David Cage, Quantic Dream’s CEO, sounded just about the only bum notes at Sony’s PlayStation 4 unveiling in February. After showing off his studio’s latest technological leap forward with a tech demo of an expressively wrinkled geriatric face, Cage drew a straight line between player emotion and character polycount. Heavy Rain’s Madison, he told us, was made of 15,000 polygons; Beyond’s Jodie Holmes comprises a whopping 30,000. “In a medium like ours,” he said, “technology is very important. It is what we rely on to get the player emotionally involved.”
It’s a line that says much about the way Quantic Dream makes games, and why Cage is so often criticised for not understanding what makes players tick. In the days that followed his turn on Sony’s stage, he was the subject of a predictable glut of angry posts claiming that it’s mechanics, not processing power, that inspire emotion in players. Yet you don’t have to look too far in order to find a host of games that fly in the face of those players’ claims while also countering Cage’s argument that processing power is king.
Take Gone Home, for instance. The Fullbright Company’s debut opens with a girl returning from a trip overseas to find her family’s new homestead empty, and she spends the game’s slender 100-minute runtime piecing together the story by examining objects in the many empty rooms of her vast new family seat. This is a world almost entirely bereft not only of mechanics, but also of animation. You can move and look, pick up objects and rotate them, doors swing open, lights flicker into life when cords are pulled, and that’s about it. Yet this is a far more emotionally resonant game than not only Beyond, but almost every other game you’ll play this year, a feat it achieves by simple virtue of a story that is sweetly told and intelligently dispensed.
Understated and passive, Gone Home.
While Gone Home spreads its narrative through audio logs and scrunched-up notes in wastepaper baskets, Journey doesn’t really tell much of a story at all. Players don’t even know where they are, why they’re there, or if they’re even alive. Its protagonist’s face is a flat, expressionless texture. The player’s mechanical involvement in the game equates to little more than analogue movement (most of the game is spent walking forwards) and an immaculately tuned jump arc. It’s a beautiful-looking game at times, too, but few players would tell you that Journey was the most emotionally involving game of 2012 because of its technology. Its emotion came from its air of mystery, from the simple pleasure of its streamlined central mechanics, and from its groundbreaking multiplayer component.
Then there’s The Walking Dead, which perhaps bears the closest relation to Quantic Dream’s output to date. It, too, leans heavily on a mix of playable cinematics and exploration of static scenes, on the language of QTEs and dialogue choices. There are further parallels between The Walking Dead and Beyond: it’s no coincidence that the latter game’s most emotional moments come when Jodie Holmes is a scared young girl, tapping into similar themes as those that made Clementine such a potent character. Despite surface similarities, however, Telltale’s episodic adventure more closely resembles Heavy Rain, particularly in the way that its choices have consequences, and that failure is punished. For all its other flaws, Heavy Rain had tension, which arose from the lingering threat that its central characters were a few fluffed QTE inputs from death.
The Walking Dead demonstrated that you didn’t need cutting edge tech for effective storytelling.
The likes of Gone Home, Journey and The Walking Dead demonstrate that there are many different ways of emotionally involving players, and challenging not their thumbs but their minds, as Cage himself put it. None put much strain on their host platforms’ processors. None would be improved by more polygons. None were made with anything like the $27 million it took to make Beyond.
Yet none of them, either taken together or in isolation, exposes the glaring flaws in the Quantic Dream leader’s mission statement. That’s because there aren’t any. For all the opprobrium sent his way, Cage is right: technology is vital. It is a perfectly acceptable claim that a more realistically modelled protagonist can be expected to give a more emotive performance. It’s true, too, that the more intricate and believable a game world is, the stronger a player’s connection to it will be. And while Journey may not have pushed PS3 to its limits, it still needed the power of a modern console. Strip away the visual bells and whistles of its standout moment – surfing through sand in the light of a burnt-orange sun – and remap its analogue controls to digital ones and you’re left with Horace Goes Skiing.
Beyond’s problem isn’t that its developer has failed to learn from studios that have similar ideas and goals. It fixes many of Heavy Rain’s mechanical problems in smart ways – chief among them its provision of proof that the QTE has a future free of glowing prompts – but it has also left behind a lot of what Heavy Rain did right. Choice only matters if there is a consequence to your actions. Mechanics only matter if the difference between success and failure is meaningful. And there’s little point in having a lifelike protagonist and a photorealistic world if your story isn’t up to the same standard. There’s no point in learning new lessons if you allow old ones to be instantly forgotten.
Quantic Dream’s ambition, then, is not inherently flawed; its problem is execution, and in its failure to recognise not only its past mistakes, but also its successes.
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