Redeemed: A Design Analysis of Heavy Rain
I could hear the man yelling at the cashier. I have to do something, I thought to myself. I quietly started walking towards the grocery aisle behind the gunman and began to approach. Maybe I could tackle him or something. Suddenly my arm brushed a bottle and it began tumbling to the ground. A button appeared for me to catch it, but I wasn’t prepared, and whether it was a Circle or a Triangle escaped me. The bottle tumbled to the ground and the gunman looked back at me. Drat! Now I was in trouble. He pointed the gun at me and ordered me over by the cashier. So much for that…now what?
And so continued another scene in Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain. This Playstation 3 only game has been getting a lot of press and some pretty impressive reviews recently. Being embraced rightfully as an “interactive narrative”, Heavy Rain chronicals the story of four characters tracking down the identity of a murderer known as the “origami killer”. An unlikely private investigator, a hopeless father of a murdered child, and other personalities pay a central roll in the game’s unfolding, built of deep characterization and large swaths of time developing your emotional connection with the characters.
I’ve written about Quantic Dream’s spiritual predecessor to Heavy Rain, Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) several times. It was an interesting experiment in my mind, but from a gameplay design standpoint, I argued that there were some Base Mechanics that were poorly executed that completely harpooned the experience. I’m all for games that focus on unique Core Experiences, and having a game built around story and exposition is certainly not something that is done often on major consoles nowadays. Many players and reviewers enjoyed the game, but as the hours wore on, the poor gameplay design became too much to bear.
I am happy to say that Heavy Rain repairs much of the damage done by Indigo Prophecy’s design choices. This studio’s game title is definitely much more mature in its development than its predecessor, likely due to feedback and iteration on the first game’s choices. Let’s break it down.
Put Your Design Where Your Player Wants It
To recap, Indigo Prophecy dropped the ball in a couple of places. While the production values were high and the story was engaging, there were some main design flaws that distracted from the game. First, no gameplay was designed around the aspects that the player cared about. While the game was a mystery thriller, the gameplay was built around mundane tasks. While the game encouraged you to solve mysteries, put together clues, interrogate suspects, and flee from the police, the actions you were asked to perform were pushing a wheelchair, finding a video in a bookcase, and making sure your character was taking nice, deep breaths, literally. The expectations given to the player were not delivered. And in games as in most everything in life, enjoyment is all about reality lining up with expectations.
Exacerbating these mundane tasks was the fact that the action sequences are supported by a mini-game. Instead of actually dodging bullets or defending yourself while dashing through the city, the player was forced to play a simon-like game of a random button sequence overlaid on top of the scene. This was completely removed from what was happening and served to push the player out of the game, rather than pulling them in.
A License to Script
Heavy Rain dealt with both of these problems. First, instead of playing a mini-game that failed to correspond to the action sequence, they created a series of quicktime events, opportunities for the player to press a button or roll the analog stick to correspond with an action happening in the scene. At this moment, press X to dodge or press Y to knock him to his knees. Pull up on the stick to lift your child into the air. In addition to corresponding directly with actions being taken by the characters on screen, the user-interface telling the player what buttons to press were cleverly embedded in the game world, putting the actual X button on the man’s wrist or the Y button on the opponent’s knee. These differences pull the player into the game far more than Indigo Prophecy could ever hope, where the game you were playing had no connection with what was occurring in the scene.
Nowadays, quicktime events, used to great extent in the original God of War, have become the standard for linear action sequences that need a challenge or some interactivity added to them. They are, in a way, a game designer’s crutch. They allow interactivity to be put into a scene or sequence of actions without actually having to design a system that would allow the player to truly perform what was happening. Instead of creating a fighting system where the player can put together their own punches, grapples, and dodges, quicktime events are scripted into a fight. Instead of creating a system where the player can conduct a symphony or scale a wall, quicktime events are built into a pre-scripted in-game cutscene. The main difference is that if a system were actually designed for each of these gameplay examples, then the scenes would be generated by the game, meaning that you could easily generate different fights or symphonies or walls to experience, instead of a scene that must be specifically scripted and built each and every time by a developer.
For most games, quicktime events are a fallback. If it isn’t possible to design out a fully functional conversation system, or climbing system, or shooting system, then you use a quicktime event. A fully designed system that allows for generative challenges would be more in depth, allow for greater player choice, and allow you to feel like you were actually in the world, a level of immersion that gives a very different feeling that watching a movie or reading a novel.
However, in Heavy Rain’s case, the Core Experience they want to deliver is that of a movie or a book. The cinematography is exquisite, and each sequence is set up to give the player a perfect and very dramatic camera angle. This makes the challenge much greater than simply giving the player a street-fighter like fighting interface. It would have been better to design a system to do all of these things. It would have been better and more immersive to create a system that quickly allowed the player to learn how to punch or fight, while simultaneously providing perfect camera angles and character responses. This is not impossible. It is, however, incredibly difficult. Developing such a system would take an enormous amount of time and resources. Thus, the choice to use quicktime events is not only a design challenge, but a production challenge as well. In the abstract world of a pure design we can ask for more, but in the realities of business management for Quantic Dream, quicktime events were likely the best way to go.
By choosing to build the action in the game around events that had a one-to-one correspondence with the cutscene, the game does a much better job of making the player feel like she’s in on the action, that they are involved. That is a far cry from the simon-based game of Fahrenheit.
Gameplay for a Purpose
The section issue that Heavy Rain handled masterfully was the actual location and purpose of the activities. In Indigo Prophecy, you would often have to do mundane tasks that had no story purpose. Instead, they only had a gameplay purpose, to lengthen the game so that you didn’t just fly through the game in an hour or two. For a game that is built around story, this is fatal.
For example, in Indigo Prophecy you had to carry boxes to the door for your character’s girlfriend. This serves no purpose other than to slow down the action. In Heavy Rain, however, most of the actions that you are performing, though just as mundane, serve to facilitate the story. In the opening sequences, you are playing with your children, swordfighting and playing tag with them in the back yard. Mundane compared to other action games? Perhaps. But these activities are legitimate because they develop the characters you are playing as, which is what the game is all about. By focusing the player’s actions around the lives of the people in the, and not just as roadblocks, the gameplay is given purpose and adds to the Core Experience, rather than detracting from it. This subtle difference, from a design perspective, is the difference between a sloppily executed title and a grand slam interactive fiction.
Do What You Want, Not What You Don’t
Quicktime events, combined with the innovated User-Interface, pull you into the game instead of pushing you out. Mundane tasks that develop emotional connection with the characters have incredibly greater purpose than mundane tasks with no story purpose. Kudos to Quantic Dream for solving this problems; it would seem they’ve really started to find their groove, I look forward to seeing what this studio comes up with next.
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In the Gameplay for a Purpose section, you make the comparison between Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain. In Indigo Prophecy, you stated that you were given mundane tasks to perform like having to carry boxes to the door for your character’s girlfriend. You labeled this as a “roadblock” and rightly so. The action is devoid of any real value to the player or to the story other than staling for time. However, you then mentioned, the opening sequence in Heavy Rain about playing with children in the back yard. This is a brilliant piece of work because on the surface it looks just as mundane as moving the boxes. But in reality it has huge psychological effects on the player. It matches the expectations of the player for the character’s role as a father. After all it is perfectly normal for a father to play with his children. It also can tap into deep emotions from the players own past, giving the game personal significance via these emotions which are then tied to the character. And on a social level, raising children is of great importance, it ensures the survival of the species. We have instincts that dictate certain behaviors, actions, and feelings when put into these conditions. This was brilliantly constructed.
We are going to be seeing more of this kind of content, where games are able to spur deep emotions within players having them experience something never before realized.
Thank you for the great article.