toblix

Heavy Rain

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I watched the GiantBomb quicklook and was constantly surprised by how much they seemed to like it. All I could see was a joke of a game. I had the bright idea of downloading the demo, but stopped after my guy couldn't get past the dumpster without handholding and then retreated back after I failed a button press.

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I watched the GiantBomb quicklook and was constantly surprised by how much they seemed to like it. All I could see was a joke of a game. I had the bright idea of downloading the demo, but stopped after my guy couldn't get past the dumpster without handholding and then retreated back after I failed a button press.

yeah they seemed to enjoy it, kind of shocked actually.

I was more dissapointed by the fact that if I didn't make my guy inhale his medication that he didn't eventually die, instead it just waited forever.

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How big budget did Heavy Rain actually have?

It's amazing how David Cage can talk himself to have such big budgets, because even though I don't know the actual budget figures, but this looks like a biiiig budget game. At least the marketing engine of Sony is behind it totally.

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How big budget did Heavy Rain actually have?

It's amazing how David Cage can talk himself to have such big budgets, because even though I don't know the actual budget figures, but this looks like a biiiig budget game. At least the marketing engine of Sony is behind it totally.

Really, they are behind it? I know they are pushing it as the next big thing, though I haven't seen any proper advertising in the UK. Left 4 Dead 2 had a massive ad on a few busses, Assassin's Creed II had the same I believe, NFS Shift had a few billboards, I could go on; I have seen nothing for Heavy Rain. I guess there could be TV advertisements, as a rule I watch as little TV as possible. Though i guess this could be a continuation of the absolutely dreadful marketing Sony has used in the past few years.

I kind of hope Heavy Rain doesn't sell well, at least not to Quantic Dream's estimations. It's not furthering the medium, if anything it is hindering the advancement. Cage needs to be dropped a peg or two, pretentious bastard. At least Molyneux has the credentials to cover him, with an absolutely fantastic catalogue of games he has been involved with.

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Of course I have no solid proof so I might be talking crap, but I've had the feeling for a long time already that there is a Sony marketing hype engine behind the game.

There's rarely any advertising for anything games related in Finland.

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To be fair, despite Fahrenheit committing many of the same gameplay atrocities if it hadn't gone completely mental with the plot I'd most likely have given it a similarly high score. :getmecoat

I couldn't get into Fahrenheit but, like Heavy Rain, I can tell why people would get into it. The games aren't complicated and look very nice. Every tiny interaction gives you an immediate, huge reward -- the action continues with more cutscenes, you get to meet new characters, you get to go to new rooms (basically, a game made entirely out of the reward content in traditional adventure games, without the puzzle part in between). It's that super casual game style overload of rewards and feedback for not doing a whole lot, couched in the aesthetics and tone of something like 24 or the X Files. It shouldn't be a surprise why a lot of people like looking at it/playing it.

The fact that you don't quite know what you're doing or why you're doing it (other than "it advances the movie") keeps me extremely separated from it when playing, though. Even when there are a few different options/paths, I still feel like I'm trapped in a dark room blindly flailing my arms against the walls in the hope that I'll find a lever which opens the door.

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How big budget did Heavy Rain actually have?

It's amazing how David Cage can talk himself to have such big budgets, because even though I don't know the actual budget figures, but this looks like a biiiig budget game. At least the marketing engine of Sony is behind it totally.

From a french article it seems the development budget was around 18M euros.

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From a french article it seems the development budget was around 18M euros.

I'm assuming that the marketing was separate, if so that is $5.3 million less than that of District 9, I expect the marketing would have been higher than that margin. I know which I consider worth the budget, it sure isn't Heavy Rain.

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I'm assuming that the marketing was separate, if so that is $5.3 million less than that of District 9, I expect the marketing would have been higher than that margin. I know which I consider worth the budget, it sure isn't Heavy Rain.

Ok, hate for Heavy Rain aside, I'm really, really surprised/happy? that a game like this got a budget that big. I mean who would put down 20-30 million for a weird adventure-esq game here in north america? No one.

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Ok, hate for Heavy Rain aside, I'm really, really surprised/happy? that a game like this got a budget that big. I mean who would put down 20-30 million for a weird adventure-esq game here in north america? No one.

The 2 shenmue games were believed to cost $70 million between them, maybe I am just bitter as they are both games I consider far superior to any other game, or interactive movie completely bombed, therefore is highly unlikely to be finished.

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Yeah I agree. Sony has always been a bit like this though, sinking huge amounts of money into 'creative risks'. It's why I've always maintained a healthy level of respect for them despite the criticism they've (justifiably) attracted during this generation.

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I'm half expecting one or two of you to turn around and say you were taking the piss, because some of the posts in here are...

I'm assuming that the marketing was separate, if so that is $5.3 million less than that of District 9, I expect the marketing would have been higher than that margin. I know which I consider worth the budget, it sure isn't Heavy Rain.
What marketing? :erm:

I don't watch television either, but even I've seen advertisements for Modern Warfare 2, Bioshock 2 and all the other games that are advancing their genres into exciting new territories on a shoestring budget whilst fully deserving of their inflated review scores - yet I've not seen a single advertisement for Heavy Rain.

District 9 was a great game though I agree!

I kind of hope Heavy Rain doesn't sell well, at least not to Quantic Dream's estimations. It's not furthering the medium, if anything it is hindering the advancement.
How's that work then?

I also don't understand this aversion to Heavy Rain. You don't like a game you don't play it, simple as that. It's not as if someone has a gun to your head, nor are they taking an existing franchise, turning it upside down and pissing on its grave. It's an original IP doing something relatively unique, and since (currently) there's nothing else comparable out there it makes such damning criticism appear extremely unfair. Especially when less deserving games get a free pass. Even if you don't like it, surely you must recognise the potential that more games of this ilk brings? whoever it's made by.

...but lets pretend you've played Heavy Rain and you maintain it's an aberration. For those who want a game in a similar vein, and yes those people do exist (and dream of games like Blade Runner as opposed to Modern Warfare Battlefield Heroics 4), what do you recommend in its stead? I mean for such heavy handed criticism there must be a veritable landslide of titles just waiting to be unleashed.

Cage needs to be dropped a peg or two, pretentious bastard.
More Cage rage! I find it hard to understand how you haterz can fixate on him since he appeared for what felt like one solitary minute during the beginning of Fahrenheit as part of a tutorial... and that was it.

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What marketing? :erm:

I don't watch television either, but even I've seen advertisements for Modern Warfare 2, Bioshock 2 and all the other games that are advancing their genres into exciting new territories on a shoestring budget whilst fully deserving of their inflated review scores - yet I've not seen a single advertisement for Heavy Rain.

District 9 was a great game though I agree!

Simply taking it to shows such as E3, Gamescom, etc costs a decent amount of money, as does simple advertising such as banner ads, I'm sure there are TV spots. When CoD MW2 had a marketing budget of $150 million, I can easily see Heavy Rain's being in excess of $5 million.

I compared it to District 9, which while a Motion picture, Heavy Rain is being pitched as an interactive Movie. It would have felt a disservice to developers to consider it as anything else. I feel it is a fair justification to make, considering it is essentially 'a Choose Your Own Adventure book' compared to a full on table top RPG.

How's that work then?

I also don't understand this aversion to Heavy Rain. You don't like a game you don't play it, simple as that. It's not as if someone has a gun to your head, nor are they taking an existing franchise, turning it upside down and pissing on its grave. It's an original IP doing something relatively unique, and since (currently) there's nothing else comparable out there it makes such damning criticism appear extremely unfair. Especially when less deserving games get a free pass. Even if you don't like it, surely you must recognise the potential that more games of this ilk brings? whoever it's made by.

...but lets pretend you've played Heavy Rain and you maintain it's an aberration. For those who want a game in a similar vein, and yes those people do exist (and dream of games like Blade Runner as opposed to Modern Warfare Battlefield Heroics 4), what do you recommend in its stead? I mean for such heavy handed criticism there must be a veritable landslide of titles just waiting to be unleashed.

Firstly I would like to point out I have played heavy rain, not much, but enough. I love games similar to Blade Runner, however Heavy Rain has a completely different feel to them. It feels more like 8mm compared to the Silence of the Lambs.

However there is one aspect of Heavy Rain I do greatly respect, which is the lack of a fail state, just a different ending.

More Cage rage! I find it hard to understand how you haterz can fixate on him since he appeared for what felt like one solitary minute during the beginning of Fahrenheit as part of a tutorial... and that was it.

It's not the section of Fahrenheit he appeared in, every interview I have read with him is cringe worthy to read, firstly he claims that Heavy rain is breaking the mould, which I cannot see how doing the same thing Shenmue did a decade ago, but moving the instructions around the screen is an innovation. He clearly exhibits a Molyneuxesque personality with a weaker sense of wonder and added arrogance.

I feel I am allowed to be vocally annoyed with him for one simple thing:

Buying Heavy Rain is almost a political act. You can vote with your credit card. You can say we want the industry to go in this direction. And if you don’t vote it means ‘no’ - just continue to make games based on zombies and monsters, that’s fine.
Source

If he is going to put it like that, of course I am going to have vocal and generally negative opinions of the man.

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...but lets pretend you've played Heavy Rain and you maintain it's an aberration. For those who want a game in a similar vein, and yes those people do exist (and dream of games like Blade Runner as opposed to Modern Warfare Battlefield Heroics 4), what do you recommend in its stead? I mean for such heavy handed criticism there must be a veritable landslide of titles just waiting to be unleashed.

Whoa, whoa, whoa there. I dream of games like blade runner apposed to MW and I can tell you one thing, Heavy Rain isn't anywhere near the direction of a game I'd like to see that's "like" blade runner.

Does that mean that anyone who likes Heavy Rain should be denied sequels or advancement in whatever genre it works in because I don't like it/agree with it being a hinderence on the industry?

Your god damn right the industry should be dictated by my personal preferences. In reality it seems to kind of take a middle-road based on my opinions, however. :)

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...whilst fully deserving of their inflated review scores...

Which games deserve inflated review scores?

I also don't understand this aversion to Heavy Rain. You don't like a game you don't play it, simple as that. It's not as if someone has a gun to your head, nor are they taking an existing franchise, turning it upside down and pissing on its grave. It's an original IP doing something relatively unique, and since (currently) there's nothing else comparable out there it makes such damning criticism appear extremely unfair. Especially when less deserving games get a free pass. Even if you don't like it, surely you must recognise the potential that more games of this ilk brings? whoever it's made by.

This is a common protest I see on the internet when someone publicly criticizes something others love. No offense, but it's a forum and it's open to that kind of talk. The forum would be no fun if we all resolved to never talk about games we disliked for whatever reason.

...but lets pretend you've played Heavy Rain and you maintain it's an aberration. For those who want a game in a similar vein, and yes those people do exist (and dream of games like Blade Runner as opposed to Modern Warfare Battlefield Heroics 4), what do you recommend in its stead? I mean for such heavy handed criticism there must be a veritable landslide of titles just waiting to be unleashed.

This is confusing, because what exactly is its stead? Why do you have to suggest a game to be released in it's place because Heavy Rain was criticized? The game is basically an adventure game, a genre which has become filled with overly pretentious, badly written, and cookie cutter games with similar graphic styles. Some of the stuff that Heavy Rain does has already been covered by Shen Mue or Pandora Directive. If your asking what adventures I would want, then Daedelic Entertainment has a tons of beautiful stuff finished or unfinished that should hopefully all come to the United States someday. I have no problem at all with adventure games staying traditional if they must, since stories are in just about every game now, it makes no difference to me.

If you mean in its stead as games that are innovative, then I would say Heavy rain is passing off putting together older conventions as new things. So I would rather no game be in it's place. Motion Capture usually results in ugly. It can hardly be done correctly sometimes in movies over with 50 million dollar budgets and up, and more often than not, in the end it's cheaper to pay some good animators to do it. Everyone in Heavy Rain looks like they have down syndrome or their facial muscles aren't working correctly, no joke here.

Uncharted used motion capture, but they still had animators do extensive work on the faces and just generally tweaking motion capture to make things look nice. I think if motion capture should be used for animation in games, then it should be used as a basic guideline, not your final animation in some effort to prove how real your animation and characters are.

I know we can be forgiving of it's shortcomings as well, since it's a game, but for the amount of hype that Cage brought on it's realism 2 years ago, it's severely lacking, and seems to only serve as, "check out this technology we used guys!" Which of course leads to more interesting making of and behind the scenes videos than some animator at a desk saying, "Yep, I animated that pretty well." This is sort of the Avatar effect.

I find all of these distressing in in a world where a few months back, every game journalist jumped on the bandwagon to say Tim Schafer should just write stories and not design games, because he's so good at the former. Yet Cage gets a free pass and rave reviews for creating mediocre stories with incredibly light gameplay.

More Cage rage! I find it hard to understand how you haterz can fixate on him since he appeared for what felt like one solitary minute during the beginning of Fahrenheit as part of a tutorial... and that was it.

He doesn't only exist inside that game you know? He does do interviews, press releases, and make outrageous statements. And stated before, Adventuregamers did give him a sloppy blowjob when he went and had his own subforum so everyone could ask the genius questions about his theories on game design. More hype. More big talk. Underwhelming delivery. I hate guys like that.

Edited by syntheticgerbil

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I dislike him because he thinks that his intentions will come across no matter what. I also dislike him because he thinks he's doing what no one else has ever done.

Eurogamer: Don't you think it might have won over sceptics a little more easily if you'd done that?

David Cage: It's true, it's true, it was not an easy choice, and honestly we discussed this internally at Quantic Dream and also with Sony, because we thought that some people might say, "I'm not interested in this game, it's way too slow." But it was also a message to say, look you're used to these games where you need to press buttons like this, like a madman, and just making things as quickly as possible - this game takes its time. But invest the time and you will be rewarded, because you will be emotionally involved in this experience.

Can he absolutely guarantee this? If he fails, can I get my money back? Because honestly, he says it like he's 100% sure I will give a damn about his characters. There isn't a "maybe". He might just not have a very good handle on English (in which case, he really shouldn't be writing the English translation and then giving it to Hollywood Script Doctors, who are useless), but he still comes across as being cocky. The flipside is that it wouldn't matter if the game was actually that good. Great work can come from a shit person, and vice versa. But Heavy Rain's writing and story seem to be so awful, and, according to a lot of the reviews I've read, this is something that carries over to the entire game and not just the handful of scenes I've checked out.

And again, I think this game is very important for the industry. It's not just about Quantic Dream and Sony and David Cage, it's about asking the market, are you interested in experiences that are for a mature audience based on storytelling and triggering more complex emotions? Yes or no? If the answer from the market is yes, it's going to open doors to others and there will be many very creative people who will maybe come up with better ideas, but at least publishers will open the door to them.

But if the game doesn't sell, it's going to close doors to everybody and for a long time. It's going to take years before someone tries something creative again. So I think it's an important game. I often say that buying Heavy Rain is a political act. It's a way of voting. Vote for what you want this industry to be in the coming years. Do you want it to be just trolls and goblins and zombies? Then don't buy it.

This is what irks me the most. From what I've seen (check the NSFW video), Heavy Rain is less about being mature and more about being racy. So while I am interested in a game that evokes emotions, I am not interested in Heavy Rain. It is not the first game to create an emotional response; it's not even the only game of the year that will do so. What about The Last Guardian? Won't that push my buttons?

Do I want the industry to be ruled by trolls and goblins? No. (I think there's a bit of an irony there, since it almost feels like he's trolling a bit.) There's a million games that offer neither of those things. I think I'll be buying those instead.

So while I do appreciate that he took a risk, and making such a game was admirable, I find it annoying that he actually thinks Heavy Rain is something to cherish, a single ray of sunlight in a goblin-infested cave.

It really isn't.

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I dislike him because he thinks that his intentions will come across no matter what. I also dislike him because he thinks he's doing what no one else has ever done.

To a point, I don't think something on this level has been done; you don't give any examples of who did the same thing before it, so you might prove me wrong. Still, there is a lot of contempt for something some of you only ever read about. Although you might be completely right (I haven't played it either), I think it's good that a game like this exists. The broader the types of games that can come out and do well, the happier I am.

Can't agree that it's racy because there are a pair of tits on the female. Another thing that bothers me is that both those scenes are completely out of context.

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I can't completely disagree with what you're saying Kroms, but I think you're letting your opinion of Cage influence your opinion of the game a bit too much. It's like actors like Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe are often dicks in real life, but I still admire their acting tremendously. You seem to be criticising a few too many things based on emotion and speculation.

I think you'd have a less stressful time if you just stopped following what Cage says like I did with pretty much every significant industry figure years ago. They always get overly passionate and slightly arrogant when talking about their work — it's the nature of the business that every auteur wants their work to revolutionise the industry. Same goes for films — director interviews can be truly cringe-worthy.

This is probably why I absolutely loved games like Fable, because I was completely oblivious to all the outlandish stuff Molyneux had been saying.

Edited by Thrik

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To a point, I don't think something on this level has been done; you don't give any examples of who did the same thing before it, so you might prove me wrong.

From the demo, heavy rain seems to pretty much be Dragon's Lair. Am I missing something?

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I can't tell if I'm supposed to take that seriously or not.

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Oh good lord that second quote is especially painful, Kroms.

Thrik, would you still watch Russell Crowe movies if he was both a dick and talentless? Kubrick is a favourite director of mine, and he was an asshole, terrorizing people into giving him the performance he wanted. Also, he never told the guy who did the music for 2001 that he replaced the music with classical pieces -- not until the composer saw the movie in the premiere. But Kubrick had talent and a respect for his own medium, Cage has neither.

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I can't tell if I'm supposed to take that seriously or not.

Ok, well, I'm not one for long speeches, but it seemed to me that the basic, now done to absolute death, QTE idea of dragon's lair is the basic gameplay in this. A branching story is nothing new, and the 'what am I thinking?' thoughts bubble mechanic is an ancient adventure game trope. I didn't even finish the demo mind, so maybe he gets more original ideas in there. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the quick time fight in the girl's apartment and will most likely get back to the demo, but I just don't see why Heavy Rain is a landmark title.

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It's not like Cage made Heavy Rain by himself, though. I doubt Quantic Dream is full of talentless assholes.

Like I said earlier I actually really enjoyed Fahrenheit apart from the ridiculous story during the last third, and I did succumb to playing the Heavy Rain demo and enjoyed that too — seems like a casual adventure game that has a chance in hell of appealing to the masses.

I personally don't get all the contempt for him and his skills. The story writing may not be the finest in the world in Heavy Rain's case (not that I know), but it's not exactly bad is it? Seemed pretty decent from what little was seen in the demo, anyway.

I dunno, just seems like a lot of pre-emptive hate for this game and I can't work out why as all they seem to be trying to do is do something different that may or may not work out. But as I say, I don't pay any attention to industry figure comments and just take the game at face value.

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Cage designed the game, is the CEO of the company that produced it and at least OK'd everything. The game's quality is his responsibility.

Fahrenheit was properly atrocious. That's where my vitriol and distrust comes from.

Heavy Rain writing seems to be, at best, CSI: Some town quality. Sure, a lot of people enjoy that, and by having no gameplay in it, a lot of people will be able to play Heavy Rain and I guess enjoy it, but that still only makes it throwaway entertainment.

We never take games at face value here, separate from their context, do we? This forum would be a quiet place if we did.

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