation on a couple -- the Quantic Dream team couldn't name them all off the top of their heads.)

Voice acted:

* English
* German
* Italian
* Spanish
* Portuguese
* Dutch
* Japanese
* Korean
* Mandarin
* Russian
* French

Note: A Polish language option is unconfirmed. (We'll update the list as needed.)

Autor: Alexander Sliwinski
Source: Joistiq
Language: English

Play: Heavy Rain interview

2009-08-12T17:13:00.001Z

Quantic Dream’s PS3 exclusive Heavy Rain has slipped back until early next year. That makes us sad. Emoticon sad. Still, we can all be cheered up a bit by watching this interview with Guillaume de Fondaumiere, CEO at Quantic Dream where he tells you all about this extraordinary game. Film. Game. Filmgame.

Oh, just check it.

Autor: Nick Jones
Source: Play
Language: English

Games Radar: Heavy Rain: the David Cage interview

2009-08-12T12:28:00.000Z

Auteur talks permanent death, emotional buildup and what went wrong with Indigo Prophecy

Of all the games on display at E3 this year, few sparked as much curiosity as Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer. The PS3-exclusive story of four characters in search of a serial killer, Heavy Rain was dark, moody and prettier than most of the other games on the show floor. But the two things that drew the most attention were its apparent reliance on quicktime-style action sequences, and the news that its main characters can die permanently, thereby altering the flow of the story. The man who revealed it all was David Cage, writer and director of Heavy Rain and Chief Executive Officer of its developer, Quantic Dream.

Cage is a proven auteur, having also helmed the critically acclaimed Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit in Europe) and Omikron: The Nomad Soul, and both he and Sony have been tight-lipped on a lot of the details surrounding Heavy Rain (which was recently confirmed for release early next year). In order to claw our way closer to the heart of the mystery, we caught up with Cage via email to glean a few new insights into the project.

GamesRadar: Now that it’s been more than a month since Heavy Rain was shown at E3, what kind of feedback have you received on the game since then? Do people seem to understand and appreciate what you’re trying to create, or do you feel that there are still some misconceptions?

David Cage: When you try to create something different, there is always a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism, and I think this is fair. Many designers claimed they have invented something revolutionary in the past, and if it was true for some of them, it was sometimes also a source of disappointment.

With Heavy Rain, we’re creating something that changes many traditional game paradigms. We try to invent something that is almost not a video game in the traditional sense (adrenaline, obstacles, levels, die-and-retry), but something that is closer to an emotional journey. When you pretend this, people may think that it won’t be interactive or exciting, because no one has tried this direction before, so there is no point of reference.

I spend a lot of time going against preconceived ideas, saying that a story could be told through gameplay and not through cut scenes, that more complex emotions can be triggered in an interactive experience, and that yes, video games can be more than just toys for teenagers. Believe me; it is not always easy, because preconceived ideas are difficult to change. Videogames are based on the same concepts for twenty years. I believe (and it seems I’m not the only one anymore) that time has come for a change.

I don’t pretend that Heavy Rain will be a revolution and I don’t know if people will love it or hate it. All I can say is that it is definitely going to be different.

GR: The news of the game’s delay until 2010 came as a shock to some, given that a lot of people seemed to be under the impression that Heavy Rain’s trailers had promised a 2009 release date. Can you talk a little about why the game was pushed back?

DC: Heavy Rain was never announced for 2009, however, recently at E3 we did talk about the game becoming available in early 2010.

GR: Part of the title’s meaning – The Origami Killer – has been made clear, but does Heavy Rain refer to anything specifically in the game? Is it foreshadowing something, like Fahrenheit and its ice-age doomsday scenario?

DC: Rain plays a very important role in the story. It constitutes the background of most scenes, but it is also an important part of the drama. We used rain like a character, trying to characterize it and give it moods supporting the ambiance and the narrative.

GR: Heavy Rain’s control scheme – in which you move your character’s head to direct him or her in a specific direction – is unusual. What inspired that decision?

DC: My obsession is to detach controls and the camera, make them as independent as possible. Most games use a chase cam, which is very convenient for controls but was not satisfying for an experience trying to use the camera to tell the story.

Changing the control scheme was the most obvious thing to do to free the camera. Moving forward like in a racing game and controlling the head of your character quickly became quite a logical decision.

I know it is always difficult to change conventions, but I got the feeling that with controls and other things, we have gone as far as possible with the current conventions. If you want to go further, you have to break something and start again from scratch with new ideas. I am excited by this possibility to try new options and investigate new ideas.

GR: While we’re on the subject of control, are all of the action sequences in Heavy Rain going to be Quick Time-style, with timed button presses? About what percentage of the game do you think will be spent exploring, versus participating in the more tense action bits?

DC: Heavy Rain is a game of exploration, interaction with the environment and decision-making. It also features some spectacular action sequences using a different control scheme that I would not exactly describe as Quick Time Events. I need to explain a little bit what I mean by that.

Many games fall into categories of “shooter” or “fighting game.” Some games feature both styles with some limitations. What does this mean, exactly? In short, it means player actions will be limited to a certain type of action scene, that he will play through different levels using repetitive mechanics and a limited set of animations. I think this genre is great for a certain audience, but it was definitely not the type of game we wanted to create. It is also very difficult to tell a story with repetitive action sequences. We believe the audience that will be drawn to Heavy Rain will want something different.

So we made the decision to have a more generic type of interface, inspired by the QTE system used by Yu Suzuki in Shenmue, but trying to make them evolve to make them a truly immersive control scheme.

We have done many things to make the sequences very enjoyable moments: we created very spectacular action scenes, each one being unique, and featuring unique movements instead of generic animation banks. We integrated controls in 3D and animated them with their target. We also entirely changed the pacing of these sequences: it is the player makes every single move of the character, he is really at the heart of the action, with very spectacular animations, a real sense of directing, and a strong sense of immersion. The player will immediately see the result of his action, failure or success, with a specific sequence. Last but not least, we fully use the controller, including sticks and Sixaxis, which provides a very intense experience.

We are very pleased with the feedback these scenes received so far. Even hardcore gamers told us they really felt they were really immersed in the action. I think players will be surprised by some action sequences in the game, how diverse, immersive and, of course, interactive they are.

GR: Heavy Rain’s been described as a “film noir thriller.” What do you see as the key elements of film noir, and how do you plan to replicate them in the game? Are there any specific films that influenced the production?

DC: I am sure players will find many references to movies, TV series or novels in Heavy Rain, but there was no conscious influence. This script is the first thing I write for a game, [and it] comes from my personal experience, things I have lived or felt. It made for me a huge difference in the creative process as I was writing about things I knew instead of trying to imagine what it is like to be a hero saving the world.

I hope more and more interactive writers will see themselves as “authors” instead of “level builders,” and try to tell about their own lives, their emotions, their visions. I am convinced that it would generate much more interesting games. I work on emotion using narrative, but there are of course many different ways of creating interactive emotional experiences. The future of this industry may very well be in writing about emotional experiences.

GR: So far we’ve seen two of the four main characters, FBI profiler Norman Jayden and journalist Madison Paige. Without revealing too much, is there anything you can tell us about the two characters we haven’t seen yet?

DC: The last character we are going to reveal is the first one to appear in the game. It is his story that really drove me in the writing of Heavy Rain. He is not your typical main character; rather, he is a more complex individual with doubts and weaknesses, and a strong emotional arc through the story. If the tag line of the game, “how far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?” applies to all four characters, he is the one having the strongest take on this. The other character is not the typical video game hero, either… but this one may well be a player favorite.

GR: How will the game be structured, in regard to the four characters? Does each character one simply get their own undivided “chapter” of the game, or will players revisit characters (assuming they’re still alive) after a different character’s story has begun?

DC: The game is structured like a movie, telling the interlaced stories of four characters. The player will play with these characters scene after scene. What I like about this system, that I started to experiment with [in] Indigo [Prophecy], is the fact that the experience is quite varied: you leave a scene and you discover a new set with a new character and something else to do taking advantage of who you are. It makes the game richer and more surprising by allowing you to tell the stories of several characters at the same time. You are sad to leave them, but glad to play with the next one.

GR: The idea of ending a character’s story after they die is a bold one; what made you decide to structure the game that way?

DC: Game Over is a very frustrating game convention. In short, it means “if you were not good enough or did not play the game the way the designer intended you to play, you should play again until you do it right.” What kind of story could a writer tell where the characters could play the same scene ten times until the outcome is right?

I wanted to solve both issues, the gameplay frustration and the narrative dead end, by seeing if I could get rid of these sequences and treating death like an event in the story that would not prevent it from continuing. Some movies and novels have done that in the past, I thought it was worth a try. ;-)

GR: Some gamers are guaranteed to cry foul if they can’t go back to “rescue” dead characters and conclude the story the “right” way; with that in mind, what do you see as the benefit to the player from taking the “die and that’s it” approach? Is there one?

DC: Interacting means making a decision. Making a decision means opening a door and never knowing what was behind the other one. There is no “right way” of playing the story, as there is no “wrong” story. There are just different stories, telling different things in different ways. There will be a benefit for the player to play with the consequences of his actions: he will create a story that is really unique to him. Even if he dies, he will see things that someone who has kept the four characters alive will miss.

GR: If a character dies, will that make the investigation more difficult or differently structured for the other characters? Or will it just close off that part of the story to the player?

DC: I try to propose a good and interesting story whatever happens, including if some characters died. The story changes depending on what is going on, as each character has a specific way to discover the Origami Killer and some specific information about him. It will also very differently structure the game for other characters. I cannot really say much more…

GR: You talked about this a bit during E3, but I’d like to revisit it for the benefit of our readers: When it was released in 2005, a lot of criticism was leveled at the final act of Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy and what many saw as a sharp departure from the tone that the game set early on. Looking back, what, if anything, do you think went wrong? Are you doing anything to avoid similar criticism with Heavy Rain?

DC: Indigo did some things well, I think, some others not that well. I am a little bit frustrated that some people only remember what did not work. The end was rushed, because the rest of the game required so much effort and attention that we spent less time on the last scenes. The story I wanted to tell required more scenes to be developed and explained in a satisfying way, and time was just missing to do that.

I also felt, towards the end of the writing, that I was not doing a videogame: there were no super powers, no evil guy, no world to save, so I added all in the last scenes. I realized later that we don’t need that anymore. So when I started writing Heavy Rain, I took all the time I needed to write the script, I got rid of any supernatural elements and decided to write only about real people in real life having real problems. I accepted the fact that I was not doing videogames anymore, and I feel much better about it.

Autor: Mikel Reparaz
Source: Games Radar US
Language: English

Kikizo: Heavy Rain: David Cage Interview

2009-07-14T12:55:00.002Z

Quantic Dream founder spills beans on QTEs, Project Natal versus PS3 motion control, "primitive" emotions in gaming and a private tête-a-tête with Hideo Kojima.

Despite three years of steady press coverage, we know surprisingly little about Quantic Dream's PS3 exclusive Heavy Rain. We know that the game's multi-threaded plot purports to offer terrifying levels of player choice and consequence, even making space for the demise of central characters. We know that its gaunt, harrowed cast of serial killers, strippers and drug-addled detectives own penthouse apartments in the Uncanny Valley, thanks to some stunning proprietary tech.

But as to how the thing will play, moment to moment, we're still largely at sea. Aspects of Heavy Rain incline towards the classic point and click adventures of LucasArts, while other elements owe something to Sega's sadly defunct Shenmue series, and still others recall games as thematically disparate as God of War, Resident Evil 4 and Mass Effect.

This elusiveness has to do less with fickle publicity than Quantic Dream's desire to transcend calcified forms of play, founder David Cage told Kikizo when we stopped by for an interview. In a very tightly crammed nutshell, Cage wishes to make interaction much more relevant to its dramatic context, tailor-making gameplay concepts to each part of a game's story rather than relying, as most developers do, on certain default mechanics and an associated control scheme.

It's a bold aim, and one that will probably play merry hell with Kikizo's category system when Heavy Rain hits PS3s next year. Elsewhere in our chat, Cage discussed QTEs, his scepticism for Project Natal, Quantic Dream's in-house tech-wizardry and "primitive" emotions in gaming. Tantalisingly enough, he also touched on a private tête-a-tête with Hideo Kojima.

Kikizo: How would you sell your "branching storyline" approach to people brought up on more traditional game plotting?

Cage: I don't think I want people to understand how it works, I just want them to play and enjoy it! That would be the best proof that it works, actually. You know about interactive storytelling, many people said that this is not possible, because narrative is linear, in essence, where interactivity is non-linear. Many people think it's not possible to combine both. Also there are some technical issues in the writing of interactive storytelling, because when you think up tree branches, you start to add branches to your tree, and branches lead to more branches that give you more branches, and you end up with a huge tree and no control over it.

So I developed this technique I call "banding stories", that is about considering my story like a rubber band that the player can stretch and deform based on his actions. So the story's always there, the rubber band is still the same, but you can change its shape and length based on what you do. So this is my solution. I tried to experiment on Fahrenheit, and it worked in many aspects, and I think Heavy Rain will go much further in the same direction.

Kikizo: What's changed between last year's E3/Leipzig presentation and what you showed at this year's E3?

Cage: The difficulty with Heavy Rain is that everything is contextual and everything is different. So it's not like in a shooter game where you show one level and then you pretty much understand everything about the game. In Heavy Rain every scene is unique - there are many different characters, many different challenges, many different things to play. So we decided with Sony to start to unveil each character at each significant trade show through the year, and each time demonstrate a different aspect of the game. So the first scene we revealed was Norman Jayden, this guy from an FBI investigation, and we wanted to show how we could have in a scene dialogue, exploration and an action sequence.

We revealed the second scene at E3, and this is Madison Paige the second character, a female character, she's a photographer and she suffers from insomnia. And she gets in a way involved with an investigation about the Origami killer, and she wants to help another character, and she goes to this night club run by a guy called Paco, and she comes here to investigate because she knows the killer. So we showed this scene which is in a night club with, I don't know how many people dancing, but it's really crowded, and the character avoiding other characters dancing. And she will end up being forced to do a striptease for the guy depending on how you play, and there are many different endings.

Kikizo: The first demo you showcased felt quite solitary, but the new Madison Paige episode is obviously much more public. How are you managing the balance between private and public situations in the story?

Cage: There are many scenes that are quite crowded. We go from one scene to another, each scene is different. Some people like Jayden are involved with the police, he works with the police. Other characters aren't.

Kikizo: How many people will we encounter in these crowd scenes, max?

Cage: The scene in the night club is really crowded, maybe 200 people on screen dancing.

Kikizo: Could you go into more detail about the technology powering Heavy Rain? I thought it was one of the best-looking games of last year...

Cage: Thank you.

Kikizo: It's always interesting to hear how these things are accomplished.

Cage: Well all the technology is proprietary, developed by Quantic Dream. We've worked for quite a while on PlayStation 3 - we got some alpha kits, dev kits for PS3 a long time ago, maybe before other developers. And also we worked with the full cooperation of Sony, they gave us fantastic support. And we really wanted to develop specific technologies because we were interested in more specific topics, like how the skin reacts to light, how to animate eyes, how light reflects in eyes, how to integrate body motion capture and facial motion capture, how to have a crowd - many, many topics which are not necessarily useful for other types of games, but we have some very specific needs in this one, especially with directing - the way we play with the camera, the way the camera slightly shakes all the time, etc, etc.

Kikizo: One of the big questions in this industry, of course, is how to create emotional experiences. You've played a headline role in that particular debate.

Cage: I've always thought the only real next gen feature would be emotion. I didn't believe that physics, AI, or polygons, or texture maps would be a real next gen feature, OK - it's just about technology. But technology is just a tool, it's not the content. It's the tool to create the content. You know when we talk about emotion in this industry, I don't think we're always talking about the same thing. Because the some people believe that when you get a golfer smiling because he succeeded, this is emotion. Well I believe this is a very primitive emotion.

We've got a lot of emotions in our industry - we've got frustration, competition, anger, adrenaline. But I'm much more interested in more sophisticated emotions like empathy, sadness, happiness, and the ways to trigger them. And this is really difficult to be honest with you, it's a real challenge. There are many ways to achieve this goal. The one we chose is to use narrative and actors.

Kikizo: So the quality of the acting...

Cage: It's first of all the script, the story, the characters. It's the quality of the acting, the quality of the direction. Emotion is not one thing, it's not one button that you press and say OK, this is emotional now. It's the combination of all these things, including interactivity and interface - interface should be a part of the emotion.

Kikizo: Certainly for story, I couldn't agree more. I cried my eyes out recently over a film called Seven Pounds. Will Smith's in it. True fact.

Cage: The first playable scene we showed is not the most emotional one. We wanted to introduce the game with a very classic action sequence of a dark thriller, you know. That was very much the idea. But the night club scene is different and we'll reveal a new scene and a new character in Cologne this year, and another one at the Tokyo Game Show, and the closer we get to release the more emotional and original we'll be about what we show.

Kikizo: Could you give me a fuller idea of the gameplay package in Heavy Rain? So far we've seen exploring the environment, the QTE-action sequence - I don't know if you're calling them QTEs or not...

Cage: No, we call them "PARs" - "physical action reactions". It's difficult to describe the package, as you called it, of the gameplay - I guess we can say that there's some action, exploration, interaction with the environment, interaction with other characters, and on a purely technical point of view yes there are some action sequences. It's the idea of the QTE developed in Shenmue, except we wanted to take them to the next stage, and make them next gen. So we tried to figure out what we could improve.

What we liked about them was that they were contextual, so instead of having a punch and a kick you could really have very choreographed scenes with a real sense of directing, and each movement being entirely unique. So we really enjoyed that and this was really something we wanted to keep. So we put the symbols in 3D in the environment, instead of having them in 2D on top of the screen they are in 3D, they animate with what you want to interact with. So if you want to interact with someone the symbol would move with them. And we tried to play with everything on the controller. We played with the sticks, we played with the buttons, we played with the triggers, and the Sixaxis motion-sensing.

Kikizo: I spoke to Hideo Kojima at last year's Leipzig show, and the final topic of discussion was the cut scene. As I'm sure you know, there are a lot of cut scenes in the Metal Gear Solid series. So my question to him was: could you think of a more interactive, less passive way of telling your story? And his answer in a nutshell was "I don't know, I'll have to think about this more. I'm not sure the technology exists for it." Right after that interview, I saw Heavy Rain.

Cage: Kojima heard about Heavy Rain last year and we met, because everyone told him about Heavy Rain and he wanted to talk, discuss this topic. It was a very interesting discussion. But yeah I believe that the only real challenge is to treat the storytelling differently, not through cut scenes but directly through gameplay. As you play you tell the story. And that's the most difficult thing to do, but also the most interesting thing.

Kikizo: Can you tell me anything more about that particular meeting of minds?

Cage: That was a private discussion and I can't really discuss it [laughs], but it was very interesting and I was really pleased that he heard about us and wanted to hear more.

Kikizo: Had you met him before?

Cage: No, it was the first time.

Kikizo: And are you a fan of his games?

Cage: I certainly respect his work, definitely, although it's not the type of game I want to make myself. But yeah he's a huge star, I guess.

Kikizo: Can you tell me a bit about Quantic Dream as a company - where it came from, where it is right now, where it's going? How has it grown to facilitate this project?

Cage: So Quantic Dream is a really old company - we're 12 years old now - and we are about 100 people internally. For Heavy Rain there are about 100 people outside the company. And we have our own sound studio in-house, we have our own 3D scanner, we have our own motion capture set - that was an investment we made about 10 years ago, because we wanted to master this technology. And that's pretty much it. We believe in emotion above all, this is really what we believe in. We believe games can become - should become - a creative medium, and not just stories for kids. So we try to create more sophisticated experiences for an older audience.

Kikizo: Have you had a chance to look at Project Natal and Sony's new motion-sensing wand? I was quite convinced by Natal.

Cage: You know, it's one idea among others. I'm not sure all people want to play jumping and running in front of the television, because I think some people just want to relax and just play, enjoy and experience. It shows Microsoft wants to go the Nintendo way, probably, go casual, compete with Wii Fit, and there's nothing wrong about it - there is a market for casual gamers. But this is definitely not the direction I would like this industry to go, because I think it should go in the direction of movies - more creativity, more new ideas, more authors - rather than going in the direction of toys. And from a technical point of view I must admit I'm still slightly sceptical about what they've shown.

Kikizo: So what are you thoughts on the new PS3 controller, then?

Cage: I think it's an interesting time for PlayStation and Sony, I think they revealed some very interesting new titles that start really to show what next-gen means. And when you look at titles like Uncharted 2 or God of War III, Heavy Rain and others, you start to see that we're really moving to the next stage. There are some very interesting new games coming along.

Kikizo: OK. And Heavy Rain is coming out next year?

Cage: Early next year.

Kikizo: What are your remaining priorities as you finish the game?

Cage: Well we're just past the alpha stage, and basically our priority right now until the game is released is just to polish everything. And it's a game requiring a lot of details to be checked, and everything should be in place otherwise it's going to distract the player from the experience itself. So we work very hard tuning the gameplay, improving the directing, improving the visuals, making it just look and play the best we can.

Kikizo: We're looking forward to seeing more. Thanks for your time, David.

Autor: Kikizo Staff
Source: Kikizo
Language: English

GamesIndustry.biz: Catching the Rain

2009-07-13T08:00:00.002Z

Following on from part one of this exclusive interview with Quantic Dream co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere, in which he talks about his role with the EGDF and the importance of games as culture, here he talks more about the development of Heavy Rain.

Specifically he updates us on where production is at, as well as the challenges of emotion and the maturing relationship between developers and publishers.

Q: How is Heavy Rain coming along - the last few miles of the marathon?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: It feels very good, we're very happy. We delivered the alpha of the game on April 15 - on time, on budget - so we're pretty happy. It's a great moment, because we now have the whole game in our hands and we can play from beginning to end. So we're now entering the most interesting part of the development, I think, which is perfecting it - making sure that all the scenes are as we expect them to be, at the same level of quality. It's a great moment to be at.

Q: "On time, on budget" - that's good, something that doesn't happen enough in the industry, one might argue. How have you managed the process to make sure that's happened? Is it as simple as just having the right management procedures in place?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: I think we prepared for a long time, before we started production of Heavy Rain, and I think that back in 2005 when we were finishing Fahrenheit and starting to look at next-gen consoles in particular, we understood we could no longer produce games the old way, like in the old days.

We understood we'd have to double the structure in our studio, that we'd have to rely on external resources to produce our next game. And for almost a year and a half we not only worked on technology in setting certain standards, and the quality bar on the development, but also on the organisation.

You don't work the same way when you outsource - especially when you outsource 500 man-months of production - than if you have everybody working in the same room on a project. So it took quite some time, but it's been quite successful, and we're very happy with how we organised internally to be able to work with faraway outsourcing companies, the way the outsourced work was delivered, and the way that the whole thing integrated into the final game.

I don't know if we found a recipe, because I think each studio and each project is a bit exceptional in a way, but for us it turned out to be a very good experience. Of course, it's extremely difficult to plan a production on a new platform and to basically create two, three, four times the amount of data that you'd have had to for previous cycles on other consoles.

But from what I can tell, looking especially at the games I've seen at E3, a number of developers are doing this successfully. I think we've reached another stage in the industry where developers can be much more mature.

I think it also has a lot to do with the way that publishers interact with developers. I must say that we've enjoyed a great relationship with Sony. The Worldwide Studios group in Liverpool has been really dynamic, it's been a great working relationship. This is also very important - when you don't have to worry about whether the publisher is going to pay you, whether they're going to accept this and this, whether they're going to ask you to do the same thing two, three or four times, and so on.

Unfortunately we've all experienced that in the past, and you're using up a lot of time and resources - but thankfully we've had a great relationship with SCE and I think, from what I hear from other developers, not only are developers becoming more mature, but also publishers.

Q: There seem to be fewer horror stories around these days, that's true. Working on a platform-exclusive title brings benefits, one of which is greater visibility - Heavy Rain's now a key PS3 title on the slate - but how do you respond to the added pressure that brings?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: I think it puts positive pressure on us - it's exactly where we wanted to be when we started the project. It's extremely important for all the members of the team to know there's a point to what they're doing, that people care. Especially in a game that's emotionally driven, where emotions are at the core of the experience. It's important that the team know what they're doing will be seen, so we're very proud.

We know this positive pressure brings responsibility, especially because I think that the promises we're making with Heavy Rain are quite important for the industry. Also because we're trying to show that it's possible to have an interactive story, that it's possible to offer players something different to just fighting, shooting and driving - that interactivity can be more than that.

So I think there's a strong responsibility, and we're very focused - but it's a positive pressure.

Q: You mention a word there that's important for the industry - "emotion" - because adrenaline rushes are common, but the sensitive emotions are much harder to bring out. Looking back you can pick out a few games - Another World, Shadow of the Colossus to name just two - as quite sensitive titles. But how do you think people will look back on Heavy Rain in that context?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: I hope that Heavy Rain will leave an imprint in people's minds, like the best movies or books - that's really our objective. I hope it's going to be not only something that they can look back on from a gaming perspective as new and original, but maybe from a more global perspective as an entertainment form, a form of expression.

This is where we'd like to be - Another World is my all-time favourite game, it's the game that made me decide to work in this industry, and I think that it has been for many a trigger point in realising that games can do more, can bring more, to people.

Q: Would it be the ultimate compliment for Heavy Rain to inspire a new generation of developers?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: Yes, absolutely.

Q: So the game has a 2010 release - is that because you don't want to put it out in the busy pre-Christmas period, or was that the timing planned all along?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: We've always known that we had a window to release the game, and it's important for us to finish it the right way. We've got some margin either way, to some degree, but again I think there's a responsibility, and we don't want to deceive - so it's important for the game to be polished up until the last minute.

Also, purely from my perspective, most publishers today realise that it's not ideal to release a new IP or a new genre just before Christmas. It's a very crowded place to be, and certain games need more space to live their life. Everybody at working on the project, both at Quantic and Sony, believe this is the right time.

Q: Do you look back at releases like LittleBigPlanet and try to learn lessons? I know they have a consistent long tail on that game, so do you see Heavy Rain as a big bang or slow burn?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: I think it's a game that will probably have a longer lifespan than other games, simply because - a bit like LittleBigPlanet - we're in our own area. So one shooter could shoot another shooter out of the charts to a certain degree, and that's probably why you're seeing the high number of sales for a short period in other game categories.

For innovative titles that stand out, that are different and almost have no direct competition to a certain degree, then you can see a longer lifespan. That's what makes publishing those titles very interesting - I think LBP has been hugely successful. You may not have seen it in the charts at number one everywhere during one particular week, but when it adds up you see that they've sold, I don't know the exact numbers, but around 2.5 million units worldwide. That's quite an achievement for a first game, definitely.

Autor: Phil Elliott
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
Language: English

Spong: Interviews// Inside Heavy Rain

2009-07-08T18:10:00.002Z

Heavy Rain, the upcoming PS3-exclusive... we'll call it an 'interactive thriller', has a lot of people scratching their heads. On the one hand, footage makes it look moody, starkly beautiful and very intense.

On the other hand, a lot of people are looking at it and asking, 'How much control will I actually have? Will it just be a series of quick time events?'

...
I sat down with Guillaume de Fondaumière, co-CEO of the game's developer, Quantic Dream, to discuss how deep the player's control of the game really goes, what his team has done to make sure you're not just passively watching a story unfold in front of you and why it made no sense for him to slap me.

SPOnG: David Cage has talked about not giving Heavy Rain an open world because he said it would limit Quantic Dream’s ability to control the flow of the story. To what extent is a player able to create their own narrative and to what extent are you as developer controlling their progression through the game?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: As I’ve said, Heavy Rain is a game in which story is core to the experience and we really want to give players the possibility to see the consequences of their actions and how it impacts the story. So, a number of actions will have consequences on a particular scene, some will have consequences in a few scenes ahead and some will have dramatic consequences on the story.

I guess, from what we’ve shown so far, the most dramatic aspect being for instance losing one of the characters. So, it’s really a game about choices and consequences. There’s nothing right or wrong that you can do in the game, but there are choices – sometimes moral choices – that you will have to make, always contextual. You’ll always understand what the motivations of your character are, and by triggering certain actions or deciding to go into a direction or another, deciding to engage in a relationship or not, to say certain things at certain moments and not others, you’ll be able to shape your own story.

But, of course, we are always in control of the story. As David said, it’s not an open world game, it’s story-driven and what’s very important for us is that the story is consistent and meaningful from the beginning to the end. This is something you (simply) can’t achieve today with an open world and a sandbox game.

SPOnG: You mentioned moral choices – a phrase that makes a lot of people groan because it’s used so often. A lot of the time, however, the choices are fairly meaningless. Do you think anyone has successfully worked moral choices into a game so far?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Not really. I think Peter Molyneux’s attempts in Fable 2 are interesting, but we’re trying to do something rather different with Heavy Rain. We’re not interested in clearly presenting to the player ‘do you want to be a good guy or a bad guy and see how the story unfolds from beginning to end if you’re a good guy or a bad guy?’ What interests us is how players react to certain circumstances and how – it’s a bit like in real life – we’re faced with certain choices in our lives and we’re not necessarily all good or all bad. I think we’re all in shades of grey, to a certain degree, and this is far more interesting to us.

I think to a certain degree this is far more interesting, because again, it’s far more realistic.

SPOnG: We’ve all been playing infamous in the office and everyone has opted to play through on good in their first attempt, which is interesting. It’s pretty meaningless knocking down a virtual pedestrian in a game but still people will swing away from it. You’ve said that the decisions aren’t as straight forward as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in Heavy Rain, but presumably there are choices where you can be more or less selfish. Has anything from your testing so far surprised you in that respect?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Not really. First of all because we didn’t really enter into user tests on the whole game.

The second thing is, we’re not in this route and I think everything is contextual and it’s really a sum of choices and sum of actions that lead you to a different story. We have a number of different endings – I don’t believe we counted them, but there are a great many. I think that the most important thing to us is that people bear the consequences of their actions and the fact that whatever they do, whatever they choose to do, they have a meaningful story that unfolds. I think the stakes are going to be very clear for the player.

The player will know what his ultimate goal is throughout the game, but there are many ways of how to get to a… I wouldn’t even say a successful ending. David (Cage) was asked a question at E3 by one of the journalists, asking ‘what if you lose all four characters?’ Well, this is possible. There is no game-over in the game. So you can actually lose all four characters. What happens then is, you still have an ending to the story. It’s a very sad ending but, as David says, it’s his favourite ending.

I guess that that was the philosophy behind it, really. It’s to make sure that whatever the choices, the story unfolds in a meaningful way and in a way that is satisfying to the audience.

Maybe some will want to play it again and see how the story ends if they choose differently.

SPOnG: So you think people will want to play through again, having seen the story before? Is there enough difference in the different paths you take that people will be compelled to come back?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: For us the most important element in the game is to give players the possibility to live and choose their own story. Whether players will either come back each time and try the different possibilities, it really depends on the gamer.

We give these possibilities, the game is saving all the time, so you always have the possibility to go back and choose a different path or do something different, or talk differently to a person, or engage or not into a relationship.
So, there is this possibility, but we’d like very much for
players to bear the responsibility for their actions, play the game through. And if at one point they believe that it will be worth exploring other possibilities, maybe play through to the end and come back to that particular point and play differently, I think this would be more interesting.

We give the possibility to players to really choose how they want to play.

SPOnG: Will there be a trophy, then, for playing through without going back to any of your saves?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: We haven’t figured out, as of yet, how the trophy system is going to work. It’s not necessarily a game that is conceptually in line with what trophies should do. Again, it’s not about succeeding or failing. It’s not about doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing. It’s about the journey. The journey is the most important thing.

So, to a certain degree, I would say we’re not rewarding the players in a conventional way. The reward is the emotional experience, is how good the story is from the player’s perspective. I guess it should be the other way around. It should be gamers giving us trophies (grins) rather than us giving players trophies!

But we’ll of course support trophies and we’re trying to find the right way to integrate trophies into the game.

SPOnG: OK. So, you’ve got four main characters, all of which are playable and, if you die, you move onto another character. Is there a risk that, with players switching characters, they’ll become ‘de-immersed’ from the game?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: I don’t think so. I think it’s not an experiment, we see it in a lot of movies. They follow different characters, and the fact that you’re following these different characters is only a way to give you different perspectives on the story. I think it only adds to the experience, and I don’t think that you’re going to lose the immersion because of that.

I think what is very important in the story and in the characterisation is to present the characters in such a way that you get acquainted (with) them, that you understand their motivations, and if we’re successful in that, I think that players will find it interesting to be able to play the story from different angles, and to see it from different perspectives.

SPOnG: The difference between a film and a game, of course, is that in a movie you’re sat passively watching, while in a game you’re in control. When I sit down to play Heavy Rain, will I need to turn off the part of my brain that tells me I’m about to play a game? Will I have to shift my expectations about what’s about to happen, compared to another game?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: I don’t think so, I think that our objective was clearly to make a videogame, an interactive experience that is… Heavy Rain is certainly a new form of game, and we’ve created new gameplay mechanics to make sure that the player is always in control. You’re in real time 3D all the time, you’re all the time in control of your character’s actions.

I think people are going to be quite surprised by the diversity of characters, by the diversity of the sets, and by the diversity of the interaction. By how interactive this game actually is.

So, I don’t think you should set your expectations differently than other games in that respect. I guess you’d probably expect a little bit more from an emotional perspective and from a narrative perspective.

SPOnG: Harold Ramis, the writer of the Ghostbusters films and game, has recently spoken about the difficulty of writing games compared to film, because in a film you’ve got one narrative line with maybe two hours of content, where in a game you have to write for multiple paths sometimes. In Heavy Rain you’re obviously looking at multiple routes that are very heavy on narrative. How easy or difficult was it to develop or write for?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: It is very difficult, because as you said, you need to write all the different threads, and you need to make sure each thread is of equal quality, so it demands a certain ability to make sure, first of all, there are strong contexts within the story. To give players real choices, and to define what possibilities there are within this context of developing other story branches that are meaningful, always, to the story. You don’t want to lead players into either dead ends, or into narrative paths that are not of the same quality in terms of story.

You also have to be careful, because it is an interactive experience, so you have to make sure that whatever the player does, he’s always in control. He shouldn’t feel that the game is just a linear sequence of non-interactive cinematics, for instance. This is really not what we’re trying to do.

Taking the example here of the QTEs (Quick Time Events). A lot of people – and this is one of the difficulties we have in presenting the game, when you watch it, or you watch a video of a play through, people don’t understand how interactive it actually is. When we give the controller to either journalists or users for user tests, the first feedback (is) ‘whoa, I didn’t realise how interactive it is, and I didn’t realise that I was really in control’. Now, of course, each interaction is contextual. You can’t do anything (you want). But it’s a bit like in real life, you know? It would be senseless for me now, for example, to stand up and slap you. It simply has no sense! However, there are a number of things that I can say, that I can do, decisions that I can make that have impact on the story.

So, our job as developers is to make sure that we give enough choices and to make sure that, whatever the choice, the story is meaningful.

SPOnG: Do you have a rough number on how many endings there are?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: 20 plus. But, I guess, what’s more important for us are the different journeys and I really don’t have a clue how many journeys there are to come to those endings. But it’s also in a particular scene. A particular scene may end the same way, however, the information – the experience – can be very different, depending on your choices.

SPOnG: Thanks for your time!

Autor: Mark Johnson
Source: Spong
Language: English

OverGame: Tribune David Cage : Une histoire d'émotions

2009-07-07T12:26:00.001Z

En réaction aux propos des responsables du studio Bioware qui voient bientôt l'avènement du jeu vidéo à histoires pour public adulte laissant tomber l'inutile violence, le créateur du prochain Heavy Rain confirme, à chaud, participer au même combat pacifique depuis des années.
Prenant une petite pause sur le développement en cours de la béta de Heavy Rain, David Cage a bien voulu réagir à chaud aux propos des deux fondateurs du studio Bioware décortiqués ici. Le directeur créatif du studio français Quantic Dream à qui l'on doit les jeux d'aventure les plus singuliers et matures de ces dernières années avec Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit et Heavy Rain à découvrir avant la fin de l'année, confirme une convergence de vue avec Bioware dont il se réjouit après avoir mené depuis des années un combat pour expliquer, tout en la cherchant, sa vision de la maturité du jeu vidéo. Rappelons au moins 2 faits notables dans le travail de David Cage, associés à son premier jeu Nomad Soul sorti en 2000 : avoir réussi à faire participer David Bowie (musique et apparition modélisée dans le jeu) et avoir créé une scène de rapports amoureux, "de tendresse" dit-il pudiquement, entre 2 personnages… Deux exemples de maturité encore à suivre.

"Je suis évidemment totalement en phase avec les déclarations de Ray Muzyka et Greg Zeschuk. C'est une analyse que j'ai faite à la fin de Nomad Soul (en toute humilité…) en constatant que mes parents et beaucoup de gens autour de moi pouvaient apprécier les mêmes livres, les mêmes films, les mêmes émissions de télévision que moi, mais n'avaient strictement aucun intérêt pour les jeux vidéo en général. Les raisons invoquées par tous les adultes qui ne jouent pas étaient souvent les mêmes : « Je n'ai pas le temps, c'est trop compliqué, je n'y comprend rien, ça ne m'intéresse pas ». J'ai alors cherché à comprendre qu'est-ce qui faisait que les jeux n'intéressaient que les gens de ma génération (et encore pas tous), et qu'est-ce qu'il était possible de faire pour étendre notre public traditionnel. Je suis arrivé à la même conclusion que mes confrères de Bioware : la narration et l'émotion sont les seules réponses valables, tout simplement parce que quand on vieillit, on n'a plus envie de jouer aux mêmes jeux que quand on est adolescent. On n'aime plus les mêmes livres, les mêmes films, nos goûts changent et évoluent (enfin normalement…), mais les jeux vidéo eux ne changent pas, d'où la rupture. Passer des heures à bastonner des trolls avant de franchir le niveau suivant pour bastonner plus de trolls n'est pas une expérience satisfaisante pour un grand nombre d'adultes, qui sont le plus souvent en quête d'un peu plus de sens et d'émotion.

Deux choses me surprennent particulièrement dans les déclarations de Bioware : la première est qu'ils semblent prêts à une rupture avec leur public traditionnel de hardcore gamers. C'est une décision qui est extrêmement difficile à prendre parce qu'en terme de marché, on sait ce qu'on perd (dans leur cas, un public très nombreux de gamers avides de leurs jeux)* mais on ne sait pas ce qu'on gagne (conquérir un nouveau public est toujours un immense challenge).

La deuxième chose qui m'interpelle est le fait que la plupart des jeux reposent sur des mécaniques répétitives (tirer, sauter, courir, se cacher, etc.). C'est une structure particulièrement pratique en terme de design parce que c'est une typologie d'actions qui commence à être très bien connue (voilà vingt ans que l'industrie produit des jeux basés sur ces principes…). Si on souhaite abandonner les "batailles", il va falloir trouver de nouvelles manières d'interagir qui ne soient pas basées sur la violence.

Même constat pour raconter une histoire : difficile de développer un scénario sur la base uniquement de coups de hache et de démembrement. Une histoire demande une grande variété d'actions contextuelles, et donc une nouvelle approche de l'interface et des mécanismes de jeux. C'est une rupture particulièrement importante pour une société comme Bioware qui a établi sa réputation et sa réussite sur ces bases, et encore une fois, je trouve leur déclaration particulièrement audacieuse.

Comme ce sont des valeurs que je défends (avec parfois un certain sentiment de solitude, je dois l'avouer…) depuis quelques années maintenant, je suis heureux d'être rejoint sur ce terrain par des développeurs de cette valeur. Avec Fahrenheit et maintenant Heavy Rain, c'est une voie sur laquelle je me suis déjà résolument engagé depuis plusieurs années sur la base de la même analyse que fait aujourd'hui Bioware. J'espère que Heavy Rain démontrera de manière claire qu'il est possible de créer des jeux différemment, basés sur la narration et l'émotion à destination d'un public adulte, et qu'il contribuera à donner envie à d'autres studios de franchir le pas. Ils le feront probablement d'une manière très différente de la nôtre et c'est tant mieux. Le plus important est de sortir de la préadolescence dans laquelle notre industrie s'est enfermée et de commencer à explorer de nouvelles voies vers un média plus mature et créativement plus ambitieux." David Cage

Autor: Francois BLISS DE LA BOISSIERE
Source: Overgame.com
Language:

GamesIndustry.biz: Guillaume de Fondaumiere - Part One

2009-07-03T14:00:00.002Z

The final session at this year's GameHorizon conference was an in-depth demonstration of Sony's forthcoming story-driven title Heavy Rain, by the co-CEO of the development studio Quantic Dream.

But Guillaume de Fondaumiere hasn't been focusing all his time on the creation of games, having successfully lobbied the European Commission and the French government to allow tax breaks to be given to the games industry.

That system, which began in 2008, was based on a cultural test - a phrase used in the UK's recent Digital Britain report. Here, the man himself talks about the problems with that test, why it's not fair, and what the next steps in the battle for media parity should be.

Q: What brings you to GameHorizon?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: It's very interesting for us, as a French developer, to come to the UK - we know that the UK is the most vibrant place in Europe for game development, so it's interesting for us to showcase what we're doing on Heavy Rain, and present this project that's very different from anything that's out there.

We're working with Sony Computer Entertainment, based in Liverpool, so we have many friends here - it's interesting to understand what others are doing here in the UK.

Q: We spoke briefly at the Nordic Game conference about your instalment as chairman of the EGDF - one month on, with some time to reflect, what are your thoughts on the challenges now?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: Well, I've been following the work of the EGDF since it was founded in Paris back in 2006, so I'm very much aware of the issues. As I said before, when the national trade bodies started to work together, we didn't know exactly what we were doing. I think it was more a way to share best practices.

But the more we started to work together, the more we started to realise that we have a common destiny, that each country can't do it on its own - except maybe the UK, which is certainly leading the way in Europe - but the more we were discussing topics such as tax credits and education, the cultural recognition of games and the debate on violence or addiction, we found that we had the same issues to tackle.

So I think in the past three years the awareness of EGDF members has grown towards crafting this common destiny - making sure everyone works better together to not only share best practices but also solve some of the issues that we face.

Today I think we're still confronted with the same critical points, the same issues. I guess the most important one at the moment is tax credits and cultural recognition, because the two come together. I think today we're in a time of economic crisis, the games industry seems be doing okay, but we all know that times are getting more difficult - and that if some are very successful still, others are struggling. I think it's high time now for governments to not only help the banks and the motor industry, but also an industry of the future - the videogame industry.

We're still pretty fragile as an industry, especially in Europe on the development side, and it's not because we have a few studios that are very successful that we shouldn't consolidate on those successes and try to improve the framework and ecosystem that enables all of us to flourish in the next decade.

We know that tax breaks are extremely effective in stimulating an industry, and I think again that Montreal and Quebec have shown us the way. If you listen to representatives of Invest in Quebec, they'll tell you that they've invested hundreds of million of dollars in the industry - but look at how it benefited our country, our region. I think the last time I was presented the numbers they'd invested CAD 400 million, with a return on that investment of CAD 600 million.

So I think it's high time for governments, and the EU, to understand that money given in the form of tax breaks to the industry is not money thrown away. It's an investment with a very high return, so it's time that we had those breaks.

We established a tax break in France on January 1 last year, so we have a whole year of projects that have been submitted and received breaks, and it's been very interesting - because for the first time we have a clear picture of what's being produced in France. I know, for instance, that out of the 110 project submitted, approximately 40 per cent passed the famous cultural test and have been granted tax breaks.

The total of the budgets that were submitted were around EUR 170 million - the first time we know how much is being produced in France, and taking into account we probably don't have 100 per cent of the picture here, maybe that number is EUR 200 million of game development budgets. That's quite a high number, and shows how dynamic the development community is in France.

The tax breaks for 2008 are about EUR 15 million, so that's a lot of money... but on the other hand you have to compare that number with the EUR 700 million that the French film industry is getting - those are numbers that are quite considerable.

Q: Do you think that number will go up in time, though? I wonder what the total budgets for film are in comparison to games?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: It's more than EUR 200 million, but French movies exported a total of less than EUR 400 million last year. I think this is something that's also very important to look at - how much of this production is being exported? Let's not forget, you're talking production budget on one hand and export turnover on the other.

I can only tell from my company, Quantic Dream, but 93 per cent of the turnover generated from our games is from exports - our publishers only generate 7-10 per cent in France, which is normal, as that's about the same as France's share in the market. So we're a heavily exporting company here.

Q: We just had the Digital Britain report in the UK give some indication that a cultural tax break could be implemented, so a lot of people will be looking at France to see how it's worked out there. What's been the general consensus, is it a restriction, or are people happy to embrace it?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: The cultural test is a problem. It's definitely a problem, and when I negotiated both with the French government and the European Commission I had to give in on a number of criteria - because state aids are only allowed under EU law under the famous cultural exception.

That was the case two years ago when I was negotiating, but I see that things have obviously changed now, because I don't believe banks are part of the cultural exception, or the automotive industry is part of it - but nevertheless those institutions and companies are getting huge amounts of funds.

So I guess that the crisis has brought not just bad things, but opened up opportunities here. I think that what was true in 2005 may not be exactly the truth today - I'm extremely happy for British developers has now, finally, looking at this, but I'd encourage Tiga and those developers to push the envelope to a certain degree.

When I was negotiating with the EU I basically had a two-year discussion with them about how to categorise games into boxes - those which are cultural and those which aren't. We came out at the end with this cultural test, but where does that come from?

Actually in France all films are based on certain very light criteria. You have to be a French company, but saying that Warner Bros France could make a movie called A Very Long Engagement and receive funds... There are a number of criteria like this, but otherwise no such cultural test to receive funds.

But those tests exist in other countries, like Holland, Britain and Germany. We've been presented those tests, and asked if we'd accept for games to pass them. Of course when I looked at them they were absolutely not adaptable to what we're doing in games. So we discussed it for about a year to try and to erase the criteria that were irrelevant.

We now have a test that allows approximately 40 per cent of games produced in France to benefit from tax breaks, and in particular some criteria are more geared towards technology and innovation - which didn't exist in the initial film test.

But I'm still not satisfied, and I've always said this is only a first step. I'd prefer to get a foot in the door, rather than have it slammed. We now have to go back to the EU and fight this battle again, on the grounds that many things have changed - obviously banks, the automotive industries getting funding... obviously there are new criteria. We may not need exclusively cultural criteria for our industry to benefit from tax breaks.

Again - I think it's an investment, while I'm not sure it's wise to invest in the automotive industry...

Q: A cynical person might point to the subject of political votes...

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: When you look at EU rules, you have to ask: "Actually, what is culture?" It's a national decision, so it's kind of weird that we, as the videogame industry, have to work with standards that other cultural areas don't have to follow.

To me, all games are cultural. Videogames aren't just a form of entertainment, but a true form of cultural expression, and I think that in twenty years' time this will be a given. No one will dispute that any more.

So we've got a rocky twenty years in front of us, and we have to make sure this recognition doesn't happen when we no longer have an industry in Europe.

Q: Is Heavy Rain within that 40 per cent?

Guillaume de Fondaumiere: Yes.

(Second part of interview name is "Catch the rain" - UL)

Autor: Phil Elliott
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
Language: English

ButtonMasher: Heavy Rain Interview with David Cage

2009-06-22T17:03:00.001Z

Wugga and Jason had a talk with the writer and director of Heavy Rain while at E3, he also happens to be the CEO of Quantic Dream. They talk about what he learnt from their last game Indigo Prophecy (or Farenheit in PAL areas) and where he invisions the game to be pushing the boundries of story telling.

Autor:
Source: ButtonMasher
Language: English

Joistiq: Heavy Rain dev to sell ‘mo-cap packages’

2009-06-18T11:45:00.000Z

Quantic Dream offering a high-end collection of animations to other studios

Quantic Dream’s famed mo-cap studio is launched the Motion Kit Collection, an “evolving library” of animations and captured motions.

Motion Kit Collection Vol 1 will feature 2 motion kit libraries (one for both sexes), each comprising 84 generic motion animations, which totals 2 X 7 linear minutes of animation data.

Quantic Dream – the French studio behind Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophesy) and the upcoming Heavy Rain – say that the new Motion Kit Collection is “the industry’s first high-end, off-the-shelf solution for real-time 3D character animation”.

With each humanoid animation captured using Quantic’s 28-camera Vicon MX-F40 system, the motions can be used for building motion kits for both playable real-time characters and NPCs. Quantic has said this process will “reduce time and budget outlays for prototyping, pre and full productions.”

The animation package is available in .fbx format, which are linkable with 3D software pipelines such as MotionBuilder, Maya, 3DS Max or XSI.

The animations were recorded at Quantic’s Virtual Actor Studio in France.

Autor: Rob Crossley
Source: Joistiq
Language: English

PlayStationLifeStyle: Quantic Dream Gives PSLS a Detailed Walkthrough of Heavy Rain

2009-06-14T16:52:00.001Z

During the E3 convention on the show floor, the PlayStation Lifestyle staff sat down with Quantic Dream, developer of Heavy Rain for an interview and a short playthrough of the E3 2009 demo.

The developer reiterates that Heavy Rain is a mature game and deals with extremely mature elements. An interesting piece of information discussed in the interview was the fact that every character in the game, and all their choresponding movements, were motion captured by actual actors. Even the crowd characters were given just as much dedication to detail as the main characters. In other words, no two characters will be alike, regardless of their importance in the game.

Even though a checkpoint system is in place, Quantic Dream urges players to continue through the game to understand the consequences of their actions. Heavy Rain is expected to hit store shelves Q1 2010. Check out the video below, and make sure to enjoy it in HD!

Autor: Kishen Patel
Source: playstationlifestyle.net
Language: English

NOW Gamer: David Cage Interview

2009-06-11T17:15:00.001Z

We talk to David Cage, writer and director of the upcoming PS3-exclusive Heavy Rain

So, where did the original seed of the inspiration of Heavy Rain come from?

David Cage: In my personal life, actually. You must have had a pretty strange life then. Well, yeah. The first thing we wanted to show, we wanted to be easy to understand. Easy to grasp. For example, you get a lot of combat, and a lot of action, but this is not what the game is all about. The way we’re promoting [Heavy Rain] is a little bit weird, actually. We’re showing you stuff that is individual to each scene.

How do you feel the three things you’ve shown so far? The Casting, The Taxidermist and this level are related then?

I felt that Fahrenheit really was the basis of our work on virtual actors, The Casting really showed what we wanted to do with them. The Taxidermist was more about how we could play with expanding stories. Mixing action and exploration. This is about the interactions in general: the result of three or four years of technical stuff.

You mentioned Fahrenheit as being a part of Heavy Rain’s process. Was that a kind of tech demo for Heavy Rain?

Oh, not really. We had no plan for Heavy Rain at the time. I actually thought Fahrenheit would be a disaster. It was so weird. We’re going back five years here, and at the time I was talking about emotions, interactive storylines, no guns and no cars. As I was pitching the game to journalists they were saying, “There’s no gun, no puzzles, no enemies? That’s not a game.” I tried to explain again and again, but no one could get it. I mean try to explain the concept to someone who hasn’t played the game. It’s hard. It sold really well, and got scores of around 85 per cent, it was at the top of the UK charts for a couple of weeks. We made money from it, for sure.

What games influenced you?

Honestly, only Fahrenheit. I don’t take my inspirations from watching games, because I try to think of a different way of interacting. I think people have used the traditional game conventions as much as they can and there has to come a point where there’s not much more you can do with it. When each button has a specific action and animation and depending on where you are, something happens – what kind of story can you tell with that? What kind of game can you produce apart from shooter games? You can play around and try to produce some nice cut-scenes, but can you really rethink entirely what games are about? No! I thought I had to go away and rethink the interface into something entirely contextual. I wanted an infinite amount of options, and I wanted to tell a story through gameplay, not cut-scenes.

How close is Heavy Rain to the original concept?

I think it’s quite close. In fact, it’s probably a little early to tell. We’re still at the alpha stage and there’s a whole lot of work to be done. There’s so much fine-tuning in the game left to do. Everything has to be perfect. If there’s one thing wrong in a scene, it’s the only thing you’ll see. There are many things that don’t work right now. We need to have everything in place, from facial animations, to score to work out the final result.

What do you think the response to Heavy Rain will be? What are your greatest fears and hopes for it?

My greatest hope is that it will be copied. I know why Fahrenheit wasn’t copied: it was so difficult to write and produce. Just in terms of the amount of data is insane. Everything you do has a success and a failure and a result on the rest of the story. It’s not just in writing, but it affects the art direction, the lighting, and everything to do with the game. To give you an idea of how crazy we are, we do specific lighting for all the dialogue, like in movies, we give you the best angle and light. We’re the only company to do facial motion capture.

We shot about a year of motion capture, every day. That’s about the same as three or four movies. We worked with 70 actors, we spent a year doing casting sessions and interviewed over 300 actors for the roles, because we wanted real actors and we wanted to use everything about them: their face, their body movements and voices.

Back to your question, my greatest hope is that people will see this as a possibility for this industry. I’m not saying everything would be like that, but for some to say, “Okay, this is a game about emotion, and storytelling for a wider audience.” I want to open the door for other publishers and developers and make them see the opportunities.

My greatest fear is very basic. Mostly that people may not like it. When you try to do something different, you can’t please everyone. If you do something like a shooter, you can make a game better than the other ones. It’s obvious and everyone can have their opinion. When you try to do something that’s a bit different, you’ll have people that love it and hate it. I always feel people can be a little unfair sometimes because we are very sincere about the way we make games.

We’re not here for the money, we spend three or four years of our lives doing something we strongly believe in and trying to share our vision. We’re not trying to make the same games over and over again. It’s always a little cruel when people just slash you sometimes without even thinking. Look at Fahrenheit – it did many things wrong, but there were a couple of new things and ideas that people should look at.

What feedback from Fahrenheit was applied to this?

After Fahrenheit we spent a lot of time reading reviews and talking to gamers and trying to work things out. Also we had a lot of things that within the team, we wanted to change. The quality of the story was one of those things. The first two thirds of Fahrenheit went very well, and at some point I became a little overwhelmed by the technique of writing – the fact that you need to step back and get some inspiration. At some points I was managing the team, directing the game and producing it, and I didn’t pay as much attention to the story as I should have. With Heavy Rain it was different. We got script doctors from Hollywood working on it, asking me for changes and suggesting things to improve characterisation, which has been very useful.

We learned the importance of the story, and to be careful of the ending. The main thing I learnt was that you don’t need to have supernatural powers to tell a story. The parts that work the best are the parts that are grounded in reality. The scene with Tyler Miles in Fahrenheit where you wake up, take a shower, drink coffee and chat to your wife was one of the greatest inspirations for Heavy Rain. You don’t do anything spectacular, you’re just living someone’s life. I thought with Heavy Rain that you don’t need to save the planet to do something meaningful.

We were also frustrated with the technology on Fahrenheit; it was on three platforms, it was our first console game, so we had a lot of work and no experience. Here we’ve got the time, on one fantastic platform and all the proprietary technology is really dedicated on this platform, so it’s a big change.

For the full interview with David Cage check the latest issue of Play, out now.

Autor: Play Magazine
Source: Play Magazine
Language: English

Gamingring: E3 2009 Heavy Rain Interview

2009-06-07T17:47:00.001Z

Autor: mike regan
Source: Gamingring
Language: English

1UP @ E3 'Heavy Rain' interview

2009-06-04T17:56:00.002Z

Executive Producer Guillaume de Fondaumiere sits down and demos the PS3 action game Heavy Rain.

Use this link to watch/download or just click a source link.

Autor: 1UP staff
Source: 1UP
Language: English

E3: Heavy Rain goes bare

2009-06-03T10:25:00.001Z

(Use a source link if this one not works - UL)

Autor: Quantic Dream
Source: Gamersyde
Language: English

Joistiq: Interview: David Cage of Quantic Dream and Heavy Rain

2009-05-27T16:40:00.002Z

We recently had our precipitation-sodden paws all over Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer, and then chatted with David Cage, a man who wears plenty of hats at developer Quantic Dream. In addition to founding the studio, he's also the head game developer, writer, co-CEO, director, and chief bottle washer. So, who better to walk us through the trippy thriller that goes where Indigo Prophecy feared to tread?

Read on to find out some new tidbits about the game, how Fight Club inspired the interface system and why his favorite ending to the game is when all four characters die. Plus why, like Guillermo del Toro, he believes that the interactive entertainment industry is long overdue for a Citizen Kane (or in Cage's case, a Slumdog Millionaire) of games.

Let's jump right in and start hammering you with questions. We have seen a lot of this new character, Jayden. He has specific tie-ins with gadgetry, with the Augmented Reality interface and so on. Will the other characters have similar gadgets or will they each have their own focus?

Each one has their own focus. I mean it is not like everyone has a gadget. Again, what you see with Jayden is not the template. There will be four other characters like this. Each one is very different. People will be very surprised by who they are.

They will each have their own strength or what they are known for? Their gameplay will be intrinsically different from the previous or the next person?

There is no real archetype in like those sexy games were you have the sexy girl, the strong guy and the fast guy. It is not that way. Each one is just a different character with a different background, different personality. They can do what makes sense given who it is.

Although having said that, we see Madison in her underwear in the teaser. Her ability is not just to appear in her underwear?

No, you will be surprised.

So what was the inspiration behind the game? It sort of feels a bit like the X-Files. You have the CSI tie-in with the evidence that Jayden can detect.

There is no supernatural element to the game. It is really grounded in reality. There are no aliens, no zombies, nothing special. There is just real people in real life in real situations.

So the inspiration really comes pretty much from ... it is always difficult to say really where it comes from. But what I know is Heavy Rain is probably the most personal thing I have done so far, which is maybe not apparent from the scene you have seen this morning.

But the real topic of Heavy Rain is in the tagline, "How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?" That is really the real subject and is something that is really personal. And I think that will talk to players as individuals and will push them to ask questions.

When you were loading the demo it was at like Act 38, is there going to be a really high number of acts in the game? You said that was about midway through, right?

Yes.

And that still ties into the 8-10 hours it may take an average player?

The scenes are really short to be honest with you. They are really short. We are trying to stay away from a really slow and boring experience.

We were wondering about the moment we saw where Mad Jack and Jayden were fighting. Will that be the same each time if you play that level? Will they fight or scramble around the same way, the scripted moments like that where you are following the instructions? You know, dodge, jump left, etc?

The controllers are scripted because they relate to the move that is made. We really want to have a real connection between what you do on the controller and what is happening on the screen. But at the same time, the result depends on what you do and you have different branches that you can go into.

It's pretty bold to have a character with a drug addiction in the game. Is there going to be some sort of ultimate payoff with his drug struggle or will there be an anti-drug message, or do you battle it throughout the game?

Yes, you need to battle with it and it will give you some very strange scenes because there is some kind of very strange interaction between the ARI and the drug.

Is that a drug that you can take at any point in the game or is it just keyed in specific moments? Like where we saw he was confronting Mad Jack and he started having the symptoms. His nose was bleeding ...

No. It is triggered at certain moments.

Okay, so you can't just take the drug. How does he actually administer it? Is it an injection?

Actually, it is through the nose. It's in a tube.

Ah, hence the nose bleeds.

Right. Obviously.

You mentioned that his drug use, there is an element of hiding it from people he knows or his co-workers or something like that. Is it possible to get caught using it and have a different ramification on the main story?

Your actions have consequences. I don't want to say too much, but ...

So, if a character dies, do you lose that character and the game continues on and you just don't get that one character's perspective or those two characters' perspectives? I am guessing that would affect the overall length of the game. Does it?

Yeah. In fact, you cannot die in the first one fourth or so of the game. It wouldn't make sense if in the first scene Jayden dies. I mean what would happen? But what we really do is we build empathy for these characters. We want to give you the feeling that you really care for them. This is really the feeling that we tried to create. So when you really care for his life, when he dies it is going to be a shock for you. So yeah, this is really what we tried to create.

Will the story continue if all four of them are killed?

That will be the conclusion of the story. It won't be a game over like you are starting and you know what happens. It will be the conclusion of the story.

Like some level of closure? You will see something.

Yeah, definitely. And to be honest that is my favorite ending.

A lot of developers are shying away from Sixaxis controls, and are not including them in the game. You guys definitely seem like you are going to be including them. Was that a specific choice or is that something that is still fluid right now and might change when the final game is done?

Well, we are still in the process of polishing the game so this is something that might be slightly adjusted based on the kind of feedback we receive. Personally I like it. I mean I wouldn't use it every single second. You know, we wouldn't want you playing like this all the time.

But as we are trying to create a sense of identification between you and your character, we do that with the system when you are controlling interactions on-screen. You really unfold the move and you really control that with the right stick. When you need to kick or punch something, having to do this (shakes hands) with the controls makes a lot of sense.

I guess it really depends on the type of game you are doing and where it fits in the general gameplay. You don't want to agitate your controller all the time.

Did you guys receive feedback from the last demo of the interface that caused you to change it?

Absolutely not.

It was just something you guys did?

Yeah. I was really happy with the demo. All the people who saw the demo were really impressed. In Leipzig, we presented it to 300 journalists in two days, and we were loaded at every single session. We said, "Well this is the first time we had seen that. That people are liking it so much and responding to it."

So the feedback was fantastic. And what people saw on stage was a 40- or 45-minute demo playing. It was real-time 3D, second to second. I was always a little bit frustrated with the interface because I thought it was a little bit old fashioned. This idea of having a 3D environment with glass on the top with symbols, and when you want to know how to interact with it you need to look at the symbols, look at what you need to do. "OK. I need to do this in order to interact with that."

It was silly in a way. So I wanted to find a solution. It is funny because you were talking about inspiration, to be honest with you, it came from Fight Club. There is this scene in Fight Club with the IKEA furniture and stuff, and everyone was so amazed when they saw that movie and said, "Wow, that is so cool!"

We wanted to find a solution. I thought again about Fight Club and I thought that this could be the solution. We wanted to find something that would be clear but that would not interfere with the environment. So that was difficult. We made many tests, but we are quite happy with the results.

How final is the voiceover we were hearing from the characters in this scene? Is that going to be the final voices or was it temporary?

It is quite final except maybe some of the accents, because most of them are English, except Mad Jack, he's American. Most of them did a very good job.

Are Scott, Ethan, and Madison going to be ... Well, I guess we have sort of seen Madison. Are they going to be different ethnicities? Is everyone white? Is it a wide range? Do you guys even know yet?

Oh yeah. We know. It is going to be quite a white game actually ... we have done previously in Indigo, we had a black character, but no. They are very different, but everyone is from the same ethnicity I guess.

And everyone, I am guessing, is not in law enforcement like Jayden is?

No.

We have seen with Jayden that it is very kind of action focused at this point, and his investigation is all done with ARi. Is there any mechanism or plan for the final game with him or any other characters for say taking notes? Will you ever do that, or taking an inventory, or selecting things?

No, not really. We didn't explore that.

So, it really fits that norm of adventure games.

Yeah. I didn't want to deal with that. I asked myself the question at some point during the design phase, like, "Do I want to take notes and connect clues and maybe find a way that this information relates to this object in the final interface?" It became very complicated and I got the feeling that it would take me away from what I was trying to achieve, which was really trying to create an emotional experience, something that would be really immersive and emotionally involving.

I didn't want the control aspect of the experience to be stronger than the emotional aspect of the game. To me, Heavy Rain is much more of a journey rather than an investigation where you need to connect clues and blah, blah, blah. I don't care ... there are so many games that do that really well. I really wanted to focus on the journey. That is unusual and it is probably difficult to see what I mean in saying that, but you will get it when you play the game, hopefully.

Was it meant to be a possible franchise? Could there be another game in the vein of Heavy Rain with different characters that are still under the title of Heavy Rain?

You know, we are not this type of company and I am not this type of designer that thinks about marketing while I design. I just tell the story that I need to tell at some point and I make the game that I absolutely wanted to make.

Now will there be downloadable content or a Heavy Rain 2? Maybe yes, maybe not. I am not really into sequels to be honest with you. For Indigo I got the feeling that I said what I had to say with the characters in the story, and it corresponded with one phase in my personal evolution. And at some point you say, "OK. That is the past. I am glad I have done it, but now I need to move on."

I hope that Heavy Rain will reach the same stage and at some point I will want to tell a different story with different characters.

Have you had time to play any games on your own?

Oh yeah.

What do you like to play?

I play a lot of game toys. You know games that you just play to spend some time and forget as soon as you turn off the console. This is what is on the market right now. There are very few games that leave an imprint and leave something with you to think about.

My biggest frustration is I went to the theater to watch Gran Torino and I left the theater extremely frustrated. And I thought, "Oh my God. When will we be able to create experiences like that in video games?" We are just telling stories about little boys shooting and jumping. When will we be able to tell real stories with real characters and real emotions? Yeah, it was some kind of frustration.

It is not that I want to be a movie director. I don't care about movies so much. But it is about the depth of what you can do in a movie compared to the depth of what you can do in a video game right now.

Do you feel like the games haven't reached that level of emotional storytelling yet?

Certainly not. We are really, really far away. We are light years away to be honest. And this is because we don't dare stop doing what we have been doing for 15 years. I mean, let's stop making games for kids and teenagers. Let's ask ourselves the real questions. Let's change the way we see interface. Let's change some of the traditional game conventions that we have had for 15 years that we take for granted, like, you cannot make a game if there is no ramping, if there is no game over, if you don't progress in difficulty, etc.

Who cares? You want to play a game that is interesting and that is an emotional journey. It is the story. It is what you feel playing. It is not that it gets more and more difficult until to the point where you just leave the controller and say I don't want to play that anymore. I spent $70 to buy this thing and I don't want to play it because it gets too difficult at some point. I don't want to play it anymore.

Who said the game has to be more and more difficult as your progress? Who said that? I mean, there is no reason for that. I mean, you just want to create a real journey, something that you experience and you are happy to be playing. That is it. I hope that more and more games will aim to leave an imprint and not just be toys, but be a real creative experience.

You say we are probably light years away from that. Certainly you must have developed Heavy Rain with that goal in mind. Are you pretty happy with the story and what you guys have accomplished?

At this stage I am really happy with the story. It kept me excited for the past three years, which is obviously a lot. At no point did I wake up one morning and say, "Oh my God. I can't do this anymore. This story is silly." It talks to me as an individual and I think it is going to talk to players at a different level than other games. I don't think we are anyway near Gran Torino or Slumdog Millionaire or any good movies that you have seen recently, because there are still some problems and there are still more conventions to break, more courage to have, but we are definitely closer than we were.

Talking about creating an emotional experience, I wanted to ask you about the about the technology behind the characters and the surreal realism of them. Did the technology to create these very life-like looking people, did that come out of your goal for the game? Or did you go, "Oh wow. We can make these really great looking people. Let's make a really emotional game."

No. Every single technology throughout the game comes from game design. We designed the goal and then we identified the technology necessary to reach the goal. It has never been the technology driving what we were doing. It is like if you were a writer and you would say, "I have got a fantastic pen! Let's write something with it because it is so cool to write something with this pen." Who gives a shit? I don't care! That is not the way to do it!

You need to have a real story that you need to tell and then you find any pen. Maybe you will find the best pen that works for you. And that is fine. But that is not the way to work. I guess it must look weird from the outside, for you guys, to see how we came from Indigo, to The Casting, to The Taxidermist, to this scene today for Heavy Rain. But when you look at it there is a real logical progression to this.

I mean we really learned. With Indigo we learned and we prototyped technology for The Casting because we thought emotion was very important in story telling. And the vehicles for emotion are actors. So you need to provide the technology to create virtual actors, to deliver emotion.

So we used that in The Casting with some success. It worked in certain aspects, with some failures. It did not fully work. And then we came with The Taxidermist where everything became interactive and you can actually really play, and it was telling a story that was a little bit more complex and different than The Casting. And then to Heavy Rain. So there is a progression, but it is always driven by design.

Was there ever a point that you told the artists, "Well the characters maybe look a little too real or they look unusual now that they are a little too real. We need to make them look a little more like stylized?" I mean, they still look like people, but...

No, actually, because the idea behind Heavy Rain was really to recreate virtual actors. So it made our life very difficult at the beginning of the development because we spent about a year to find the right guys, the right actors, for the roles. It was not like picking one face, and one voice, and one actor for the body motion capture. We needed to have one consistent person. That is exactly like an actor for a real movie.

So that was really difficult. It was a nightmare. So this is really something that we discovered doing it. We spent a year doing casting sessions in the UK, the US, and France. We ended up with four actors where we said, "Here they are. These are really the characters." It was really funny, because when I look at the scene, I was of course in the studio with the actors and I really recognize them. I recognized the way they move, the way they talk, and the way they move their face. It is really them.

So I would say with The Casting we maybe had 50% of the performance of the actors. I would say here we are probably closer to 70 percent, maybe 80 percent. There's still room for progression, but we're getting really close.

Are these known actors or just people that you guys found?

They are professional actors but they are not known so far. But I hope they will get to be known now with the game. You know the problem with Hollywood ... we considered at some point working with famous actors, but the idea was to have someone famous for a week, give them a million dollars, and get what you could get. But that was not the way that we wanted to go with this.

Collaboration with the actors was a year of work, with the four main characters. A year working on a very regular basis to shoot motion capture, to shoot facial, to do the voices, and to do all these things. So they were really immersed in the story and they really had a real understanding about what we were trying to achieve and what the story is about. This is something you wouldn't get from anyone in Hollywood. So I guess we needed a different kind of partnership with the actors, a different type of cooperation.

I know you have talked about Gran Torino and Slumdog. You have talked about Heavy Rain and how games haven't quite gotten there yet. What if tomorrow someone comes from a studio, even Sony, and says we want to option this and make it into a movie? Do you think that is a possibility that might happen because the story is so strong?

Yeah. Of course it is a possibility. Honestly I have never reasoned Heavy Rain, thinking of a movie, and saying, "Oh it has to be a movie. That is my dream." It is not my dream. I am happy if there is a movie, but really the experience I wanted to create was a game. I don't know. It may be an interesting movie. I think it would be a different kind of movie because of the four characters and the way their stories are interlaced. It is going to be something different, but it has to be done right. There is no way we are just going to sell the license to someone and say do whatever you want. Do a shooter movie, do an action movie. Do whatever you want. It would have to be something that would really be faithful to the original idea.

Speaking about a game that takes 8-10 hours, what sort of game play mechanic is there to save your game? Do you have to interact with something or can you drop out at any moment and save the game?

That is something you don't need to care about. We really tried to work with the interface and the game mechanics behind to be totally invisible to the player. You don't need to care. At some point I want you to forget that this is a game. Just follow the story and get immersed in the emotional experience.

At any point did you look at this and say, "Oh this works really well as a serialized story that might be downloadable?"

Yes. We won't do it with Heavy Rain. But what we have developed with Heavy Rain is an interface that will allow you to tell any kind of story. So we could tell a dark thriller like Heavy Rain, but we could tell a drama. We could tell a comedy. We could do anything because all the interface is very simple, and accessible, and contextual. So you could do pretty much anything. That is something that is interesting.

The actor game engine.

Maybe.

Or Shakespeare's game engine.

I am dreaming of the day where game creators will have to think about the story they want to tell and the emotion they want to trigger instead of what technology they are going to use and how it is going to fit into the interface. That will be an interesting moment.

Cool. Well, thank you for your time!

Thank you very much.

Autor: Kevin Kelly
Source: Joistiq
Language: English

US PlayStation Blog: David Cage Interview

2009-05-26T18:59:00.001Z

Autor: Chris Morell
Source: US PlayStation Blog
Language: (English)

1UP: Looking Back at Indigo Prophecy

2009-05-20T14:08:00.001Z

David Cage reviews his first attempt at the interactive drama genre, and reveals why he doesn't want to make a sequel.

Though the universes aren't connected, you'd be forgiven for thinking Heavy Rain was a sequel to developer Quantic Dream's previous game, Indigo Prophecy. Hell, we assumed as much in our database description on 1UP for a couple of years before correcting the error, and the two share enough similarities that it's hard for me to look at one without thinking of the other. Perhaps the best way to describe the new game is that it's a gameplay sequel with a from-scratch story.

So I figured it made sense to dedicate one day of this week's Heavy Rain cover story to looking back at the game that came before it, and get director David Cage's take on it now that he's gained a few years of perspective.

1UP: If you were to review Indigo Prophecy now, how successful would you say it was?

David Cage: Indigo Prophecy was the first game entirely based on narrative and characters, not using any standard game mechanics but only contextual actions and decisions affecting the story. It demonstrated to me many very important points: it was possible to create a game without weapons, a car, or puzzles, and it was possible to tell a story through player actions, not through cut-scenes. The game explored new ground working with three main characters at the same time with apparent opposite goals -- one was the murderer, the two others the investigators -- and changed my understanding of identifying with a character in a game. It made me work on interactive storytelling for two years, a luxury that few game designers have, trying to find new writing techniques -- creating the concept of bending stories, for example -- and discovering all the difficulties of trying to tell an interactive story.

From a consumer standpoint, we were happy the game was both a critical and commercial success, being reviewed worldwide in the mid-80s on all platforms and spending several weeks on the UK charts, for example -- a country that did not have a narrative game in this position since Myst, maybe.

From a company standpoint, we developed proprietary technologies on three platforms, and our team gained a very unique experience. We put in place our motion capture pipeline, invented a new approach to realtime directing tools, and utilized many other innovative technologies.

Last but not least, Indigo was definitely the game that got Quantic Dream on the radar of the industry, thanks to the interest raised by the press and fans worldwide. Many publishers played the game and saw what we tried to achieve, which allowed us to sign with a console manufacturer as prestigious as Sony.

After this long answer, how could I say Indigo was not successful to me? It did some things right and certain things wrong. It was definitely not perfect, but we felt it was original and different.

1UP: Are there any specific scenes in the game that you think worked best?

DC: The first scene that comes to my mind is the one where you control Tyler Miles, a cop, as he wakes up in the morning. He looks at his girlfriend still asleep, takes a shower, and puts his clothes on. Then he goes to the kitchen. He drinks the coffee his girlfriend prepared, they talk, and he leaves for the office. I remember when I wrote this scene, I thought it would never work. There was absolutely nothing happening, nothing spectacular, just a guy waking up and going to work. When I played the game for the first time, I had this unique feeling of sharing the character's intimacy, playing his life with him. It is definitely the scene that convinced me that it was possible to think differently about interactivity.

I also liked the scene at the lake, where the hero is confronted with a moral decision, saving a little boy about to fall in a lake but taking the risk of being arrested by the police, or just leaving. The choices were presented in multiple windows and the player had to make a quick decision with moral consequences. The scene worked quite well, although being quite simple, but many people told me they left and felt really bad for a long time after [playing it].

One last scene was the one where the hero's ex-girlfriend comes back to his apartment to get some stuff, and the player can be nice or tough with her, trying to seduce her again and potentially get intimate. Someone told me he was usually a nice person, so when the girlfriend came back, he was as nice as possible with her. When he played the game again, he wanted to play differently to see what would happen...but when she came, he could not be tough with her and played exactly the same way. I love this story, because it means this player saw this program moving a bunch of pixels on screen like a real character with emotions, which means that we reached our goal.

1UP: Do you think if Indigo Prophecy was released today, you would have an easier problem including the game's sex scene in North America?

DC: To be frank, I don't know yet. I think there is still an atmosphere of paranoia around video games. Some people seem to think games have an incredible power because of interactivity. Even in our industry, some decision makers are convinced of that, although all studies I know demonstrate games don't have more influence than movies or books.

Graphic novels were at the same stage 30 years ago, because laws were made by people who did not read graphic novels, so they thought it was dangerous. I think times will change and interactivity will get more and more accepted in our society. Game creators are getting more mature and in many cases are telling more meaningful stories in games.

As a creator, I like to be free to create the most realistic interactive experience possible, and sex and violence are parts of our lives. Not that I necessarily want to promote those aspects but it is an element of human nature that I believe people can connect with in the games we do.

1UP: We're seeing the evolution of many of the ideas from Indigo Prophecy in Heavy Rain -- the new button-pressing minigames, the story approach changes, etc. -- though clearly the story, setting, and characters are new. Did Heavy Rain ever start out in your head as an Indigo Prophecy sequel?

DC: In fact, yes. After Indigo, I wanted to work on something different because I thought the game would be a commercial disaster. It was really different from what the industry was doing and there was absolutely no hype about emotion or narrative. But when we started talking to publishers, many of them told us they loved Indigo and they were interested in publishing the sequel.

So I started thinking of Indigo 2 but I quickly realized I had nothing more to say on this story and these characters. I really enjoyed the time I spent with them, but they were attached to a moment in my life, and I had moved on. I wanted to write something more personal, deeper, more adult, with no world to save and no supernatural powers.

Indigo opened the way to a different type of experience, giving all the bricks any author would need to tell any kind of story. It was the first time I could only think of what I wanted to tell, what I had to say, and not about what technology to use or what button to press. It was definitely a huge change of paradigm. Sony came to us quickly after Indigo because they enjoyed the game, asked us what we were working on, and we told them about The Casting, this technical demo of a virtual actress in realtime 3D. They offered to give us PS3 dev kits and to present the demo in their booth at E3. Heavy Rain was voted the most anticipated PS3 title after the show, just based on this demo -- and I guess [based] on Indigo -- which definitely proved to us gamers were eager for a different type of interactive experience.

1UP: I've heard you guys say you agreed with complaints that Indigo Prophecy didn't stay grounded in reality towards the end of the game. Have you given any thought to how you would have ended the game had you not gone the supernatural route?

DC: What was definitely wrong in Indigo was the fact that the end was not built enough and came as a series of disconnected events. We put so much effort to reach the end that we could not accomplish all we wanted [at the end]. It was supposed to be supernatural from the beginning, and I think that was OK with the kind of story we were telling. But we've learned many lessons since then and realize we should have paid more attention to resolving the end.

1UP: Can you share some behind the scenes trivia about the game that we might not know?

DC: Plenty...here are some:

I was the actor for most of Lucas Kane's [motion capture] animations in the game. I thought it would be faster to have the director and the actor as the same person. I learned a lot doing this and it definitely helped me directing actors on Heavy Rain, but this is not something I would do again, because it is quite time consuming and only fun on the first day.

When we met Angelo Badalamenti for the music, we spent about four hours in a taxi that got lost not finding his place (he lives in the countryside around New York). I don't want to remember how much we paid. Then we worked on the music, and spent the rest of the day drinking wine, talking about how he found the theme of Twin Peaks and how it was to work with David Lynch.

All facial animations were done by a puppeteer triggering animations with a mocap glove. He was listening to the dialogue, and then he moved his hands in the air to animate the face of the character, one shape per finger. He did that in all languages...

The original game title was Fahrenheit, but it was renamed in the US because someone clever in the marketing department was scared that the game could be confused with Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie from Michael Moore, and that it could hurt the sales.

Indigo sold out on Xbox in most countries on the first week. The publisher significantly underestimated the sales on this platform.

About four versions of the game were released: the European version, that was the original version I wanted that was released uncensored; the American version, which had some changes regarding sex; the Japanese version, where all women had to have their chests covered; and then the last version was a director's cut version released only in the US, and that was in fact the European version.

We were working on Indigo during the Hot Coffee scandal. There was some kind of paranoia at the time that some genius teenager could extract graphic assets involving sex from the game, so we had to go back and cover the private parts of all characters present on the DVD, even if they were not shown in the game, just to make sure no one could extract them from the program. This was probably one of the most time consuming and, to me, weirdest things I've had to do in my career.
The part of the story that was grounded in reality was definitely the one that worked the best. It convinced me that it was not necessary to have magic powers or to fight aliens to tell an interesting, interactive story. Our media has now reached a level of maturity where real stories with real people can be told, which is definitely a good thing.

1UP: Are there any secrets in Indigo Prophecy that to your knowledge have yet to be discovered by players?

DC: Yes, there are still a couple of Easter eggs, but let's keep them secret. Maybe fans will jump back in to the game now to look for them.

1UP: Will hardcore Heavy Rain players notice any nods or subtle references to Indigo Prophecy?

DC: Maybe. There was one about Omikron in Indigo.

Autor: Matt Leone
Source: 1UP
Language: English

1UP: Heavy Rain and Quantic Dream Blowout

2009-05-18T17:03:00.000Z

If you've followed interviews with French developer Quantic Dream over the past few years, chances are you've heard some of co-CEO David Cage's greatest hits: making games for a mature audience, exploring new forms of interacting with a controller, telling bendable stories without relying on cars and guns, etc. It's certainly interesting stuff, but for this week's Heavy Rain cover story, I wanted to pose our questions from a few different angles, starting today with a look at Cage's personal history and the origins of the company.

1UP: How did you get your start in the game industry?

David Cage: I was initially a professional music composer, [working] for various record companies before starting to work on video games. Then I wrote the soundtrack of different games on Sega Genesis, SNES, and PC. As I was also a gamer, it was quite an easy step for me. As I was working with developers on different projects, I started to understand the roles and processes, and I made a couple of good friends in the industry.

I quickly had it in mind to create the game I was dreaming of playing, a game where the player would be free in a huge and living realtime 3D city, where there would be a story and the possibility to drive vehicles, to fight, and use weapons. This is how I wrote Omikron, my first title, entirely at night and on weekends, not having a clue about what the technology could really achieve at the time or what development constraints were.
I ended up with a 200 page game design that I showed to a couple of friends. They were all impressed by the weight of the game design -- I still like to make them heavy... -- and by the fact that the game was totally impossible to make. I managed to convince them to leave their jobs to work on a prototype. We started from scratch and worked really hard for six months in one of my sound studios -- totally soundproof with no windows! We signed the game with Eidos the last week before I [would have run] out of money. From the six people who started the company with me, three are currently at Quantic.

1UP: What's something you think most people don't know about Quantic Dream?

DC: Mmm...like a trivia type of question? OK, here are a [few] tidbits:

The very first name of Quantic Dream was "Extreme Studio." It sounded so bad that we had to do something about it. This is how I came up with Quantic Dream, referring to quantum physics, which seemed to me a mix of science and unexplained magic.
Before we signed Omikron with Eidos, we started developing a prototype on PlayStation 1. We presented it to a certain major publisher at the time who was very interested -- we had a city in realtime 3D running on PS1 in 1995. We did not sign the game with them because their CEO told us that PlayStation 1 would be dead in six months and that they would rather develop on PC. We were stupid enough to listen to him and work on a PC prototype that became Omikron. The CEO left the company a little bit later -- and this publisher left the industry... A good example of visionary people in the game industry. With more foresight, we maybe could have delivered the very first open world city in realtime 3D on PS1 years before GTA3.
I wrote the soundtrack of many games, including Speedy Gonzales for Sega on Mega Drive -- Mexican music with an FM synthesizer. I had two weeks to discover the hardware and the tools and to compose the soundtrack...an interesting moment in my career. But hey, we have all done things we are not proud of.

1UP: Your most recent games have taken place in the United States. Is there a particular reason you've chosen to set games there?

DC: I guess [because I've] worked on thrillers, which [come from] an American cinema genre, the natural setting was the US. France is a fantastic country for food, history, nature, culture and art, but I guess it is easier to write about another culture you feel familiar with but that is not yours.

For Heavy Rain, we spent time in an east coast city for three weeks with cameras, and it was a real shock to see the poverty, the ghettos, the abandoned factories, and the sense of danger that the social disparity creates. When you live in Europe, the US is most of the time depicted as the country of success, power, money, heroes saving the world, and sexy girls. Discovering the social side of America that you rarely see in movies was something absolutely scary. I came [across a particular city coincidentally], not really knowing what I was looking for, but I found the exact background I needed to tell my story, and I must say it really fed the writing of Heavy Rain.

1UP: Any desire to make a game set in France?

DC: I don't have any specific desire to write a game set in France. I guess most American people would see it as a nice postcard with the Eiffel Tower, the Camembert, the French bread, and Amelie Poulain on a soundtrack with an accordion. I don't have enough distance with my country to be able to tell something interesting about it...for the moment.

1UP: Do you have any unusual traditions at the office for whenever you hit particular milestones or anything along those lines?

DC: Well, yes we have a couple. A funny one is called "la coupe du boulet" -- the idiot cup. It is a real trophy we put on the table of the person who made the stupidest thing of the day in the development. A couple of people often had it on their table.

1UP: Has there been anything big in your career that almost happened, but then changed at the last second?

DC: Oh yeah, we were close to dying a couple of times...but finally survived. We also were about to raise more money in 2000, but at the last minute one of the investors decided games were a risky business and we only raised half -- which was still a significant amount of money that allowed us to develop the company.

We were also close to signing with a certain publisher a couple of times...but didn't in the end. They changed their mind on Indigo half an hour before we were supposed to sign the contract. After three months of intense negotiations, we told them we changed ours on Heavy Rain half an hour before too...[so] I guess we are on par [smiles].

1UP: Have you ever worked on a game that got cancelled partway through development?

DC: No. Given the level of personal involvement the team and I put in our games, it would have been a real drama. I think it is difficult for people outside the industry to understand how developers can be so emotionally attached to their game. For most of us, it is not just a job, but a part of our lives that can be killed any time for reasons that are not always related to the quality of the game itself.

1UP: Do you know how to create origami?

DC: Absolutely not. It makes them even more fascinating to me [smiles]

Autor: Matt Leone
Source: 1UP Heavy Rain minisite
Language: English

JeuxActu.com: Heavy Rain : interview David Cage

2009-03-06T19:20:00.002Z

Comme promis, nous vous proposons ce soir la suite de notre reportage au sein de Quantic Dream. Après la visite des studios il y a une quinzaine de jours, nous vous proposons de regarder l'interview de David Cage qui a été faite au moment de notre passage dans leurs locaux. Il nous parle de Heavy Rain bien sûr, mais aussi du jeu vidéo de manière plus générale. Voici notre tête-à-tête.

Pour cette interview en compagnie de David Cage, PDQ de Quantic Dream, mais aussi créateur du jeu Heavy Rain, nous vous proposons ns deux choix de lecture : l'interview écrite classique ou l'interview vidéo. Durée de la vidéo : 16"41 minutes. Faites votre choix. A noter que la vidéo est accessible en streaming via le lecteur flash, en téléchargement aux formats SD et HD 720p, mais aussi aux formats iPod et PSP pour les spectateurs nomades.

JeuxActu : Heavy Rain est attendu comme le Messie. N’est-ce pas une pression un peu trop dure à supporter ?
David Cage : Dure à supporter… ? Non… Quand on est créateur de jeux vidéo, on a envie d’être dans cette position-là. On n’a pas envie de faire des jeux dont tout le monde ignore. On aime être attendu au tournant, donc c’est une bonne pression. Maintenant, il est vrai qu’on n’a pas le droit de décevoir… Plus l’attente est importante et plus la déception l’est également. On travaille donc dur avec les équipes pour être à la hauteur des attentes.

Comment le projet Heavy Rain est-il né ?
Heavy Rain est parti de l’après-Fahrenheit, un peu de manière bizarre d’ailleurs. La période qui précéda la sortie de Fahrenheit fut un peu difficile dans le sens où je me sentais comme un alien dans cette industrie. Je me rappelle de l’époque où on dévoilait les premières démos du jeu dans les salons tels que l’E3. J’en profitais pour me balader dans les autres stands et je ne voyais que des jeux qui n’avaient rien à voir à ce qu’on faisait. J’avais l’impression d’être passé à côté de quelque chose, le sentiment peut-être de faire un jeu qui n’allait intéressé personne. Du coup, j’étais un peu déprimé par cette histoire et je me suis dit : « tant pis, c’est quatre ans de notre vie ! » Après ça, tout le monde me sollicitait pour que je fasse la suite de Nomad Soul. Au moment de lancer la production, de nombreux éditeurs sont venus vers moi pour me demander de développer Fahrenheit 2, car ils avaient trouvé le premier épisode vraiment intéressant et ils m’ont poussé à creuser davantage vers cette direction. Entre temps, les critiques de la presse ont commencé à tomber et elles étaient plutôt bonnes. Certaines étaient tellement dithyrambiques qu’on n’aurait même pas osé les écrire nous-mêmes. Ensuite, Fahrenheit fut premier des charts dans des pays comme l’Angleterre et cela faisait très longtemps qu’un jeu français n’avait reçu un pareil accueil. Tout ça a un peu frappé les esprits et notamment les décisionnaires qui ont vu le potentiel du jeu. On s’est donc posé la question de Fahrenheit 2, mais je ne voulais pas repartir sur une suite. J’avais le sentiment de ne plus rien à dire de plus par rapport à cet univers, ces personnages, cette histoire. J’avais envie de repartir sur autre chose et notamment sur la technologie faciale. Comment recréer des performances d’acteur, retranscrire des émotions dans un jeu vidéo, voilà ce qui m’intéressait. Sony est venu nous voir, nous félicitant sur notre travail fait sur Fahrenheit, et souhaitait qu’on mette en valeur les capacités techniques de la PlayStation 3. C’est comme ça que le projet The Casting est né. Le succès fut immédiat avec plus d’un million de téléchargements sur le Net. On n’avait pourtant rien montré puisqu’il s’agissait juste d’une démo technologique. Sony et nous-mêmes avons été agréablement surpris et on a décidé de mettre en œuvre Heavy Rain qui s’appuierait sur cette démo.

Je me rappelle de l’ovation que vous avez eu à la dernières Games Convention. Le public vous a carrément déroulé le tapis. Vous vous attendiez à un tel plébiscite ?
Pas du tout ! C’est d’autant plus surprenant car lors du keynote de Sony, j’ai eu l’occasion de faire une intervention. Chose étonnante, j’ai été applaudi avant même d’être monté sur scène, avant même de montrer Heavy Rain ou quoique ce soit. Sony m’a ensuite dit que c’était la première fois qu’un créateur de jeux vidéo était ovationné de la sorte. On a ensuite fait des présentations aux journalistes et on ne voulait pas venir avec une simple cinématique pré-calculée histoire d’en mettre plein les mirettes. On a donc développé cette fameuse démo du taxidermiste qui représente entre 45 minutes et une heure de jeu complet. On sait que les journalistes sont curieux de savoir comment le jeu se joue. On voulait avec cette démo mettre en place l’histoire du jeu, montrer comment on peut la mettre en avant dans l’aventure. Tout le scénario est interactif.

Donc, cette scène ne sera pas intégrée dans le jeu final ?
Non, il s’agissait juste d’une démo développée spécialement pour la Games Convention. La raison est simple : on ne voulait rien dévoilé sur le jeu, l’histoire qui est vraiment au cœur de l’expérience de Heavy Rain. On ne voulait vraiment rien gâcher. Là aussi, on a été agréablement surpris par les réactions des journalistes qui ont applaudi à la fin de la démo. Ce n’est pas arrivé une seule fois mais à chaque représentation. Là encore, Sony nous a affirmé que c’était une grande première. Le feedback de la presse est vraiment positif même si je ne suis pas certain que les journalistes ont tout compris à cette démo. D’un autre côté, j’ai été un peu vexé par ceux qui ont confondu la cinématique présentée au keynote et la démo présenté en behind closed door. Ceux-là ont déclaré que le jeu était bourré de QTE et que le jeu n’était pas interactif. Heavy Rain, c’est tout sauf ça. Il y a très peu de cinématiques dans le jeu et les gens qui n’ont pas vu la démo ont du mal à comprendre véritablement le concept.

D’ailleurs, lors de cette démo, vous évoquiez l’absence de Game Over dans le jeu, que l’histoire se poursuivait même après la mort d’un personnage. En ce moment, c’est assez à la mode de remettre en cause le Game Over. Pouvez-vous nous expliquer comment vous allez intégrer tout ces aspect dans Heavy Rain ?
Le Game Over fait partie des réflexions qu’on essaie de remettre en cause dans le jeu vidéo. Ce qui me gêne dans cette industrie, c’est la façon dont les idées évoluent assez lentement, alors que du côté de la technique, tout va à 100 à l’heure. Aujourd’hui, on fait encore des jeux à partir de paramètres qui sont vieux de 15 ans, en pensant qu’on ne peut pas faire autrement. Sur Heavy Rain, on va tenter de remettre en cause un certain nombre de choses qu’on considère comme acquis, comme le Game Over. Quand on veut raconter une histoire dans un jeu, le Game Over est un paramètre difficile à prendre en compte. C’est quelque chose que je n’avais pas réussi à vraiment gérer dans Fahrenheit et là, j’essaie de trouver une autre approche. Le Game Over ne peut pas signifier la fin de l’histoire, il va à l’encontre de la narration d’une histoire. Mon idée sur Heavy Rain est donc de traiter tout ce qui va se produire comme une péripétie de l’histoire : s’il le personnage est blessé, s’il échoue, s’il meurt. Tout cela sont des choses qu’on va intégrer directement dans l’histoire, afin qu’elle continue en tenant compte de ces informations. Cela demande beaucoup de travail et pas mal de réflexion et au final, il n’y aura pas de Game Over dans Heavy Rain.

En ce qui concerne le gameplay, on a vu beaucoup de QTE dans le jeu. Rassurez-moi, il ne s’agit pas du cœur du jeu ?
Evidemment que non ! Heavy Rain n’est absolument pas basé sur les Quick Time Events. C’est un des composants du jeu. C’est fait très différemment de Fahrenheit car on sait que ces séquences n’ont pas vraiment fonctionné. On a écouté les critiques qui ont été émises à ce sujet. Néanmoins, on estime intéressant de proposer des séquences d’action très chorégraphiées, spectaculaire, cinématographique. C’est pourquoi, on voulait garder ce système de QTE mais avec une approche différente. Les séquences sont beaucoup plus variées, plus rythmées et qui offre au joueur une expérience cinématographique. Mais cela reste une partie du jeu qui reste une aventure contrôlée par le joueur, pad en main, libre de ses faits et gestes.

Et si cette démo n’est pas intégrée dans le jeu, vous n’envisagez pas de la proposer en télécharger sur le PlayStation Network ?
Il y aura des démos jouables avant la sortie du jeu. Cela peut très bien être cette démo du taxidermiste ou même complètement autre chose. Peut-être qu’on intègrera la démo en bonus dans le jeu final, toutes les propositions sont ouvertes aujourd’hui…

Etre exclusif à un support, j’imagine que c’est beaucoup plus simple au niveau du développement de et la production ?
Très sincèrement, après Fahrenheit, c’était un choix. On a vraiment souffert sur Fahrenheit d’être sur trois plates-formes, ce qui était totalement compréhensif de la part de l’éditeur à l’époque, qui avait envie de rentabiliser le jeu au maximum. Mais pour un studio comme nous qui développons notre propre moteur, c’était assez compliqué. Sur Heavy Rain, on a eu le choix de la console et de l’éditeur et on a vraiment décidé de travailler avec Sony. La PlayStation 3 est une console qui nous a aussitôt séduits, aussi bien pour son architecture, sa technologie, son double cœur mais aussi son pad ou son historique. En choisissant un seul support, on peut vraiment se concentrer dessus, tenter de pousser la console dans ses derniers retranchements, sans avoir à penser qu’il va falloir adapter nos méthodes sur une autre machine. Même au niveau de la jouabilité, c’est beaucoup plus facile, le fait de travailler avec un seul et même pad.

Et malgré toute la puissance de la PlayStation 3, y a-t-il des choses que vous n’avez pas réussi à intégrer dans le jeu ?
Pas pour le moment, la PlayStation 3 est vraiment une machine très puissante. La question est plutôt de trouver comment utiliser cette puissance à bon escient. La PS3 repose sur du calcul partagée entre deux processeurs. C’est donc un paramètre à prendre en compte au niveau du développement et c’est à nous de nous adapter face à ce que nous propose la machine.

Comment voyez-vous l’avenir du jeu vidéo ? Sommes-nous partis vers une course à la technologie ou à l’inverse, comme Nintendo, faut-il aller voir du côté de la jouabilité ?
Je le vois de manière assez atypique, surtout par rapport à ce qui se dit et se lit. Pour ma part, l’avenir du jeu vidéo ne réside pas dans les logiciels que proposent Nintendo, où le but est de gesticuler avec sa Wiimote ou sauter sur son Wii Fit. Beaucoup de personnes qui ont acheté la console et l’accessoire ne s’en servent plus aujourd’hui. Nintendo a fait un coup marketing fantastique et cela reste indiscutable, mais je ne suis pas sûr que ça traduise une véritable tendance de fond. Je vois plutôt ça comme un phénomène de mode… C’est complètement marginal de déclarer ce genre de propos aujourd’hui puisque tout le monde est persuadé que le casual représente l’avenir du jeu vidéo. Je n’y crois pas une seconde. C’est un marché qu’on peut séduire une fois, à travers des astuces comme la Wiimote ou Wii Fit, mais qui sera difficile de convaincre à nouveau. L’avenir du jeu vidéo est plus fondamental que ça. Il faut continuer à être plus créatif, inventif et être plus accessible en proposant des histoires qui parlent à tout le monde. Le jeu vidéo doit toucher un public plus large en proposant un contenu intéressant et ne pas se fourvoyer dans des histoires qui n’intéressent que des niches. Il n’y a pas que des trolls, des gobelins, des Nazis dans le jeu vidéo…

Et vous ne pensez pas que Nintendo peut parvenir à capter tous ces nouveaux joueurs à l’aide de ses deux consoles que sont la Wii et la DS ?
Aujourd’hui, Nintendo se positionne sur un autre marché, celui du jouet. Aujourd’hui, la Wii et la DS sont deux machines qui sont vendues dans les Toys’R us qui sont des magasins de jouets et c’est très bien comme ça. D’un côté, Nintendo fabrique des jouets tandis que d’autres misent davantage sur l’interactivité et je pense que c’est ça qui attirera un public plus large. Faut regarder ce qui se passe dans le cinéma, dans la littérature, les thématiques sont infinies et il faut que le jeu vidéo s’en inspire.

Merci Monsieur David Cage

P.S.: Use source link to see a video version of interview. (later available at blog)
Autor: Maxime Chao
Source: JeusActu.con
Language: French

D+PAD: Killer APP

2009-02-24T10:53:00.009Z

After spending three years in pre-production, fifteen months writing and almost two hundred days motion capture shooting, Quantic Dream’s David Cage is ready to talk more about his studio’s upcoming PS3 title, Heavy Rain; a game that he hopes won’t just prove to be an outstanding dark thriller, but a title that will forever change the face of the industry.

”MY MOTIVATION FOR HEAVY RAIN WAS TO CREATE AN EMOTIONAL SIMULATOR"

D+PAD: Heavy Rain is a brand new IP for Quantic Dream, but just like your previous title, Fahrenheit, you’re looking to break boundaries with storytelling in video games. How do you go about starting a project like Heavy Rain? Do you look at what worked well in Fahrenheit and expand upon those elements, or is it a completely different process?

David Cage: After Fahrenheit, we spent a lot of time reading critics’ opinions and listening to gamers. We also had many things we were not happy with and that we wanted to rethink and change. At the same time, we did not start thinking of Heavy Rain as a sequel, but I had the feeling we found something with Fahrenheit that I wanted to explore further. These ideas of letting the player tell
the story through his actions using Bending Stories, of considering the experience as an emotional journey with moral choices, of having short and varied scenes, of moving the challenge from the controller to the mind of the player, all these were interesting concepts that could significantly be improved. But we also had many new ideas that we wanted to implement regarding gameplay and a new technology that allows us to improve the quality of the immersion.

If I had to summarise my motivation for Heavy Rain, it was to create an emotional simulator, use all means to make the player feel something, making an experience rather than just another video game. To achieve this goal, I thought that Fahrenheit opened the way, but that there was much more to do.

Heavy Rain is looking to blur the line between video games and movies. Were you inspired by the work of any particular film creator/director for Heavy Rain, or is the game entirely your own vision?

You are always inspired by other people’s work, not only movies, but also books, TV series, comics, paintings, art in general. Heavy Rain is a dark thriller and I am sure people will find connections with some films we all liked like Silence of the Lambs or Seven. I also really liked a Korean movie call Memories of a Murder and other Asian films. I like Asian cinema, but I also appreciate some Spanish or Spanish-speaking directors like Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Alejandro Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel) or Alejandro Amenabar (The Others).

What’s really dierent for me on Heavy Rain is that it is the first script I’ve written for a game that refers to things I have personally experienced in my life. In most other art forms this is quite usual, but it was something weird to do for me in a video game. Most games talk about rookies going to the battlefield or heroes fighting against the forces of evil, situations that few people actually experienced in their own lives, so they can only try to figure out what it means for their characters.

Heavy Rain is of course not based on my private life, but it is based on emotions that I have experienced myself, which will - I hope – support the story I want to tell and make its emotions more believable. I think our media is now mature enough to tell more
personal stories, and I hope that more game designers will start talking about more personal things, because this is how other art forms reached maturity and more complex and interesting forms.

This is probably my main expectation from next gen games. Rather than displaying more polygons or having a physics engine, they should start to offer meaning.

“WE COULD NOT CREATE THE GAME WE WANTED USING THE SAME OLD RULES”

One of Heavy Rain’s most touted features is its unique interface. Can you tell us a bit more about how Heavy Rain’s control
system works and how it sets itself aside from other titles in the genre?

We had a very simple approach to interface: it should participate to immerse the player in the world by asking him to mimic what his
character is doing on screen. We experienced that on Fahrenheit with the new control system we proposed for actions (MPAR, using a move on a stick to unfold animations instead of just pressing a button). We continued experimenting with the same philosophy on Heavy Rain. We have also implemented an interface called MPRESS that could be seen in the Games Convention demo when the character needs to hide, for example.

Regarding navigation, we wanted to nd a solution to the dependency between controls and cameras. We were looking for a real sense of directing all the time, and not only in cut scenes, which meant having the possibility to place cameras in the set without having constraints based on controls. At the same time, all games that tried that had to face conicts with the control system, with characters suddenly going left while the player wanted to go right just because the camera changed. We solved this issue with two
things: moving forward is [like accelerating] in a racing game by pressing R2 (whatever the position of the camera is), while the left analogue stick controls the head of the character, defining his direction when he walks. We also added a specific system to help navigation in populated environment to offer realistic sets where the player cannot get stuck. These are just some of the new ideas we put in place for Heavy Rain regarding gameplay. Some of them are real changes of paradigms, but we could not make the game we wanted using the same old rules.

It’s been said that QTEs will be commonplace within Heavy Rain. Taking into consideration the amount of criticism that has been levelled at the use of QTEs in the past, how have you gone about making sure that they add something to the experience, rather than detract?

QTEs are a minor part of the gameplay of Heavy Rain. They are used in some action sequences for scenes that would have been mpossible to make with any other types of interfaces. If you have a fight for example, you either make a very video game type of sequence (punch/kick/combos, always the same moves, limited in an arena to avoid collision problems and inconsistencies with the environment), or you rethink the interface to support what’s really important in a ght: reflexes, quick decision making, pacing, having spectacular moves and directing, being injured, winning or losing). We entirely redesigned the interface to integrate and animate GUI within the 3D world instead of having it on top of the screen, which is denitely less distracting, and we worked hard on tuning them, timing them right, making sure they reinforce immersion and support the feeling we try to create in the scene. I think people
will be quite surprised by what we managed to do in the game. I know many hardcore gamers are by instinct resistant to the concept of QTEs, but we put some serious thought into making it evolve and I hope to convince them that our approach supports the experience.

In another interview you stated that you felt most video games were “structured like porn movies”, whereby part of the story is told, then there’s some action, and then a bit more story. With Heavy Rain you’re looking for a more consistent “interactive performance”. Can you give us some examples as to how that will work?

The reason why most video games are structured that way is very simple: they are based on repetitive patterns that make it impossible to tell any story, so they have to rely on cut scenes to move the story on until the next action scene. Interactivity is used to trigger adrenaline and stress, but it does not support narrative in any way. What I’m trying to change is to directly use interactivity to tell the story instead of cut scenes.

The player should tell the story directly through his actions instead of watching it. The first way of doing this is to rethink interface and this strange rule saying that a control scheme should be limited to a certain amount of repetitive actions. If you use
a contextual interface, you get access to an infinite number of actions, so your characters can at least do things to tell a story and not just jump or use their gun. The other dicult conceptual step to make is to redefine what gameplay is about: an experience may not be based on weapons or cars and still be fun. Interacting does not necessarily mean to destroy, kill, jump or drive. Interactivity can be about changing your environment, changing relationships or making decisions. It doesn’t have to be limited to military conflicts; any kind of situation can become interactive. Fahrenheit started to show that it was possible: the game was not using any gun or vehicle; it had no enemies to fight and no puzzle to solve. It was just about immersion and decision making. I think it is time for our industry to grow up and explore new possibilities instead of redoing the same games with the same old concepts over and over again.

“IT’S TIME FOR OUR INDUSTRY TO GROW UP”

Other games have tried to implement a similar decision-making system to what you’re doing with Heavy Rain, but the results and storystructure have always ultimately been pretty much pre-determined. How deep does Heavy Rain’s system go? Is there a specific number as to how many variances the story has to offer?

When you think of narrative in a game, you have two options: you create a sandbox (ideally an MMO) where you give as many quests as possible and hope that gamers will generate a narrative on the fly by their interactions, or you write a story. In the first option, you have no control over the narrative and most of the time, there is none or of very poor quality. If you write the story, you can
guarantee its quality and consistency for the player. No one can pretend today to generate complex storytelling procedurally just because this is not possible. Heavy Rain is based on a script, and I don’t think there is anything bad or wrong about that. I
created a backbone for my narrative, I wrote all the possible variations based on the player’s decisions I could think of, using techniques like Bending Stories to follow their consequences and give a feeling of freedom to the player within the context of the story, so his decisions can really impact the narrative. I think the result will emulate a freedom of choice while maintaining the quality and consistency of the narrative. It is impossible to say how many paths there will be, just because there won’t really be any. Actions have consequences, sometimes they are limited to the scene, sometimes they will severely impact the narrative.

Are you concerned that some players simply won’t run with the concept of Heavy Rain’s flowing narrative, for example, choosing to
reload whenever a character dies instead of letting the game run through? Did you consider being more Draconian and forcing this on the player?

This is still a possibility. I still have some time before making a final decision. It is always difficult, because it should not frustrate the player but support and improve his experience.

An increasing amount of publishers and developers are moving into the mindset of preparing additional content to be made available as an extra download post-release. What do you think of that approach, and is there much scope for DLC in Heavy Rain?

Honestly, my focus is on putting as much content as possible on the Blu-ray. We have many plans for DLC, but I won’t work on them until the game is finished and fully satisfying. Games are expensive; my focus is to give as much as I can to gamers for
their money.

“WE HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY TO DEMONSTRATE THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO CREATE GAMES WITH MORE CREATIVE AMBITIONS”

Video games have gone from being predominantly fantasy-based to realistic ‘gritty’ experiences. Even games developed by your own studio have followed the same path to an extent, with Omikron’s futuristic setting replaced by more realistic scenarios in Fahrenheit, and an even darker realism set for Heavy Rain. Why do you think there’s been a sudden push for realism?

Omikron was aiming to be realistic with the technology of its time... I think that more and more creators want to tell stories that are closer to them, to situations or emotions they have personally experienced. It is easier to talk about something you know than imagining what it was to be a rookie during WWII... For me, it is much more about situations than about realism, more about my personal link to what I want to write than a will to tell stories set in a contemporary or realistic environment. I could work on a
non-realistic game in the future and still try to talk about subjects that matter to me and thus seem to me “real”.

Do you believe that a realistic setting helps with story-telling, to allow players to empathise with characters more so than they would in a make-believe scenario?

Realism is just a rendering type you choose, nothing more. You can create emotions with any type of rendering if you have something interesting to tell. You don’t need MoCap, virtual actors, facial animations and all the other technology we have on Heavy Rain. This was just the tone and atmosphere I chose for this game because I thought it supported the story I wanted to tell. It is not a requirement and you can tell fantastic stories full of emotions without realism. There are many examples of that in all other arts: think of Miyazaki’s work for example, or the fantastic animation film The Iron Giant, Alan Moore or Frank Miller for comics, ICO or REZ for video games.

David Reeves has said that Heavy Rain will be the most important game for PS3 this year. Does the knowledge that there’s a huge
amount of pressure on the team to deliver from both consumers and colleagues affect development?

Currently, I’m working on a title that is extremely anticipated worldwide, exclusively on a console we chose, with the full support of a console manufacturer, with the time and means to make the game we want, on something that is new, original and creative, aiming to redefine how players play games, making covers of magazines and raising an incredible amount of interest. I have worked all my life to be in this position now; this is what any creative person in this industry dreams of doing. Am I going to complain that Sony sees Heavy Rain as a major title for their console this year? Certainly not. This is an honour and we do everything we can not to disappoint people’s expectations. It may sound arrogant, but I believe that this game can be important not only for Sony or Quantic Dream, but beyond for our industry. We have the responsibility to demonstrate that it is possible to create games with more creative
ambitions, more complex stories to tell, and that it can be fully playable and more exciting than interactive battlefields. I hope to convince people outside our industry that games can be more than just toys for kids: that they can become art. I don’t pretend I will do all that with Heavy Rain and make it a milestone, but I hope that it will open the way.

You mentioned earlier that you think it’s time for the industry to grow up. With Heavy Rain you’re creating a much more mature, slower-paced title in an industry fuelled by juvenile ‘big guns and fast cars’ themes. Hardcore gamers have reacted to Heavy Rain in a very positive light so far, but what do you think will make the game stand out at retail?

Heavy Rain will be different. I hope it is going to break with many old game conventions and explore new ideas. Its story will – I hope – also surprise people, and I would like them to go from scene to scene eager to know what will happen next. The game will aim at creating moments that will leave an imprint in players’ mind. The game should also look stunning with its graphics, virtual actors and motion capture animations, but most of all, I hope that people will enjoy it because of its ambition to be what comes after video games.

Heavy Rain launches exclusively on PlayStation 3 later this year.

Autor: D+Pad staff
Source: D+Pad
Language:English

Heavy Rain : visite des studios

2009-02-18T19:32:00.005Z

Comme nous vous l'annonçions hier dans ce petit extrait teasing, voici la première partie de notre reportage consacré à Heavy Rain, le prochain jeu signé Quantic Dream (The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit), désormais reconnu comme étant l'une des exclusivités les plus attendues de la PlayStation 3. Puisqu'il s'agit d'une production entièrement française et surtout à portée de métro, nous avons décidé de prendre des nouvelles du développement et surtout de nous entretenir avec David Cage, PDG de la firme et créateur du jeu. Pour commencer, il a décidé de nous faire la visite des studios, du plateau de graphistes à la salle de Motion Capture, en passant par le coin son et les autres développeurs éparpillés sur les trois étages de ce bâtiment du XXème arrondissement de Paris, vous allez tout savoir de ce qui se trame à l'intérieur. Et dans quinze jours, nous aurons le plaisir de mettre en ligne l'interview complète de David Cage à propos de Heavy Rain. Enjoy !

Autor: Maxime Chao
Source: Jeuxactu.com
Language: French

David Cage nous parle du casual gaming

2009-02-17T19:57:00.003Z

Il y a quelques semaines, nous nous sommes rendus chez Quantic Dream pour prendre des nouvelles du développement de Heavy Rain, l'une des plus grosses exclusivités de la PlayStation 3 prévue pour cette fin d'année, si tout va bien. Sur place, nous avons eu droit à une visite complète des studios mais également à une grosse interview de David Cage, Directeur Général de Quantic Dream, mais aussi créateur du jeu Heavy Rain. En attendant la mise en ligne de ce reportage qui sera découpé en deux parties (la première arrive demain soir), nous vous proposons un petit extrait - en vidéo - de notre tête-à-tête, et plus particulièrement de ce que David Cage pense à propos de l'avenir du jeu vidéo et du casual gaming. Selon lui, "l'avenir du jeu vidéo ne réside pas dans le casual gaming et certainement pas à travers ce nouveau public qui saute devant Wii Fit ou qui gesticule avec des Wiimotes". Des propos à contre-courant des discours actuels, peut-être marginaux mais qui reflètent une vraie réalité, comme il tient à le préciser. "L'avenir du jeu vidéo est beaucoup plus fondamental que ça, il se situe au niveau de l'interactivité. Il est temps que le jeu vidéo devienne adulte. On doit continuer à être créatif, inventif, trouver des sujets qui intéressent le grand public" ajoute-t-il avant de tacler tous ceux qui se contentent de développer toujours les mêmes thématiques, récurrentes et qui ne font pas évoluer le jeu vidéo dans le bon sens. Il s'agit donc d'un petit avant-goût de ce qui vous attend dans notre reportage complet autour de Heavy Rain, tourné dans les locaux parisiens de Quantic Dream. noter que l'émission est accessible en streaming via le lecteur flash, en téléchargement aux formats SD et HD 720p, mais aussi aux formats iPod et PSP pour les spectateurs nomades.

Autor: Maxime Chao
Source: Jeuxactu.com
Language: French

NOWGamer: Interview: David Cage

2009-02-02T10:45:00.004Z

We speak to the video game industry's pioneering storyteller, David Cage, about his upcoming PS3-exclusive Heavy Rain. Read on for the definitive interview...

It’s been over a decade since you founded Quantic Dream, how happy are you with the studio’s direction so far and is there anything you would have liked to have done differently over those 10 years?

Quantic Dream is today in a good position: we always worked on original IPs we created and on very ambitious projects. We had a lot of creative freedom and the budget and time to make the games we wanted. We had this rare luxury to explore new areas instead of making me-too products.

In ten years, we also developed unique proprietary technologies, integrated Motion Capture with our internal studio and developed a very effective truly next gen pipeline. Most of all, we built a very strong team of about 100 people. Most of our core team members joined us as juniors and are today very experienced seniors.

Before Fahrenheit, the company was “under the radar”, as a publisher kindly told me at the time. Today, I think we gained visibility thanks to Fahrenheit, The Casting and now Heavy Rain, and our vision about emotion and narrative gets more and more interest. Most of all, I think we made the right decision by deciding to take all risks in exploring a new direction that we would own instead of copying established genres.

On the negative side, I would say this result required a very long time to bear fruits and a totally unreasonable amount of efforts and sacrifices. I took all risks when I started the company, slept under my desk for years and made serious sacrifices about my private life. Sometimes, people think that it is a great job, just to wake up in the morning with a new idea, someone comes to give you money to produce it and there you go. The truth is unfortunately more complicated.

But all in all, I am very proud of this company, especially because we always worked on very interesting and ambitious projects we chose, and also because through time, we managed to gather (and to keep) a fantastic pool of talented people patient enough to deal with my crazy ideas.

I created Quantic Dream to explore the possibility of using interactivity to create experiences with more substance for a more adult audience. Each game we made was a milestone on this path.

I still have a lot to achieve before being happy, but I can see that our trajectory is consistent with where we want to go...

Quantic Dream’s games have all been very narrative based, why is this? What draws you to using video games to tell stories?

Mankind used all media it invented to tell stories: drawings, books, theatre. Cinema and now television follow the same path. People love to hear stories. I never understood why video games should be limited to shooting or jumping. There is much more to do with interactivity, and we are just at the beginning.

Everything we do now will be seen in the future like very naïve tries, a little bit like the first movie ever made about a train in a station: it is still a fantastic piece of history, but we know now that cinema was much more than that.

Interactive storytelling has still to be invented, and working to discover this new area is something definitely exciting for me. I never thought in matter of business or what is the best genre to make money. I just worked on the things that seemed to be interesting. Being a pioneer in that genre while being able to discover new ways of telling my stories is a very exciting adventure. I am exactly where I wanted to be and I’m very lucky in that aspect.

Do you ever think video games will be respected as a story-telling medium in the same way as cinema and literature?

I have absolutely no doubt about it. If you lived in the 18th century, you probably wanted to be a composer, in the 19th century a writer, in the 20th century a movie maker. But if you live in the 21st century, there is no more exciting space to be than interactivity.

We invent a new art form with a new language. We have this fantastic challenge of taking it from infancy to maturity, to tell new things in a new way and to make it unique enough to draw a wider audience. Some absolute master pieces will come from our media in the coming decades, maybe things that will resist time and be seen in the future as art.

Is Heavy Rain a spiritual successor to Fahrenheit? Will emotions affect the gameplay in the same way?

Fahrenheit was our first try in discovering new ways of triggering more complex emotions. I think the game had some very interesting moments that proved that it could work.

It showed me that it was not only possible, but also that it would be a very different kind of experience based on different paradigms.

For Heavy Rain, we tried to analyze what worked and what didn’t in Fahrenheit, and to go much further. The technology is probably the most visible aspect at this stage of the things we improved: we worked hard on graphics and animations to have believable virtual actors able to convey the kind of subtle emotions we were looking for. But our main efforts went on the core of the experience we wanted to create: the story. I was looking for a different type of story, more grounded, based on real people in real life. I felt strong enough to get rid of all fantasy elements games usually use, and to tell a story based on characters and emotions. I think the scenario is quite unusual for a game, and I hope it will significantly contribute to make HR truly unique.

Game play was also of course at the heart of my design work. Creating immersion even in the simplest interactions, using game play to create emotion while offering an interface that would be simple and accessible without being simplistic, these were some of my goals. Most of all, I aim to put players in the characters’ shoes, make them feel what characters feel. I hope that HR will be strong enough to leave a long lasting imprint in players’ minds, the same way good movies or books do.

In Heavy Rain, the character animation is unprecedented; how much further do you believe the technology your using can go? Or have you pushed it to its limits?

Certainly not. We can go much further. The quality of the MoCap can of course still be improved, but also how we use it to create believable attitudes and postures, how we mix it with procedural animations or physics. Although we worked a lot on these aspects in HR, there is still a lot to do in order to make the player believe he controls a real human being.

Do you think the technology you bought from Vicon has paid off? Is it delivering to your expectation?

Having an in-house full MoCap system is a rare luxury for a developer. We made this choice seven years ago and we never regretted it. We developed unique techniques, we learnt how to shoot, how to direct actors, we experimented everything we could (from ice skating to walking in a crowd), we learnt how to produce insane amount of high quality animations in an acceptable time frame (and an affordable cost…), which I believe will be one of the strong points of HR. We also invested in our proprietary facial animation technology which will give unprecedented results in a game.

Most of all, we understood that MoCap was the easiest part of the process. The real challenges are about organization and pipelines, directing actors, and how you make your animations and characters fit.

MoCap becomes more and more a strategic technology for developers and for the type of games we create in particular. Depending on someone else for such an important part was just not possible. Also, I guess the cost of the 12 hours of MoCap we had in Fahrenheit would have paid the system, so it was definitely the right choice to buy it instead ;-)

HR will put the bar high regarding animation. It is probably the game using the most animations ever made: we shot for seven months every day, with a total of 50 actors and stuntmen. The final game will feature more than 15 000 unique animations. In the game, almost every single action is unique as everything is contextual.

Can you describe the scripting process behind Heavy Rain? How many pages of script are generated for a multi-stranded story like this?

Through the overall writing process, I wrote about 5000 pages of script (you probably double this figure if you include all my notes). The final script used in production is about 2000 pages. It represents a lot of work, with the major difficulty of maintaining consistency and quality through so many pages and all narrative possibilities. A movie script is usually no more than 120 pages. Writing HR was thus like writing 15 movies, which represents quite a large amount of work…

Interactive narrative as we see it is difficult to write, because for each scene, you need to have a strong element of narrative and a strong element of game play. I tried to make everything interactive and only use cut scenes when there was no other option to tell the story. I also use very little recurrent game play mechanics, which means that each scene has something new to offer.

So you end up needing a left brain and a right brain: you need to be creative to tell a good story but you also need to be extremely structured and organized to deal with game play, consequences, consistency.

Most other genres are also very well established, with writing techniques, known structures, all the material you need as references. But with interactive narrative, nothing exists, and when you write, you are quite alone on your island, trying to figure out what will work and what won’t without anyone or anything to refer to and give you tips. You don’t only write a story, you also invent the language, the grammar and all the words to tell it…

I worked on novels and movie scripts before, but interactive narrative is definitely the most difficult, technical and generally challenging exercise.

Of everything you showed at Leipzig, how much is likely to make it into the final product?

As I explained during the presentations, the scene we showed called “The Taxidermist” is not a part of the main narrative of Heavy Rain. It is just a short story we created to illustrate some key concepts of the game, especially the interface and the player’s actions can impact the story.

We agreed early on with Sony that we didn’t want to announce the game with another nice looking cut scene or an impressive technical prototype. We know that when explaining Heavy Rain, many people would be dubious that interactive storytelling or emotions could be anything else than another adventure game or an interactive movie from the old days… We chose to introduce Heavy Rain for the first time to the public with this scene because it was fully playable and demonstrated that it was possible to create an experience where the player would tell the story through his actions.

We will probably make this scene available to players as a bonus scene to unlock or maybe as extra downloadable content.

For a cinematic game like Heavy Rain, did you ever think that using Hollywood actors would help sell the title? Is it your ambition to use recognisable thespians, or do you prefer to use lesser-known performers?

We gave very serious considerations to both options. Initially, we really wanted to go for famous actors because we thought they would bring their talent (marketing as such was not a sufficient reason for us).

In fact, we realized that it was a two-edge sword: on one hand, you get a unique talent, a face and voice that people immediately recognize, on the other hand, they can easily appear like a marketing asset for a weak game, or they can easily jeopardize the game where gamers would just see the actor and not the character.

The main reason that made our decision was availability: if you can get a world class actor for a week, that’s already a big challenge, but that was unfortunately far from what I needed. My collaboration with the main actors of Heavy Rain went through several months.

We took time to cast them, we rehearsed a lot together, they had to learn their parts by heart for the dialogues, and when it was possible, we asked them to do the stunts. All this significant amount of work required time and availability, exactly like a real movie.

Few talented actors would consider going on a set without having met the director, knowing their script and being excited about the movie to be made. With video games, all this can seem superfluous. Actors (and their agents) often have so little consideration for games that the only discussion you can have is how much money for how much time. No one cares about what you try to achieve, they very rarely agree to invest time and energy in their part, all they want is a maximum amount of money for a minimum amount of time, and ideally, on a game that won’t hurt their image too much…

I can understand how we reached this situation, but this is why I did not want to invest time and energy trying to convince people that what we were doing was different, because in the best case scenario, I could never get what I wanted. So I spent a year casting “not-famous actors”, people having talent but not being known from main stream. I found truly fantastic people who are really talented, who fit perfectly my parts, who were prepared to invest time and energy through months to get the right result.

What I learnt from this is that time change. The old days where we desperately needed Hollywood is gone. In the coming years, talents including writers, directors and actors will come from the game industry, and Hollywood will want them in their movies.

I really believe that the actors of Heavy Rain have a real talent and I hope this experience will bring them the notoriety they deserve.

Can you reveal anything about Heavy Rain’s story?

No.

Okay… Well, we don’t want to talk about the story at this stage, because it will be a key component of the game and we don’t want to spoil it for players. All I can say is that Heavy Rain is a mature story evoking themes and using a tone rarely seen in a game. It is also probably the most personal thing I wrote for this media.

I don’t know if people will like it or not, but I am sure that it is going to be something unique and different.

Fahrenheit delved into some quite fantastical territory– will Heavy Rain do the same, or is the story more grounded?

Heavy Rain is about real people in a real world confronted to real problems. No sci-fi, no magic, no supernatural powers. I think our media is now ready for more subtle stories. We don’t need to save the world or destroy the evil monster to tell something exciting anymore. I thought I had to in Fahrenheit to make the game spectacular, but I realized that the best part of the game was when it was grounded. It made me realize that reality could be just as exciting as fantasy, and that most people would probably relate more easily to characters and situations that are closer to what they know and who they are.

What are the inspirations behind Heavy Rain? What sources influenced the style of storytelling?

You can never really tell where your inspiration comes from. I guess it is a mixture of all your personal culture, whether it’s books, movies, tv series, comics, lyrics, games, but also paintings, sculptures, whatever modeled who you are.

Many games are conceived and sometimes written by a team, or sometimes by a free lance writer outside the project.

I wrote Heavy Rain alone. I try to put more of myself, some of the things I felt or thought, something definitely more personal. It is not a script of compromises or common denominators, it is really a story that relates to me and that I wanted to tell, whatever that means…

You’re using Sixaxis control in Heavy Rain– was that mandated by Sony, or does Quantic Dream have an interest in the function?

The only thing Sony asked us to do was to make the best game we could. Absolutely nothing was mandated. Sony is not this type of publisher telling you what you should do. They had a real interest in what we wanted to achieve so they supported our creative vision. All they wanted us was to create something unique for the Playstation 3.

Sixaxis is an interesting device for certain types of actions, and it totally fitted our desire to create physical identification between what the player does with his controller and what his character does in the game.

Would you describe your games as an extension of the ‘point and click’ graphic adventure?

Certainly not. It does not rely on the same mechanics. Point and click games are usually based on the same patterns: puzzle solving or object management to unlock the next set with more puzzles and objects. There is a story but it is certainly not the real backbone of the game. It is just a nice layer putting all these scenes together. I am quite tough with this genre because it is one I loved and played a lot. But I must admit that it has absolutely not evolved for a decade.

Heavy Rain is based on very different paradigms: storytelling is the essence of the experience, not a nice layer. Game play and storytelling are totally interlaced. The game is not based on puzzles or inventories, but on contextual actions, decision making, moral choices. It is not an experience where you can get stuck by tortured puzzles you can only solve in a FAQ on the Internet, it is a journey that you affect by your decisions. Most of all, it aims to create emotional involvement to immerse the player and make him care for the story and the characters. This is not just a nice thing to say, it is really at the heart of all the design decisions we make.

So no, Heavy Rain is not an extension of adventure games. It is a new type of experience based on different paradigms. It aims to prove that it is possible to tell a story in a game through game play and not cut scenes, to create an exciting experience defined as an emotional journey, not targeting kids but an adult audience, with mature material dealing with real people and not superheroes. I know that’s a lot. But this is what I like about my job ;-)

Autor: Christopher Reynolds
Source: NOWGamer
Language: English

NowGamer Interview: David Cage

2009-02-02T10:45:00.002Z

We speak to the video game industry's pioneering storyteller, David Cage, about his upcoming PS3-exclusive Heavy Rain. Read on for the definitive interview...

It’s been over a decade since you founded Quantic Dream, how happy are you with the studio’s direction so far and is there anything you would have liked to have done differently over those 10 years?

Quantic Dream is today in a good position: we always worked on original IPs we created and on very ambitious projects. We had a lot of creative freedom and the budget and time to make the games we wanted. We had this rare luxury to explore new areas instead of making me-too products.

In ten years, we also developed unique proprietary technologies, integrated Motion Capture with our internal studio and developed a very effective truly next gen pipeline. Most of all, we built a very strong team of about 100 people. Most of our core team members joined us as juniors and are today very experienced seniors.

Before Fahrenheit, the company was “under the radar”, as a publisher kindly told me at the time. Today, I think we gained visibility thanks to Fahrenheit, The Casting and now Heavy Rain, and our vision about emotion and narrative gets more and more interest. Most of all, I think we made the right decision by deciding to take all risks in exploring a new direction that we would own instead of copying established genres.

On the negative side, I would say this result required a very long time to bear fruits and a totally unreasonable amount of efforts and sacrifices. I took all risks when I started the company, slept under my desk for years and made serious sacrifices about my private life. Sometimes, people think that it is a great job, just to wake up in the morning with a new idea, someone comes to give you money to produce it and there you go. The truth is unfortunately more complicated.

But all in all, I am very proud of this company, especially because we always worked on very interesting and ambitious projects we chose, and also because through time, we managed to gather (and to keep) a fantastic pool of talented people patient enough to deal with my crazy ideas.

I created Quantic Dream to explore the possibility of using interactivity to create experiences with more substance for a more adult audience. Each game we made was a milestone on this path.

I still have a lot to achieve before being happy, but I can see that our trajectory is consistent with where we want to go…

Quantic Dream’s games have all been very narrative based, why is this? What draws you to using video games to tell stories?

Mankind used all media it invented to tell stories: drawings, books, theatre. Cinema and now television follow the same path. People love to hear stories. I never understood why video games should be limited to shooting or jumping. There is much more to do with interactivity, and we are just at the beginning.

Everything we do now will be seen in the future like very naïve tries, a little bit like the first movie ever made about a train in a station: it is still a fantastic piece of history, but we know now that cinema was much more than that.

Interactive storytelling has still to be invented, and working to discover this new area is something definitely exciting for me. I never thought in matter of business or what is the best genre to make money. I just worked on the things that seemed to be interesting. Being a pioneer in that genre while being able to discover new ways of telling my stories is a very exciting adventure. I am exactly where I wanted to be and I’m very lucky in that aspect.

Do you ever think video games will be respected as a story-telling medium in the same way as cinema and literature?

I have absolutely no doubt about it. If you lived in the 18th century, you probably wanted to be a composer, in the 19th century a writer, in the 20th century a movie maker. But if you live in the 21st century, there is no more exciting space to be than interactivity.

We invent a new art form with a new language. We have this fantastic challenge of taking it from infancy to maturity, to tell new things in a new way and to make it unique enough to draw a wider audience. Some absolute master pieces will come from our media in the coming decades, maybe things that will resist time and be seen in the future as art.

Is Heavy Rain a spiritual successor to Fahrenheit? Will emotions affect the gameplay in the same way?

Fahrenheit was our first try in discovering new ways of triggering more complex emotions. I think the game had some very interesting moments that proved that it could work.

It showed me that it was not only possible, but also that it would be a very different kind of experience based on different paradigms.

For Heavy Rain, we tried to analyze what worked and what didn’t in Fahrenheit, and to go much further. The technology is probably the most visible aspect at this stage of the things we improved: we worked hard on graphics and animations to have believable virtual actors able to convey the kind of subtle emotions we were looking for. But our main efforts went on the core of the experience we wanted to create: the story. I was looking for a different type of story, more grounded, based on real people in real life. I felt strong enough to get rid of all fantasy elements games usually use, and to tell a story based on characters and emotions. I think the scenario is quite unusual for a game, and I hope it will significantly contribute to make HR truly unique.

Game play was also of course at the heart of my design work. Creating immersion even in the simplest interactions, using game play to create emotion while offering an interface that would be simple and accessible without being simplistic, these were some of my goals. Most of all, I aim to put players in the characters’ shoes, make them feel what characters feel. I hope that HR will be strong enough to leave a long lasting imprint in players’ minds, the same way good movies or books do.

In Heavy Rain, the character animation is unprecedented; how much further do you believe the technology your using can go? Or have you pushed it to its limits?

Certainly not. We can go much further. The quality of the MoCap can of course still be improved, but also how we use it to create believable attitudes and postures, how we mix it with procedural animations or physics. Although we worked a lot on these aspects in HR, there is still a lot to do in order to make the player believe he controls a real human being.

Do you think the technology you bought from Vicon has paid off? Is it delivering to your expectation?

Having an in-house full MoCap system is a rare luxury for a developer. We made this choice seven years ago and we never regretted it. We developed unique techniques, we learnt how to shoot, how to direct actors, we experimented everything we could (from ice skating to walking in a crowd), we learnt how to produce insane amount of high quality animations in an acceptable time frame (and an affordable cost…), which I believe will be one of the strong points of HR. We also invested in our proprietary facial animation technology which will give unprecedented results in a game.

Most of all, we understood that MoCap was the easiest part of the process. The real challenges are about organization and pipelines, directing actors, and how you make your animations and characters fit.

MoCap becomes more and more a strategic technology for developers and for the type of games we create in particular. Depending on someone else for such an important part was just not possible. Also, I guess the cost of the 12 hours of MoCap we had in Fahrenheit would have paid the system, so it was definitely the right choice to buy it instead ;-)

HR will put the bar high regarding animation. It is probably the game using the most animations ever made: we shot for seven months every day, with a total of 50 actors and stuntmen. The final game will feature more than 15 000 unique animations. In the game, almost every single action is unique as everything is contextual.

Can you describe the scripting process behind Heavy Rain? How many pages of script are generated for a multi-stranded story like this?

Through the overall writing process, I wrote about 5000 pages of script (you probably double this figure if you include all my notes). The final script used in production is about 2000 pages. It represents a lot of work, with the major difficulty of maintaining consistency and quality through so many pages and all narrative possibilities. A movie script is usually no more than 120 pages. Writing HR was thus like writing 15 movies, which represents quite a large amount of work…

Interactive narrative as we see it is difficult to write, because for each scene, you need to have a strong element of narrative and a strong element of game play. I tried to make everything interactive and only use cut scenes when there was no other option to tell the story. I also use very little recurrent game play mechanics, which means that each scene has something new to offer.

So you end up needing a left brain and a right brain: you need to be creative to tell a good story but you also need to be extremely structured and organized to deal with game play, consequences, consistency.

Most other genres are also very well established, with writing techniques, known structures, all the material you need as references. But with interactive narrative, nothing exists, and when you write, you are quite alone on your island, trying to figure out what will work and what won’t without anyone or anything to refer to and give you tips. You don’t only write a story, you also invent the language, the grammar and all the words to tell it…

I worked on novels and movie scripts before, but interactive narrative is definitely the most difficult, technical and generally challenging exercise.

Of everything you showed at Leipzig, how much is likely to make it into the final product?

As I explained during the presentations, the scene we showed called “The Taxidermist” is not a part of the main narrative of Heavy Rain. It is just a short story we created to illustrate some key concepts of the game, especially the interface and the player’s actions can impact the story.

We agreed early on with Sony that we didn’t want to announce the game with another nice looking cut scene or an impressive technical prototype. We know that when explaining Heavy Rain, many people would be dubious that interactive storytelling or emotions could be anything else than another adventure game or an interactive movie from the old days… We chose to introduce Heavy Rain for the first time to the public with this scene because it was fully playable and demonstrated that it was possible to create an experience where the player would tell the story through his actions.

We will probably make this scene available to players as a bonus scene to unlock or maybe as extra downloadable content.

For a cinematic game like Heavy Rain, did you ever think that using Hollywood actors would help sell the title? Is it your ambition to use recognisable thespians, or do you prefer to use lesser-known performers?

We gave very serious considerations to both options. Initially, we really wanted to go for famous actors because we thought they would bring their talent (marketing as such was not a sufficient reason for us).

In fact, we realized that it was a two-edge sword: on one hand, you get a unique talent, a face and voice that people immediately recognize, on the other hand, they can easily appear like a marketing asset for a weak game, or they can easily jeopardize the game where gamers would just see the actor and not the character.

The main reason that made our decision was availability: if you can get a world class actor for a week, that’s already a big challenge, but that was unfortunately far from what I needed. My collaboration with the main actors of Heavy Rain went through several months.

We took time to cast them, we rehearsed a lot together, they had to learn their parts by heart for the dialogues, and when it was possible, we asked them to do the stunts. All this significant amount of work required time and availability, exactly like a real movie.

Few talented actors would consider going on a set without having met the director, knowing their script and being excited about the movie to be made. With video games, all this can seem superfluous. Actors (and their agents) often have so little consideration for games that the only discussion you can have is how much money for how much time. No one cares about what you try to achieve, they very rarely agree to invest time and energy in their part, all they want is a maximum amount of money for a minimum amount of time, and ideally, on a game that won’t hurt their image too much…

I can understand how we reached this situation, but this is why I did not want to invest time and energy trying to convince people that what we were doing was different, because in the best case scenario, I could never get what I wanted. So I spent a year casting “not-famous actors”, people having talent but not being known from main stream. I found truly fantastic people who are really talented, who fit perfectly my parts, who were prepared to invest time and energy through months to get the right result.

What I learnt from this is that time change. The old days where we desperately needed Hollywood is gone. In the coming years, talents including writers, directors and actors will come from the game industry, and Hollywood will want them in their movies.

I really believe that the actors of Heavy Rain have a real talent and I hope this experience will bring them the notoriety they deserve.

Can you reveal anything about Heavy Rain’s story?

No.

Okay… Well, we don’t want to talk about the story at this stage, because it will be a key component of the game and we don’t want to spoil it for players. All I can say is that Heavy Rain is a mature story evoking themes and using a tone rarely seen in a game. It is also probably the most personal thing I wrote for this media.

I don’t know if people will like it or not, but I am sure that it is going to be something unique and different.

Fahrenheit delved into some quite fantastical territory– will Heavy Rain do the same, or is the story more grounded?

Heavy Rain is about real people in a real world confronted to real problems. No sci-fi, no magic, no supernatural powers. I think our media is now ready for more subtle stories. We don’t need to save the world or destroy the evil monster to tell something exciting anymore. I thought I had to in Fahrenheit to make the game spectacular, but I realized that the best part of the game was when it was grounded. It made me realize that reality could be just as exciting as fantasy, and that most people would probably relate more easily to characters and situations that are closer to what they know and who they are.

What are the inspirations behind Heavy Rain? What sources influenced the style of storytelling?

You can never really tell where your inspiration comes from. I guess it is a mixture of all your personal culture, whether it’s books, movies, tv series, comics, lyrics, games, but also paintings, sculptures, whatever modeled who you are.

Many games are conceived and sometimes written by a team, or sometimes by a free lance writer outside the project.

I wrote Heavy Rain alone. I try to put more of myself, some of the things I felt or thought, something definitely more personal. It is not a script of compromises or common denominators, it is really a story that relates to me and that I wanted to tell, whatever that means…

You’re using Sixaxis control in Heavy Rain– was that mandated by Sony, or does Quantic Dream have an interest in the function?

The only thing Sony asked us to do was to make the best game we could. Absolutely nothing was mandated. Sony is not this type of publisher telling you what you should do. They had a real interest in what we wanted to achieve so they supported our creative vision. All they wanted us was to create something unique for the Playstation 3.

Sixaxis is an interesting device for certain types of actions, and it totally fitted our desire to create physical identification between what the player does with his controller and what his character does in the game.

Would you describe your games as an extension of the ‘point and click’ graphic adventure?

Certainly not. It does not rely on the same mechanics. Point and click games are usually based on the same patterns: puzzle solving or object management to unlock the next set with more puzzles and objects. There is a story but it is certainly not the real backbone of the game. It is just a nice layer putting all these scenes together. I am quite tough with this genre because it is one I loved and played a lot. But I must admit that it has absolutely not evolved for a decade.

Heavy Rain is based on very different paradigms: storytelling is the essence of the experience, not a nice layer. Game play and storytelling are totally interlaced. The game is not based on puzzles or inventories, but on contextual actions, decision making, moral choices. It is not an experience where you can get stuck by tortured puzzles you can only solve in a FAQ on the Internet, it is a journey that you affect by your decisions. Most of all, it aims to create emotional involvement to immerse the player and make him care for the story and the characters. This is not just a nice thing to say, it is really at the heart of all the design decisions we make.

So no, Heavy Rain is not an extension of adventure games. It is a new type of experience based on different paradigms. It aims to prove that it is possible to tell a story in a game through game play and not cut scenes, to create an exciting experience defined as an emotional journey, not targeting kids but an adult audience, with mature material dealing with real people and not superheroes. I know that’s a lot. But this is what I like about my job ;-)

Autor: Christopher Reynolds
Source: NOWGamer
Language: English

PSM3: Article sur heavy rain

2009-01-25T13:47:00.005Z

Autor: PSM3 ; Scan by Gray Fox
Source: GameKyo.com
Language: French

3DTotal: An Interview with Morgan Yon

2009-01-09T12:14:00.000Z

(Morgan Yon is a Heavy Rain concept art's artist - UL)
3DTotal: Hello Morgan, thanks for taking time away from your canvas to chat with us. Can you briefly give us a little insight into your background as an artist, and how it all started for you?
Morgan: First of all, thank you for allowing me to share my experience as a concept artist, and furthermore for explaining the way I capture the environment in which I have been for almost two years. As far as I am concerned, my debut to the art world was similar to many of us, for I began drawing very early - I would say from the age of 3 - and have never stopped since. My grandfather was an oil painter and my mother an architect, and I believe I have inherited their artistic genes. I went into artistic studies from the end of secondary school, where I followed an illustration training course in an art school in the city of Lyon, in France. These four years of studies were, for me, the true beginning of my artistic learning, when I was able to practice subjects such as sculpture, anatomy, illustration, animation and traditional painting.
Every year reinforced in me the idea that I had really found my way.

Then, the young provincial that I was, I went to the capital and I made my first steps in February 2006 at Quantic Dream Studio as a character designer, where I was able to build on what I had learned at school and discover the world of digital illustration. By going through art books, websites and forums, I realised that the world into which I had just stepped was going to teach me a great deal of things, make me discover an incredible number of talents, and be an endless source of inspiration. Working every day, side by side, with talented artists, combined with the emulation that this team creates, generates a ceaseless motivation and a constant urge to progress.

After two and an half years in the video game industry, I joined the visual effects studio “The Moving Picture Company” in London. Currently im working as a concept artist at Darkworks Studios.

3DTotal: You said you explored sculpture, anatomy, illustration, and so on, at art school, so how applicable is this knowledge and these skills to your present day digital work?
Morgan: I believe the knowledge of perspective and anatomy has been the most important and the most constructive part in my learning process. Indeed, everything is useful and present in the illustrations I create today. Anatomy enables me to be as coherent as possible in the creation of characters, and thus it becomes a necessary basis in my cartoon style, for instance. Therefore, and thanks to perspective’s notions, I can stage these characters and create the images I have in mind. Sculpture was a good way to learn 3D and shapes in space. I believe there is no better way to understand anatomy than by doing sculpture.

During my first school years, we learned, over and over again, how to draw and erase the draftsman’s tricks, which we had through working the academic drawing. Afterwards, the programme approached problems of storytelling, framing, colour and so on. It is like a complete formatting of our past as a draftsman, and a new foundation.However, it becomes harder not to be seduced by the digital tools we have to avoid those constraints.3D modelling removes any problem of perspective, and digital painting allows us to begin over and over again at will, which is why I try from time to time to keep the drawing basis I have whilst sketching. My studies gave me a basic experience and my drawing abilities, which grow day after day through training by feeding off all the images which I see every day. That’s what I find so exciting in this profession: its constant and never-ending questioning.

3DTotal: Looking at your portfolio examples of your latest works, vast landscapes seem to be a recurring theme, within which we often find single characters swamped by their surroundings. I get feelings of loneliness and isolation from these images. Is this something that you wanted to convey, and if so what are your reasons for this type of imagery combining man and nature?
Morgan: I have always had huge difficulties in approaching sets, and this lack of experience quickly caught up on me. Then I began uncountable tests of forms, perspective and scale, quickly executed in Photoshop. Being more and more familiar with digital tools, I also discovered 3D where I was able to quickly set up perspectives and rid me from these constraints which somehow hampered me. My latest works result from these tests, in which I stage characters almost eaten by their environments. It is always, for me, a true challenge to imagine spaces where the viewer can feel the gigantic sizes, and be intrigued and unhinged by them. I also enjoy challenging my characters; confronting them with their environment and trying to let the viewer imagine his own story stemming from the place and characters I have designed.

I have also been very inspired by video games, in particular “Shadow of the Colossus”, which to me is a true artistic masterpiece where designers have been able to play with scale to create incredible scenes. Cinema is also a strong influence for my latest works; I find in epic scenes a poetic connotation which I like trying to transcribe in my illustrations.

3DTotal: What were the “difficulties” that you faced when first approaching landscapes?
Morgan: Sets are for me a true challenge. Bringing to light a scene in order to better convey the feelings that we want to, is a truly hard test for me. As I said before: perspective, and each problem which derives from it, puts me under pressure because the errors which we can commit are visible and it is a work which demands a lot of attention and time.

On a few occasions, I did not take the time to think about which way the scene should be lit. I thus focused on details and told myself that the light would come afterwards. When I was almost finished with my picture, I tried to catch up with the light as best I could by tinkering with things from right to left. Huge mistake! Since then, I have tried to make this work at first-hand. I define my light source in the first step and try to keep that constantly in mind. Details are also things which seem important to me in order to create images as well as possible. To keep a global coherence in a picture is very difficult, and to captivate the reader on the foreseen elements is another one.

In my case, interior sets are delicate to do because light is very important; the way it is put in, the way objects interact with it, what it connotes, etc... For all of these questions I have to find answers in the starting process. On the other hand, exterior sets have other difficulties. Light is very important too, but so is the colour scheme and the way these colours match. Even there, the pictorial food of images and references is, in my opinion, truly necessary to approach this kind of decoration and challenge. But there is no secret: the more we practice, the more the automatisms build themselves up, and questions find their answers.

3DTotal: I’m quite taken with your interesting use of composition and the framing of your artworks. We can often find images which have been tilted slightly, making the work slightly unnerving/disorientating. Do you like to test your audiences? What sorts of influences from the past have found their way into the challenging imagery that you create today?
Morgan: You are right with the unnerving sensation I wanted to convey. I am also very interested in comic strips - the poor man’s cinema, as the saying goes - where the framing should emphasise the subjects. In my latest works, the slightly tilted framings strengthen my intentions to unhinge the viewer. I try to put these ideas into the image using what I learned about framing when I was at school. I also try to stimulate the viewers’ reactions towards the subject and their feelings by looking at my image. I use a straight framing to connote quietness, and create unease by tilting the frame. Everything depends on the subject and the message I want to convey.

When I was 14, I went on a school trip to 1944’s landing beaches in Normandy. This experience was one of the most striking of my life. I still have a vivid memory of it and I try today, with the tools which are handy, to make the viewer feel what I saw and felt. I remember in particular the Arromanches’s sea-cliffs. I found myself at the bottom of these sea-cliffs, overwhelmed by their greatness; a place that carries so much suffering and sacrifice, and I will always remember these strange and intense sensations of isolation, weakness and intoxication, all of which held in a freaky, cold silence. This period of history became a recurring subject in my paintings, for it interests me a lot and it therefore took a natural place in my work.

3DTotal: Wow, that sounds like such a unique experience! I am so pleased that, as an artist, you are trying to convey those feelings to the rest of the world through your work, long after the time. Would you say that your strongest inspiration comes from personal experience? Or can you find equally as much inspiration looking through books, websites and so on?
Morgan: It is true that I am more satisfied by the pictures which were inspired by what I lived or by what I felt. I try to put a little piece of me into those works and finally I think that it shows. Also I am not that fond of reading, but I try now to plunge myself into books to imagine other universes and to build my own stories. Forums and websites are also a big source of inspiration, but it’s more difficult to imagine other universes than those we have seen. Indeed, images shown on the Internet have already been thought and imagined by the author. If I come across a picture which I like very much, my first feeling is, “wow, I want to do this too”, but I have the sensation of something that does not belong to me.

When I look at the images of other artists, I generally keep in mind a piece of information concerning an interesting framing for example, or a link between shape and colour scheme. I thus try to store up information and use it in my personal images. I think it is necessary to make the difference between taking ideas which belong to the artist and use what they offer to us to create a personal, new one. I definitely try to have the latter approach. I would thus say that the experiences which I have lived are indeed the basis of a more accomplished work, where I give more energy and passion. Nevertheless, ideas and feelings that other artists share with us through their illustrations are also an evident source of inspiration in my work. What I have learned by looking at the work of others is that the technique matters less than messages and ideas which they want to convey. Now if, on top of that, one has faultless technique, it cannot but command my admiration.

3DTotal: Your mark making is truly beautiful, Morgan. A fine example of your painting skills I believe can be found in the piece titled, ‘Devil’s Beauty’ (above) – a monochrome image which displays wonderful brush work that brings the image to life. Can you share with us any secrets about how you go about your paintings and the kinds of brushes you employ?
Morgan: This illustration is a part of a couple of images created for a future comic strip’s project based
on real facts from WW2. My main direction was above all the atmosphere. I wanted it to be awfully cold and hostile. How would you feel if you were left deep inside a Byelorussian forest with the sound of a whole bunch of tanks and infantry hot on your heels? The monochrome range was unavoidable, and I wanted the picture being read step by step. We discover the place, characters, and finally the tank. I also helped the viewer to go through the image thanks to the silhouette of the forest, which is a complete part
in this dynamic. The closer we get to the right-hand side of the image, the darker and more impressive the masses get – the effect being similar to a wave which breaks out. “The Devil comes down.”

Once this composition was found, I began working on details, relying on picture references. For the forest, I did not want to use photographs over which I should have to paint, and so I used some parts of photos to turn them into tree brushes, allowing me a total control in their rhythm. To create the moody and snow-covered ground, I used a large number of dirt brushes by trying to obtain something coherent in their forms and spaces. The characters were handled with basic Photoshop brushes, and the snow is a succession of white point motion blurred. To bring the stage to life, I tried to have a painterly approach by suggesting things rather than highly detailing them, even though it is sometimes difficult to restrain myself. Through the design of this picture, I have been more focused on the creation of custom brushes, which saves me extra time and enables me to reach unexpected, yet interesting, results.

3DTotal: It sounds like you actually put yourself right in the centre of your paintings. Do you think this is your ‘key’ to achieving such potent imagery? Does painting in such a way ever make you quite emotional; for example, do you feel the pain or the isolation that your paintings are emulating whilst you are working on them?
Morgan: Maybe so! As I said before, staging myself often gives birth to new feelings which I try to write down. It reminds me of the moments when I play video games; for example, I sometimes literally bend to avoid bullets when I play first person shooter games! I think that I sometimes have the same reactions when I work on a picture. I do not say that I lie on the ground to avoid the tank in Devil’s Beauty (because I think people would take me for a madman), but I have at least tried to place myself inside the skin of a man who would be there and to try to feel his fear and his emotions. In a slightly less serious way, I also take the expressions of the characters I work on, make a face, and subconsciously I also put myself in the skin of the characters that I design.

When I think again about it, it must be downright hilarious to see me that way, but this is maybe the key to achieving the pictures that I have in mind. Everything is based on the relationship that I want to establish with the viewer, and to achieve it, it’s perhaps necessary to live as the subject.

3DTotal: I’ve noticed that your images often involve subjects towards the edges of your canvases finding themselves in darkness, whilst the light focuses in on the important elements and the action of the pieces. This, to me, is reminiscent of classical paintings. Where do you source your inspiration from, and which artists - past or present - are your greatest influences?
Morgan: The scenes which I represent usually consist of a set with a main light source. I like working with dark atmospheres; I indeed try to focus on the light so that I leave the rest in darkness. I spent a lot of time working on thriller comic strips where the blacks best serve the subject, and since then I have kept these automatisms in some of my paintings. I am also inspired by many things which I have seen everywhere, but some paintings speak more to me than others. Among them, Masters like Diego Velasquez, Rembrandt, Gustave Courbet, and also artists less known such as Leon Augustin Lhermitte, are part of the visual references which I often use.

However, having known the digital world of illustration for only two years, I have mostly found my visual inspiration from the incredible number of recent artists which I have encountered here and there during my long visits online. I remember the day I saw for the first time a digital concept art, “The Beach”, by Thierry Doizon. Downright nailed on my seat, I realised the possibilities which were offered to us by manipulating digital painting software. Nicolas Bouvier’s artworks leave me literally speechless, for he has an awesome sense of scale and shapes, without speaking about the poetry of his images.

So, artists like Craig Mullins of course, Daniel Dociu, Mathias Verhasselt, The Black Frog, Feerik, Marko Djurdjevic, and countless others, are names which I often double-click on and I learn a lot by looking at their art. Recently, I fell on the incredible work of Thomas Pringle, who single-handedly matches everything I like in illustration. Thanks to the Internet for that!

Finally, in the comic strip world, which I like as much as concept art, the books which we owe to Bernie Wrightson, Alberto Breccia, Guarnido, Claire Wendling, Virginie Augustin and Thomas Von Kummant are part of those which seldom remain on the shelves of my library.

3DTotal: You’ve mentioned comic strips a fair few times throughout this interview, so what is it about comics that inspire you so greatly, and how does this inspiration transfer to your more painterly digital artworks?
Morgan: A comic strip is the media which I knew first of all at school, and for which I had at once a huge interest. It was the first time I met professionals because we had professors already known in the comic strip industry. It was, for me, one of the most interesting classes because I really understood that a comic strip is a true relationship between the artist and the reader. You have a story to tell and there are codes
to follow, as in the movies, in order to make the reader feel what you have in mind. A comic strip is, according to me, a true science of storytelling. Line art and colour are also stages of storytelling. The result is more than clear to the reader, and you learn your errors very quickly.

The link between text and images is essential; the way your eyes go through the pictures has to be as clear as possible, which represents a whole lot of work beforehand. I consider comic strips as real, personal commitment in the duration: a true adventure. I find in every frame of comic strips an illustration; the framing is meant to say something to the reader and the drawing also serves the subject. It is maybe the reason why I try to involve it in the illustrations I create today. I am also much more attracted to the boards coming from either graphic novels or authors’ books. Perfect inkings/unblemished outlines speak less to me than one simple line art or a direct colour work. I feel the intentions of the author in this kind of work much more. I thus take these things which are appropriate for the comic strip and try to use them in my illustrations. Having no personal graphic style in comic strips (although it is something on which I’m working) I use the knowledge I have as a basic starting point in illustration.

3DTotal: Your character work is quite interesting in contrast to your landscape paintings; they can be either highly stylised, or highly detailed and realistic looking. Which method do you prefer, given the choice, and why?
Morgan: I would say that I have no preference. It’s just that realistic drawing represents for me a technical challenge, whereas cartoon is a real relaxation. For instance, I like working with attention on the modelling of the faces: it is a thing in which an artist can easily be restricted to his own tricks, and thus it requires a constant return on foundations, anatomy and analysis of bodies and movements. To succeed in making characters understandable, as precisely as possible, the expressions, anatomical specificity, clothing details and body language is a really interesting challenge. Instead, cartoon style allows us to have complete freedom. Stylising a character, finding other forms, being more nervous in the line art and letting your pen go on the sheet, is something incredibly fun… I particularly like working on general forms, being mostly more satisfied with my preparatory sketches, rather than the finalised one.

3DTotal:I find you choice of canvas sizes very interesting: some of your works are panoramic; others find themselves as tall, thin canvases. What decides on the size of your canvas when you start a painting?
Or do you find that your canvas size is constantly changing whilst you work on a piece? What decisions do you make when framing your paintings to keep the viewer excited by your subject matter?
Morgan: I generally have no precise idea of the format I will work on when I decide to make an illustration. My personal works are often born after I have seen an interesting photo or movie. So, I have a very first idea which comes to me, and I put it very quickly on the sheet. Then, although it may not be the best way to go, I often re-size my images to keep focus on what I want to convey. I often start on a vertical format which will be finally a wide panoramic. However, if the subject strongly fits itself (in particular when characters are high-angle framed, allowing me to express the idea of a person swamped by his/her environment), my format remains constant throughout the process of creation. But generally, and my pictures don’t contradict me, I work set designs in horizontal format, and for more intimate subjects I try
to work them in a less conventional format.

However, there is a media in which I force myself to define beforehand my frames: comic strips. To keep the viewer excited by the subject I’m working on, I try to create the path that the eye will follow during the first visualisation of the image. I think it is a truly important part in the preliminary study, and one which I always keep in mind throughout my process of creation. Indeed, I often ask people who surround me to peek at my image and try to tell me which path their eye followed, and thus what they deducted from it. This test is very important and helps me to quickly realise if the visual is meaningful or not. I usually make this test when I begin to get swallowed too much by details which could possibly turn out obsolete.

Finally, I draw this framing ‘science’ from the pictures of other artists that I have looked at every day. For me, if my glance circulates in a natural way across a picture, then goes into the details, I feel that the artist has already made fifty percent of the work and this is what I try to reproduce in my own works. I always keep in mind that the viewers’ eyes never make mistakes.

3DTotal: It’s interesting that you mentioned ‘science’ in your last answer, as I was thinking the process in which you approach your comic strips sounds quite like a scientific formula. Do you get more overall satisfaction from your comic strips or from your digital paintings, or are they equally satisfying?
Morgan: I would not say that it is similar to a scientific formula, but rather to codes. In my opinion, even if we have the most accurate drawing, if the framing or the composition does not serve the drawing, the image will not be interpreted as wanted. This “science” in comic strips is something very apprehendable, but also very rigorous. Paradoxically, some artists do everything to break these rules and manage very well, but it is a risk to take with regards to the reader. The only boards of comics which I have made at the moment were for school, and a few years later I feel more satisfied with my current illustrations. However, I try to use the daily learning in the field of concept art to approach the creation of an album of comic strips.

People say that, for a young author, a first album is never anticipated, but a first draft can very quickly create a good or bad reputation. It is thus a question of taking time and being sure to have in hand the elements which allow approaching a project in a serene way. Making an album - just one - has been a true dream since I was a young boy, so you can imagine what satisfaction I shall have when it happens, or when I put the last brush stroke to the last frame.

3DTotal: It has been a pleasure speaking to you, and I wish you all the very best of luck for the future.
Keep in touch!
Morgan: Thank you for the interest you have put into my work and me. Of course, we will keep in touch!

Autor: 3D Total Artists staff
Source: 3D Total Artists
Language: English

GameStar.it: Intervista a David Cage su Heavy Rain

2009-01-05T06:33:00.007Z

Intervista a David Cage, responsabile di Quantic Dream che parla a ruota libera dell'influsso di pellicole quali "Seven" e "Il Silenzio degli Innocenti", della sceneggiatura di oltre 2000 pagine, dell'immersione totale nell'universo del gioco, della somiglianza dei protagonisti con la controparte reale, e di come Heavy Rain costringerà i giocatori a compiere scelte da veri esseri umani

Heavy Rain, cinema o videogioco?

I colleghi della redazione di GamePro hanno incontrato gli sviluppatori di Quantic Dreams (software house precedentemente nota per la realizzazione di Fahrenheit) nella sede francese della compagnia per ottenere informazioni sul futuro thriller in esclusiva per PlayStation 3, Heavy Rain. A rispondere alle nostre curiosità è David Cage, CEO di Quantic Dreams e direttore del gioco, che prova fare luce sul titolo che dovrebbe ridefinire gli standard del fotorealismo nella grafica dei giochi di nuova generazione. Fra qualche pagina potreste essere più curiosi di prima...

GameStar: Heavy Rain, un gioco che è stato definito dal tuo team come un thriller psicologico, è un'esclusiva PlayStation 3. La tua precedente produzione, Fahrenheit, è stata sviluppata per PC, PlayStation 2 e Xbox. Lo sviluppo focalizzato su una singola piattaforma vi consente di raggiungere la miglior qualità possibile?
David Cage: Credo che lavorare su una singola piattaforma sia un immenso vantaggio, prima di tutto perché puoi ottimizzare la tecnologia in uso per trarre il massimo dall'hardware. Inoltre, sapere quale controller sarà utilizzato e in che modo gli utenti giocheranno fa una grande differenza.
Quando si sviluppa simultaneamente su console multiple e PC hai qualcuno che gioca con un'interfaccia composta da mouse e tastiera, qualcuno che gioca davanti al monitor di un PC mentre altri giocano in soggiorno. C'è una grande differenza con lo sviluppo di un'esclusiva per console; per un game designer è preferibile sapere come l'utenza giocherà il suo titolo e quale controller utilizzerà per poter ottimizzare al meglio l'esperienza.

GS: Pensate che gli standard che avete raggiunto fino a questo momento con Heavy Rain sotto l'aspetto della grafica e negli altri comparti siano possibili solo con PlayStation 3?
DC: Credo che la potenza di PlayStation 3 sia fondamentale nella creazione di un'esperienza realistica come Heavy Rain. Avevamo bisogno di molta banda e di una notevole potenza di elaborazione per realizzare un motore di elevata qualità e una grafica estremamente dettagliata, per ottenere verosimiglianza nei volti e nelle espressioni facciali, e così via. Quindi sì, l'architettura di PlayStation 3, organizzata attorno alle SPU (Synergistic Processing Unit), è stata estremamente utile nella realizzazione di Heavy Rain.

GS: Heavy Rain è pesantemente influenzato dal cinema, al punto che numerose tecniche cinematografiche sono state incorporate nella realizzazione del gioco. In che modo il vostro titolo si differenzia da un film?
DC: Vedo principalmente due differenze tra la realizzazione di un gioco come Heavy Rain e quella di un film. Quando lavori a una pellicola hai un copione di circa 100-120 pagine e racconti solo una storia; quando lavori a Heavy Rain invece hai una sceneggiatura di 2000 pagine perché non racconti solo una storia ma numerose vicende che si intersecano a seconda delle azioni del giocatore; dobbiamo considerare le conseguenze delle azioni degli utenti, qualsiasi esse siano, e per questo c'è molto lavoro da fare.
La seconda differenza più evidente è relativa al fatto che la tecnologia in ambito cinematografico è perfettamente definita e nota fin dall'inizio mentre nella realizzazione di un gioco esistono numerose limitazioni tecniche, in modo particolare quando si vuole lavorare con attori virtuali.
Allo stesso tempo vuoi estrarre il massimo dalle performance dell'hardware ma devi considerare i limiti tecnici che ostacolano la realizzazione di un'esperienza tridimensionale in tempo reale. Sei sempre diviso fra creatività e tecnologia, due elementi contrastanti; la sfida è comunque eccitante.

Protagonisti virtuali...in carne e ossa

GS: Quanto sarà lungo esattamente Heavy Rain?
DC: Stiamo lavorando per un'esperienza di gioco di circa 8/10 ore. Non desideriamo un percorso più longevo e sicuramente non andremo oltre questo arco temporale. Preferisco concentrarmi su 10 ore che le persone ricorderanno a lungo ed essere pienamente consapevole di ogni dettaglio del gioco, piuttosto che offrire 60 ore di scenari vuoti e un girovagare continuo. Il ritmo dell'esperienza è fondamentale a mio avviso; vogliamo che sia serrato e che il giocatore passi di sorpresa in sorpresa. È questo il nostro approccio.

GS: Un'attrice che presta la voce a una protagonista del gioco le assomiglia in maniera inconfondibile. Tutti i personaggi di Heavy Rain assomigliano agli attori che hanno fornito loro la voce?
DC: Sì. Con Heavy Rain abbiamo deciso che non avremmo voluto più attori per lo stesso personaggio. Solitamente nei giochi si ha un attore per la riproduzione del volto, un altro per la voce e un altro ancora per il motion capture che fornisce i movimenti.
Abbiamo pensato che questa scelta non fosse ottimale per quello che avevamo intenzione di fare con Heavy Rain. Volevamo ricreare un attore con le sue fattezze ma anche con i suoi movimenti per fornire al personaggio maggiore consistenza. Pensavamo fosse un aspetto fondamentale della caratterizzazione dei protagonisti. Questo approccio ha cambiato il modo in cui abbiamo lavorato al gioco perché il cast degli attori ha assunto un ruolo estremamente importante in quello che stavamo facendo.
Non dovevamo semplicemente trovare una voce e un volto soddisfacenti ma un attore in carne e ossa adatto a un personaggio. Abbiamo impiegato circa un anno in sessioni di casting fra Parigi e Londra per trovare le persone giuste. Era un aspetto fondamentale del gioco a nostro avviso.

GS: È già tutto stabilito per quanto riguarda l'impianto narrativo di Heavy Rain? Sapete esattamente come finirà la storia oppure ci sono ancora piccole modifiche da apportare o qualche elemento da rivedere nella trama di Heavy Rain?
DC: Ci sono due aspetti in un progetto come Heavy Rain. Prima di tutto si tratta di una produzione impegnativa con molte risorse da sviluppare, e questo significa che non puoi modificare la storia; deve essere scolpita nella pietra una volta che ti senti soddisfatto, perché da quel momento si mette in moto il meccanismo della produzione, una macchina imponente. Non puoi tornare indietro e dire, "Questo personaggio non ha più 60 anni, ne ha 20 perché ho cambiato idea".
Tutti gli aspetti relativi alla trama devono essere stabiliti affinché la produzione possa iniziare. Allo stesso tempo ci sono altri aspetti del gioco in cui sappiamo di avere il tempo necessario per apportare alcune modifiche, e questo è vero in particolar modo per quanto riguarda il gameplay e l'interfaccia; l'impatto della produzione non è in questo caso particolarmente significativo. Proviamo continuamente soluzioni differenti, facciamo esperimenti per vedere cosa ne pensano gli altri...questo per compiere le scelte giuste per il gioco. È un aspetto importante in una produzione ludica; la prima cosa che implementi è raramente quella giusta, di solito devi provare diverse soluzioni prima di trovare quella ottimale.

Heavy Rain, simulatore di emozioni

GS: Potete darci tre ragioni per cui i giocatori dovrebbero interessarsi a Heavy Rain?
DC: Vedo Heavy Rain come un viaggio emotivo. Non consideriamo l'esperienza come una progressione di ostacoli che servono a fermare il giocatore. Non ci saranno enigmi da risolvere o orde di nemici da sconfiggere, tutto verte intorno alle decisioni del giocatore. Lo vediamo realmente come un viaggio da intraprendere, si tratta di un simulatore di emozioni.
Vogliamo creare qualcosa in cui il giocatore si trovi in situazioni differenti e in cui si senta coinvolto in quello che succede; vogliamo che si interessi alla storia e ai personaggi, che abbia voglia di scoprire cosa accadrà in seguito, cosa ne sarà di un particolare personaggio.
La ragione per cui i giocatori dovrebbero interessarsi a Heavy Rain è che noi vogliamo mettere l'utente nei panni dell'eroe che deve assumersi delle responsabilità importanti. Non si tratta di meccaniche tipo: "vuoi essere buono o cattivo?"; sarà molto più ambiguo e sfumato. Vogliamo porre domande al giocatore in quanto essere umano e chiedergli: "Cosa faresti se fossi in questa situazione?"
Vorremmo che la risposta non fosse sempre ovvia; le persone devono chiedersi cosa farebbero in una data situazione, provare il dubbio. Nel gioco sarà necessario prendere delle decisioni, stiamo cercando di creare alcuni momenti che i giocatori ricorderanno, che lasceranno un'impronta nelle loro menti, proprio come i migliori film che hanno visto o i migliori libri che hanno letto. Cambiano qualcosa dentro il fruitore e questo è il nostro obiettivo. È molto ambizioso e difficile da realizzare, ma è per questo che siamo qua.

GS: Visto che si tratta di un gioco sviluppato in maniera analoga a un film, quali sono le pellicole che hanno influenzato Heavy Rain?
DC: È sempre difficile stabilire da dove proviene la tua ispirazione perché in realtà deriva praticamente da tutto quello che ci circonda - dai film che ti piacciono, dai libri che leggi, dalle serie televisive, dai fumetti, dai quadri. Talvolta l'ispirazione nasce da elementi che non sono affatto correlati a quello che stai facendo.
Per quanto riguarda i film, personalmente apprezzo titoli dark quali "Il silenzio degli innocenti", "Seven", o "Fight Club", e tutti hanno avuto notevole influsso sull'ideazione del gioco. Inoltre ho apprezzato pellicole meno note quali "Memories of Murders", un film sud coreano molto interessante. Ci sono molte, molte cose che possono influenzare il tuo lavoro. Credo che in ultima analisi l'aspetto che rende speciale Heavy Rain è il fatto che per la prima volta metto in un gioco alcuni aspetti della mia vita e alcune esperienze personali.
Molto spesso quando scrivi giochi parli di eventi che non hai mai provato realmente. Non sono mai stati in guerra e non sono mai stati dei supereroi che salvano il mondo, eppure la maggior parte degli addetti ai lavori parla di questo genere di vicende che non ha mai vissuto. Con Heavy Rain ho provato a rappresentare situazioni che ho pensato, provato, vissuto nella mia esperienza personale. Spero che questo contribuisca a rendere il gioco sincero, e che alla fine qualcuno se ne accorga.

GS: Non avete classificato Heavy Rain come un survival horror tuttavia nella demo mostrata alla stampa è presente una scena in cui una donna fugge da un serial killer tassidermista che trasforma le sue vittime in trofei da esposizione. Potete spiegarci meglio?
DC: Heavy Rain non ha assolutamente niente a che vedere con il genere dei survival horror. Il tema principale del gioco è completamente differente e piuttosto inconsueto in un videogioco, essendo interamente basato sulle emozioni. Non fa leva sulle meccaniche abituali dei survival, non si occupa di armi, non parla di zombie e non ha niente a che vedere con la sopravvivenza. Si tratta solo di prendere delle decisioni in situazioni difficili.

Il mistero si infittisce

GS: C'è stato qualcosa che avete imparato nel corso del processo di sviluppo del vostro precedente gioco, Fahrenheit, che avreste voluto includere nel progetto attuale e che alla fine avete implementato?
DC: Quando completi un gioco ci sono sempre molti elementi che avresti voluto includere, aspetti che avresti voluto trattare diversamente o soluzioni che non hai avuto il tempo di provare. Dopo Fahrenheit eravamo divisi tra la sensazione di aver provato a realizzare qualcosa di nuovo e la consapevolezza di aver suscitato interesse fra i giocatori, nella stampa e nel mondo, per quello che avevamo realizzato.
Abbiamo pensato di aver scoperto qualcosa di interessante raccontando la storia attraverso le azioni del giocatore invece che attraverso i filmati di intermezzo. Allo stesso tempo, c'erano molti aspetti dei quali non eravamo soddisfatti, così ci siamo presi un po' di tempo dopo Fahrenheit per leggere quello che la stampa aveva scritto sul gioco, cosa ne pensassero i giocatori sui forum nel tentativo di ottenere un riscontro diretto. Abbiamo avuto un grande dibattito interno al team per analizzare gli aspetti che ci sono piaciuti e quelli che non ci sono piaciuti.
Sostanzialmente abbiamo implementato in Heavy Rain gli aspetti che funzionavano meglio di Fahrenheit oltre a provare nuove vie per spingere al limite tutti i settori del gioco. Quello più evidente è la grafica. Abbiamo speso molto tempo e risorse nella realizzazione di un nuovo motore grafico e crediamo che il risultato sia molto più efficace rispetto a Fahrenheit.
Abbiamo pensato da zero l'interfaccia del gioco, il gameplay e il modo in cui tutto funziona. Abbiamo sviluppato l'idea di legare fra loro diverse storie per rendere maggiormente tangibili e pregne di significato le conseguenze delle azioni dei giocatori. Abbiamo infine lavorato per sbarazzarci delle situazioni classiche del "Game Over", l'aspetto che ho trovato più frustrante in Fahrenheit.
In un certo senso è un fallimento per il designer quando tutto quello che riesci a proporre è una schermata di game over. È un po' come dire al giocatore: "Sai cosa? Hai fallito, torna indietro, rigioca e prova a fare qualcosa di meglio". Questo è il messaggio che si invia di norma all'utente, mentre in Heavy Rain cerchiamo di includere questo elemento nella sceneggiatura: la trama deve procedere portando con sé le informazioni relative alle azioni del giocatore.

GS: Sappiamo che non potete fornire dettagli ulteriori sulla trama ma potete dirci qualcosa di più sulle premesse generali di Heavy Rain?
DC: Heavy Rain evocherà probabilmente temi raramente usati in un videogioco. Tutte le idee alla base del gameplay sono basate sul fatto che il giocatore racconterà la storia direttamente tramite le proprie azioni. I giocatori saranno allo stesso tempo gli attori, i direttori, perfino gli scrittori dell'esperienza ludica.
La nostra speranza è che giocatori diversi vedano in Heavy Rain storie diverse, o versioni differenti della stessa storia...in parole povere è a questo che stiamo lavorando. Al momento non vogliamo rivelare alcun dettaglio sulla trama di Heavy Rain, perché crediamo sia la componente chiave dell'esperienza di gioco e non vogliamo rovinare la sorpresa. La storia è scritta ed è attualmente in produzione. Se vi raccontassimo troppo potremmo rovinare la sorpresa ai giocatori.

Autor: Nicola Congia
Source: GameStar.it
Language: Italian

Videointerview: Pavel Dobrovsky rozhovor s Davidom Cageom & Montion Capture Studio - reportaz

2008-12-24T20:14:00.004Z

This three videos are from december czech paper magazine LEVEL.

LEVEL DVD, Pavel Dobrovsky rozhovor s Davidom Cageom cast 1.

LEVEL DVD, Pavel Dobrovsky rozhovor s Davidom Cageom cast 2.

LEVEL DVD, Reportaz v Montion Capture studiu, komentuje Pavel Dobrovsky.

P.S.: Thanks to janko for uploading this at YouTube.

Autor: Pavel Dobrovsky
Source: LEVEL
Language: Czech

Playstation.blog: Inside the Heavy Rain Press Event

2008-12-18T20:24:00.009Z

Hello everyone! My name is Guillaume de Fondaumiere, co-CEO at Quantic Dream and executive producer of Heavy Rain.

Last month, a group of roughly 35 journalists from around the world came to visit Quantic Dream. Following our first presentation of Heavy Rain in Leipzig in August, we wanted to be able to share our passion for the game and reveal in particular how such a massive project comes to life. When you play a game such as this, it is difficult to really understand how much effort goes into its production. Our hope was that through such a visit, we might be able to educate gamers a bit more on how a game is crafted and how important artistic direction is to ensure a consistent experience from the first to the last minute.

Following a quick tour of our studio, David Cage, Quantic’s CEO and creative director on Heavy Rain, gathered media in our motion capture studio located on the ground floor of our building. We had decided to present them the complete production process, from game design and initial concept art up until the final integration of all elements within one scene in real-time. The presentation lasted roughly two hours, in particular because we had prepared a number of making-of type videos and real-time code on PS3 illustrating the different steps of 3D set production, actor casting, 3D character creation, and Virtual Actor performance. At the end, we explored together a never before shown scene of the game live on PLAYSTATION 3 in which all elements had been put together.

I think the most fascinating aspect of Heavy Rain is the fact that more than 250 people are contributing to its making, all of which are working under the artistic supervision of David Cage, His attention to detail is really fascinating…I am sitting in the back of our studio while he is passionately talking about our project. More than anyone else in the team, Heavy Rain is his baby. For the past two and a half years, I can clearly feel how proud he is to show how his vision is coming to life.

For the end of the tour, we had prepared a little surprise for our guests: to practice live on stage and become a Virtual Actor in the game. We equipped two journalists with body suits and reflectors. The stage had been dressed with set elements: a door, two chairs, one table, a cupboard. David briefed the two journalists on the scene, explaining to each of them what their role were, the starting point of the scene, and what they were supposed to say and play.

Once fully equipped the two casually entered the stage. The rest of the crowd had assembled around the set, in a similar casual fashion. However, when David started to use his firm directing voice to ask for silence and pronounced the first syllabus of the typical movie-style check-up words “ready to roll. Rolling and….ACTION” we virtually felt the attention of our journalists-turned-actors spinning from vaguely alert to 100% focused. The crowd was holding its breath, as all assembled immediately sensed the change. David had decided to shoot the scene in three distinct steps. The first shot was repeated twice as David gave more direction to its actors after initial takes. The second and third shots however were played exactly how David had envisioned them. Our actors were “in their roles” and did actually play quite professionally. A big round of applause followed the last “…and CUT” words of David at the end of the third shot.

This concluded the presentation and the rest of the tour was spent answering interviews or casually discussing with the journalists what they had seen before.

When the game was unveiled at Games Convention in Leipzig, we were obviously delighted at what a great response we received. With the event that day, we wanted to take the unique opportunity to let journalists and gamers around the world take a look behind the scenes at how Heavy Rain is made. It is a very special feeling to see at the precise moment when everything comes together and is being assembled to create what we believe will be a unique interactive experience. We hope that we were able to communicate how much innovation and artistic effort goes into its production and look forward to showing you more of the actual game in the coming months.

Autor: Guillaume de Fondaumiere
Source: Playstation.blog
Language: English

GamePro:Heavy Rain: Interview

2008-12-18T00:32:00.002Z

Heavy Rain boasts over 8 hours of gameplay, multiple storylines, and the elimination of "game over" mechanics.

Autor: GamePro staff
Source: GamePro.com
Language: English

Heavy Rain Design

2008-12-13T13:31:00.024Z

Heavy Rain Four Characters

Heavy Rain Character Design: NWI

Heavy Rain Character Design: SSH

Heavy Rain Character Design: Ethan Mars

Heavy Rain Character Design: CBL

Heavy Rain Character Design: DOC

Heavy Rain Set Design Art Concept: Grossery Shop

Heavy Rain Set Design Art Concept: House

Heavy Rain Set Design: Crime Scene

Heavy Rain Set Design Art Concept: Lexington Station

Autor: Morgan Yon/Quantic Dream
Language: English

GameSpy.PS3: Quantic Dream's David Cage on Heavy Rain (PS3)

2008-12-12T09:55:00.002Z

We talked to David Cage at the Quantic Dream studio in Paris to chat about the influences behind the upcoming Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer.

Recently we traveled to Paris to visit Quantic Dream, the studio behind Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Indigo Prophecy. We spoke to Quantic Dream founder and CEO David Cage about the upcoming Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer, a game designed solely for the PlayStation 3. Cage is the director and screenwriter for Heavy Rain, meaning he was the one in charge of writing some 2,000 pages of script for it, which he expects to be released in late 2009. Besides showing us "The Taxidermist," a demo that has been seen before in other venues such as E3, Cage and the rest of the Quantic team were very protective of any details regarding the story and characters that will be seen in Heavy Rain. Still Cage, who worked as a musician, composer and writer for years before founding QD in 1997, was a fascinating person to talk to, if guarded about any of Heavy Rain's many secrets.

GameSpy: Does the French government pump funds into game development to give it the same sort of weight French film has?
David Cage: The French government supported the idea that games were culture so they could really support the industry in a similar way that they support the movie industry because it's a cultural identity of the country. So the government helps with tax cuts and certain things to protect the industry. That's really clever and we really praise the French government for understanding the situation of this industry because we're really between technology and culture. We have some fantastic schools and we were just seeing art students leaving France because they couldn't find a job here and ended up working in the UK or the US. So they started working on giving us the means to keep these people here in France, working here. Also, there were very few cultural products that when you're French you can sell all around the world. When you're a moviemaker or a book writer, sometimes you can export what you do in your culture. With videogames, basically, we're trying to sell our games worldwide. So, it's a good thing for French companies.

GameSpy: How much of Quantic Dream's research and development funding comes from Sony and private investment versus the French government? Is it more Sony, or does more come from France?
David Cage: It's much more Sony, of course. Nothing insane, I don't know what the actual figures are. There's what they call an R&D cut, and that's probably 20% of what you actually invest.

GameSpy: What were the most painful lessons learned from Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit that you didn't want to replicate with Heavy Rain?
David Cage: I don't know that there was any painful lesson. There were some very positive lessons, and the first one was that there is a market with what we're trying to achieve. The reviews were very high, the figure sales we were really happy with. And that was really not obvious at the time that we were doing it, because we created the game and it was based on interactive storytelling and emotion.

Even today, if you talk about that stuff, it's a bitch to make to any publisher. Talk to them about how many guns you have, how many enemies you're going to kill, that's cool. But then you say, "Oh, well you know what, I'm going to trigger subtle emotions." Oh, okay. Is this going to be interesting? What is the point? So, we just demonstrated that it was possible to do that, first on a technical, conceptual point of view to tell the story from a player's actions. And last but not least, people already had interest in this. So these are good lessons.

Now there are always things you wouldn't do the same way, we hesitated on the [interface's] action system until the last minute. There were different options that we tried and I don't think we chose the right one. So this is something we'd definitely do differently. One of the lessons was that it's extremely difficult to do a cross-platform title when you have such a high level of expectation of graphics and visuals and technology. When you work on several platforms, you fight to have your game working on all, but it's not optimized for any of the three platforms. Where here, working only on PlayStation 3, we created PlayStation 3-exclusive engines so we take the best out of the hardware.

GameSpy: Beyond other videogames, what elements of other mediums, such as film and literature, have you or the team drawn from to create this dynamic storyline?
David Cage: The most obvious inspiration probably came from certain movies, thrillers that we all love like "The Silence of the Lambs," or "Se7en" or "Fight Club," these type of things. Some less well-known movies like "Memories of Murder," which is a fantastic thriller set in South Korea, where it rains all the time. But the dominating thing, you're influenced by books, TV series, comics, paintings, art in general.

I would say what's special about Heavy Rain is it's probably the first time I wrote something that was a little bit more personal. You know, most of the time when you're a game designer, you try to write stories about something that you don't have a clue about. What is it like to be a rookie during the second World War? I don't know. I can guess, but I've never been there. What is it like to be a superhero, to have supernatural powers, to save the world? I don't know. Most of the time you write about things you don't have a clue about.

Whereas here on Heavy Rain, my starting point was really about situations, themes that I have experienced myself, and that was probably the most personal thing, the starting point was about fears that I had or thoughts I had or emotions I had. And when you think about it, it's quite unusual in games but quite standard in all other media, I mean in movies or literature it's obvious that the author or the director talks about something that was close to him or her in a similar way. I think it brings a certain level of sincerity and makes the script believable.

GameSpy: From what we can tell, Heavy Rain takes place in an American city. Some British and European developers cite a need to study American culture more closely than simply watching Hollywood movies and TV. How much has the team researched the United States before creating the universe of Heavy Rain?
David Cage: Quite a lot. I spent a lot of time in the US over the last probably 10 years, I'm in the country three to four times a year. You know, in Europe we hear a lot about the American culture through your music, through your books, through your movies, through your TV series. The United States is a very interesting country, with many interesting things happening. It was not a marketing decision to say "Oh, it's going to sell better in the US if it's set in an American city." I think it's the background which worked best with the story we're trying to tell. The team spent more than two or three weeks onsite, we chose a city and we spent three weeks there taking pictures, taking videos, talking to people, trying to get a feel and trying to imagine the story we wanted to tell in the different locations we were visiting. Then we tried to make locations a part of what we try to evoke in the story so it's really not just a background but a part of the atmosphere we tried to create.

GameSpy: Have you considered doing a live demo to build public interest or are you more interested in protecting the project as much as possible?
David Cage: Well you know, we worked on this "Taxidermist" demo just because each time we talk about interactive storytelling and emotions people have interest, they say, "Oh, that's great but how is it going to play? Is it going to be cut-scenes? A long movie we're going to watch? Is it going to be about pressing one button every ten minutes, what's the gameplay about?" So we wanted to solve this problem by coming to people not with good answers or a nice cut-scene, but a playable demo. So this is why we show this 45-minute demo that we've done at E3 and in Leipzig, "The Taxidermist" kind of solved the problem of not really revealing anything about the story or the scenes as we just wrote a different story, more like a short movie just to illustrate how the story could be played.

GameSpy: But how about the idea of putting it online?
David Cage: Yeah, well, it's a little bit early to put a playable demo online. The game won't be released until the second half of next year, so it wouldn't make sense a year before to release a playable demo now. But maybe, there will probably be a playable demo at some point.

GameSpy: On the technical side, how did the team attempt to replicate physical movement? Were university professors or scientists involved, did you bring them in to discuss anatomy and physiology?
David Cage: Not directly. In fact, we practice a lot with mo-cap, just shot every week for three years, just trying new ideas, trying new things. Of course, we studied all the white papers on biology to make sure the stunts we created made sense. But no, there were no scientists directly involved. I think all this work's been done by other people and we have access to their research and there's no need to do this work again.

GameSpy: What is the origami structure on the front cover of Heavy Rain?
David Cage: It's the most classical origami you can make, it's one of the easiest to create. It's a crane, I think.

GameSpy: You said the game is for adults and since many adults are less experienced with playing the more advanced videogames, were you worried about making it a little easier to pick up and play for an adult?
David Cage: With adults there are two types of adults. I've played games since I was 10, I know how to play games but I'm an adult. So hopefully, we'll reach this audience of people who were gamers but just quit playing because they couldn't find the appropriate content. Once you play 10 first-person shooters how much more can you play? Maybe you still buy one once a year, but there's no material for these former gamers.

On the other hand, one important thing for us in Heavy Rain was to make the interface as simple and accessible as possible. Not for marketing reasons, we just believe it should not be so much about the controller. This part should be easy and accessible so you really forget about it and just focus on the decisions you want to make in certain sequences in the story. But doing simple things should be simple, so we definitely go for a simplified interface. This doesn't mean there is no depth to the gameplay, just that the input isn't where the depth lies, it should be what decisions you make and how they impact the story.

GameSpy: How much does music come into play in Heavy Rain?
David Cage: It's a huge part of the experience and I was really lucky with music in my previous games. I had David Bowie on Omikron, I had Angelo Badalamenti who was a David Lynch composer on Indigo Prophecy, and both of them were fantastic collaborations and they bring so much to the final result with very emotional and sensitive music. And being myself a former musician, we understand the importance of music. So we're going to announce the composer of music for Heavy Rain very soon.

GameSpy: Have you always been a screenwriter?
David Cage: No, I was a musician.

GameSpy: What did you play?
David Cage: Piano. And I was a composer and arranger of music, I worked on commercials, for record companies, I worked on advertising, TV series, movies, and I started making music for videogames. I worked with Sega, with Virgin Interactive and for different companies.

GameSpy: Is that what brought you to writing for videogames?
David Cage: No, I always wrote. I was writing novels as a hobby, making music for a living, and playing games almost full-time, so I found a way to put everything together.

Autor: GameSpy Staff
Source: GameSpy.PS3
Language:English

GamePro: How Heavy Rain strives to be the "best movie you've ever seen"

2008-12-11T15:34:00.003Z

Heavy Rain director talks about film influences like Seven and Silent of the Lambs, the game's 2000 page script, total immersion within his game's universe, how all characters in the game look like their voice actors, and how the game will force the player to make choices as a human being.

GamePro heads to Paris to visit French game developer Quantic Dream (previously known for creating the genre-bending adventure game Indigo Prophecy) and gets the latest details on their forthcoming PS3 exclusive dark thriller, Heavy Rain. We interview the company's CEO and director of the game David Cage to find out everything we can about the game that's said to redefine how photo-realistic next-gen graphics can be.

GamePro: Heavy Rain, a game that's been described by your team as a psychological thriller, is exclusive to the PlayStation 3 console. Your last game, Indigo Prophecy, was developed for Xbox, PS2, and PC. Does developing for a single console allow you to focus on creating the best possible game?
David Cage: I think when you work only on one platform, it's a huge advantage, because first thing is, you can optimize your technology to really take the best out of the hardware. Also, the fact that you know what controller you're working with and how people will play makes a big difference.

When you're simultaneously developing for multiple consoles and the PC, you have the keyboard and mouse interface, someone playing on a PC screen, and at the same time, someone playing in his living room. There's a huge difference developing solely for one console. As a game designer, you prefer to know how people will play your game and what controller they will be using so you can optimize the experience.

GamePro: Do you think that what you've achieved so far graphically and otherwise with Heavy Rain could only be possible on the PS3?
David Cage: I think that the power of the PlayStation 3 is important when creating a realistic experience like Heavy Rain. We needed a lot of bandwidth and a lot of power to create this high quality engine, to create very detailed graphics, to have these characters and facial animations, and so on. So, yeah, the architecture of the PS3 organized around SPUs (Synergistic Processing Units) is something that was extremely useful to create Heavy Rain.

GamePro: Heavy Rain is heavily influenced by movies to the point where numerous filmmaking techniques were incorporated into making the game. How is your game different from a movie?
David Cage: I can see two differences between making a movie and making a game like Heavy Rain. When you work on a movie, you have a script that is around 100 or 120 pages long, and you tell only one story. When you work on Heavy Rain, the script is about 2000 pages because we don't tell only one story, we tell many interlacing stories depending on what the player does.

We need to manage the consequences of the player's actions, whatever they choose to do. So that's a lot of work, and the second main difference is the fact that with movies, the technology side is well known and understood. On the video game side, we have a lot of technical constraints, especially when you want to work with virtual actors.

At the same time, you want to get the best out of the performance. You need to think about all the technical constraints to recreate the performance in real time 3D. So, you're always split between creativity and technology. So that's contrasting, but it's definitely something still challenging.

GamePro: How long is Heavy Rain going to be exactly?
David Cage: We're shooting for an experience between eight and ten hours long. I'm not looking for the longest experience. We're definitely not going to be beyond this ten-hour limit. I prefer to focus on ten hours that people will remember for a long time and be really conscious about every single detail, rather that giving them 60 hours of empty sets and moving from one place to another.

The pacing of the experience is really important to me. We want the experience to be fast and we want the player to move from surprise to surprise, and the pacing to be right and tight. This is our approach to it.

GamePro: A female voice actor you've shown us looks exactly like the character in the game she provided the voice for. Do all the characters in Heavy Rain look like the voice actors who provided their voices?
David Cage: Yeah. With Heavy Rain we decided that we didn't want several actors for one character. Usually, in games, you have someone for the facial scan, like, "this is the way character will look," someone else for the voice, and someone else for their motion-captured movements.

We just believed that it was not right for what we were trying to achieve with Heavy Rain. We wanted to recreate one actor with his likeness, but also his performance, because we felt it would be much more consistent. It would be a part of the characterization. So, it totally changed the way we worked on this game because the casting became a very important component of what we were doing.

We had to find not only the right face and the right voice, but just the right actor for the character. So we spent about a year doing casting sessions, here in Paris and in London, to find the right people. That was a very interesting aspect of the game, definitely, for us.

GamePro: Is everything set in stone for Heavy Rain? Do you know exactly where the story's going to end up, or are there some changes yet to be made, things still lying around in Heavy Rain's story?
David Cage: There are two aspects in a production like Heavy Rain. First, it's very heavy production with really a lot of assets to be produced. That means you can't really change your mind about the story -- it has to be set in stone once you're happy with it because the full production is going to start, and it's a huge machine. So, you can't really go back and say, "Oh, this character is not 60 years old, he's now 20 years old because I've just changed my mind."

All the story aspects have to be set in stone so production can work. But at the same time, there are other areas of the game where you know you have more time to alter, and this is especially true regarding gameplay and regarding interface. The impact of production is not really significant there. So, we continue to reiterate, to try different things, to prototype, to see what people think of what we try -- to make the best decisions for the game.

That's an important part of the game. The first thing you implement is rarely the right one, so you need to try different things until you become comfortable with it.

GamePro: If there were three reasons for gamers to care about Heavy Rain, what are they?
David Cage: I see Heavy Rain as an emotional journey. We don't see the experience as a series of obstacles just to stop the player. There won't be any puzzle you have to solve; there won't be hordes of enemies you need to fight. Everything will be about decision-making. We really see it as a journey, and it's also an emotional simulator.

We would like to create something where the player will be in different situations and feel really involved in what's going on. We want him to care for the characters, care for the story, and really want to know what's coming next, what will happen to these characters.

The final reason to care is we want to put the player in the shoes of the hero and give him difficult choices to make. It's not, "Do you want to be good or bad?" It's going to be much more ambiguous than that. We would like to ask questions to the player as a human being and say, "What would you do if it was happening to you?"

We would like the answer not to be obvious. We would like people to think, "Yeah, what would I do if it was happening to me?" You'll have to make the decision in the game of course. We try to create a couple of moments that players will remember, that will leave an imprint in their minds, like the best movies you've seen or the best books you've read.

They change something in you, and that's our ultimate goal. It's really ambitious, of course, and challenging and difficult to make, but this is what we are meant for.

GamePro: Being a game that's developed similarly to a film, what movies have influenced Heavy Rain?
David Cage: You know, it's always difficult to know where your inspiration comes from because it comes pretty much from everything -- from movies you like, from the books you read, from TV series, from comics, from paintings. Sometimes it comes from things that are really unrelated to what you're doing.

On the movie side, I really love all these dark films like "Silence of the Lambs," "Seven," or even "Fight Club." These types of movies were a huge influence.

I really enjoyed some lesser-known movies like "Memories of Murders", which is a South Korean movie, that was really interesting. There are many, many things that can influence your work. I think what is a little bit special for me on Heavy Rain is that it's maybe the first game I write in which I put some parts of my personal life or my personal experiences.

Very often when you write games, you write about things you never experienced. I've never been at war, I've never been a superhero saving the world, and most people write about these things they never experienced. On Heavy Rain, I tried to write about things that I felt, that I thought, that I experienced in my personal life. Hopefully, it's going to make the game more sincere, and hopefully people will feel it in the end.

GamePro: You've classified Heavy Rain as not being a survival-horror game and yet in the demo shown to journalists there is a woman attempting to escape a taxidermist serial killer who turns women into stuffed trophies. How is this so?
David Cage: Heavy Rain has absolutely nothing to do with the survival horror genre. The theme of the game is very, very different and quite unusual in games. It's entirely based on emotions. It's absolutely not relying on the current mechanics of survival horror titles. It's not about weapons, it's not about zombies, and it's not about surviving. It's just about making decisions in difficult situations.

GamePro: Was there anything you learned in the development process of your previous game Indigo Prophecy that you wanted to and did include in Heavy Rain?
David Cage: When you finish a game, there are always many things that you regret, that you would do differently, or that you didn't have time to try. At the end of Indigo Prophecy, we were split between the fact that we felt we tried something new and that there was a lot of interest amongst players, press, and the world, for what we had done.

We really got the feeling that we discovered something interesting by telling the story through players' actions instead of telling it through cutscenes. At the same time, there were many things we were not happy with, so we took some time after Indigo Prophecy just to read the press, read what players had to say on the forums -- really getting as much feedback as we could. Also, we had a big post-mortem in the team to talk about what we liked and we didn't like.

Basically, what we tried to do is reinforce what worked well in Indigo Prophecy into Heavy Rain, and just try new ideas, to push the envelope pretty much in all departments of the game. The most obvious department is the graphics -- we invested a lot of time and energy into developing a new graphics pipeline, and we think the result is much more effective than it was on Indigo Prophecy.

We rethought the interface of the game, the gameplay, and about how it works. We developed the idea of banding stories together to make consequences of players' actions even more tangible, even more significant. We also worked on getting rid of "Game Over" situations, which was some kind of frustration for me in Indigo Prophecy.

In a certain way, it's a failure for the designer when all you can propose is a "Game Over." It's like saying, "You know what? You died, so go back, play it again, and try to do a better job." This is the message sent to the player, and with Heavy Rain, we just try to handle the situation just as another bit of information in the script. The script has to carry on, taking this information on board.

GamePro: We know you can't reveal too much about the story, but can you tell us the general premise of Heavy Rain?
David Cage: Heavy Rain is will probably evoke themes rarely used in a game before. All the ideas behind the gameplay is based on the fact that the player will tell the story through his actions directly. They will be at the same time the actor, but also the director, even the writer of the experience.

We hope that many gamers playing Heavy Rain will see different stories, or different versions of the story. This is in a nutshell what we're working on. We don't to reveal at the moment anything about the storyline of Heavy Rain, because we feel like it's the key component of the experience. We just don't want to spoil anything about it at the moment. But the story's written and it's in production. We really feel it will spoil the pleasure of the players if we tell you too much.

Autor: Patrick Shaw
Source: GamePro
Language: English

GameTrailers.com: Heavy Rain Director and In-Depth Interviews

2008-12-11T09:27:00.001Z

Part 1

Part 2

P.S.:Big thanks to janko and liquid (you can met them at our forum) for found info like this.
Autor: GameTrailers.com
Source: Part1
Part 2
Language: English

Eurogamer:Heavy Rain preview and vital statistics

2008-12-11T08:19:00.004Z

There's no rain during our trip to Paris to see Heavy Rain, which is bad news for the photographer travelling in our group, who might have done well out of that. Then again, there's no Heavy Rain on our trip to Paris to see Heavy Rain either. Nor, it turns out, was there any sign of it at Leipzig's Games Convention in August, despite its top billing at Sony's conference and director David Cage's press briefings. When we sit down with Cage three months later to ask whether anything we've seen so far - characters, locations, scenarios - is actually in the game you'll be invited to buy in the second half of 2009, he pauses for a second. "No."

Instead we've been invited under the Channel and through the terrifying Parisian traffic to witness a speech and a slideshow. Cage - the diminutive, loquacious and occasionally poetic head of development studio Quantic Dream - wants to tell us about his ambition, his methods, and his philosophy. And it's important to emphasise his role. He wrote the 2,000-page, non-linear script that prescribes not only the game's characters, locations and scenarios, but also its gameplay mechanics, over a period of 15 months, preferring the help of Hollywood script-doctors to established game developers. He directed every one of the 60 scenes that make up the game, casting and commanding more than 70 actors and stuntmen to perfect the look. His co-CEO - the charming Guillaume de Fondaumière - treats him reverentially, greeting the press and helping us to pass the time between interview slots, but only Cage speaks about the game.

We're up against pure ego, then, in a building where everything is open plan except for a single private office (guess who), and yet we're spellbound. We can't tell you how Heavy Rain looks, sounds or plays in any great depth, but we can tell you it's interesting. As with Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in the US), Cage respectfully declines the "pattern-based" rhythm of modern action-adventures, preferring "a complex story told through contextual actions and realistic visuals", which reaches beyond the emotional palette - as he perceives it - of frustration, anger and anxiety that underscores the majority of contemporary videogames. It's easy to trigger fear and frustration, he argues, "but to make you feel social emotions like empathy is more difficult".

Cage says that Heavy Rain's development is "the largest motion capture project ever in games", but we're not shown how it will deal with your movements. Ironically, contextualising these goals within the framework of what will go on sale next year is almost impossible. Leipzig's taxidermist scenario - where a woman enters a house, discovers stuffed dead people, is surprised by the return of the house owner, and has to escape - gave us an understanding of one or two core concepts, like the 'impress' system, where a character hiding quickly in a cupboard is held in place by an awkward combination of buttons designed to bridge the emotional divide between sofa and peril. We also discovered that the Sixaxis motion sensor would be used to throw, kick and generally "give an impulsion", as Cage puts it, and that your character would move when you held a trigger and follow head movements directed by the player. But Cage refuses to elaborate during our visit, except to say that "there is some kind of language regarding the interface and how we deal with things".

Although the art is directed in Paris, a lot of the grunt work is outsourced to Asia, where artists follow a painstakingly assembled "outsourcing bible" to construct each location from a level architect's "blueprints". We ask about the way in which Cage goes about weaving story and gameplay together, speculating that just as developers who allow gameplay to dictate the scenario are often forced to concede to cut-scenes - something Cage promises only to do as a last resort - he may be forced to concede to repetition if he's to map his game to the story he wants to tell. "I'm not starting with the story and trying to fit gameplay in," he insists, becoming animated, "because that would fail the same way. What I try to do is to think about the story and the gameplay together. At the moment that I have an idea for a scene, I try to think about the potential for gameplay in this scene. Or when I think I think about a nice gameplay mechanic, what's the potential for the story? I wrote many scenes that were deleted because they had a good idea for gameplay but not for story, or a good idea for story but not for gameplay. I need to have good ideas for both in every single scene."

The consequences of these gameplay mechanics - whatever they turn out to be - will bend rubberband arcs within each scene in a manner that amplifies Fahrenheit's most noteworthy achievement. "There are scenes that you will get or you will miss based on what you've done," Cage tells us after his presentation. "There will be part of the scenes that you will see or not see, and there will be specific actions in the scenes, so it's really an open end. There is no way you can see everything in one play-through, because there are many scenes you can only see if you play a certain way."

Famously, Cage has even conquered death in Heavy Rain, having revealed earlier in development that the termination of a central character will not end the game. It's a problem he confesses that he couldn't solve in Fahrenheit, in which one character was essential to the unfolding story and others - though playable - were ultimately periphery. "What do I do?" he says, almost forlornly. "The game stops, what happens? I had to give you a game-over... With Heavy Rain, we took a big risk, and said, okay, this is a huge challenge but let's try to ensure that whatever happens we don't need game-over. There will be different ways of dealing with that."

Given the author, we suspect this means the death of playable characters will be essential to progress. Having elected to make another game of "choice and consequences", Cage is eager to assert that we will have to make difficult, contextual decisions more poignant and complex than the binary moralism of most adventures. Even so, a visual timeline of the game's story, which lurks uninspected by most of assembled press along the back wall of the production floor, is a straight line from left to right, and Cage confirms that while your path through the game will probably deviate from the guy standing behind you at the checkout, there's a coherent "linear backbone to the story".

Cage describes punishment and failure within games as an "old idea" and says that he finds modern games with their ramping difficulty off-putting. Beyond the broad strokes, our visit also contemplates the finest details - the emotional firmament of each scene, dictated not only by characters and your actions toward them, but also their surroundings. Incidentals like a mother kicking a door closed with her heel as she struggles with groceries have been motion-captured, while a prostitute's apartment reveals photographs pinned to the side of the bathroom mirror and a stereo positioned within earshot of the shower because that, we're told, is where its owner prefers to listen to it. Despite the Havok sticker on the posters, it's no surprise to learn that Cage also guides the physics within each location, insisting that your material impact on any given scene must make sense within context. "You cannot when you visit the prostitute, for example, just take a pillow and throw it on her and make a mess," he explains.

At the end of his initial presentation, Cage guides us through a number of the game's locations - its "sets" - taking in the prostitute's home, an antique shop full of dusty typewriters (each of which has individually modelled keys), a train station showered through giant windows by the light of dusk, and a grim crime scene in the night, at which a detective - potentially one of the core cast - stands at the police line, while cops in overcoats pick through the scraps of grass around a tarpaulin-suited body, under the sweeping lights of the traffic crossing a bridge overhead. Heavy rain falls. We ask Cage about his decision to set both his recent games on the US East Coast. "With these two games I tried to create dark thrillers," he says. "You don't choose the place where the story takes place just because it's cool; it has to support your story, and I think that's the case."

Trophies will be included, but Cage hasn't decided how. "It's not exactly what we're trying to achieve with Heavy Rain, but I think we're going to make it work," he says. It's another response that he delivers without much contemplation. That, evidently, came long ago, as did the decision to jettison anything approaching the outlandish conclusion to Fahrenheit. "When the game was released, you guys wrote that the most interesting part was probably the first two-thirds where we were just following normal people in normal life, and we were just with them. Working on Heavy Rain, we just decided [the ending] is not a mistake we should do again. We can tell a real story about real people in real life, and we can make it as interesting as anything else." Cage may be polarisingly self-assured, but it's the first time since we arrived in France that we've decided he's wrong. This is more interesting than anything else.

One of the fascinating things about Heavy Rain - previewed on Eurogamer today - is its reliance on development studio head David Cage, who wrote the massive script single-handedly, and motion capture. On a recent excursion to see the game in development, we noted down a few of the more interesting stats in its creator's presentation. We thought you might enjoy them, so here they are:

The script

2,000 pages long

60 scenes, each about 15-20 minutes long, most, but not all of which you see on any play-through

40,000 words of non-linear dialogue

Based on 6,000 pages of notes and references

15 months in development

The art design

Two weeks scouting for locations on the East Coast of the USA

15 months of design by ten people

Photos, topographical gameplay maps, sketches of every item, paintings of every scene

The outsourcing to Asia

Over 100 people involved outside Quantic Dream

480 man-months of work

Based on an "outsourcing bible" and "level architect blueprints"

The motion capture

All done on-site at Quantic Dream in Paris

170 days of shooting across nine months

Over 70 actors and stuntmen involved

Casting sessions in Paris and London

30,000 unique animations recorded

Autor: Tom Bramwell
Source: Eurogamer.net
Language: English

1UP: Heavy Rain Interview

2008-12-01T06:57:00.005Z

1UP: I heard you mention at Games Convention that Heavy Rain is "everything we learned and did right on [Indigo Prophecy] done 10 times better, less everything we've done wrong." What are some examples of things you did wrong in Indigo Prophecy that you're staying away from this time?

David Cage: After [Indigo Prophecy], we spent a lot of time reading reviews and players' feedback on forums. We also had our own ideas about what worked and what didn't. First and foremost, I think we have a much stronger script in Heavy Rain. Although it was more complex to write, I think the characters have real substance, and the story should be emotionally involving. I also tried to evoke themes rarely used in games, which should be one of the challenges of the game, but also one of its more interesting aspects. It's an important test for me to see if we can tell more subtle stories and trigger more complex emotions in a game or not -- something we already started to experiment with in [our] The Casting demo.

We also continued to develop our concept of "bending stories," allowing players' actions to have consequences on the story. We pushed this idea further, in a more constant, fluid, and effective way. We also entirely redesigned the way action scenes work, something that was one of the weak aspects of [Indigo Prophecy].

We also spent a lot of time and energy in developing a solid engine, graphics tools, and pipelines. I think gamers can already judge the graphic quality from the first playable demo we presented. Many people seemed to think that this pre-teaser was prerendered and not interactive, but it's entirely real time and fully playable.

We really improved the experience at all levels, with more interactivity, new gameplay mechanics and interfaces, high-quality sets and virtual actors, a new technology of facial motion capture, better animations, and many, many other surprises I cannot reveal now. But, believe me, what we've shown so far is nothing compared to what we're currently working on for the full game.

1UP: You also mentioned at Games Convention that the taxidermist scene you showed won't be part of the game's main story. Will it still appear in the game, and if so, in the exact same way we saw it? Or perhaps with changes, such as how Konami showed Metal Gear Solid 2 scenes in their marketing with Snake as the main character -- even though he never appeared in those scenes in the real game -- to avoid spoilers?

DC: Not showing a part of the game was really important to us. We believe story is a key component of the experience, and we didn't want to spoil it. We haven't decided yet how this first playable will be used. Maybe as a bonus scene that players will unlock in the game, or maybe as extra downloadable content.

1UP: You warned against reading too much into the taxidermist scene, but does that scene suggest Heavy Rain's themes might be more rooted in reality than Indigo Prophecy's?

DC: Definitely. We tend to believe in our industry that we need to tell simplistic or spectacular stories, where the hero saves the world, destroys evil, or has supernatural powers. This is because the videogame, as a medium, has been too immature to tell complex and subtle stories. I made this mistake myself at the end of [Indigo Prophecy], where I felt my story needed something spectacular because all I had so far was normal people leading a normal life. I realized that the "normal" part was the one that worked the best, and that it wasn't necessary to save the world to tell something exciting anymore. Heavy Rain will be about normal people in real life, and I believe it'll be much more emotionally involving, as gamers will easily relate to the situations and characters. This is a new approach. In Heavy Rain, you won't be a superhero or a gangster. You'll just be someone real.

1UP: How have the button-pressing minigames in Heavy Rain evolved from those in Indigo Prophecy?

DC: Of course, we were not satisfied with the way PAR (this is what we call these sequences) were implemented in [Indigo Prophecy]. We bet on the peripheral vision of the player, and it didn't really work. Having said that, we didn't want to throw away everything just because we did it wrong. There are some very interesting aspects to PAR: There's no limit to the types of actions, animations, and cameras you can offer, which makes every single action and scene unique. These scenes are very spectacular, fully contextual, and easy to understand and play. They're also more and more common, as they've been used in games like Shenmue, Tomb Raider, and God of War.

So I started again from a blank page and tried to keep what I liked about PAR while getting rid of what I didn't like. I think we found an interesting new solution by integrating symbols in 3D in the set and in animating them with the character or object they relate to. It's much less disruptive for the visuals, better integrated -- and, if well tuned, can be interesting to play. We also changed the pacing of the action, asking for fewer symbols but on a fast pace. PAR segments are just used in certain sequences for certain actions, of course; they don't constitute the main component of the experience.

I know there's always a strong reluctance from some hardcore gamers for this type of sequence, but we hope to convince them by the way we're going to implement them and by how we'll make these sequences really enjoyable and spectacular.

1UP: How do you determine which actions players will perform with the right analog stick and which they'll perform with physical controller movements?

DC: We use the Sixaxis motion controller for violent actions requiring you to push, hit, or kick in general. Our approach to interface is really based on emulating the character's moves on the controller. We want to make the player feel the same way as his character onscreen.

1UP: Will players use the PS3 controller's face buttons for anything?

DC: We don't use them for the moment, apart from action sequences. We don't feel we need them for the moment.

1UP: In a recent interview with Develop magazine, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said, "One focus that has been, and will be, key is how we use the online technology and PlayStation Network to involve more consumers in participating.... That's the major common theme that we are trying to enforce with all our projects." Might we see any online features in Heavy Rain?

DC: Heavy Rain's an experience about interactive narrative and emotion, and we really wanted to focus on making these core elements right. The game will support the Trophy system and may offer some kind of extra content online, but Heavy Rain is a single-player experience.

1UP: What's the biggest development challenge you're currently facing?

DC: The biggest challenge is probably about the overall level of detail and quality we need to reach in all areas of the game. Any detail may break the illusion and stop the suspension of disbelief. In most action games, the player can accept that dead bodies disappear after a while; this kind of thing would break the experience in Heavy Rain. All characters have to move and behave right, all elements in the environment that the player may want to interact with must be interactive, and the story must behave in a logical way, always offering the player possibilities that they'd reasonably expect. Maintaining this level of quality and consistency through the full game is definitely a challenge, especially because each scene is unique, and most of the time offers a specific [type of] gameplay.

1UP: Is Heavy Rain the only project in development at Quantic Dream, or is the company a multiple-game studio at the moment?

DC: Quantic Dream's been a single-project company for years. We put a lot of energy and attention in our projects, and we never wanted to compromise the quality. The company has now reached another stage where we're ready to have two and soon three projects at the same time, with the same desire of ambition and originality. We want to continue to pioneer emotion and narrative in games in the future, but also apply what we've learned to different formats and different genres. Online is definitely going to be one of our next steps. This industry changes quickly, and online is going to be a key component of not only gameplay, but also of distribution in the near future. What gets me excited is to work on new ideas and new challenges, and I think we have some very unique concepts in the pipeline.

Autor: Matt Leone
Source: 1UP.com
Language: English

Micromania Games Show 2008: Heavy Rain public presentation video

2008-11-01T17:26:00.010Z

Here's the public presentation of Heavy Rain for the PlayStation 3 made by its Producer at Micromania Games Show 2008 in Paris.

- In this demo, the player takes the role of a young journalist who is investigating on several girls' disappearances, she goes to a house of a taxidermist who is suspected of killing these women. In this presentation, the Producer of the game shows 2 different ways to finish this demo, there are lots of different ways to get through the story.

- Multiple view camera system, not always behind the girl.

- The demo is fully playable, no cut-scenes, the player can control the girl at any time.

- The Sixaxis motion sensor is used in the game to make different moves (open a window, raise or hit on an object, etc.).

- It is possible to hear what is happening in the mind of the character, so the player knows the different choices that are available.

- No loadings in the game!

- Backgrounds are fully interactive (all objects can be used, all doors can be opened, etc.).

- Very interesting Split Screen System to keep an eye on the murderer, control the character at the same time.

- The player has to maintain several buttons to stay hidden, uncomfortable situation for the player to reproduce the same stress in the game.

- Quick time events for some action scenes.

Autor: Antoine Morcos
Source: GameKyo (JeuxRance.com)
Language: English/French

Quantic Licenses Omegame Menus Master For Heavy Rain

2008-10-31T07:00:00.000Z

French middleware company Omegame announced that Paris-based developer Quantic Dream licensed Menus Master, a user interface toolchain, for upcoming PlayStation 3-exclusive title Heavy Rain.

Menus Master is designed to help artists and programmers reduce the time it takes to author game user interfaces, such as 2D and 3D front-ends, in-game UIs, and heads-up displays. With the software, game user interfaces can be fully authored by artists, without the assistance of a programmer.

Though little has been revealed about Heavy Rain, which is due sometime in 2009, director David Cage has previously described it as a "dark film noir thriller with mature themes."

Quantic Dream’s previous titles include Omikron: The Nomad Soul, which was released for PC and Dreamcast, and Indigo Prophecy (also known as Fahrenheit in Europe) for the Xbox, PS2, and PC.

"We want to immerse audiences emotionally in the story, make them care for the characters and what happens to them," says Quantic Dream's co-CEO and Heavy Rain's executive producer Guillaume de Fondaumière.

He continues, "The user interface, which is the link between the game and the player, is therefore very important. We benchmarked different technologies available on the market, and finally selected Menus Master as it was the only solution providing both great artistic possibilities and easy integration within our in-house engine and tools.”

Autor: Eric Caoili
Source: GamaSutra
Language: English

Gamesindustry.biz: Living the Dream

2008-10-22T08:00:00.001Z

At this year's Sony press conference in Leipzig one of the key presentations to take place was for Heavy Rain, a visually intricate horror title from French developer Quantic Dream, which makes extensive use of detailed motion capture.

To find out more about how the game is coming along, and to get a picture of the development landscape in France, GamesIndustry.biz spoke to Quantic Dream CEO Guillaume de Fondaumière in the build up to this year's Game Connection event, where the company will be exhibiting.

Q: We're coming up to Game Connection - what do you hope to get from the event?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Well, I guess two things. The first thing is that it's always interesting to meet the industry, basically, and also the publishers - we shouldn't forget that Quantic Dream is a videogames developer first and foremost, so I'll be able to meet with all the people involved with acquisition of product. So it's going to be interesting to feel the pulse of the industry during the event - even if we don't really have something to sell at this stage.

On the other hand it's also going to give us the possibility to meet again, or for the first time, fellow game developers who would want to take advantage of our motion capture system - to be able to present to them our services, and look at their projects and see if we can work together.

Q: It's been an interesting few months for Quantic Dream, following the demonstration of Heavy Rain at the Sony press conference in Leipzig?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Yes, we're very happy and excited. We're in the last half of the development of Heavy Rain, and it was important for us to be able to finally show some first scenes of the game to the journalists - and indirectly also to the audience.

We've been very happy with the response - you never know what to expect when you develop projects that are quite innovative and, I would say, out of the normal route for games. You never know, and I must say from what I read it seems that it's been unanimously regarded as something that's interesting - and people want to see more and play the game. So we're very happy about that.

Q: How important do you think it is for videogames to do something unique, something different?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Well, I think that almost for the past fifteen years gamers have been pretty much - and this is a caricature of course - playing the same game, killing the same zombies down the same dark corridors. I think that gamers maybe feel a little bit bored these days and - we think, at least - are looking for something a little bit different, more emotional, something that has more depth and meaning.

The initial response we got, a least from some journalists who are to a certain degree core gamers, was that this is something that interests them. So we're excited to work on such an innovative title.

I think that when you look at the market in the past two years, for example some products that Nintendo has released recently, you see that there's a new audience hungry for videogames. Again, you need to create new experiences to be able to attract these new audiences.

Yesterday, 40 or 50 year-old couples might have bought Wii Fit to exercise a little bit - tomorrow maybe they want to play a thriller like Heavy Rain on their PlayStation 3?

I think it's important for the industry to reinvent itself today, also because we're facing huge competition from TV in particular - TV series' have become a hugely popular form of entertainment, so we have to raise the bar of our productions and create the next generation of entertainment.

Q: You mentioned the "E" word there - emotion. A lot of people are looking to try and involve gamers more in games, but very few arouse a genuine emotional response in gamers. How far is the industry from really being able to do that on the same level as film and TV?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: I think there are many ways to provoke emotions from an audience. Films are a good example, and certain games do this relatively well. Our approach is that to hook an audience you need to have a good story. I think this interactive narrative... we're only at the beginning of tapping into the whole potential of what this new form of storytelling can bring in terms of emotion and audience involvement into videogames.

The other thing is that audiences must truly immerse themselves, not only in the story but also in the characters. This is why we've put a great amount of focus in the creation of what we call virtual actors - basically 3D characters that are capable of expressing emotions, and thereby evoking emotions on the part of the audience.

I think today we have the technology to be able to do that - there's still a lot of work on the interactive narration, and hopefully Heavy Rain will demonstrate this, that we are at the stage where we do have a story which you can play, rather than just watch through cutscenes.

For the virtual actors we do have the technology to create hyper-realistic characters and to have them perform like real actors. We're really entering into new territory here, and we'll see what the response will be from audiences, but we're quite confident that this title will be the first milestone in this direction.

Q: There are big companies, like Ubisoft and Ninja Theory, which are looking at taking their games to other media. Does that prove that there's less distance between games and other entertainment forms?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Oh yes, there is less distance. We're all working with similar technologies. I think that what's going to make the difference between the different titles is the way the story is treated - interactive story elements - and this is something that David Cage [founder of Quantic Dream] and his team have been working on for many years now. This is really going to make the difference.

If you only take a franchise and the characters, and even if you animate them in a realistic way, this is not enough. If you're still driving your story through cutscenes, you're not tapping the full potential of creating the emotional response from audiences as you could if you were really giving players the possibility to play the story - in particular give them the possibility to change the story through their actions.

I think this is really a totally different thing, and this is a unique thing that games can offer - to really give the audience the opportunity to have an impact on the story.

Today, David uses this analogy with porn movies quite often - he says that most games are basically like porn movies. There's action, and that's what most people come for, and then there's a story (basically a cutscene), and then there's action. This is the way a porn movie is structured, and this is the way most games are structured too nowadays.

What's we're trying to do is mix this together and make a new form of entertainment, which so far we're calling interactive cinema, or interactive drama... we didn't find a better word so far to suit it.

Again, we don't think it's the only solution to create the "E" word, as you say, but it's certainly one path into creating emotion for our audience.

Q: You've invested a lot in motion capture - how have you found the cost of the Heavy Rain project? Is motion capture cheaper in the long run than animation, for example?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: The thing is that you need to compare like for like. If you compare the cost of a game with twelve hours of key frame animation to a production of a similar game with a similar amount of animation but where motion capture has been extensively used to create those animations - there's simply no comparison, motion capture is by far the fastest and cheapest way to create those animations.

Of course, using motion capture you have to acquire or rent a system, and you have to have actors - pretty good actors really, because the technology is pretty good today, so you want to capture excellent performance.

But even if you sum all this up, all the technology, I think it's still much more relevant to create these animations using a motion capture system rather than in a classical way.

That's basically it - I don't think the cost of Heavy Rain is far apart from any other triple A title that's out there on the market.

Q: What's the development picture like in France at the moment?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: I think it's no secret that France was a booming videogames country in the late eighties and throughout the nineties, and then we faced some major difficulties I would say between 2000 and 2005.

I guess there were two reasons for that downturn - first of all we've been hit by the distortion of competition - primarily from Canada, from Montreal, which as you know is a French-speaking province. The fact that they created a tax credit worth almost 50 per cent, this has had a big impact in France, and a lot of our creators, developers and programmers went to Canada, so I think we lost more than half of the community to Montreal in those days.

The second thing is that we didn't develop the right titles - as simple as that. I think that our studios weren't matching the demand of the market, and it's taken us some time to get our things back together - and for certain studios to reach maturity.

Today I think that the landscape is very different from five or six years ago. First of all we've finally obtained a production tax credit of 20 per cent - it's still relatively low, lower than in Canada, but it helps to correct this distortion of competition that we've suffered from, and it helps studios recapitalise, helps us in financing our activities from this year on.

It's certainly going to have a very positive impact. My calculation is that approximately EUR 12-15 million is going to flow into the studios in the coming months thanks to this tax credit. It's not an awful lot of money, but it's still a welcome push, especially nowadays.

The second thing, as I said, is that some studios have matured and been able to create different titles, a number of which should be successful and significant, and come out into the market in the coming twelve months or so.

Q: There's this condition to the tax break of a game needing to be 'cultural' - do you think that's a useful term to use? How many games do you think fit under that label?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: I think all games are cultural. Unfortunately we weren't able, during our discussions with the European Commission to make them understand that all games are culture.

With 18 months of tough negotiations, we've been able to come to an agreement that a definition that unfortunately excludes 30-40 per cent of games that are produced.

But I prefer to see the glass half full, rather than half empty, and I think it's a step in the right direction. I think that this measure is going to prove beneficial to the French videogames sector, and I think that we have to continue, at the European level, to educate people as to what games are, why it's important to have a lively European videogames sector, and hopefully in the future we will be able to obtain from the European Union a far wider recognition of videogames as a form of cultural expression.

My aim is that all games be recognised as a form of cultural expression in the way that all movies are recognised as a form of cultural recognition.

Q: Isn't it going to be tough to persuade those people who didn't grow up with videogames, because it's not a part of their own culture?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Of course, I think that the generation gap is an important factor, although when we started our discussions the culturally recognised games were the exception. Here I think today, if you take the definition that has been accepted by the European Commission, a good majority of games fall into this category.

In only 18 months - and I must say almost alone - we've been able to, if not change their minds, then at least alter their judgement. So I think that if all countries adopt a similar approach and go one-by-one to the EU, explain what the sector is, what their games are, why this is culture to them and culture in general, then I think it will help to change their minds.

Q: On a final note, how is the development for Heavy Rain coming along?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: Development is going as planned. We're currently recording all the dialogue for the game in our audio studio. No major worries, everything is going like planned.

Q: Any release date available as yet?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: I can't tell you more about that, but the game has been announced for 2009 - later, rather than earlier, but it's an end of summer, beginning of Autumn/Winter title.

Autor: Phil Elliott
Source: Gamesindustry.biz
Language: English

October 2008 Heary Rain progress screens and artwork

2008-10-09T12:37:00.006Z

Special thanks to Janko for found this.
Autor: Different sources.
Source:
Language:

VG247: Heavy Rain play target is “8-12 hours,” says Cage

2008-09-12T12:03:00.001Z

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Quantic Dream boss David Cage said a single walk through of top drawer PS3 thriller Heavy Rain is likely to take no more than 12 hours.

“We’re still in the middle of production, so I can’t really tell you the exact time of the game, but we’re targeting a game between eight and 12 hours in gameplay for one walk through,”

he said.

Seen for the first time in Germany last month, the game showed what appeared to be unparalleled plot-branching, a fact, Cage said, likely to keep the hardcore coming back for much more.

“It’s impossible in one walk through to see everything there is to see,”

he added.

“And that’s going to be OK. For most gamers, they’re going to play it once, and really enjoy it and have a great journey, but some hardcore gamers will want to come back and see everything, and all possible options.”

Heavy Rain has been branded PS3’s “most important title for next year” by SCEE boss David Reeves.

Autor: VG247 Staff
Source: VideoGaming247
Language: English