The Heavy Rain Tapes, Part One

Welcome to part one of our seriously in-depth interview with Quantic Dream's David Cage. Heavy Rain is expected on shelves within the next six months – we find out if the game's ready, if Quantic Dream is ready, and, more importantly, if the world is ready?

The games that bring in the big bucks these days tend to involve shooting people in the head, right? Aren’t you concerned that there’s too small a market for something as subtle as Heavy Rain?

That’s a complex question. The market is diverse and we need to make products for all of these different kinds of people. There are some people – a lot of teenagers – who just want adrenaline and fun. At the same time we believe – though it’s not demonstrated yet – that there is a market for adult and for more major products based on storytelling, emotion and other things. It makes a lot of sense for the publishers to fund [FPS] because that is what the market wants, but is it what it wants, or is it because there is nothing else? It’s chicken and egg. Do people buy shooters and so on because this is the only type of experience on the market? If we offer them something new will they buy it? Do we give people what they expect, or do we give them something they don’t expect? And that’s a gamble.

That’s also the difficulty, though, isn’t it? Pulling an example out of thin air, take Modern Warfare. People know exactly what to expect from a series like that, but Heavy Rain does seem to need this vast explanation. How have you overcome this to explain the game in a nutshell, so people get it?

It’s very difficult to describe. I went down that road with Fahrenheit. I spent two whole years trying to explain to people what Fahrenheit was and no one got it. Of course, when the game was released, they were like, ‘Oh, so this is what you meant’ and I shrug and say, ‘Yeah… didn’t I explain this right?’ There was something wrong there, definitely. When you are a developer, you’ve got two options. Either you go for a very established genre for which you know there is a market; you do an FPS – no surprise there, there are people out there who want to buy FPS’. The downside is that you’ll have very strong competitors who’ve been doing first-person shooters for years… much better than you.

Or you say, ‘You know what, I’m going to try to create my own genre’. I still need to demonstrate that there is a market for this new genre, but if I can do it, I have no competition… I’m on my own. I was the pioneer and I really created something, and that’s the choice we made. Not for business reasons; having a strong strategic vision. It’s much more because it’s what I believe in. I need to do something exciting; something original because it’s what is new that excites me.

But there’s always a chance that that will fail, right? Heavy Rain hangs on either stirring genuine emotion in the player, or falling down. Very few games in the past have ever managed to stir anything at all and when they have, they have in small doses. What makes you think you can succeed across an entire game?

We take a very different approach. I think we are the very first ones trying really to take the story approach. People love stories. Every time a new media was invented, it was used to tell stories. Cinema, television, writing, or whatever. People love stories in any country and in any period of time. Why would interactivity be the exception to this rule? I also see the limits of what can be done with the current paradigms. Technology gets more and more fantastic and you can do incredible things, but it’s still the same games. I mean, how many monsters can you kill? How many zombies can you shoot?

We lost count last week…

[Laughs] Yeah, so you know… there is a point where you say, hey, I’ve played this game before. I’m 40 years old, I was pretty much born and raised with videogames. I’ve played so many games and they’re all the same and at some point you just feel like you’re wasting your time. That’s not the best use of the free time I put aside for entertainment, maybe I should watch a movie, or go on the internet, or listen to some music, or do something else, but games? I start to lose interest, to be honest. That’s because of a lack of creativity, originality and new ideas. So I say instead; people love stories, so let’s tell a story. So that adults can find an interest again in interacting. They will understand that it’s not just about shooting and driving, it’s about emotions and feeling something.

That’s the difficulty, though, isn’t it? You say to yourself as a player ‘I’m going online to shoot this guy in the head, but how exactly is that different from the guy I shot in the head last year?'

Yes, exactly. These games are striking visually and really fun to play when you play them for one hour, but after two hours, you say, ‘hey, I’ve been doing the same thing for two hours’. Okay, the environments look fantastic and it’s really fun, but why am I doing this? What's the real purpose, what will I get in the end? New levels, new enemies, then the ending.

That’s a broad generalisation, but largely true, we suppose. Do you think then that games don’t ask enough story questions, don’t give us enough impetus to get to the next part, to see the next scene, or to finish it?

I think that many games start with just providing adrenaline and say that that’s enough. Which is true with my kid; he’s nine years old, he really enjoys all these action games and he loves them. But, he’s nine. He doesn’t pay attention to the story and the characters. And that’s okay when you’re nine. But when you get older, you expect more from your entertainment time. If it can make you feel something or make you more clever, or even leave an imprint in you. So that when you turn off the console, there is still a part of the game in you. When I watched Slumdog Millionaire for example, or Gran Torino, I mean for half an hour after leaving the cinema, I was still in the movie. I was so impressed with the story and just, you know, trying to digest the things that I felt during these two hours. With games, you turn off the console and you go do something else. They don’t leave an imprint. Very few games leave an imprint in you, so they don’t change who you are, they don’t change the way you see things.

Do you feel that that’s a consequence of a lack of talent on behalf of developers in terms of knowing how stories work, or do you feel that it’s because of the dichotomy of trying to balance both gameplay and story with neither seeming too contrived?

It’s a little bit of everything. A lot of it has to do with the history of videogames in that when things started out, they were made by teenagers for teenagers. All game developers were very young people. So, they were creating these kinds of experiences because they thought it was cool, and they were right. But now, more and more game developers are getting older and older. I’m 40, I think Fumito Ueda [Ico, Shadow Of The Collossus, The Last Guardian] is 45, all these guys are getting older. As time goes on you don’t want to make the same games. I could not make a shooter. I don’t want to play them. I don’t understand why… I don’t even understand why it’s fun to play any more, so I can’t make them. I try to make games for people who expect what I expect from my entertainment time; something with emotion and meaning.

But are gamers getting more mature? We played Dragon Age recently and that allowed us to behave in a pretty immature way, which was funny, but had consequences. With the ability to kill off main player characters in Heavy Rain doesn’t it bother you that too many players will do this and never see all that work you put into their own individual stories?

Not at all, for one simple reason; players will talk to other players, and that creates a kind of metagame. Like if you played it and maybe you killed the robber [in the shop scene] and maybe I played it and I let the shopkeeper be killed, then we’ll talk about our experiences and see that ‘Oh, I missed that’. We can talk about the game so it’s something interesting. Nothing is lost in terms of the community of gamers. All of the hard work we’ve put into this game will be seen. Maybe not by the same person, but the community will talk about it and that’s a part of the pleasure of the experience. If you don’t want to do this, if as a developer you just want to make a very linear thing in which everyone will see everything, that conversation will never happen.

But that level of permutation is a huge rod you’ve created for your own back there, surely? That would seem to us like an epic task.

It’s been a huge amount of work, but at the same time I just want to make clear that it’s not procedural. It’s not like you can do anything and everything has consequences. There is a story. The backbone of the story is unmovable. You can play variations around the story; your actions have consequences around this backbone, but you can’t change the events. So, writing a scene – even a small scene like the hold-up – is a lot of work because you need to think of all the options. Most of all though, you won’t want to frustrate the player. So you need to create context for choices, make sure it is really clear and then manage every single solution to this context.

So everything is much more about setting the context right, because if you leave it too open, people will want to do so many different things that you [as a developer] can’t handle them. If the context is very clear, you’ll only need very few options and then you can handle them. For example with the shopkeeper, the idea is very simple, you are stuck, in a shop, with a robber. In this case he doesn’t know you are here. The context is very clear; you can’t escape, you need to find a way out. You can streamline every single possibility to hitting him in the back, or talking to him, or staying hidden, blah, blah, blah, and you can handle any of those options as a developer. The whole game is conceived that way.

You talk about the metagame in that people will play things differently, and you talk about causing players to feel emotion. Aren’t the two concepts incompatible? Surely if everyone is made to experience the same emotional response, they will also react identically and make the same choices? How have you gone about ensuring that Heavy Rain’s audience will experience it in diversely different ways?

You can’t be sure of that, but if you take the example of the shopkeeper – people who buy Heavy Rain will probably know that your characters can die, so they’ll probably be nervous about confronting this robber with Shelby and taking the risk of something maybe bad happening to him. So it will splinter the population of gamers between the ones who will want to do something and want to be a hero, and try to save Hassan because he’s a nice guy, and the others who may think they may not want to take the risk – to not want to lose in this scene just because of this situation. I don’t know, you can never guarantee what people will do and there are a great number of scenes where, sure, the majority of players will do something, or not do something. We don’t have any statistics about this so far from user tests, but we have discovered some very interesting differences between players.

Like people playing as polar opposites?

Yeah sure, but it’s never that black and white.

Mass Effect was. We played through it twice; once as the super-moral good guy and once as the belligerent prick. Both are entertaining, but for different reasons. Would you say Heavy Rain contains more shades of grey than Mass Effect, or was there ever a temptation to just go for the tried and tested good versus evil method of morality testing?

Never. Never. Although it’s fantastically done in Mass Effect and in some other games, in Heavy Rain, that was really not the idea. The idea was that no one is black, no one is white – people are kind of grey. And it was also about having situations that have no simple answer. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m sure I would do this if it was happening to me’, it’s more like ‘Hmm… tricky, I don’t know – I need to think’ because the answer is not obvious as to what I should do in this situation. But these are the most interesting choices; do I want to be good or bad? It’s been done before by many people and it’s very interesting in some situations. But here what is very interesting is to have real choices where the answer is not obvious.

That’s an interesting point because other media – films and books – go out of their way to prevent the consumer from predicting what will happen next, but games seem to go out of their way to make it obvious. Is that something you’ve tried to avoid in Heavy Rain?

Again it’s related to the fact that we as an industry think that we make games for teenagers and kids, so we try to make things very casual and as clear as possible. The bad guys have to be very baaaaad and the hero has to have big muscles and look fantastic, and the women have to have big boobs and be very sexy because to a teenager, this is what women are. Well, I think we’ve passed that stage and we can go to the next one and say, ‘You know what, you can be a very evil character, but it’s not written on your face’.

Click here for part 2