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 ?

Re:How Is The PS3 Putting Out Graphics Like This?

[enderjsv]

Do we HAVE to turn this into a system war? Can't we instead talk about Heavy Rain?

Re:How Is The PS3 Putting Out Graphics Like This?

[smcn]

Agreed completely. Besides, everyone already knows that console games will never look as good as on the PC.

Re:Interesting but not fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should consider the word "game" more like you consider the word "film." There really isn't anything in the definition of a game that says it must be fun. I mean, chess is a game and it is not exactly the kind of fun that you probably associate with fps video games.

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.

Re:Real life rarely makes a good game...

[Rogerborg]

Remind me: how many millions of people play The Sims?

Re:Real life rarely makes a good game...

[OverZealous.com]

I'm not trying to pick a fight, but I disagree (a little).

I recently was replaying Shadow of the Colossus. To me, there is a game that exemplifies art. It was beautiful to watch, immersive, playing it was unlike anything I had played before, and the story was deep and dramatic. (It even ended on a sad note for those who believe that anything that makes you happy can't be art.)

Forcing someone to play through an hour of boring, everyday tasks is less than art. It's not even very creative (in my opinion). How many movies and books and other things have been made that focus on everyday things?

Or, for that matter, how many games already been made where the user gets to choose between decisions (Black-and-White, Fate [I think], that one with the biological superhero)? Every time, while the game is interesting, the decision making process is hampered by the vary fact that a game is limited to what the designers have already though up. Currently, decision-based games are more like choose-your-own-adventure books. The decisions are more thrown in to add "replay value" than to truly give the user choices. (Save the baby, or let it die? Play it twice, to see the different cut-scenes! Yay, more hours of gameplay...)

The gaming medium as art has to be more than just taking a movie or book and slapping lame controls on it. That's like doing a crayon drawing in oils, and calling it art. It needs to incorporate what makes games different than the other mediums.