This is amazing footage. From what the speaker was telling the crowd (I'm a native French speaker), everything is interactive, and by everything, even down to the cutscenes (with very small non-interactive events that rarely occur).
About the cutscenes : only a few of those scenes were actual non-interactive cutscenes. The rest that looked like "quicktime events" were actually controlled by the player herself. you can still move the head and shift your character, as well as in certain situations, change your position and move during those "cutscene" looking areas, as they aren't actual cutscenes, but in-game scenes that carry a cinematic point of view (so people might mistake it for being a non-interactive button-masher-quicktime-promt-screen event, when in fact the player is actually moving the person from place to place trying to find an exit). What people don't realize by watching this video, is that the cinematic quality of the camera angles is at such a high caliber they start to believe the whole thing just may be scripted : it shows how much quality has been put into this demo, and the final game will hold many, MANY different outtakes on the same scene. Props to Quantic Dream for doing such a feat!
Regarding character movement : it is handled by the R2 trigger to move in the direction of the head's orientation (which is in turn, controlled by the left analog stick). Doing so, the speaker says, allows the player to maintain the same direction in movement flow despite the different camera angles that may shift suddenly during, for example, sneak missions or rush events.
Finally, everyone who has played Indigo Prophecy will understand just from the tech demo that this game will be a real gem amidst the shooters and typical games of this and even past generations. It is, essentially, as the studio intends it to be, a breakthrough in narrative storytelling in a videogame (far surpassing MGS4), and it will reinvigorate the entire detective & mystery genres for its quite revolutionary gameplay mechanics.
The speaker finally says that they have not focused entirely on graphics, but rather on story. For this reason, the demo on its own has been confirmed to not even be in the game : it is nothing more than an in-game representation of the game engine rendering the final Heavy Rain in real-time. Even the main character won't be present in Heavy Rain. For the sake of protecting its story from spoilers, the studio resorted to building an original short-story simply to demonstrate the graphics and gameplay engine that they have developed for their game, coming out exclusively on the Playstation 3.
Hope this helps!
Log in to comment