The “Break it Down” Blog

It seems that everything Quantic Dream does is meticulous, intentional and detail-oriented to say the least. When I first laid my hands on Indigo Prophecy (after nagging from a friend that it was an “awesome story-driven game”) I could tell in the first scene that things were going to be different. The game opens up with a mock-movie-set where you are shown how to play the game as if you were an actor in a movie being shown how to run certain scenes and lines.

Well that’s different… and really damn creative. How much money did it cost to develop this tutorial instead of throwing text up on my screen? Quantic obviously likes to do things their way.

Fast-forward about a year and in-comes the 2006 E3 demo “Casting” video that Quantic Dream put together just to show off how realistic 3D characters could be when backed by a strong script and voice-acting. They must have spent 6 months preparing the animated sequences, mo-cap, script, voice acting, effects, etc. all for that one demo movie that ended up having nothing to do with the final game (the character see in the Casting video is not the main character from Heavy Rain).

Now fast forward to this years Game Con 2008 and we see Quantic Dream has put together another demo video, undoubtedly taking another few months to do so, that shows off the new game engine, new main character, a few NPCs and the revised Quick-Time-Sequence implementation:

The best part is that this entire sequence, that fat NPC and house she sneaks into do not occur in the game. Again, Quantic has put this together to just give folks a tease… a little taste, without giving away any of the story.

In an interview with 1up, Quantic Dream’s President/CEO David Cage (he also writes and directs Heavy Rain) comes across as an enigmatic character with the charisma of a Peter Molyneux and showmanship sense of a Steve Jobs — in short, Cage knows how to bait us and goddamn does it work.

In Heavy Rain, Cage clarified, there is no supernatural overtones that we saw in Indigo Prophecy. He pointed out that a lot of the attachment to Indigo Prophecy, it’s characters and it’s story line, all occured in the “everyday life” flows of the game — not that they were uneventful or boring, murders can be incredibly complex story lines… he just pointed out that you didn’t necessarily need aliens/magic/etc. to increase the gamers experience.

Cage points out that Heavy Rain will focus around “normal life”, I’m guessing what he means here is that whatever happens in the game could possibly happen in real life… no aliens. For anyone that just got bumed out, consider how good something like Usual Suspects was, and there were no aliens in that.

One of the things that blew me away about this presentation was the fidelity of the game engine driving Heavy Rain. Being a PS3-exclusive at this point, it’s possible that Heavy Rain (not Little Big Planet, Resistence 2 or Killzone 2) turns into the “must have” title for the PS3 and starts to move consoles late 2009. We might find out that it’s not another shooter or goofy-cute platformer that folks want, but an honest-to-god intense experience that they cannot have anywhere else.

To say that I’m “excited” about Heavy Rain is an understatement… I’m jonsing. We will certainly keep you posted on any new impressive developments as they pop up.