Heavy Rain [PS3]

[EvilBoris]

It'll certainly be interesting to see, whether or not Heavy Rain can strike the right balance between the story serving the gameplay and the gameplay serving the story.

[JP]

There was a lot of problems with the second half of Farenheit for me. Even with it being what was essentially only half a game it still felt like it was twice the game that most were at the time.

I'm still very cautious about this one but there's nothing so far that makes me distrust their handling of this.

[Brad]

What John just said. I actually never completed Fahrenheit because a friend told me it wasn't worht it but I enjoyed it up to just past halfway. The problem with the QTEs was they made it impossible to see/pay attention to the cut scene that was taking place! The QTEs in Shenmue, GOW and Resi 4 were fine.

[Family Fry]

Nice little interview with David Cage, looking back on Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3174321

Him talking about Fahrenheit 2 is interesting, saying that publishers were very interested.

"So I started thinking of Indigo 2 but I quickly realized I had nothing more to say on this story and these characters. I really enjoyed the time I spent with them, but they were attached to a moment in my life, and I had moved on. I wanted to write something more personal, deeper, more adult, with no world to save and no supernatural powers."

That in turn became Heavy Rain

Also about the last part of Fahrenheit...

"The part of the story that was grounded in reality was definitely the one that worked the best. It convinced me that it was not necessary to have magic powers or to fight aliens to tell an interesting, interactive story. Our media has now reached a level of maturity where real stories with real people can be told, which is definitely a good thing."

[Family Fry]

4 Views of the same story.

Ethan Mars
Scott Shelby
Madison Paige
Norman Jayden

Meet our first guy.
Norman Jayden



Norman Jayden, 29 is an FBI Profiler, specializing in psychological profiling of criminals and holds a degree in psychology and forensic medicine. He is able to apply emotional intelligence to get into the heads of the murderers, is a highly professional, committed, organized, methodical and brilliantly intelligent. He has become obsessed with finding this killer.
He is sent to the West Coast to back up the police in the investigation of the Origami Killer.
Jayden believes they may have had the killer in custody but failed to interrogate and released them back onto the streets, this is a point of tension between Jayden and the Police of not getting anywhere fast which will be shown throughout the game.

Jayden has a device prototype created by the pentagon called A.R.I (Alternate Reality Interface) Glasses and a wireless Glove, these allow you to take a closer look at the crime scenes and can detect Fingerprints, Blood, DNA fragments, pheromones and more invisible to the naked eye. The glove can absorb crime scene information via touch, come into touch with blood and it can identify victim and cross check against other information.


Sounds cool so far but the most interesting part is each character will have specific strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately Jayden is a drug addict, addicted to triptocaine which he has become dependant on. If time passes without you taking these drugs decisions become harder to make and less clear, you will suffer from tremors, dizziness, and instability. Not only that but Jayden is hiding this addiction from the rest of the world, the player will have to make decisions based on this, keep it secret whilst looking for the killer?


All decisions made in the game rotate around the characters body, depending on their state of mind it can be calm and slow or fast and impulsive, if you are drugged you may not even be able to read what the decision is.


There is no game over in Heavy Rain if your main character dies you simply loose their point of view on the events, you switch to another character but without the influence of the character that has died, and the story can change. It is possible for even all 4 characters to die and you will be given a conclusion, albeit probably not a satisfying one.

Am loving the sound of this, especially playing an FBI Agent with drug addiction, only 1 character has been shown so far.
Apparently due for November 2009 release

[ezee ryder]

Sounds and looks fantastic

[Tig]

interest x1000


please let the script and performances be good

[Family Fry]

some hd gameplay of scene described above

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/24771

[EvilBoris]

Lovin' the loopk of those QTEs. VOice acting sounded a bit great and the graphics were no way near as good as those tech demos.

[Flabio]

Still cautiously optimistic about this one. I don't think it's going to review highly, it falls a little outside the normal realms of traditional gaming and into the (more interesting, to me) field of interactive fiction.

Narratologists will love it, but I expect most gamers will hate it. Which is a good thing, not every game needs to have mass market appeal.

[ezee ryder]

Lovin' the loopk of those QTEs. VOice acting sounded a bit great and the graphics were no way near as good as those tech demos.

I agree to a certain degree, I don't think the quality of that video does the game any favours.

[Eight Rooks]

I'm still interested, though I didn't think that much of the voice acting/dialogue. Nothing terrible - not that great either. Plus the glove and shades sound like fairly weak gameplay contrivances as much as anything else. Some of the screens were neat, though, and I admire that Quantic Dream are trying to do something to change up QTEs - I wonder if the drug addiction points to another element of regular gameplay in there? The Edge preview talked about moving the characters around similar to a "regular" videogame, I'm sure, and if you have to keep acquiring a particular item to keep this guy's mental state under control that surely can't be part of just simple branching paths.

[abigsmurf]

so the way it works is you have all of these QTEs but you don't actually die if you fail them, you just branch off into a different situation (aside from some times where it looks pretty certain you'll die)?

[Eight Rooks]

The one basic complaint most people seem to come up with is that yes, for all the cinematic wow-factor, the game seems to be pretty much a long series of QTEs. An insanely complicated map of branching paths is still... an insanely complicated map of branching paths. Cage's "innovations" seem to be the presentation, and the idea that you can fail a QTE, even up to the point of getting one character killed, and the game will just jump to another character's viewpoint with the story re-writing itself around one character missing. The only way to get a game over would seem to be to end up with all four characters dead.

[abigsmurf]

A lot of the enjoyment will probably depend on how the QTEs 'feel'. There are too many games where you die despite feeling you pressed a button in time and it's frustrating. I think the final battle of God of War 2 was one of the worst for "I PRESSED IT DAMN YOU!"