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Heavy Rain Interview And New Screens

Posted Jun 08, 2006 at 07:44AM by Christopher C. Listed in: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, News Tags: Quantic Dream
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Heavy Rain


On the last day of E3 this year I was making a final tour of Sony's booth when I ran into something I hadn't seen before. There was a small crowd huddled around one of the monitors, and people were whispering excitedly and pointing. Too tired to be polite I shoved my way past a couple of folks, and mouth breathed heavily on the back of a dude's neck till he cleared a path so that I could see what was going on. If you haven't seen the video yet, you really ought to, Heavy Rain is an adventure game currently in the works from developers Quantic Dream, the makers of last years excellent Indigo Prophecy. IGN's Jeremy Dunham cornered some of the folks behind this intriguing looking title for a neat interview, what follows are excerpts from the session.
 

IGN: The Heavy Rain demo was definitely one of the more impressive games in Sony's booth at E3, how long had the team been working on it prior to the show?

Guillaume de Fondaumière: In fact, we spent less than three months to put the demo together from scratch, which includes developing the PS3 engine, writing the script, making the auditions to find the actress, defining the Mo-Cap techniques and doing some basic R&D for the tongue and hair.

Initially, this demo was a purely internal technical prototype that was not supposed to be shown outside the company. Our original goal was just to define if it was possible to create a next-gen character able to express complex emotions and what it would take on a technical point of view. David Cage wrote a script where the actress would go through different emotions in just a couple of minutes, from the very shy and naïve actress of the beginning to the drama at the end with real-time tears. He also wanted to know if we could make the audience listen to her, care for her and react to her emotions in a similar way than with a real actress.

Sony saw our work-in-progress and asked us for the permission to show it in its booth at E3 to show what could be done in matter of virtual actors on a PlayStation 3. The challenge was that we were only a few weeks away from E3 when the request came n and had not planed to finalize "The Casting" before the end of June.

Heavy Rain - Image 1    Heavy Rain - Image 2    Heavy Rain - Image 3


IGN: The animation in her face was fantastic but the lip-synching looked like it wasn't quite finished. What kind of technology is the team using to create this kind of character emotion?

Thierry Prodhomme: This demo is just our first test. We are in the middle of our R&D and artistic research on virtual actors, so we are still far from the final result (although the audio in the AVI is slightly desynchronized compared to the real-time 3D version running on PS3). [Note from QJ] I've realised this myself of the videos floating around on the net, the realtime version at E3 matched the audio much better]

Heavy Rain - Image 1    Heavy Rain - Image 2    Heavy Rain - Image 3


IGN: With that kind of detail on individual characters, how many people can we expect to see populating an environment at once?

Cage: We currently work on massive crowds with a high level of realism, so we plan to have a lot of populated environments in the game. All characters will have this level of quality but we will use techniques like LOD (level of details depending on the distance) to focus the resources on what the player can really see.

IGN: There has been a lot of speculation since E3 that Heavy Rain will go "PS3 only" because of where it was shown. Any truth to that or can we expect to see it on multiple systems?

Fondaumière: We hear and read a lot of things lately on Heavy Rain. All I can say is: not everything is true and nothing is written in stone as we speak. For now, Quantic Dream is working on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC platforms.

Heavy Rain - Image 1    Heavy Rain - Image 2 


IGN: Realistically, when can we expect the game to come out?

Fondaumière: Heavy Rain will be released in Fall 2008.

Heavy Rain certainly sounds and looks to be fantastic, and the news that it might be in the works for multiple platforms (i.e the Xbox 360) is something to ponder, it's likely that like Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed, Quantic Dream is trying to get Sony to pony up the cash for an exclusivity deal, guess we'll just have to wait and see how that pans out.

To read the full interview, go ahead and click the "read" link below.

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10 Comments


Sort by:
   by Emil (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » Screenshots look better than the animation
Title says it all. Nevertheless amazing work for only three months with the new console. Although it seems it tries to be so real that it looks artificial again. I guess there are too many gestures and stuff like that, a little exaggerated. Most of them look kind of quirky, especially the mouth movements look like the first experiments with 3d faces a few years ago.

But enough with the ranting, I am sure that it is a really good and useable base to start with.

   by Modroneman (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » Fall 2008???
Yeah, I'll be waiting for this one with bated breath... NOT

   by R Kelly (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » I love this new technology
if only i could make a game with realistic urinary physics.. i would also call my game heavy rain. but in my game i would pee all over the town a little bit at a time..like hiding behind corners and doing drive-bys... so far no technology can perfectly represent the complex arch of my stream..not to mention the perfect tint and smell.. splash splash skeet skeet. R ZKelly gives you something good to eat.. doo doo butter from another! skeet skeet taste my treat

   by BIG O (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » WTF???
What the hell is this game about anyway. Looks like its just about some female who lost her man and *****.

   by sinjinn (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » looks good
i dunno how good the game will be but taleast we know what kind of stuff to expect from this generation now

   by haha (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » LOL
the companies are just trying to get money out of sony for exclusivenesssss

   by hush404 - 2006-06-08
 » 2008?
wow... ha.. thats quite a bit off.

   by Sony (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » Worry not my loyal gamers
This was done as a research project and doesn't represent a game. However the animations being worked out are the representation of what they will be accomplishing in their titles.

This is only 3 months work, talking lips are very complicated to display in real time. REMEMBER this is real time not a pre rendered video. It's still a work in progress but if you noticed the animation is spectacular. Though the face is still awkward due to the various amounts of muscles in your face I have faith that they will meet their goals.

Believe!

   by Advertising -
   by soapinmouth - 2006-06-08
 » wtf
so this isn't even a game lol

   by Erick (Unregistered) - 2006-06-08
 » Weird
This is weird, the screenshots look realistic with muscles and all, yet kinda fake at the same time. Crazy.



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