Heavy Rain Previews Show Promise

As the February release date for Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain nears, several publications have gotten a chance for some hands-on time with the game and seem to be intrigued by what they saw. Quoting the Opposable Thumbs blog: "The game grabs you during the quiet moments where nothing 'happens.' When you look at a picture your child drew. When you're questioning someone about a crime. When you're trying to figure out how to react to a violent situation. The preview we were sent put me in different situations as I played a small handful of characters, and each one provided a few tiny moments that were surprising in terms of storytelling or subtlety." Eurogamer's previewer had a similar reaction: "To my great delight as well — Heavy Rain isn't a mature game because it has unhappy families and moody lighting, it's a mature game because it anticipates an adult response from the player and is prepared to receive it."

Comments

Interesting

[enderjsv]

From what I've seen of the game so far, I think I can honestly say without hyperbole that this game is the biggest and possibly most important experiment in the past 15 years of gaming. It really takes the whole idea of what is considered to be a game and breaks the mold. It actually reminds me a bit of Indigo Prophecy, but ten times more deviated from standard gameplay practices. I'm excited to see if it will work and how it will be received.

Re:Interesting

[eulernet]

Don't expect too much !

Hint: I have been one of the programmers behind Omikron the Nomad Soul, their previous success.

The biggest problem with Omikron is that we spend a lot of time adjusting the gameplay on the first level, at the expense of the following levels.
Making the game appealing takes a lot of time, and when the game is too large (and not clearly defined), it takes an exponential amount of time.

Another big problem is that Omikron tried to merge several types of games: adventure, action and fight.
Instead of creating one good adventure game, we created 3 below-average games.
And these games mix as easily as water and oil.

I lost all my ties with Quantic Dreams, but I'm pretty sure they still have these problems, with a boss who wants to create too ambitious games, and a team confronted to an unclear direction.
Quantic Dreams also lost a lot of their coders at the end of the first game, due to stress, bad scheduling, and in general a terrible lack of organization.

An anecdote:
the boss wanted that the player might pilot the cars in the city, so we spent 3 weeks of coding to allow that, plus a lot rework of the 3D graphics, since the roads needed to be tagged. Did you know that you could pilot the car manually ?

mature, adult

[md65536]

I hope it stays that way, in North America too. I played Indigo Prophecy, the American version of QD's Fahrenheit. For the American version, they took out "adult" things like sex.

There is a shower scene still in Indigo Prophecy, but the character is showering in her underwear! What an odd confusion of sex and nudity, where it's okay to walk in on someone showering, as long as they're doing it with clothes on! IMHO not a very "mature" way of handling nudity.

(inb4 European vs. American acceptance of nudity)

Real life rarely makes a good game...

[OverZealous.com]

When I read the (mostly vague) descriptions of the game in the article, all I could think of was that the author summed up the game early on:

You'll be doing many mundane things: turning lights on and off, cooking dinner, taking a shower. In fact, the first hour of the game seems to exist only to show you how normal your life as an architect and a father is. In that time I did some work, played with my kids, and helped my wife around the house.

After watching me playing the game, my real-life wife made pointed out that I could have actually done some work, helped her around the house, and then played with my kids in the time I had just spent with Heavy Rain. I didn't have a good counter-argument.

(Emphasis Mine)

I'm aware that there is more to the game than this, but I think what makes a video game interesting is the way it abstracts you from the real world. How is this game going to abstract mundane details of everyday life in a way that isn't just boring? It's too bad the author didn't expand on any more details.

There really isn't anything in this review that makes me think the game shows promise, despite the Slashvertisment's summary.