E3 Preview: Beyond: Two Souls
- Thread starter Sarah LeBoeuf
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There seems to be an Ellen Page fetish at E3. Weird, huh? Well, I guess it's a break from constantly acting in films like Juno...
Am I the only one who found the Beyond Presentation during the Playstation show unintentionally hillarious?
"We are proud to announce academy award nominee Ellen Page will be in our new video game. Her brand of acting is perfectly suited for this role. To demonstrate this we are now going to show you a cut scene of the game in which she sits motionless and quiet while a nameless sheriff rambles at her awkwardly for five minutes."
"We are proud to announce academy award nominee Ellen Page will be in our new video game. Her brand of acting is perfectly suited for this role. To demonstrate this we are now going to show you a cut scene of the game in which she sits motionless and quiet while a nameless sheriff rambles at her awkwardly for five minutes."
I loved Heavy Rain. I love Ellen Page. I love the concepts of linked souls and modern day seemingly-magical power stuff. As far as I'm concerned, this game can only be a good thing.
Am I the only one who isn't interested in Ellen Page being a badass and killing cops for the sake of being a badass? I see no mystery or tension or intriguing plot, especially not when compared to Heavy Rain. I mean, its quantic dream, so maybe they can pull it off, but the trailer looked ridiculous (good motion capture though).
Its an E3 trailer though, so I shouldn't pay much attention to it at the moment, because its probably going to come out in 2015
Its an E3 trailer though, so I shouldn't pay much attention to it at the moment, because its probably going to come out in 2015
I don't get it. Why does Cage keep coming up with the whole "There is no genre for my games" when they have been done to death, already? Heavy Rain was one big interactive movie with plot bifurcations like in PC adventure games, or Japanese visual novels.
The man can write, but that doesn't mean he's this groundbreaking force pushing video games to the next level as a medium. It just baffles me some times.
The man can write, but that doesn't mean he's this groundbreaking force pushing video games to the next level as a medium. It just baffles me some times.
You weren't the only one. I thought it was hysterical that they crowed about having her as a voice actress, then showed an extended scene in which she didn't say a single word.The Hungry Samurai said:
But, having seen actual gameplay, holy sheboygan do I want to play this game.
She has to call herself "A Tiny Canadian" in this game. Source: twitter
*World explodes around her*
Terrified Cop: WHO ARE YOU?!
Jodie: A Tiny Canadian. *smirk*
*World explodes around her*
Terrified Cop: WHO ARE YOU?!
Jodie: A Tiny Canadian. *smirk*
It's unfair to call Heavy Rain an interactive film really. It's not a standard game at all but it's strengths come from the interactivity rather than just the plot.Vault101 said:
It's hard to describe, you can control where the player works, what they look at, what they touch what they say. There are button prompts for everything and they're genius, it's weird, the character was ducking under barbed wire and it felt like the way I was pressing the buttons was exactly what ducking under barbed wire was. They'd make you hold certain buttons and carefully ease over others and you would end up play a very delicate tense finger twister on the controller.
The other thing and the big thing is you don't need to hit all the QTEs to win and they don't replay. It's not 'we're going to do this over and over again until you hit the correct button sequence and we'll show you the full cutscene' instead it's
'He's coming at you with a pipe, press x press x! Ahh you missed it and he just smashed you face with a pipe and know he choking you, mash the button stop him from choking you, wait a minute press O, smash him over the head with the frying pan...' etc
It's very tense, they're very cleverly placed and designed and it invests you in the fight.
Saying that, the satisfaction from playing Heavy Rain isn't the satisfaction of completely a challenge, jumping through the hoops in a game. This isn't a level up kind of scenario. Instead it uses the gameplay to make you feel bonded to the characters and events much quicker and deeper than you would in a book or film.
There's a part where you're put in a room, there's a table and a knife and psychopath tells you that if you want to see your child again, you have to cut your finger off. In a film if they shot it well and the acting was really good, maybe you could see how important it was. But here you had to pick up the knife, draw it back and do it yourself. And it felt so much more real. Suddenly you realised wait a minute this is a big thing. Am I going to do it? Oh sh* sh* I'm going to do it...'
There really isn't anything like it. It's definitely not a game in any sense of anything you've played before but there's a power that the interactivity brings that 'interactive film' can't convey. The narrative feels so much stronger than a film and it's different when you're controlling whats going on. Whereas 'interactive film' just makes it sound like a choose your own adventure.
People who didn't like Heavy Rain say that David Cage should have just gone off and made a film if that's what he wanted to do. But it's not and this would not have worked as a film at all. In fact the story was crud, but the power of the medium almost overcomes that
I hope that Quantic Dream really do learn from their mistakes, and provide things like drastically different endings, a story free of plot holes and perhaps some actual difficulty. I only failed the QTEs in Heavy Rain very, very occasionally, although it could have been on a medium difficulty (did Heavy Rain have difficulty settings? I'm putting Beyond on hard, if it's possible).
Well, if you haven't played the game, you don't even really know what you're asking. Beyond improves upon Heavy Rain's gameplay, but still uses much of the same control scheme.Vault101 said:
for me beyond was one of the few bright spots of this year's crop of e3 conferences. The tech behind their work keeps improving so quickly, it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here.
