Heavy Rain Interview with David Cage (Page One)

David Cage and his studio, Quantic Dream, gave PlayStation3 owners a thriller like no other in Heavy Rain. David was kind enough to respond to my interview request about Heavy Rain and his thoughts about various issues concerning the game.

1. Are the scenes in Heavy Rain all of the scenes you initially came up with for the game? If not, how did you decide what scenes made it into the final game?

David Cage: Actually, about four scenes were written but not included in the final game. When the game was assembled, these scenes seemed to slow down the pacing, felt redundant or did not bring anything to the storyline. There was for example another scene between Ethan and his son before he disappears. I really wanted to create this strong feeling of love between a father and his son, I wanted the player to feel responsible for Shaun so when he is kidnapped, the player feels emotionally involved. But I decided to cut this scene because the previous scenes were enough to establish this feeling.

In general, very few scenes I write don’t make it to the final game. With interactive drama, given the volume of data that you have to produce, you have limited possibilities to make changes “on the fly” without significantly affecting production.

Also, the game tells a story, which means that you cannot get rid of a “level” the way you would in an action game otherwise the story does not make sense anymore. So the focus on the script is extremely important. If something does not work at this stage, once production has started, there is nothing you can do about it anymore.

But there are always some areas on which you can freely iterate until quite late in the development without affecting production too much. The 3D icons for example were implemented after different iterations, the thought system and other interfaces can usually be tweaked until quite late in the development process.

2. The actions that the player performs in Heavy Rain's gameplay feel very true-to-life in a way. For example, the player presses R1 to pump Shelby's inhaler or turns the right analog stick to turn on a stove. How did the team at Quantic Dream accomplish this?

DC: We wanted controls to mimic the character’s moves on screen. We thought that “making” movements at the same time than the character could significantly contribute to make the player feel like he is a part of the world, and thus improve his sense of involvement and immersion in the world. It is a very simple thing, but unfolding moves reinforces player’s physical presence in the world.

The hardest part was to find a sequence for this interface allowing players to emulate moves that are sometimes complex. That was especially true in action sequences where prompts are not randomly displayed but are related to the movements.

3. During the more intense scenes of Heavy Rain, the player feels tension and drama -- they're "in the moment." During the creation of the game, how did you make sure that the player is engaged in the gameplay experience to that extent?

DC: The writing is the starting point of everything. All the emotions, tension, sadness, fear, guilt, whatever you want the player to experience, should be present in the script. There are some well established techniques in matter of writing to create identification, empathy, make the audience feel certain emotions at certain moments, and I certainly used them each time it was possible.

But the most important thing for me was to make sure that emotions are not just present in cut scenes but most of all during game play. Creating a very sad cut scene is one thing, creating an interactive moment making you feel sad and depressed is something more complex.

This is where the development of Heavy Rain was so interesting to me. It wasn’t just about using existing techniques but rather finding new ideas to make game play a part of the emotional involvement of the player. We also realized the importance of art direction, where every single detail becomes important. Lighting, sound design, music, cameras, everything should participate to create the emotion you want to trigger.

4. Do you like writing intense, dramatic/psychological thrillers like Heavy Rain? Can we expect you to write more stories of this kind in the future?

DC: After Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain was my second game in the “dark thriller” genre. This is a genre that was very appealing to me, as I was a big fan of some movies in that genre, but it was also a very convenient context to understand what telling an interactive story could mean: it was a very codified genre that everybody knows, contemporary, adult, with a strong emotional aspect.

After two games, I feel like I have learned what I wanted to learn with it, said what I had to say. I remain interested in drama, dark themes and characters’ feelings and psychology, but now I would like to explore very different types of universes and tell different types of stories.

All the things I have learned on my two last games will be extremely useful in trying to push the envelope and see how I can go further with this new genre we have created. Learning is my main motivation in my work: I make games to learn and discover.

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