An interview with former Quantic Dream’s animator, Alexandre Roche has been posted on gaming site, upsblogit.com which reveals some very interesting facts about the development of the Playstation 3 exclusive, Heavy Rain.
**PLEASE NOTE – If you have not finished the game or not even started playing it yet and you want to be unspoiled then I would advise you not to read below**
For those of you that have finished the game or dont mind reading the interesting facts, then scroll down and you will see the interview.
Alex Camilleri:
Hi Alexandre, thank you so much for this interview. First easy question: what was your role in QuanticDream until you decided to leave the team?Alexandre Roche:
Hi Alex, I’m really glad to give some informations about Heavy Rain to you and your readers. I worked on the animations, in fact, Heavy Rain contains more than 20000 body’s animations. Each one of them is the result of acting in Quantic Dream’s Motion Capture studio, and I had to refine these with a team of 10 animators.Alex Camilleri:
Few months before the release date, someone told us that Sony was pushing QuanticDream to censure some contents. Is that true? How much is different the ‘official’ version of Heavy Rain from the ‘uncensored’ one?Alexandre Roche:
Well, you have to know that there are different levels of child protection in each country, and they’re never the same. For exemple, a game 16+ in France should be a 18+ in USA or a 21+!! Every Game, DvD, or other support, classified “Adult Only” in USA, should be only sell in sexshop and there is no interrest for Sony to do that. But don’t worry, they just ask us to hide some nudity during the showers or the love scene. They also ask us to hide the death of Jason Mars. But I guess there is no other change between the orignal David Cage’s version and the final version.Alex Camilleri:
As you mentioned it, how has the car accident scene changed from the uncensored version?Alexandre Roche:
Actually the animation wasn’t so different. In the uncensored scene, after the car accident, Jason started rolling on the road for a while. It was quite violent scene considering that a child was involved in it.Alex Camilleri:
What about the sex scenes? I played Farenheit (PEGI 16+) some years ago and, honestly, it was a lot more explicit than Heavy Rain (PEGI 18).Does it depend on the publisher? (N.B. Farenheit was published by Atari, Heavy Rain by Sony).Alexandre Roche:
I guess that’s more a question of exclusivity. Farenheit was playable on PS2 XBOX and PC so Quantic Dream could choose Atari (which is a French publisher) to publish the game. Heavy Rain is only on PS3 so we had to follow Sony’s rules. As they want to give access to the game to the most players they can, HR sex scene is lesser explicit than Farenheit sex scene! And that’s a shame because Madison has a really great body…!Alex Camilleri:
Has QuanticDream ever considered of publishing two different versions of the game? Could we expect a Director’s Cut edition of the game?Alexandre Roche:
As you know, I’m not at Quantic Dream anymore, and I think that’s Sony who’ll decide that kind of thing. I can tell you that during the latest development period, Cage was thinking about publishing a Director’s Cut edition of Heavy Rain but, as you can actually see, nothing evolved from this idea.
Honestly I think you could see such a version in the future…Alex Camilleri:
Cersorship apart, did QuanticDream took big changings during the development of Heavy Rain (different 3d models, locations or gameplay features)?Alexandre Roche:
I could only answer on the graphics stuff: QD is a big studio so you can’t really know what’s going on in the other departements. The biggest change I noticed was the Madison’s haircut. She was blonde with a horse tail at the beginning, to finish brunette with short hair. Jayden changed a little too: he looks more “junky” than he was at the beginning. I know that the ARI system was reviewed a lot of time; same thing for the introduction and the second floor in Ethan’s house, which didn’t exist 2 years ago! And somes scene disappered from the orignial version.Alex Camilleri:
Is that true that Heavy Rain was ment to support the PlayStation Move controller? What do you know about it?Alexandre Roche:
I don’t know anything about it, but I’m not the good person to answer this question. I heard David Cage talking about the Playstation Move Controller and the possibilities that it could give to a game like HR. I think this controller could be use for a future QD’s game, but that’s only what I think.Alex Camilleri:
What was the hardest animation you worked on?Alexandre Roche:
Hum… it might be the Piano animation, more precisely Jayden’s fingers playing piano. I’m not going to give you all my secrets but it was really hard to give some reallistics moves to the fingers!!! Or maybe the Madison’s pee animation… I had to take off her panties, in a realistic way: with the level of detail we got in HR that was such a mess!! And how you want to be concentrate taking off some underwear from a gorgeous lady…Alex Camilleri:
Well, thanks a lot for this interview Alexandre! All the best for your career!
Again a huge thanks to upsblogit.com for the article.
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