Listening
to David Cage talk about games tends to leave audiences in a state of
mild awe. As the founder and visionary of developer Quantic Dream, Cage
has taken his company – and his art – in a direction virtually unseen in
the gaming industry. The way he speaks about his projects makes you
feel that not only does he understand how to market his products and
create a special kind of intrigue about them, but that he authentically
strives to do something new, something different and something that
takes you by surprise.
His authenticity shone through when presenting Beyond: Two Souls to a small group of journalists behind closed doors, and you could tell that just about everyone in the room was into the demo. There was very little shuffling around. No one seemed to be playing with their iPhones. Everyone intently stared at the giant projection of Beyond: Two Souls on the screen ahead of us as Cage showed a significant portion of the game off before letting us pepper him with questions.
What quickly became clear as Cage’s colleague worked his way through
five portions of Beyond: Two Souls while Cage talked is that, in some
ways, the game is mechanically similar to Heavy Rain. Cage himself
admitted that people often wonder how his games play, and strove to
answer that question by showing a hodgepodge of familiar and foreign
gameplay. “Choosing a scene” to show people “is always a big nightmare,”
he readily admitted, but he decided to go with some more
action-oriented subchapters while promising that the more subdued and
heady scenes Heavy Rain fans love so much exist in the game.
As such, the demo began on a train. Main character Jodie (played by actress Ellen Page) sits alone trying to sleep, but she’s suddenly awoken by her mysterious spirit companion alluded to in the trailer that first revealed Beyond: Two Souls at Sony’s E3 press conference. Quarreling briefly with this ghostly figure named Aiden, Jodie goes back to sleep, leaving Aiden up to his own devices. As such, you get to control Aiden in addition to Jodie, and needless to say, controlling Aiden and taking full advantage of his wide array of skills results in a totally different kind of experience.
Aiden lives on a different plane than Jodie, and he’s governed by a different set of rules. By using SixAxis, Aiden catapults around the train, going directly through matter at will (though he can’t stray too far from Jodie, or the screen becomes blurry, warning you to go back). Bored, Aiden can mess with other passengers on the train by knocking over some coffee and catapulting a magazine across the car, startling the few others around and awake. This is done by completing certain interactions with the DualShock’s twin analog sticks. But Aiden can do far more than that. In fact, it rapidly comes to the fore that Aiden isn’t only the source of Jodie’s trouble (as seen in the aforementioned introductory trailer) but that he also continuously guarantees her survival as she escapes from the authorities for still unknown reasons.
As the train unexpectedly grinds to a halt, you can see exactly how Aiden’s skills assist Jodie. Aiden can fly out of the train and investigate the scene rife with cops intent on finding Jodie. Aiden’s proximity to the cops may allow you to overhear certain conversations to give you a heads-up as to what’s happening. But when the cops come across Jodie regardless of Aiden’s limited intervention, she attempts to escape. This escape in turn showcases more of what Aiden is capable of as well as bringing into the loop a familiar Heavy Rain-like control scheme that anyone who played David Cage’s 2010 PlayStation 3 exclusive will be plenty familiar with.
The cops give chase as Jodie -- now controlled by you -- makes her escape. Quicktime button prompts appear in the form of directional pad arrows, face buttons and triggers ripped directly out of Heavy Rain. You’re still moving Jodie through the environment with the joystick, but the prompts indicate actions she must take, which includes plenty of hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, Aiden assists Jodie in getting out of the train alive by creating a supernatural shield around her as she darts into the nearby woods, desperately running away from her pursuers and their fearsome canine companions. Strangely, this scene also allows you to hear the strange “voice” of Aiden as he communicates with Jodie, though it comes off as pure gibberish that, somehow, only Jodie herself can understand.
Jodie’s run through the woods is littered with danger. The police are behind her and seemingly endless obstacles lay before her. Myriad quicktime events later, the voices behind Jodie become less audible and she puts some distance in between her and her pursuers. After scaling a rockface, however, she finds herself in another bind. A police checkpoint has been setup on the road in front of her, and she’s unsure of how to proceed. But thankfully, Jodie has Aiden on her side, and it shows off yet another skill that proves its use almost immediately. That skill is Aiden’s ability to possess certain characters it and Jodie come across.
By possessing one of the police officers, Aiden coerces him into a nearby police SUV where the cop begins to bash the vehicle along the guardrails. This causes a sufficient enough diversion for Jodie to make a beeline towards a parked police motorcycle, which she subsequently (and rapidly) proceeds to steal. Aiden again creates a shield around her to protect Jodie from a hail of bullets, and after a series of quicktime events brings her down a dark road, she runs into another checkpoint and thereafter rides into a quiet town in the dead of night.
It’s here, near the end of the prolonged demo, that Beyond: Two Souls
started to become unexpectedly gamey. As Jodie sits behind a parked
car, injured and exhausted, the SWAT team led by the same leader seen in
the trailer shows-up. Gamers are encouraged to use Aiden to cause a
massive amount of damage, killing the small, heavily armed army
surrounding her by whatever means necessary. This may involve detonating
cars, erupting a nearby gas station into flames or using other
obstacles in the environment. Aiden can even possess some of the SWAT
team members, including a helicopter pilot and a sniper who will, in
turn, unleash a barrage of friendly fire on those around him.
Soon thereafter, the demo ended and Cage told everyone in the room exactly what fans of Heavy Rain want to hear. At any time through any of those sequences, any number of things could have happened. Jodie could have escaped, but in different ways. She could have made it only so far. She may have even been arrested. Like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls never ends with a game over screen. Choices, actions and repercussions are permanent, and they’ll have very real implications as your version of the story unfolds. Cage describes this system as one that allows you to “succeed or fail to different extents,” creating plenty of “gray area.”
Clearly, Beyond: Two Souls is well on its way to being a tour de force, but there’s bad news: the wait for it is going to be a long one. Cage began concocting Beyond: Two Souls in late 2010, and his script, which he says is around 2,000 pages long, makes for complicated development, especially considering the technology surrounding the game is far superior to that of Heavy Rain’s. So while Beyond: Two Souls will eventually be delivered exclusively to PlayStation 3, don’t expect to play it until sometime in 2013.
His authenticity shone through when presenting Beyond: Two Souls to a small group of journalists behind closed doors, and you could tell that just about everyone in the room was into the demo. There was very little shuffling around. No one seemed to be playing with their iPhones. Everyone intently stared at the giant projection of Beyond: Two Souls on the screen ahead of us as Cage showed a significant portion of the game off before letting us pepper him with questions.
As such, the demo began on a train. Main character Jodie (played by actress Ellen Page) sits alone trying to sleep, but she’s suddenly awoken by her mysterious spirit companion alluded to in the trailer that first revealed Beyond: Two Souls at Sony’s E3 press conference. Quarreling briefly with this ghostly figure named Aiden, Jodie goes back to sleep, leaving Aiden up to his own devices. As such, you get to control Aiden in addition to Jodie, and needless to say, controlling Aiden and taking full advantage of his wide array of skills results in a totally different kind of experience.
Aiden lives on a different plane than Jodie, and he’s governed by a different set of rules. By using SixAxis, Aiden catapults around the train, going directly through matter at will (though he can’t stray too far from Jodie, or the screen becomes blurry, warning you to go back). Bored, Aiden can mess with other passengers on the train by knocking over some coffee and catapulting a magazine across the car, startling the few others around and awake. This is done by completing certain interactions with the DualShock’s twin analog sticks. But Aiden can do far more than that. In fact, it rapidly comes to the fore that Aiden isn’t only the source of Jodie’s trouble (as seen in the aforementioned introductory trailer) but that he also continuously guarantees her survival as she escapes from the authorities for still unknown reasons.
As the train unexpectedly grinds to a halt, you can see exactly how Aiden’s skills assist Jodie. Aiden can fly out of the train and investigate the scene rife with cops intent on finding Jodie. Aiden’s proximity to the cops may allow you to overhear certain conversations to give you a heads-up as to what’s happening. But when the cops come across Jodie regardless of Aiden’s limited intervention, she attempts to escape. This escape in turn showcases more of what Aiden is capable of as well as bringing into the loop a familiar Heavy Rain-like control scheme that anyone who played David Cage’s 2010 PlayStation 3 exclusive will be plenty familiar with.
The cops give chase as Jodie -- now controlled by you -- makes her escape. Quicktime button prompts appear in the form of directional pad arrows, face buttons and triggers ripped directly out of Heavy Rain. You’re still moving Jodie through the environment with the joystick, but the prompts indicate actions she must take, which includes plenty of hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, Aiden assists Jodie in getting out of the train alive by creating a supernatural shield around her as she darts into the nearby woods, desperately running away from her pursuers and their fearsome canine companions. Strangely, this scene also allows you to hear the strange “voice” of Aiden as he communicates with Jodie, though it comes off as pure gibberish that, somehow, only Jodie herself can understand.
Jodie’s run through the woods is littered with danger. The police are behind her and seemingly endless obstacles lay before her. Myriad quicktime events later, the voices behind Jodie become less audible and she puts some distance in between her and her pursuers. After scaling a rockface, however, she finds herself in another bind. A police checkpoint has been setup on the road in front of her, and she’s unsure of how to proceed. But thankfully, Jodie has Aiden on her side, and it shows off yet another skill that proves its use almost immediately. That skill is Aiden’s ability to possess certain characters it and Jodie come across.
By possessing one of the police officers, Aiden coerces him into a nearby police SUV where the cop begins to bash the vehicle along the guardrails. This causes a sufficient enough diversion for Jodie to make a beeline towards a parked police motorcycle, which she subsequently (and rapidly) proceeds to steal. Aiden again creates a shield around her to protect Jodie from a hail of bullets, and after a series of quicktime events brings her down a dark road, she runs into another checkpoint and thereafter rides into a quiet town in the dead of night.
Soon thereafter, the demo ended and Cage told everyone in the room exactly what fans of Heavy Rain want to hear. At any time through any of those sequences, any number of things could have happened. Jodie could have escaped, but in different ways. She could have made it only so far. She may have even been arrested. Like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls never ends with a game over screen. Choices, actions and repercussions are permanent, and they’ll have very real implications as your version of the story unfolds. Cage describes this system as one that allows you to “succeed or fail to different extents,” creating plenty of “gray area.”
Clearly, Beyond: Two Souls is well on its way to being a tour de force, but there’s bad news: the wait for it is going to be a long one. Cage began concocting Beyond: Two Souls in late 2010, and his script, which he says is around 2,000 pages long, makes for complicated development, especially considering the technology surrounding the game is far superior to that of Heavy Rain’s. So while Beyond: Two Souls will eventually be delivered exclusively to PlayStation 3, don’t expect to play it until sometime in 2013.
Athens Time
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