In a recent design
column in Game Developer, the author spoke about managing player expectations.
If the world looks real, a player will see something and feel like they should
be able to interact with it. How far can you really go?
To re-use the example,
if there's a slide in a playground, and the player thinks, "Oh, well it's
a slide; I should be able to slide down it." Perhaps it doesn't make sense for the
character to do it, but the player may feel like, in this realistic world, they
should be able to do that sort of thing.
How can you deal with that?
GdF: The important thing for us is context. The second thing
is, whatever in the environment within the context should be interactive, then
it's interactive. People were quite surprised, I think, to see how interactive Heavy Rain is and the fact that you can
really interact with most of the objects that are there.
I mean, if there's a television
you can switch it on and look at it. A radio, same thing. Objects, books,
newspapers, doors -- if there are doors, you can open them, you can venture into
different environments.
Even if it is not driving the story as such, but of course
we believe it is extremely important for people to feel immersed in the
environment. However, players shouldn't expect to go against the context.
If
your character is on a playground and there is a slide, but it would make
absolutely no sense for the player now to slide down the slide, then it is not
interactive because it simply makes no sense. That's the limit that we have,
but we try to minimize those moments where you eventually could think of
interacting with something... most of the time, you can.
In Fallout 3 -- I don't know if you've
played it -- you come out of this Vault in the beginning of the game, and you're
searching for your dad. But if you want -- and this is what most people do -- you
can spend hours and hours and hours playing all these sidequests, just helping
somebody research a book or going and defeating 12 monsters of a certain type
or something like that.
If you care so much
about finding your dad, you're probably not going to do these things. It's good
the options are there, but, ultimately, if someone were really analyzing it, it
could undermine the main narrative. Balancing player expectation and their
desire for freedom with the desire to push the narrative proper forward seems
like a very tough thing to do, so I guess we'll see.
GdF: It is a tough thing to do, but again, it's always the
same thing; it depends on what the expectation is on the game and what we as
designers define is the experience that we are offering. If you want to drive
cars and run and shoot people, then you shouldn't buy Heavy Rain; this is not a game for you. If you want to be the hero
of a grand thriller, if you're looking for something that is meaningful, then
you're up for the Heavy Rain
experience.
What kind of camera
are you using? It's not clear to me based on what I've seen.
GdF: It's cinematic cameras, because at any point in
the game you always have two cameras tracking you. We didn't want to have a
camera in the back or first-person; we wanted to give a very cinematic feel to
the game, and so we're using this system that works pretty nicely, actually. It
looks far better, if you ask me.
In addition to the
artistic implications, it also seems that, in terms of the hardware, if you can
control the viewpoint then you can also increase the number of polygons and
things running on the SPUs on the screen at that time. Is that something that
you are employing?
GdF: Absolutely not, actually. The whole game is being rendered
in real time all the time, and we actually have a camera team that is working
in post-production to set all the different cameras -- but everything's
running. So we're not using the camera direction to help us render more
polygons. No.
How large is the
camera team?
GdF: We have four people working on the cameras, which is
quite a big team.
It is!
GdF: Every moment in the game, someone thought of the two
camera angles. I think to a certain
degree it's giving perspective; it characterizes the playable characters even
more.
Do these people come
from the game industry, or did you also consult film?
GdF: No, most of them come from the movie industry. They
have movie experience; this is really what you want.