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Heavy Rain - Playing a Story
Edge Magazine is running a piece about Heavy Rain, a thriller by Quantic Dream that's been in development for a few years now. Edge spoke with David Cage, the game's writer and director, about using graphics technology not simply for breathtaking landscapes or realistic lighting, but to bring the characters to life and make them more believable. Cage walked the folks at Kotaku through a demo, and they provided details on how the controls will work. From Edge:
"'We worked very hard on motion capture, especially facial motion capture,' explains Cage. 'As you know, eyes are incredibly hard to do: the minute movements they constantly make mean you can tell whether something is human or not. We created a technology to motion-capture that from actors.' The shaders applied to the lead character's eyes and the skin that surrounds them also conspire to nudge Heavy Rain's characters closer to believability. The 'deadness' that so often afflicts such digital mannequins has been significantly chipped away, and we are presented with Madison, a character whose facial features, though attractive in an expectedly unnatural sort of way, also carry blemishes that succeed in breaking down her artificiality."
All this realism stuff gets on my nerves. Sure it looks more realistic but is it actually a better game? Are the graphics on the Wii "realistic" hell no, they are basically cartoons but the games play well and I don't care about the graphics. So the eyes flicker around in this new game like the eyes of people in a meeting just waiting for it to finish, flicking to the clock, back to the notes and then gazing out of the window in a day-dream before flicking back into the room in case they are asked a question.
Realism isn't always the best way to convey the most emotion and impact, look at the finest paintings from the likes of Rembrandt, and its that impact that games companies should concentrate on rather than on yet another way to make a dull game look pretty.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think you probably do need to say it. What's your point? That every attempt to improve facial features is doomed because of the uncanny valley? That this technology shows that the uncanny valley worries are unjustified? That this project has achieved a lot but still fails due to the uncanny valley? That despite suffering from the uncanny valley, this project nevertheless has achieved a remarkable level of empathy?
It's not that games were somehow better back then, it's that you were younger and had more time to spend selecting and learning to play video games - and that you're comparing random games from today with your best memories of the best games of the past.
My best memories of, say, Deus Ex are much better than Crysis was... but I'm sure they're much better than Deus Ex actually was too.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Exactly! Thats basically how they showed the romance between the egg and the box in the latest Pixar flick.