Something that I've
been really interested in recently is conditions of failure that don't feel negative -- like "failure" that yields an interesting result, so you don't feel like so much
that you've failed, but just that you found something different.
GdF: In Heavy Rain,
there are two things. First of all, you are in a story, and so your journey is
prompted by your actions. There's no point system, so you cannot reach a
certain status. To a certain degree, you just evolve in the journey, and
depending on your actions you are going to experience a story that is going to
be different.
So we have absolutely no mechanism to gauge the successfulness of
a story. What's very important to us is, whatever the outcome, it must be
interesting. I'm always using the example of the fact that in Heavy Rain, you have no game over. You
have four playable characters, and you can lose the characters; now, if you
lose all four characters, you're still going to have a game over.
It's the end of the story. There is a very, very subtle but
important difference between a game over, something that implies that you have
to do it again to succeed, and the end of a story. All story threads give you a
satisfying ending -- satisfying in the sense that it can be sad; it can be
happy; you may know or not a number of answers to the questions that you have
while playing the game.
But it's a fitting ending to the story. You have a
satisfying experience. If you lose all four characters, it is going to be the
end of the story; it's a sad ending, but we hope it's going to be a satisfying
experience because it ends not just on an end screen asking "why?"
No, you perfectly understand why it's so, and that's very important to us.
What are your own
personal goals for this project?
GdF: I think that the most important goal for us is to show
that video games can be more than just shooting, driving -- that games can be
meaningful. We really think games can be more than that; can be a true form of
cultural expression, like movies or books. So I think we, as a
developer, feel that what we did is successful if people, even just slightly,
change their mind about video games and think, "Yeah. Actually, a game can
be as meaningful as a movie."
I don't have my own
personal opinion on this, but I've heard some people say that it's so much like
an interactive movie -- why not just make a movie?
GdF: Those are two radically different things. In a movie,
you are passively looking at the story. You see a perspective to certain
events; you see one single possibility. What we're doing, we're really giving
you a choice. We're setting a strong context; we're setting a number of possibilities.
We're presenting to you different kinds of characters, but what really happens
depends on your choices. If Heavy Rain
was a movie, it would be ten, twenty, thirty movies, and that's what's
interesting.
It seems like in this
scenario there are a number of things that could potentially kick you out of
the narrative. For example, HUD elements must be carefully crafted, or a saving
system might be quite difficult to implement. How have you addressed these kinds
of things?
GdF: The game is saving all the time, so your progress is
stored. We hope that players are not going to play like this: We hope that they
are going to bear the consequences of their actions and play at least the first
time through the story; however, if at any point you want to go back and you
want to see what would have happened if this and this, you have the possibility
to do so. But yeah, the system works, and it's smoothly implemented, so I have
no worries about this.
And what about things
like the stick images that come up on the screen and stuff? Obviously, you have
to show players how to do it, but do you find that it is at all jarring for
people, or do they start to forget that the icons are there?
GdF: What you have to bear in mind is that we've shown, so
far, four scenes. Two of them are relatively in the beginning of the game; two
others are pretty much in the last third of the game. In Heavy Rain, when you start the game, the first scene is also a
tutorial. It's not only a tutorial; you're really in the story. The story
starts, but we are making a tutorial so people slowly get to understand how the
control works.
We've seen that in user tests, once you've gone through this
first scene, you totally forget about the interface. We need to show something
on screen because otherwise people don't know what to do, and we're trying to
integrate it as best as possible in the environment -- in the 3D -- so it has a
minimal impact on your immersion.
But really, that was our experience on the
play tests; people really forget about it. At one point, you're just doing the
moves and interacting with the characters without even looking. You know at one
point how it works, and then it's totally non-intrusive.