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• The Art of Heavy Rain

  We have absolutely no clue what Heavy Rain is going to be. Well, we have some idea, sure. We know that Quantic Dream’s unsettling detailed three-dimensional characters and environments recall the world on its most, dreary rain-soaked day, shades of grey and brown and green. We know that the character’s have facial expressions that dip so low into the Uncanny Valley that they stop being repellant and become entrancing. We know that the game will be played predominantly through quick time events. We know that, if Indigo Prophecy and Omikron are anything to go by, Heavy Rain’s going to be, if not good, one hell of an interesting game. Truth is, we know so little because Quantic Dream hasn’t shown the actual game to anyone besides a small handful of journalists and employees of Sony Computer Entertainment. They’ve shown two demos as examples of the technology and style that will make up Heavy Rain. That’s it. No actual game. Quantic Dream are mysterious Frenchmen, so they are. Today, we can add some new pieces to the Heavy Rain puzzle. This concept art may not tell us a whole lot about the game’s story or what it will actually be like to play, but they speak volumes about its tone. This game is going to be unsettling. How unsettling? Follow the jump. Read More... Posted Apr 06 2009, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, uncanny valley, sony, indigo prophecy, heavy rain, quantic dream, omikron, ps3, scea, Fahrenheit

• Feeling It: Social Versus Primitive Emotion in Videogames

  In a recent talk at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in France, Quantic Dream’s David Cage discussed emotion’s role in videogames. Quantic Dream have claimed their new game, still known after two years by its codename Heavy Rain, has conquered the Uncanny Valley, creating human characters so lifelike that players can’t resist identifying with them. In his talk, Cage discussed mixing motion captured performances with hand-drawn animation in Heavy Rain to achieve such natural expression in an interactive setting. Performance is only the beginning of Rain’s ambition, though, as Cage turned the topic to utilizing finer, more social human emotions as love, jealousy, and shame to create a game’s foundation for immersion versus the more primal emotions traditional to games, such as anxiety and aggression. Read More... Posted Jun 25 2008, 11:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, uncanny valley, fumito ueda, indigo prophecy, heavy rain, farenheit, quantic dream, omikron, david cage