The most conspicuous thing about Beyond: Two Souls is just how unlike a video game it looks. During the 45 minute presentation we saw recently in Paris, we were struck by the number of video game trappings developer Quantic Dream has discarded, even by the studio’s own defiant standards. There’s nothing on the HUD. On-screen prompts are rare. Characters look less like digital puppets and more like famous actors. It’s symbolic that Cage and his gameplay team headed up by Quantic veteran Caroline Marchal have all but done away with the quick-time-events so omnipresent in the studio’s last game, Heavy Rain. Too mechanical. Too distracting from the game’s heart; its story.
Beyond: Two Souls offers further proof that the landscape of big budget video games may eventually be smoothed out and reshaped, even if it’s a long, hard slog to get there. One gets the feeling that if Quantic had its way, in twenty years we would not be referring to video games as ‘games,’ so much as ‘experiences’ (or perhaps a less ostentatious word with the same meaning.) It’s not entirely a pipe dream; Quantic’s focus on stories grounded in emotion and human experience is not as rare as it used to be.
“We’re not as alone,” says Marchal. “I played Telltale’s The Walking Dead for instance...very good work, very well written. I think since Heavy Rain, several studios have realized they could talk about normal life and story. The Walking Dead is a great example.”
Telltale and Quantic Dream’s efforts have much in common. We don’t talk about ‘levels’ in their games, we talk about ‘moments,’ or ‘scenes’. We talk about the stuff that made us cry, the experiences we had. And while The Walking Dead was more traditionally grounded in a genre than Heavy Rain or Beyond, its sucker-punch storytelling was a revelation. It’s not just games with a narrative focus at their core, either; even well-trodden franchises like Tomb Raider are starting to shake off the shackles of tradition to focus on character arcs and emotionally-driven storytelling.
“The thing is, gamers get older,” says Cage. “Game creators get older. I was 10 when video games appeared, I'm 42 today. I don’t have the same tastes I don’t have the same expectations, I don’t play the same games, I don’t watch the same films. So how does the industry address this issue of creating content for an older audience having different expectations?”
“Some people are more interested in mechanics, and that’s fine,” continues Marchal. “There are lots of games out there that rely on mechanics. But I think since Heavy Rain, several studios have realized they could talk about normal life and story and produce great games.”
With this said, the team at Quantic Dream are always a step ahead of their peers in their ambition to evolve emotional storytelling in video games. This time the studio has further indulged its passion for movie language by casting a well-known – and more crucially, extremely capable - actress in Beyond’s central role. When talking about Ellen Page’s involvement in the project, David Cage sounds more like filmmaker catching his first big break than a gamemaker who has 15 years of experience in the industry.
“When you are a young director like me – and you have Ellen Page and Willem Defoe on your set – you try to be focused and try to be good,” says Cage. “They’ve worked with some of the most talented directors in the world, and that was very exciting.”
Calling himself a director on a set might sound a little self-inflated, but directing is exactly what Cage has been doing. From the chunkiest section of the game we saw last week – showing off approximately 45 minutes of gameplay - Ellen Page is delivering a performance that could certainly be described as the most dramatically-challenging of her acting career. This is teenage angst beyond Hard Candy's Hayley Stark or Juno.
“I was born with a gift”, her Jodie mumbles. “Or what they call a gift. It’s really a curse, it’s ruined my life. Made me the person that I am today. A freak. A mistake. Someone I hate.”
In Page, Cage has found the perfect mixture of vulnerability, toughness and youthfulness, and always refreshingly one step away from that ironic candour she is so known for. Her performance is channelled through Quantic’s astonishing performance capture technology, which demonstrates a subtlety in expression far more advanced than anything we’ve seen in Rockstar’s L.A. Noire, the last game to push such graphical boundaries.
The result is - in moments - transcendent in the way it elicits empathy. Some journalists had tears in their eyes at the end of the section, a slice of gameplay that takes place during Jodie’s lowest ebb. And while Quantic threw an awful lot at the group assembled in its French headquarters – including an attempted suicide, an escape from a burning building, a birth and a death – the material was arrestingly intimate.
“We hope this exceptional standard of performance is what will woo players,” says Executive Producer Guillaume de Fondaumiere. “It’s not about slapping a name on a box to sell copies.”
Alongside this focus on emotional storytelling comes the need to expand Beyond’s target audience outside of those who know what to expect from the studio. Quantic must convince gamers that its brand-new, unusual game is worth playing, and it must convince non-gamers that its brand-new, unusual game is an ‘experience’ worth having. Both are tricky propositions.
“It’s very difficult to make these types of games,” says Marchel, “and it’s very difficult to understand how to play it when you haven’t played it.”
Cage has long been frustrated at the resistance to his vision, particularly in the wake of those who believed Heavy Rain was just a giant cut-scene. “There is some resistance (to this kind of experience). Maybe we’re not good enough at what we do. Maybe we need to tell better stories that are more appealing to all these people.”
He pauses, rethinks. “But maybe these people should listen more. At least give us a chance to convince them, which is sometimes really difficult.”
Cage is also concerned that the majority of those seeking mature storytelling in video games make up a giant untapped market, still ignorant of Quantic’s push for evolution. “There are people who would like to interact in this way but they’re just not interested in the games we make. And that’s an issue. The thing is, not everyone’s interested in shooting and driving cars; some people want something more meaningful.”
To combat preconceptions that Beyond will be a reskinned Heavy Rain, the elimination of constant quick-time-events was important, both as a gameplay decision and as a message to the unconverted. “The (quick-time-event) system was a barrier, explains Cage. “For people who didn’t play Heavy Rain it was confusing and gave them the wrong idea.”
“I’m pretty proud,” says Marchal of the new ‘contextual’ system she and her team have implemented. “Because the problem with QTEs is that they disturb the player, who only looks at the prompt and not the action itself.”
To broaden its reach further, Quantic is honing in on a non-gaming female audience. Executive Producer Guillaume de Fondaumiere believes this bracket values the emotional core of what Quantic is trying to do above every other aspect.
“It was incredible with Heavy Rain. A lot of guys told us it was the first game they played with their girlfriend, and I think that David had that in mind when he came up with Beyond. I think it’s a game that could be attractive to women who never play, but might want to play this game. Because the themes are accessible.”
Beyond is, ultimately, the accumulation of 16 years worth of trial and error, a refinement of a vision David Cage has had since he introduced the first virtual actor – David Bowie(!) – in Omikron: The Nomad Soul in 1999. For detractors of Cage’s writing style, it’s unlikely you’ll find anything new here; as Cage notes, he and the team have been going in the same direction for 16 years.
“When you keep digging and going in the same direction, hopefully you go somewhere. Nowadays, it’s difficult to survive when you don’t have a distinct identity or vision for the industry.”
And while it’s narrow-minded to illustrate Quantic’s efforts as the only means to evolve emotional-storytelling in games - like Heavy Rain before it, Beyond is traditionally grounded in big, blockbuster film language than the more abstract experiences we’re seeing produced by indie outfits – the studio is refreshingly consistent.
“We’ve always had people telling us what we’re doing is not the right direction,” says de Fondaumiere. That what we’re doing is not ‘mainstream’ – that magical word – enough, that the only options are to be mainstream or so far off-road nobody will be interested in what you’re doing.”
The challenge for Quantic is finding the financial means to survive long enough to prove naysayers wrong.
“We’re lucky - each game we’ve made sold 3 times more copies than the last,” explains Cage. So you have this kind of curve, where you can say game after game, ‘I’m doing them better.’ This is our curve. And maybe Beyond won’t sell three times more than Heavy Rain but I hope it will still sell more; just to prove there is more and more interest in this kind of experience we are trying to create.”
And perhaps, as we see more studios cautiously exploring the untrodden path of emotional engagement, the brazen Quantic Dream might be forgiven an ‘I told you so.’
Lucy O'Brien is Assistant Editor at IGN AU. You can follow her mumblings on IGN at Luce_IGN_AU,or follow her @Luceobrien on Twitter.
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