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

• By Patrick Shaw
• December 11, 2008 15:34 PM PST
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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.

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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.

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