David Cage explains what he wants to reach with his new game.
David Cage wants player interaction to be more than just shooting a gun, which is is goal in Beyond: Two Souls. Cage hopes that people “get” Beyond: Two Souls, because it is a different type of game, its not just ‘being interactive with a gun’. This is what he also wanted to achieve with Heavy Rain back in 2010.
“The games industry is very conservative. Each time you try something different you need to explain, evangelise and give a lot of effort just to get people to go past their current expectations. There will still be people who haven’t played Heavy Rain who think it’s a long movie with a couple of prompts, like Dragon’s Lair. I did promotion of Heavy Rain for two years and I tried to explain Heavy Rain, I showed it and I made demos. ”
“I said, ‘Look, you are in control all the time. It’s not Dragon’s Lair, you’re in control.’ But people didn’t get it, or they thought, ‘Oh, my character doesn’t have a gun so I don’t know how I can interact.’”
According to Cage the problem is that the industry “defines interactivity by shooting” this means: if the player isn’t shooting anything, they aren’t being interactive. “What we tried to say with Heavy Rain is, ‘You can be interactive without a gun’. There are many other ways of interacting that are not through committing violent actions.”
“With Beyond we are going to change many things. You have direct control over Aiden, and this entity is something that will sound familiar to more people, and will attract them to the game and make them realise it’s not Dragon’s Lair-esque in any way. It’s fully interactive, we have less cutscenes than many first-person shooters that I can see, and it’s just about interacting in a different way. It’s a different experience and I hope that people will be open-minded and open to trying something different.”
■ Jensen6
