Heavy Rain Executive Producer Guillaume de Fondaumiere says that while the game has “more than 20 endings,” they’re less important than the path the player chooses to get there.
As the Co-CEO of Quantic Dream as well as the Executive Producer of PS3’s quick-time thriller Heavy Rain, de Fondaumiere was in Dublin, Ireland for an exclusive preview for members of the Irish media hosted by Sony Computer Entertainment Ireland. In a video posted on PlayStation Blog EU, he talked at length about the highly-anticipated title, which is slated to launch (alongside everything else) in early 2010.
Throughout the video, de Fondaumiere emphasized the contribution that players’ actions would have in real time on the plot of Heavy Rain. “You’re always in control of the characters, you’re always in real-time 3D. Through those actions, you’re going to tell your own story – really something that is totally unique.”
“For the first time in a videogame, you will be able to be – at the same time – the director, the actor, and the scriptwriter.”
Later on in the interview, de Fondaumiere said that the game had “approximately 60 scenes, and, ah… I couldn’t even tell you how many endings we have.” Apparently, though, he could tell us, saying that there were “more than 20 different endings” in Heavy Rain – but that they weren’t the point. “Most importantly, I would say … we have very distinct journeys.”
That’s all well and good, Mr. de Fondaumiere, and I know that my coworker Susan Arendt loved the game at E3, so I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I do wonder if perhaps he’s overstating matters a bit – in this very video where he talks about gamers taking the roles of scriptwriters, he mentions that the script was already written by fellow Quantic lead David Cage.
Of course, I’m just nitpicking here. Obviously, the script is already written, and there is no way for someone playing Heavy Rain to do something that hasn’t already been thought of and implemented by the developers at Quantic. There aren’t infinite permutations here, and despite de Fondaumiere’s claims, the stories are limited by what was put into the game. Even so, while Heavy Rain won’t let everybody completely make up their own story (about super-powered Peruvian hobos), what they’re aiming to do is still pretty damn impressive.
And no, I still can’t write about Heavy Rain without getting Tay Zonday stuck in my head.
(Via VG247)
