In february Sony is releasing its PS3-Blockbuster Heavy Rain. The media hype promises a new dimension of gaming. We met David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream, and he told us some interesting details about Heavy Rains replay value, quick time events and plans on releasing the game on other consoles. He also talked about the intended audience, relations to Fahrenheit and Sony's plans for the future.


GameRadio.de: Do you see Heavy Rain more as an interactive movie or as a restricted game?

David Cage: None of those. I don’t think it is a restricted game. I think it is different. I don’t even know if it is a video game anymore. It is fully interactive second to second. But I don’t think it is a videogame in the sense that most videogames are really focused on very basic emotions: frustration, adrenaline and competition. Heavy Rain is about emphathy, love, hate, sadness – very different types of emotions. And most videogames are about repeating patterns. You do the same thing over and over again, until the point where you don’t even know why you do this. Heavy Rain gets rid of all this. Each scene is unique with a different type of challenge. The game is more an experience for an adult audience. We don’t target kids or teenagers. It is a game for people who love films and emotional engagement rather than just pressing buttons and get excited about it.


GameRadio.de: Can you go to different places like in a sandbox game?

David Cage: It is absolutely no sandbox game for one very simple reason: In a sandbox game you go to the sandbox and maybe there are people, maybe you like the toys there and have a great time – maybe not. But no one thought about your journey. No one thought about optimizing the time spent here. Heavy Rain is much more like a rollercoaster. From the minute you are in the line someone designed the experience for you. Every single minute you spend will make you feel something. There is no cutscene, you are in control all the time. But it is not GTA, because there is no drama in this.


GameRadio.de: What happens if the character dies in the beginning of the game? Is his plot over or can he reappear in the stories of the other characters?

David Cage: In fact the main characters can’t die before certain points in the game, which are reached in the first hours. Later in the game the characters can die and you will loose their plot. But it is not only loosing something, because maybe he died and you get access to scenes that you would have missed otherwise. So its not: “Oh I’ve died. I want to play again. So I take my savegame and play again”. It is a different story and most of all it is a story that is unique to you, to the way you played. In a certain way you become the writer.


GameRadio.de: What happens if I think that I did something wrong? Is there another chance to rewrite a special sequence or do I have to reload?

David Cage: There are ways in the game where you can go back. But I would really encourage players not to do that, to play it in one walkthrough, without playing too much with the savegames. Because this game is a journey. You need to bear with the consequences of your actions. There is nothing you can do that is so bad that you will have a miserable experience. It can be a happy ending or a very sad ending. There are many variantions.


GameRadio.de: So Heavy Rain has a high replay value?

David Cage: There is. If you are a harcode gamer and you want so see absolutely everything in the game, you can probably play it five to ten times. But that is not the goal, to be honest. We don’t make this game so people can play it ten times. People should really enjoy the story and got the feeling that they make choices with consequences like in real life. You can never know what would have happened if you if you had behaved differently. You make one decision at some point and there's a consequence.


GameRadio.de: Is the experience like in a role playing game where you can play as a evil or a good character?

David Cage: Not at all. It's just about decisions. Characters are who they are, they have their strong and weak sides. But it is not like an RPG where you pretend to be good or bad. No one in real life is black or white, people are always grey. And our characters are exactly the same. No one is evil and no one is just a white knight. They have to make decisions, very difficult moral decisions where the answer is not obvious. You don’t know immediately what to do, you have to think about it.


GameRadio.de: Your studio also did Fahrenheit. What is the main difference to Heavy Rain?

David Cage: I would say that Fahrenheit was a prototype for Heavy Rain in a certain way. We were really discovering how to tell a story through gameplay. This is something we discovered with Fahrenheit. There were many things that we did I think right, couple of things we did wrong. But we learned from that and we spend a lot of time reading reviews and talked to players about what they didn’t like. And we tried to improve everything with Heavy Rain, making it the right experience. It has a much, much better story and is more consistend from the beginning to the end. It is also much more emotional and much more adult. There is no supernatural power involved. It is only about real people in real life. We try to show with Heay Rain that something is exciting without any supernatural power. You don’t have to save the world. We tried to tell a story in the vain of “Seven” or “Silence of the Lambs” rather than another game with zombies or aliens.


GameRadio.de: A lot of players think Heavy Rain is just a bundle of quick time events. What is your opinion to that?

David Cage: They are wrong! They talk about something they don’t have a clue. We showed four scenes with four different characters. One third of one scene had QTEs. This is the balance of Heavy Rain. But I am not ashamed of doing quick time events, I am really proud of it. All the people that were very sceptical before taking the controller felt right into the action. Because we worked on the control schemes. We use the triggers, the sticks, the buttons, the motion control so that you feel like you are doing those things.


GameRadio.de: Whats the reason for the PS3-exklusive development of Heavy Rain? Do you plan to release the game for PC or Xbox 360 at a later time?

David Cage: No, never, because Heavy Rain is published by Sony. Signing Heavy Rain we had the choice of the publisher. There were three or four major publishers. We chose Sony because the PlayStation 3 is really the console that we liked. We needed the power of the Hardware to make this game. And also we wanted the support of a major publisher like Sony, because Heavy Rain has a different concept, it has a different format. It needs to be explained, to be shown the right way, it needs the proper marketing support. When you do a first person shooter everybody knows what you are talking about, you just need to show two sceenshots and everybody knows. With Heavy Rain you need to show the demo, to explain the concept. So we needed someone like Sony. On the other side Sony is quite happy with the relationship so far. They see Heavy Rain as some kind of showcase for the PlayStation 3. It is a technical showcase showing virtual actors and the high quality graphics. At the same time it is their vision of the future of the console. Maybe stop making games for kids and trying to make more games for adults. It is the first step into this direction.