Jake "OrangeGoblin"
Editorial, Preview Tuesday, November 3rd 2009

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As well as letting us get our grubby mitts on upcoming titles, Eurogamer Expo ‘09 was packed with developers telling the stories behind their games. Here’s the first in a series of posts about what they had to say.

“How far are you prepared to go in order to save someone you love?” asks David Cage, founder of French games studio Quantic Dream and director of Heavy Rain. In any other game your answer would probably be “to the next level, if I get to fight a cool boss,” but Cage says he plans to make you feel something more.

The emphasis of Heavy Rain is not on shooting, driving, or strange logic puzzles. Instead, Cage wants players to empathise with the four main characters of the game, who have all had their lives affected by the mysterious Origami Killer.

There’s Norman Jayden, the FBI profiler investigating the case, who has secret drug addiction and some high-tech glasses, and Madison Paige, who can only sleep in motels. Also hunting the Origami Killer is private detective Scott Shelby, and Ethan Mars, who’s son has been taken by the killer.

To demonstrate the game, Cage is showing a scene starring Shelby. This is the same part of the game that was on show at PAX; Shelby visits Hassan’s Shop, a small store run by the father of one of the killer’s victims, only to be interrupted by a robbery.

Cage showed us how the scene can play out in a number of different ways. Grab a bottle off the incredibly detailed shelves and whack the robber over the head. Step on some crisps littering the floor, and get caught by the robber. Put your hands up and reason with him, or go in and fight hand-to-hand. “Using psychology,” says Cage, to a big audience laugh.

Next up is a trailer featuring Ethan Mars. It could easily be for a thriller movie, right down to the Trailer Guy voiceover. What really interests me is the sheer mundanity of it. A shot of Ethan eating breakfast with his son gets me incredibly excited, simply because we rarely see such genuine human interaction in a video game. Now it’s time for questions from the audience.

How many ways are there to play the game?

Cage dodges that one, answering it’s “hard to say”, with each action having so many possible repercussions.

Can games be art?

I heard a few groans, myself included. “There are two ways of thinking about games,” answers Cage. Games can be toys or entertainment, just something to have fun with. Or, interactivity can be an art form, where the goal is not fun, but to make you feel something. But he doesn’t care if people call Heavy Rain art or not.

The media fixates on sex scenes, like Fox News and Mass Effect. What are you going to do about that?

Cage has one simple rule – everything is allowed, as long as it makes sense in the story. Sex and violence should only be there if it is needed, and not gratuitous.

He hopes that if Fox News attack Heavy Rain, gamers will rise up and throw stones at them. The game is rated 18, and by then you should be old enough not be shocked by the sight of virtual nipples, but the development community must also take responsibility. He offers a thinly-veiled criticism of Grand Theft Auto’s capacity for killing prostitutes as an example of developers going to far. “We all pay the price,” he says.

What did you learn from Fahrenheit?

“Do we have two or three days for the answer?” he jokes. No one was interested in publishing the game when he was first trying to sell it, but once the game was out he’d get calls from publishers saying how much they enjoyed playing it with their wife. Fahrenheit was essentially the prototype for Heavy Rain.

How will difficulty options change the game?

The main effect is how you use the controller. Hardcore gamers will have to use all the buttons, sticks, and motion controls of the PS3, but the easiest difficulty uses just one button. You can also press L2 to hear the characters thoughts on the situation. As the difficulty is reduced, this essentially becomes an in-game walkthrough. But the game won’t play itself – “I’m not a frustrated movie director,” says Cage.

Will Cage be in the game’s tutorial, as with Fahrenheit?

“Never again,” he says. He got a lot of stick for doing it in Fahrenheit, and Heavy Rain is meant to be about emotions, not David Cage.

Why are your games set in America?

“Good question,” responds Cage. He’s a fan of M. Night Shyamalan, who sets a lot of his movies in Philadelphia, so Cage took the Heavy Rain team there for some location scouting. “It was the most shocking experience of my life,” he admits.

He wanted to see the poor places, the worse parts of America. They hired the movie scout from Philadelphia, who showed them the barbed wire and abandoned railways, the crumbling houses and the burnt out cars. The scout took them to meet two incredibly poor families, so they could see what life was like for them. One family had just lost their daughter, and were crying as Cage’s team took pictures.

“We felt so stupid,” he says. But it changed how he wrote Heavy Rain, and if the game conveys just 1% of what he saw and felt, he will be happy.

Are you prepared to make cuts to get the game released in Australia, where the ratings only go up to 15?

“We haven’t discussed it yet,” says Cage. Minor cuts have been made for other countries, but as far as he knows Australia will accept the game as it is. If not, he will fight for it. It’s not porn, not ultraviolence, its just a story.

Are the graphics of Heavy Rain possible on any other system?

“Whatever I answer, it will be suspicious!” he laughs. “Honestly, I don’t think so.” It had to be on PS3 for two reasons: the hardware, and for Sony. The architecture is very powerful if you make a real PS3 engine, instead of just porting. PlayStation is part of his culture, the controller part of his home.

He doesn’t think you necessarily need ultra-realistic graphics to get emotion, but that was the idea for Heavy Rain The graphics are so real that when he sees the game’s actors, he thinks they look like video game characters.

“I thank Sony and will never thank them again,” he says. “Enough! Not again, enough!” The audience laugh. Sony take risks on games like LittleBigPlanet and Flower Cage says, and not enough companies take risks these days.

And with that, we were done. Cage certainly had some interesting things to say for himself, particularly the moving story about Philadelphia, and the game looks undeniably incredible. As it stands, Heavy Rain is top of my “games to buy a PS3 for” list.

Still, I can’t help but remember the absolute travesty that was the second half of Fahrenheit, and hope that Cage won’t make the same mistakes twice. I also question his assertion of not being a frustrated movie director – the game apes cinema at every possible opportunity. Will Heavy Rain be interactive enough to avoid cutscene fatigue? We’ll have to wait until next year to find out.