[Thello]

Originally Posted by Mircalla

words

You're not funny.

[Melanie68]

Originally Posted by Mircalla

Why is it inappropiate? <snip>

It is inappropriate because what you call colorful language, we consider to be insulting and flame-worthy material. There is nothing wrong with not liking the game, but it can be said without using the word "retard" in a pejorative manner. There is nothing wrong with your opinion of the game, we are asking you to express in a less insulting way. One moderator of this forum (stepurhan) warned you, now I (another moderator) am giving you a final warning. Thanks.

[Sonny-Bonds]

I have just written an article on this exact point:

http://armchairadventuregames.blogspot.com/

I think it is an adventure game, for the reasons I go through in the article,
but it clearly deviates from the Adventure Gaming template in many ways.

Please let me know what you think of it, comment - discuss!

[inm8#2]

Finally finished this. Great experience! One of the best stories in a game I've come across. Hell, it was better written than most Hollywood products of today.

I haven't read this thread and don't care to study the debate about whether HR is an adv game or not. Personally, I think there are adventure game elements, but it's more of an interactive movie. This does not diminish it at all. In fact, for what HR seeks to accomplish, it does so majestically.

[Lee in Limbo]

Originally Posted by inm8#2

This does not diminish it at all. In fact, for what HR seeks to accomplish, it does so majestically.

*clicks Like*

[inm8#2]

Adventure game or not, it's going to be a movie!

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/gamenews.php?id=73548

[thejobloshow]

Originally Posted by inm8#2

Adventure game or not, it's going to be a movie!

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/gamenews.php?id=73548

I like Heavy Rain, but it's a pastiche of films and tv series from the same thriller genre.... Good luck to it I suppose. I would have thought Alan Wake showed more promise as a film or TV adaptation (assuming that it attracted a decent writer).

[Roper Klacks]

The story was very generic, but i think it could work better as a movie than a game, but only if David Cage isn't writing. Heavy Rain writing was awful.

[Venkman]

If you held a draft of television/screenwriters, Milch as a number one pick would not be that bad.

[Christian IV]

Quite a thread. Quite a journey between the personal view of a game and the personal scuffle between posters. I prefer the game view.

As for what Cage himself says this deserves repeating:

Heavy Rain is often referred to as an adventure game. How do you feel about the application of that genre title to the game? In what ways is it appropriate or inappropriate?

Adventure games are a very clearly defined genre based on established mechanics: exploration, inventory management, puzzles and dialogue choices. There is generally a focus on story and characters with a very slow pacing and cut scenes to make the narrative move forward, generally in a quite linear way.

Based on this definition, Heavy Rain is NOT an adventure game. There is no inventory in the game, no object to combine or examine, no puzzle, the game does not rely on everlasting dialogues. The story is told through players' actions and not through cutscenes, and players' actions have significant consequences on the narrative. Last but not least, Heavy Rain offers a diversity of situations and gameplay, as well as some spectacular action sequences.

So to make a long answer short, I don’t think Heavy Rain belongs to the adventure genre, although it is about story and characters. I don’t know to what genre the game belongs. I don’t think it is that important though to put it in a specific box with a label on it. At the end of the day, if people enjoyed it, they rarely wondered if it was because it was an action/adventure or an RPG.

“Adventure games are dead” is a common phrase in the gaming industry. Do you think that discussion is even relevant in the current gaming landscape?

I'd probably agree with that phrase. The Adventure genre is one I really enjoyed but it has struggled probably because it's been unable to evolve with the games becoming outdated and of less interest. Again, I am talking about games based on inventory management, puzzles and dialogue choices.

It certainly does not mean that people lost interest in good stories and interesting characters, but more in the specific experiences this type of games had to offer. Heavy Rain offers a new approach to interactive storytelling: it is not based on mechanics, it fully integrates real time 3D and cutting edge visuals, it mixes storytelling and actions, and most of all, it offers players to have a real impact on the story. It is not just about seeing one or another cutscene at the end, it is about living different stories, being the writer, actor and director of their own story.

and later in the article, http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/a...interview.aspx, M. Dave says:

Do you see this style of game becoming more prominent in the future?

I would like a better balance between games for kids/teenagers and games for adults. At the moment, it is probably a ratio of 99% vs 1%, I would be really happy with a 70% vs 30% ratio as a first step…

Again, this is not a personal fantasy, it is an absolute necessity for our industry and a natural way to evolve. Think of the first movies that were made a century ago: very spectacular scenes that were shown in fun fairs to impress people and entertain kids. Cinema successfully evolved from a fun fair attraction to art. Video games were also born in fun fairs. We still have to evolve and become an art.

i will come back to that last bolded part, but first a few more quotes:

Regarding characters, the game also features a quite impressive gallery of faces and surprising people… all based on real actors. They were usually created as full virtual clones of real people, using their face, their voice, their body, their movements and facial animations. We developed all technologies and engines internally at Quantic specifically for Heavy Rain.

I believe all this work plays an important role in the experience offered by Heavy Rain. The story and the characters aim to look and feel real, sets, animations, faces are as close to reality as possible today in real time 3D. It was really useful in creating believable emotions, empathy, and make the player feel he is “playing reality."

so we move from art into REALITY...so art is not real? Artistic and artful renderings of life, which allow us to relax and enjoy a game setting rather than feel WE ARE THERE totally....is something to leave behind?

and about the people in the game and how Cage treats them:

Archetypes are the entry points to characters. They allow to break very quickly the barrier with the player and to make him comfortable. He thinks he knows these characters forever and can predict how they can/should behave.

Once this is established, the challenge is to go beyond archetypes by adding layers of complexity to the characterization that will surprise the player and make him feel there is more than what he thought. He believed he knew everything about this character, and then you can reveal other aspects of his personality that he did not suspect. By doing this, you can create rich and surprising characters without spending hours to create empathy and make players care for them.

so we are rats in a maze that a superior being (the developer) controls and enjoys watching being shocked and surprised....being encouraged to make assumptions so that the game can gain power by shocking us out of it..

Spoiler:

(life and death choices..who lives who dies...who must we kill?)

so we are supposed to have fun while being forced to experience traumatic choices and see dangerous things happen and to be deceived and shocked by people we think we know? I think I have enough of this in real life to not want to really go to a game for more.

and Cage again:

Most of all, what I learnt from Indigo is: 1) it is possible to create an experience based on story and emotion for an adult audience, and 2) players can have interest for this type of experiences if it is written and executed right. Just discovering these two points would have been enough in my mind to justify the hard work put in Indigo.

so this is a big discovery? that a good story engages the audience? I think that this may have been known by story tellers for some, well, maybe like 4000 years....

and finally:

In Heavy Rain, the gameplay appears to be relatively simple, chiefly giving gamers an avenue to travel through the story. Are good storytelling and complex gameplay mechanics incompatible concepts?


“Allowing the player to make complex things in a simple way” was one of my tag lines designing the game. I wanted the challenge to be in the mind of the player and not only on the controller. I am not a big believer in mechanics in general. Creating patterns and loops spread through levels is not my vision of creative design. I try to explore contextual actions which means that what you can do changes based on the situation. It is much more complex to write because your characters have virtually access to anything, which means more freedom and more problems on a design standpoint, but I believe this is the only way to go. It is almost impossible to create interesting and complex emotions with a hero only able to run/jump/shoot/crouch, and you end up having to tell the story in cut scenes.

So in short, I don’t believe that complex mechanics are necessary for good storytelling because mechanics are based on loops and narrative hate loops. We need to invent new ways of interacting not based on mechanics. I believe this is where the real challenge is.

so most of the games we have enjoyed where characters run, jump shoot, fight with swords or words or actions, crouch, move ...are boring...and we are fish in a barrel enjoying only a pony ride?

this is a strange direction for Quantic to do, it is basicaly turning their backs on Omikiron a wonderful artistic and surprising game full of beauty and all the things that Cage says he is NOT doing...and they turn to photo realistic shocking and demeaning, ie the player as a rat in a maze of his (Cage's) design performing for his amusement.

Not much fun I would say in the end,....and as for making it for an expensive and exclusive platform when the PC works just fine and has for decades..well that is just marketeering and I wont support any game that is so blatantly sponsored by a platform maker. I am sorry to see some of the lower level mud slinging in this thread, I hope we can keep the conversation civil and remember that words have meaning as well as content.

[Christian IV]

I am sorry to see David trash his own companies past great achievemnts and become one more movie clone maker. We are vanishing into the mirror of the camera. I hope some remember and keep moving into art and away from the mechanical eye.

My point is that David is talking about making games an art when they already are and one of Quantic Dream's games was truely one of the most artful and artisitc yet, Nomad Soul... yet he turns his back on that and follows the easy jargon of the word spinners and review machine that wants NEW and BETTER and more "realistic" ....which is the same slippery slope that print literature and the movie industry is sliding down now....into the pit of mangled lowest common denominator shock em style of cheap thrills. And as for the question of genre we see the evolution of adventure games that now includes a wide range from Tomb Raider (action adventure) to Far Cry (high action adventure) and Crysis, Mass Effect, as well as Dreamfall and Syberia, and the great RPGs like Oblvlion and KoTOR, and Jade Empire..these are all adventures of kinds and sorts....and to run from a genre just because the reviewers are too dumb to see complex evolution of CGI game literature ...is sad. David I expected better of you and from Quantic...and I am sad to see interactive movies taking over the wonderful possibilities of the game world. We need dreams and artful adventures that are not just machine made to remember our humanity and the random magic of life.

I will keep hoping for a sequel to The Nomad Soul..and will pray for David to escape the maze.

[Luther10]

Originally Posted by Christian IV

Not much fun I would say in the end,.... and as for making it for an expensive and exclusive platform when the PC works just fine and has for decades..well that is just marketeering and I wont support any game that is so blatantly sponsored by a platform maker. I am sorry to see some of the lower level mud slinging in this thread, I hope we can keep the conversation civil and remember that words have meaning as well as content.

No matter how much I disagree with you, it's after all your opinion and I totally respect it (even though I feel like at times, you're picking specific quotes or sentences or words, and taking them out of context) .... but anyway, that last paragraph (quoted above) , ahhhhh..., really leaves a bad taste in my mouth...

So before we dive deeper into this discussion, I want to verify something important. Just want to ask you one question: Have you played Heavy Rain?

[Venkman]

That quote is ridiculous. Does Christian hate all first-party console games, all consoles in general? What about games that are "exclusively" for the PC? Games by Microsoft ("first-party" for PCs in a way)? What does "working fine for decades" have to do with the future or the fact that there are many types of games that have historically worked better on consoles?

[River]

I don't mind if a game is a console exclusive, a port or a PC only title. The entertainment industry is about money and if a studio does a good deal with companies like Sony or Microsoft... good for them. I play games on my PC, console and phone so bring us great titles. It is the only I ask.

[mrLOL]

I know a mentally challenged person IRL who loves to play on my synth because there's a auto-play mode so he can randomly press the keys and whatever he does it sounds AWESOME!

Heavy Rain = that synth on auto-play mode.
People who likes Heavy Rain's gameplay = Mentally challenged people (to lesser degree).

I played through HR because I think the writing and atmosphere is beautiful, but when it came to enjoying the game-play I had to fully focus myself to retard my brain down to PS3-level and then I was able to get into this illusional state where it felt like >I< was playing the game (similar to how the person I mentioned above got into the illusion he was playing the music coming out of the synth).

So I'm not doubting that people enjoy the gameplay of HR, but games are supposed to be about heightening your brain-activity in a effortless flow manner, not about reaching the absolute zero of brain-activity.

(I'm not however saying that I like the "cash in mouse-hole" type puzzles either, that gameplay is equally bad as HR except on the far side of the other side of the scale).

[ozzie]

[...]The story is told through players' actions and not through cutscenes, and players' actions have significant consequences on the narrative. Last but not least, [it] offers a diversity of situations and gameplay, as well as some spectacular action sequences.

He could also be describing The Last Express with these sentences.

[Dale Baldwin]

Originally Posted by mrLOL

Heavy Rain = that synth on auto-play mode.
People who likes Heavy Rain's gameplay = Mentally challenged people (to lesser degree).

There are ways to get your opinion across, and this is not it.

If you're going to make a statement, don't make a sweeping insulting generalisation like that.

[rtrooney]

Wow! Lots of invective! Either the game is so incredibly good that it deserves the diatribes. Or it is so incredibly bad that it deserves the diatribes. For me, as before, it isn't worth the equipment investment required to play the game.

[mrLOL]

Originally Posted by Dale Baldwin

There are ways to get your opinion across, and this is not it.

If you're going to make a statement, don't make a sweeping insulting generalisation like that.

Well just to make clear I didn't mean "mentally challenged" as in the usual internet-insult, it was simly the analogy of my particular example (the first time I played HR that image of my mentally challenged visitor playing on my synth came immediately mind and I think it's a good analogy for HR),
however ofc the implication is pretty strong () so for that I apologise. (hence why I added the "to lesser degree", meaning I don't think they are mentally challenged, only that the HR-gameplay speaks to the less intelligent side of people)

[mrLOL]

rtrooney: do you have any controllers? (xbox, nes, anything)?
load up the high-res "let's play" on youtube and pretend to tap buttons while stuff happens, you think that I'm joking, but seriously I've both played it through and watched some let's play (I wanted to see different paths) and it turns out to be nearly the same thing,
I know many ppl who simply watch it as a long movie on let's play and it actually works BETTER that way because then you can skip some of the parts which are there only to drag out the game-time.