Beyond: Two Souls creator David Cage has explained why Quantic Dream’s PS3 game is the largest motion capture project ever made.
“We wanted them to have nothing except this mo-cap suit, so they have 18 markers – these shiny balls – on the body, and about 90 little dots on the face. No wires, the sound is directly captured, it’s not done in post-production. it’s all captured on set at the same time. So we have an entire, consistent capture of the performance, which is something that has never been done in a videogame before, as that level. It’s also the largest performance capture project ever made as far as we know.”
“It’s about twelve months of shooting, more than 300 characters in the game, and it’s about 23,000 unique animations. That’s a number that is totally, absolutely insane. We realised that afterwards unfortunately, but that was really a crazy amount of work.”
“Games really like moves and patterns and things that are repetitive, so usually they have a bank of animations that they re-use all through the game, which works very well in the context of an action game. It doesn’t work at all in the context of a narrative-driven experience where you want each action to be unique, you want your character to be able to do zillions of things without any limitation and without repetition. So that means that you need specific animations for every specific action in the game.”
“When you open a door in an action game you just open the door, but if you’re a narrative-driven experience opening a door can be done in many different ways. You can be in your apartment and open a door and that’s it, but then you may fear what’s on the other side of the door, and then it’s a different way of opening it.” - David Cage, head of Quantic Dream
