December 11, 2008 – How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love? For most people in real life, they’d risk life and limb, particularly if the person that you love was in danger of dying. But would you feel the same way with a video game character? Quantic Dream is working hard on trying to blur this distinction by making a title that will play with your emotions, raise the level of story telling and expand gaming. Heavy Rain, their upcoming film noir thriller, will exclusively hit the PS3 sometime next year, and I had a chance to check out some of the elements that will be working their way into the game at Quantic’s Paris studio.
According to David Cage, the writer and director of Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream’s vision is “to create experiences that engage players emotionally, explore the potential of interactive storytelling and creates new formats for adult audiences.” The studio has a significant track record with attempting these kinds of titles, with projects like Omikron: the Nomad Soul and Indigo Prophecy as part of their resume. But how does that vision influence Heavy Rain? Cage stated that the game will be a film noir thriller that revolves around interactive story telling. That means that the story will change based on the actions and choices of the player, with various consequences based on what you happen to select. “We see it as an emotional journey based on the fact that you tell the story, not through cutscenes, but directly through your actions,” Cage said. This is intentionally designed to set the player on an emotional roller coaster that will have depth and meaning and will be original and innovative.
Check out Heavy Rain videos here (HD available).
As a result, the development team is trying to create significant moral choices for the player during specific moments. “One of our goals in Heavy Rain is to create some specific moments where the player will have to make a decision, and the decision won’t be obvious,” Cage said. “So the game is not about being good or bad; it’s about asking difficult questions to the player so they ask themselves, ‘What would I do if this happened to me?’ The answer is not obvious – you really need to think about it.” Cage intentionally brought up death in games, which is extremely easy because you kill hundreds or thousands of enemies across a number of titles and there’s no impact or consequence to the player at all because that’s the entire purpose of that particular game. That’s not the kind of game that Heavy Rain is, and in fact, the development team wants the impact of death to be an introspective moment for the player. “I would really like to find a way that killing one person would actually mean something to you, and that this decision is not obvious at all – that there’s more of an attachment to this person, but there’s maybe a trade off, like if you kill him, you’ll get something, but if you don’t kill him, you’ll get something else,” Cage said.
That’s an extremely ambitious plan for a game, and Quantic Dream knows this primarily from experience. The team has been working on the plot and gameplay elements for more than two years, and knew that there had to be a lot of assets and materials to support the scope and scale of the project without diluting it for multiple systems. According to Cage, Quantic learned this the hard way on Indigo Prophecy, because trying to program for multiple consoles forced them to compromise a number of their artistic choices at the end of that game to make sure it was shipped in time. To avoid this, it was decided that Heavy Rain would be PS3 native from the beginning to support the significant development stats behind the project.
The attention to detail is stunning.Heavy Rain’s non-linear script, which took a total of fifteen months to write totals 2,000 pages (or the equivalent of twenty movies), spread out over ninety separate scenes, including the various actions, consequences and choices that could potentially occur within each scene. Cage worked with a Hollywood script doctor to make sure that the game was written like a movie, because he felt that “games are mature enough to tell complex stories with depth and meaning.” However, the complex side of the script writing came in the fractal structure of the plot development, meaning that the same kind of detail for each scene and the development across every single choice present in these scenes had to have a full five act structure to improve the overall story. In fact, Cage mentioned that “each scene had to offer something strong in terms of narrative and play” to be valid for the story. This meant keeping cutscenes down to a minimum and only using them when absolutely necessary, and making sure that scenes flowed seamlessly and quickly while constantly keeping a player on their toes and not being sure what to expect from one instance to another. If done properly, Cage surmised, the overall presentation would create moments that would leave imprints in the player’s mind.
Bolstering this effort is a significant amount of motion capture, making Heavy Rain the largest mo-capped game ever made. More than 170 days of mo-cap shooting have currently been mo-capped for Heavy Rain, and eventually there will be a grand total of nine months of mo-cap work every single day for the project. Unlike Indigo Prophecy, which had 15 actors that were mo-capped for the game, Heavy Rain will have more than seventy actors and stuntmen fully captured to allow each character to have their own distinctive walk and stance, with more than 30,000 unique animations for characters in all. If you’ve seen any of the video for Heavy Rain, you’ll notice just how realistic and how lifelike the characters appear, which seems to have bridged the “uncanny valley” between digital characters and real people. Cage emphasized that the way to present seemingly lifelike characters is with the right casting, which involved a full year looking for the right actors and actresses with specific looks that the team wanted for characters before they performed voice over and mo-cap sessions, as well as 3D mesh captures of the face and the eyes.
In fact, when asked about how Quantic managed to handle this tricky feat for developers, Cage said, “the big step forward that we made was capturing the eyes of the real actors, because it’s something very few people do, and it makes a huge difference. It’s so complex what’s going on that most of the time when you quickly look at it, you go, ‘Oh, the eyes are just looking here and that’s fine, I can animate that,’ but you never get the same result. There’s a subtlety here that’s really difficult to reproduce by hand, so the best way we found was to capture it from the actor,” Cage said. But much more than simply running these people through a 3D scanner, the actors that worked on the project completely dedicated themselves to their roles, working on and memorizing their parts for an entire year. One actor even mentioned that the entire game was like working on three movie roles in one.
Quantic has spent a lot of time making sure that characters look and act realistically.While Cage showed us some of the characters that had been scanned and rendered in the game, he also mentioned that the designers did 3D scanning of people on the street to help them with their character creation. What was striking was that not every person scanned would play a significant role within the game, but the texture and detail of each person would obviously make a scene more realistic. We were shown shots of old men and women, a businessman with a Bluetooth headset, a young boy, a bodyguard and other characters, all of whom looked extremely lifelike. What’s more, when Cage animated some of the faces, the effect was incredible and even a little unsettling because it was so realistic.
Adding to the realism is the attention to detail for the locations in the game, which feel almost photorealistic. The team worked with movie set designers and architects to come up with many of the environments that form the background of scenes, and even sent two weeks with the entire development team on the U.S. east coast to gain videos and location ideas. From there, the ten person design team spent fifteen months coming up with the basic elements for each section of the game. That included storyboard ideas, placeholder geometry or texture maps and other design features. Considering the large amount of assets, the team knew they wouldn’t be able to produce the entire game on their own. As a result, the company created an outsourcing bible and pointed out in exact detail what each location should look like. From there, Quantic outsourced some of the game to a company in Asia to produce much of the environments before they were sent back to Quantic for final touching up and improvements. In all, more than 480 people have been involved in the outsourcing of the title, which makes this the largest game outsourcing project ever, and across the three years of development, more than 220 people at Quantic will have worked on the overall title.
What’s a thriller without a crime scene?Regardless of the numbers involved, the scenes that were shown looked amazing. Whether it was the recreation of a home with paper butterflies strewn across an overhang or the attention to detail within a train station (including its animated schedule signs), Heavy Rain will look incredible. Cage showed footage of varied environments as well and moved through them in real time with the camera, highlighting the amount of items that have been rendered and placed as set pieces, so I could get an idea of how these spaces would appear to characters. It wasn’t much of a stretch to gain a sense of the people that lived and worked in different environments. For example, when I was shown a mechanical workshop, which featured a lot of typewriters and clocks, it was easy to get a sense of the kind of artisan that worked there by looking at the various springs, gears and other items placed next to works in progress. Flying through a small cluttered apartment, you got an idea of a young woman that did her best to make her studio apartment distinctive between her kitchen, bedroom area and bath. Although the last thing that Cage showed off was a rainy crime scene, with police moving around and setting up a cordon around a location of interest, the amount of detail within the rain that fell, the faces of the police and the train yard that was shown was enough to both give a chill to the player and make you interested in investigating the area. Needless to say, this is one title that PS3 owners will want to keep their eyes out for when it’s released sometime in 2009.
