Heavy Rain

[Kenzomatic]

Well I just saw some footage of this game (I know I'm probably weeks late on this) but I can confidently say this game will not live up to the hype.

Most of you have probably heard me rant about how much I hate Motion capture before and how animating is the best way (ask anyone at Pixar about their thoughts on motion capture) anyways the weirdness of motion capture shines in the footage I watched. But of-course it does they claim over 500 hour of Mo-Cap and to clean up the footage properly would take over 50,000 man hours. So They cleaned up for their demoing but the rest I bet is only touched up with computer filters.

Next I must have saw like 20 quick time events thats not interactive thats distractive. Why not just make a movie that has DDR and when you miss button the movie stops playing. I guess we could call that interactive.

Then more of that god awful horrible splitting of the screen. This is poor directing there are ways show impending doom without having essentially a security moniter. I mean it is not usefull outside a montage to tell a story.

Anyways Clearly this will be Indigo Prophecy 2. Which isn't the worst thing. Well it will if they put timers on dialog response. I had just hoped they would remove the crap that held Indigo Prophecy back and maybe stop trying so hard to be a point and click adventure game and juts become an true RPG. Which FYI from Fallout 3 to Uncharted they still fall in an adventure genre, they just have different play mechanic.

[Luinil]

Uncanny Valley...

[iclim4]

I have to disagree Ken.
You can't dismiss a game as "not living up to the hype" simply because it's not the game you want it to be. This also goes the other way around.

Not every game has to stay in the same formula, Heavy Rain is trying to be Heavy Rain, not Uncharted or Fall out.

Next I must have saw like 20 quick time events thats not interactive thats distractive. Why not just make a movie that has DDR and when you miss button the movie stops playing. I guess we could call that interactive.

The purpose of those is fear and concentration, It keeps the gamer on his/her toes. It's their way of immersing the gamer in the game because one mistake could mean life and death. And a little fun fact, there is no "game over" in this game. If you make a mistake and you die, the story branches and moves on.(problem with this is if you have sucky reflexes, they say the game ends in around 4 hours [I assume everyone dies]. haha) Plus at certain choices you get to choose to either kill someone or let him live. Choices like these are what honestly intrigues me. (I've played only a few games that gave such heavy conequences to my decisions: One is Suikoden, another is F/S N, and another is Tsukihime) And all three games are my favorites.

Of course I'm not confident myself if Heavy Rain will live up to the hype.
There's just not enough info to give a decisive answer. But It does have my interest so far.

[zex]

Well, I think there are two important things to consider. One is how much the paths will really branch and the other one is how the game will play. The first one is the most complicated to answer, it really depends on what Quantic Dreams can make. I duobt it'll be a "different story for everyone" like they claim, but in Fahrenheit you could see that, even though the end was one, things you did affected the story (like describing wrong Lucas' portrait made it more difficult for Carla to identify him). If they do what they promise, that'll be really good

The other point is the gameplay, and here we have no mysteries. The game will play pretty much like Fahrenheit. If you liked that game, you'll like Heavy Rain, if you didn't, you won't. Pure and simple. So, the game will literally be full of QTEs, and it's one thing we all know and it won't surprise us. So, if you either like QTEs or at least can enjoy a game with them, HR won't disappoint in that way (as I said, story is another matter). If you can't, then you won't like HR no matter how you slice it and you should stop hyping it inmediately.

Personally I thought that it wasn't that Fahrenheit had too many QTEs, but that the necessity to pass them kinda made it drag a bit. And the ending was really anticlimatic. But in all it was a great game, and a nice change of pace from other games. If, like it's promised, HR solves the first one (since they say you can't "fail" a QTE), and they improve the story, particularily the ending, I can safely say that HR will be a great game, at least for me

[iclim4]

If HR is trying to appeal to me, then it just needs to have a great story.
It's what drives me to play pixelated sprite RPG's for hundreds of hours and Phoenix Wright games where all I do is read, click something occasionally and read some more. And I truly enjoyed these games.

My point is Zex, it's too early to say Heavy Rain will not live up to the hype.
I don't even think there's a lot of hype around it.

[zex]

Actually, I was responding to Kenzo's OP (and, really I wasn't responding as much as just giving my impression on Heavy Rain and just making use of the fact that this is a good place to do it )

[iclim4]

You're really weird.
haha
This line threw me off.

"If you can't, then you won't like HR no matter how you slice it and you should stop hyping it inmediately."

Since at that point I was the only one with a pro HR comment, I thought it was aimed at me.

[Mako]

Motion capture isn't that bad is it?

[Dgc1808]

I don't really see that many people hyping it. Just a few people doing some massive hyping... I'm one of them ... Can't wait.

[skeezer]

I really don't have high expectations for this title, I'll probably get it either way. But I don't see much hyping like dgc said, only a couple of massive hyping.

[Kenzomatic]

Motion capture isn't that bad is it?

YES IT IS!

One day I will write a theses on why studios should choose to not use motion capture.

Half-Life 2 was hand animated and look how fluid everything was they used Mo-Cap for reference on things like the hands. And their rigs where pretty limited compared to today, true it didn't reach film quality but hand animation (3D we are talking) reflects perception of reality so you get what is expected. Mo-Cap is reality with flicker and lack of percission and the biggest thing is ZERO perception of reality. Animators or experts in movement and the ideas they transmit. An exercise every animator goes through is having a character pick up a heavy object and how to give the character weight. I assure you that usesing Mo-Cap ends up being much more mechanical because Mo-Cap misses the tiny nuassences and fails to compensate with exaggeration. 9 times out of 10 the people working on Mo-Cap are clean up artist there job is to fix the footage, ie remove jerkyness/flicker and fix problem like a foot reversing. Sometimes they will have an animator fixing up the footage but still the foundation is crap so you better off to just Animate from scratch.

@Iclim Well some of what I was say was more game theory then just what HR should be. Anyways I will not enjoy HR it is just like Indigo Prophecy/Farenhieght in game play and really did not like thoose aspects of that game what so ever. The story stuff seems very interesting, and maybe it could be so good it outweighed the bad but from where I stand I don't think it will for me. I'll see what the reviews say and I'm never to proud to try something. Anyways the idea of their game is not in the gameplay and i think that it could be applied to any play mechanic but the choose one i don't like.

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