Heavy Rain Preview

VideoGamer.com: How long will it take the average gamer to complete Heavy Rain?

DC: I didn't want the game to be too long, to be honest. I'm telling a story and I want to create a very intense journey. It's difficult to create this emotion through 40 hours. So depending on how you play, I think that one typical walk through would be between eight and ten hours depending on how much you want to explore. It's really up to you.

VideoGamer.com: Is that just one character?

DC: That's all four characters. Their destinies are interlaced, so you play one scene with one and another scene with another, so it's not like you pick up one at the beginning and you play all the way through. Everything is interlaced. So I would say eight to ten hours would be a typical walk through, but of course you can replay scenes. There is a big replayability value.

VideoGamer.com: Because you'll want to see how else the scenes can play out?

DC: If you want to.

VideoGamer.com: Is it a purely single-player game?

DC: Yeah.

VideoGamer.com: Will there be any online features?

DC: Yeah definitely. We're working on this at the moment, having some content online and different features online. But it won't be of course multiplayer. It's a single-player experience.

VideoGamer.com: Will you support the game after it's released with downloadable content, or will it be a self-contained experience?

DC: It's both. It's a self-contained experience. We won't release the end of the game as DLC that you need to pay for. The game has all the scenes it's supposed to have. It's a complete story. But we are talking with Sony at the moment about having maybe extra downloadable content, maybe with prequels or sequels about the characters. I'm sure people will get attached to some of them and will want to know them even better.

VideoGamer.com: Heavy Rain appears to be an emotionally engaging game. Some people criticise games for not being truly emotionally engaging, and say there's never been a game released that has caused people to cry, for example. Will Heavy Rain make players cry?

DC: That's really the goal of Heavy Rain. If people play Heavy Rain and don't feel anything then we've missed the game. It's as simple as that. Our starting point with Heavy Rain was to say look, all the games around here are just based on adrenaline. It's just on excitement and frustration and competition - all these simple and primal emotions. What about all the more complex emotions like empathy, sadness, happiness? Can we make you smile or even laugh in front of your TV? Can we make you cry? Can we make you feel something different than just shooting and jumping? That's the challenge of the game. I hope we succeeded. There are some very unique scenes in this game, things that, when I play them I really feel something and hope players will feel something too.

VideoGamer.com: So maybe they will cry?

DC: Who knows?

VideoGamer.com: What do you say to the critics who say the game looks too quick time heavy?

DC: Bullshit! Just bullshit! I mean what's the question? We released Fahrenheit before. People know very well what the kind of balance we're looking for is. The balance is quite similar in Heavy Rain. I think that people who didn't see any demos or did not play the game are a little bit confused by the fact that the interface is in 3D. It's not quick time events. You navigate. You're free to explore. It's just that the interface, instead of being 2D icons in the lower corner, they are now inside the set. That's the only difference. You control the character second to second, and the balance is quite similar to Fahrenheit. There's no difference.

VideoGamer.com: Was it simply the case that when some people first saw Heavy Rain they didn't completely understand what you're trying to do?

DC: You know when you make a first-person shooter, you just see ten seconds and you know what the game is about. When you see a game that has no real reference, that is kind of different, it's really difficult. Some people imagine things. Don't be afraid. It's not quick time based. All the purpose of Heavy Rain is to tell the story not through cutscenes, but through gameplay. I would be stupid just to release cutscenes. I mean what's the point? I'd better make movie then. That's silly.

Heavy Rain is due out exclusively for PS3 in the first quarter of 2010.