Kara, Heavy Rain Dev Team's tech demo

[Erttheking]

I was talking to my friend today and she brought up this tech demo that the development team of Heavy Rain made.

And yes the graphics are very nice, the modeling was good and I'd like to see more games with graphics this good, blah blah blah blah. But there's something else I want to focus on.

WHY ISN'T THIS A REAL GAME!? Seriously, watch that video and honestly try to tell me that you wouldn't be interested in a game with this person as the main character. Heck! Even the guy who's never on screen manages to get a lot of emotion across in just a few minutes. Dear God, how can you come up with something like this and just say "Welp, we're never gonna continue this story". It's saddening in a way, I really want to know what happens next.

EDIT: This was made in 2012? Christ I'm behind the ball.

 

[Gatx]

Well, for one thing, there's nothing about it that screams "game." It's a short film, it has a story, and yeah. It's not like you saw someone demo a short clip of a really cool game mechanic like web slinging or a portal gun and thought "I want to play that game!" you saw a video and thought "I want to know more about that story!"

Also an A.I. becoming self-aware and facing destruction is like one of the basic narratives of robot fiction. I'm sure you'd be able to find a story similar to this one that's meatier.

 

[Nouw]

While it wouldn't be 1:1 to the video I think a game where you play as an A.I. that gains sentience/freedom/whatever could justify its place in the game medium. You start off the game doing stuff, taking orders and completing objectives. Fastforward and something goes wrong and suddenly you can do whatever you like.

Spoiler: Spoilers for Bioshock

'Would you kindly' comes to mind except I'm thinking you should get way more freedom when you gain direct control i.e. you can choose to pursue your creators or forget about them and try to move on with a new life.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Nah.

Just because something works in a 7 minute trailer doesn't mean it'll work in a full length game. The fact that it's so short is what peaks your interest in wanting to see more. But that won't automatically correspond into something that can be stretched over several hours.

Sometimes things just need to be short and sweet.

 

[viranimus]

Consider scale. Ill use WoW as an example. Take a character and put them in say the starting zone for Pandaria. You can see you are getting a solid 50 fps on your PC. Take that same char into a second story Inn in the original world. All of the sudden you see you are pushing 200 fps. While some things work well in tiny enclosed environments, to put them under the stress of a complete open world will yield diminishing results.

This is true of graphics, mechanics, even on a narrative and emotional level. While it is powerful in a short clip, to try to expand it outward to be a fully fleshed out game and somehow manage to avoid not just Amtracking right into countless other stories around the same subject. Trying to avoid all of that wealth of content would be like walking in a minefield. So it might be possible to do this kind of story, How long and well could it be fleshed out before it became cliche or outright uninteresting?