'Heavy Rain' is a cousin of the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.
Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.
Playing with light is something that is very important, especially when you want cinematography in your game.
Some media used to talk about video games only to say how violent or addictive they could be. With 'Heavy Rain,' they talked about the story of the game and the emotions they felt while playing.
I don't think that photorealism is required to offer emotions. You can have very abstract characters and renderings offering the same type of emotions - look at Pixar movies: they're not photorealistic; they're stylised, and it doesn't prevent emotion from happening.
'Indigo Prophecy' already brought a lot of new features to the traditional adventure genre, including the Action system, MultiView, Bending Stories, etc. 'Heavy Rain' will include features like advanced physics and AI, realistic characters and living environments.
Every time you try to create an experience with a character who doesn't use a gun, doesn't drive a car, doesn't jump off platforms, doesn't solve puzzles, you are taking a risk.
I believe that interactive storytelling can be what cinema was in the 20th century: an art that deeply changes its time.
Games are quite shy at talking about different things. Most are about facing hordes of monsters or saving the world or whatever; few games actually talk about the real world, about real people, about their relationship, their emotions, their feelings.
As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.
The concept of 'Heavy Rain' is to offer real-life situations with real characters. There are no supernatural elements in the story.
With 'Heavy Rain,' we're creating something that changes many traditional game paradigms.
I don't pretend that 'Heavy Rain' will be a revolution, and I don't know if people will love it or hate it. All I can say is that it is definitely going to be different.
'Fahrenheit' was a very difficult product to sell to publishers initially because no-one believed in storytelling or emotion.
Game Over is a very frustrating game convention. In short, it means, 'If you were not good enough or did not play the game the way the designer intended you to play, you should play again until you do it right.' What kind of story could a writer tell where the characters could play the same scene ten times until the outcome is right?