Quantic Dream’s David Cage talked about the complexity of Beyond: Two Souls which results in the gameplay variety which is offered to the players and in the amount of work put into the motion capturing process.
“Each scene offers you a different challenge. Each scene is unique, like you see in a film. The game’s story is told in chronological disorder, like in the film Memento. It creates an interesting dynamic. Sometimes you can see the consequences of something before seeing the cause.”
“It’s about asking the player not just to watch the story passively, but contribute to the story at a macro level – to try to understand it and put the pieces of the puzzle together. It creates another layer of interactivity that is quite interesting. Beyond is the story of two characters. It’s the story of their relationship. It’s about being tied to someone for all your life and having to cope with that, and accept it.”
The team spent 12 months shooting mo-cap which ended in 300 characters and 23,000 animations. “It was a crazy amount of work. I was looking for a creative collaboration with talent. We did not pay some actors in Hollywood to do a couple of voiceovers in a soundbooth… It was about scanning the face and body of these people to recreate their perfect clone in the game, in realtime 3D. We don’t only have their look, we have their movements and their expressions. Their entire performance is recreated.”
“That means we need a specific animation for pretty much every single action in the game. If you open a door in an action game, you just open a door. In a narrative-driven experience, opening a door can be done in many different ways. You can be in your apartment just opening a door, and that’s it. But if you fear what’s on the other side, then it’s a different way of opening the door.”
