Heavy Rain Interview And New Screens
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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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