2010’s Heavy Rain wasn’t merely a PS3 game: It was an cinematic choose-your-own adventure with multiple outcomes, all of them awesome. According to Megagames, this multiple award-winning game sold 1.5 million units, four times more than Sony had estimated.
French developer Quantic Dream likely does not want to repeat that success. The company jettisoned their game engine in favor of a more powerful one, a move that signals to the world that Quantic Dream wants their upcoming game, Beyond: Two Souls (B:TS), to beat Heavy Rain in a two-games-enter, one-game-leaves cage match.
B:TS already has the advantage, at least to geeky people like me. While Heavy Rain was a noir-style mystery, B:TS has a supernatural element.
According to Sony associate producer Victoria Ornstein, “Beyond is the story of a young woman, Jodie Holmes, who has these paranormal abilities. She’s grown up her whole life with this connection to an entity, and the entity [named Idan] exists on a different plane and is able to see and hear things that normal people cannot….There will be points within the game where you’ll be able to freely choose whether you play as Jodie or as Idan the entity.” Other times, she said, you’re have to play one or the other.
As far as I could tell, Idan was a glowy tentacle of energy that could knock over a can of soda or even open a hatch. Jodie, on the other hand, is played by the girl-crushable Ellen Page (Hard Candy, Whip It, Inception), who has been mo-capped to perfection.
Ornstein said, “In addition to the new game engine, Quantic Dream has spent a lot of money upgrading their performance capture. So for Heavy Rain they used twenty-eight high-precision cameras to do the motion capture. In Beyond: Two Souls, we’re using sixty four. So it’s definitely an increase in fidelity for what’s being captured.”
Ornstein called Quantic Dream’s technique “full-performance capture.”
“In addition to the body, they’re also doing the face and the voice at the same time, which leads to less discrepancy. At times in Heavy Rain, you notice the characters’ face and body movement would be slightly off and disconcerting, so the full performance capture–what they used in Avatar–would create a more realistic animation for the characters,” she said.
My demo’s results were excellent: You could see Jodie’s fear when she ran from the police. And as with Heavy Rain, you can alter the storyline with the gamepad, by taking the appropriate actions when prompted–or failing to take action, which alters the storyline in a different direction.
I’m concerned that some gamers may call this a “been there, done that” style of gameplay. But I strongly believe that choose-your-own-adventure gaming is not done often enough.
If B:TS manages to capture even a fraction of Page’s uber-talent, while keeping up Heavy Rain’s immersive storyline, Quantic Dreams will have another hit on their hands.
And check out the trailer, below.