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The Paris, France-based developer Quantic Dream has been working in the virtual actor space since
Omikron (1999) and improved it with
Indigo Prophecy (2005), but at E3 in 2006, it looked like it was onto something big. It demoed a non-interactive video sequence in which a virtual actress, Mary Smith, auditioned for a part in a videogame called
Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer. It was a complex visual of a simple concept: a woman in a kitchen whose emotions transform from giddy, romantic happiness to sadness to fury.
The precise, raw emotions that were seen on the woman's face not only showcased the studio's technical prowess, the video demo has since been downloaded over 1 million times.
At a private viewing at this year's E3 (this preview was under embargo until the Leipzig Games Convention was underway), a real-time demo showed how far the developer has come. "People were eager for something different," said
Heavy Rain's Director and Writer David Cage. "Probably more adult. And definitely more emotional."
So what exactly is
Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer? Cage bills the experience as an adult emotional thriller, and the game is based around five main concepts. First, the story is told through the player's actions: You don't watch the story. You play it. (Quantic Dream introduced this idea in
Indigo Prophecy, which used contextual button and stick movements to allow players to open doors, dodge attackers, keep someone calm, play basketball -- even pee.) Second, players' actions have consequences, and the decisions the player makes affect the way the story is told. Next, Quantic Dream wants
Heavy Rain to be emotionally driven -- that is, the team wants you to actually care for the living and breathing characters. The fourth concept is that the story and themes explored in
Heavy Rain will be adult. Cage promises that the game "will invoke themes that have never been used in games before." Finally, the developers want to make
Heavy Rain accessible to a broad audience of players.
The unfolding journey of
Heavy Rain is an enormous departure from conventional game design. "In
Heavy Rain you don't have a gun. You don't drive a car. You don't solve puzzles. You don't deal with inventories," explained Cage. "This is a different type of experience than what the videogame market usually has to offer."
That all may seem a bit hard to swallow, and the demo shown at E3 was designed to illustrate the key concepts of
Heavy Rain. The developers are keeping quiet about major plot points, so it featured a story that is outside the main plot of the game.
It's worth noting that the opening menu alone is engrossing: A facial close-up on one of the characters -- Madison -- was eerie and mesmerizing. Using real-time 3-D facial motion capture, Quantic Dream has recreated detail down to the micro-movements in the eyes. Complex shades of the skin, shadows and more make the visual quite breathtaking.