Overgame sat down with Quantic Dream for an interview with their recent announcement of thier partnership with Sony and their upcoming title. Overgame : Why being so mysterious about a title that will most probably be Heavy Rain ?Guillaume de Fondaumiere : We thought it wasn’t necessary to announce the game’s title yet. Mostly because we won’t show anything until a few weeks.
Q: During E3 ?A: No, it will be a little bit later than E3, a show relatively important for japanese people, if you see what I mean. So not far from now. There is still no official confirmation that this game is HR.
Q: Well, yeah, but I don’t see a game studio starting simultaneous work on two games mainly developped for the PS3.A: No, at least not for now, even if we should start a new production soon. But for now, we work with Sony on a project, and soon, I think, we will announce the game’s title.
Q: Many journalists already see a link between the mysterious game and HR.A: Everybody does, and I let them do. But, for now, I don’t have to confirm or deny it. We just made a communication in a certain way. That the game’s title is for now HR or something else is not really important anyway. I think it’ll be more interesting to discover what kind of game it will be. We’ll obviously unveil its title, the details, images - not only images by the way - around the end of september.
Q: How’s HR development going ?A: Very well !
Q: And what about the virtual actors system, announced during the Numeric Festival of La Villette, last year ?A: We’re still working on it. We had a casting for about 350 people last week. In fact, it’s a true process, there are tons of researches going on what we want to do with virtual actors. It’s truly long run work to reach the quality we want to achieve but mostly, to create a tool that we will be able to use for our future games, or other companies’.
We already rent our mocap studio and in the future, we probably could offer a service on virtual actors. Hence the necessity to have a maximum number of profiles, to be sure the tools we develop are versatil. Creating a virtual actor and making him talk for 4 minutes isn’t enough. What we want, is to be able to create virtual actors, tall, small, fat, slim, asians, caucasians, african, and to have a production process that will truly allow us to make it so at reasonable costs.
Q: Is Heavy Rain a true game ? We had the impression, during E3 2006, that it only was a tech demo.A: The Casting, what we have shown last year, and that’s where there has been a confusion, was a tech demo, a casting we made for HR. And we thought it was interesting to link both, the game itself and what we did with actresses. You will soon know who has gotten the main role.
Q: So it wasn’t requested by Sony ?A: No, not at all. We originally founded this project. It’s just that we started working on the PS3 because we quickly had the dev kits. We thoguht it was the ideal console to create virtual actors and we also wanted to learn how to create thos kind of actors or actresses.
Two months before E3 last year, Sony came, saw what we were doing and they told us “that’s great, could we showcase it during the show ?” and we said “sure.”. Of course, this demo contributed to convince them to work with us and they now have officially signed for a title, on a project not announced yet.
Q: But HR’s developemnt still continues ?A" Of course. It’s a very important project. We announced the deal with Sony a few days ago but it’s now been a while that we work together. What I can tell you is that we had some choice, a vast choice, but we chose Sony and the PS3 as partners.
Q: You hinted the console’s power earlier. Did this factor have something to do with your decision ?A: Indeed. We have a big faith in the PS3, that’s obvious. It is the powerful console on the market now, and for the kind of games we create, we needed this power to achieve our ambitions. So the choice was pretty simple.
Q: We still feel that the trend now is multiplatform. Aren’t there any risks to choose an exclusive deal ?A: When you’re an editor, this question is actually meaningful. Developing on several platforms is theortically less risky. In fact, you still have to carefully analyze the porting costs, if you can port, between two platforms that are very different - I mainly speak about the 360 and the PS3.
Then, you can do Wii and PS3 but for me, it would be like doing Game Boy and 360 ; there is a huge gap. You can’t imagine using the same elements. For the 360 and the PS3, you can still have a common graphical basis. But still, it’s only a graphical basis because the architecture is really very different. To be clear, I think that if you have a 15 million budget on a PS3 title, addign 2 million for a 360 port is clearly not enough. Or, the game won’t match the quality of games developed especially for the 360.
One should not forget that we make games in a concurrent environment where there always is a main version, and less pushed versions that are only ports. Games that sell on a system as well as on another system are very rare, and it’s the same for the gfx or performances.
Q: Should I deduce that you plan to use all the PS3’s potential ?A: That’s the goal, obviously. Our choice makes us entirely focus on the PS3, then gives us the possibility to push way more than if we were working on two different platforms. Working on two different platforms, this means a choice : either you plan to use two markets at a lesser cost, but then it’s a lesser game, or you want to make two quality versions, but then you have two games that are not fundamentally different but that are going to cost one as much as the other.
Q: So even if many people are still very skeptical for the PS3’s future, you still have faith in SonyA: Yes, obviously. Skepticism doesn’t worry us at all because I think that other people would have told us that they were skeptical about 360’s chances if we had chosen this console.
Today, the console that sells the best is the Wii. Great. Now, if I don’t release my game today, I’ll do in two years. How will the market be like on two years ?
I have the feeling that analysts still have very different opinios on 360’s and PS3’s positions in two years. There still are people that think that the Wii will still be the console with the bigger install base ; I doubt it. And between the 360 and the PS3, I think the PS3 is gonna win. But anyway, my opinion, for this gen, is that we will have a market with three important actors, and I think this is a very good thing. It will be much more balanced than last gen.
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