Interviews// Inside Heavy Rain

SPOnG: You mentioned moral choices – a phrase that makes a lot of people groan because it’s used so often. A lot of the time, however, the choices are fairly meaningless. Do you think anyone has successfully worked moral choices into a game so far?

Guillaume de Fondaumičre: Not really. I think Peter Molyneux’s attempts in Fable 2 are interesting, but we’re trying to do something rather different with Heavy Rain. We’re not interested in clearly presenting to the player ‘do you want to be a good guy or a bad guy and see how the story unfolds from beginning to end if you’re a good guy or a bad guy?’ What interests us is how players react to certain circumstances and how – it’s a bit like in real life – we’re faced with certain choices in our lives and we’re not necessarily all good or all bad. I think we’re all in shades of grey, to a certain degree, and this is far more interesting to us.

I think to a certain degree this is far more interesting, because again, it’s far more realistic.


SPOnG: We’ve all been playing infamous in the office and everyone has opted to play through on good in their first attempt, which is interesting. It’s pretty meaningless knocking down a virtual pedestrian in a game but still people will swing away from it. You’ve said that the decisions aren’t as straight forward as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in Heavy Rain, but presumably there are choices where you can be more or less selfish. Has anything from your testing so far surprised you in that respect?

Guillaume de Fondaumičre: Not really. First of all because we didn’t really enter into user tests on the whole game.

The second thing is, we’re not in this route and I think everything is contextual and it’s really a sum of choices and sum of actions that lead you to a different story. We have a number of different endings – I don’t believe we counted them, but there are a great many. I think that the most important thing to us is that people bear the consequences of their actions and the fact that whatever they do, whatever they choose to do, they have a meaningful story that unfolds. I think the stakes are going to be very clear for the player.

The player will know what his ultimate goal is throughout the game, but there are many ways of how to get to a… I wouldn’t even say a successful ending. David (Cage) was asked a question at E3 by one of the journalists, asking ‘what if you lose all four characters?’ Well, this is possible. There is no game-over in the game. So you can actually lose all four characters. What happens then is, you still have an ending to the story. It’s a very sad ending but, as David says, it’s his favourite ending.

I guess that that was the philosophy behind it, really. It’s to make sure that whatever the choices, the story unfolds in a meaningful way and in a way that is satisfying to the audience.

Maybe some will want to play it again and see how the story ends if they choose differently.