There’s a brief new trailer out for Beyond: Two Souls, the new project from French developer Quantic Dream–most famous for the highly cinematic Heavy Rain. The game stars Ellen Paige and Willem Dafoe, appearing in their own likeness as well as voice thanks to motion capture and whatever you call scanning someone’s face and making it a 3D model.
(I looked it up, I guess it’s just called “3D Scanning” which is a bit underwhelming as far as names go.)
First up is the new trailer, called “Guilt.”
If you haven’t been following the trailers so far, do yourself a favor and go check them out. I really think this game has the potential to be one of the top games of the year. And that’s really saying something when you’re in the company of games like The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite.
Heavy Rain was a masterpiece in its way, of course, but I think some people didn’t love the “playable movie” feeling that it sometimes gave off—in the sense of feeling on-rails and limited, or feeling like you’re being swept along by the game rather than playing it. I tend to be really forgiving of that kind of thing, but there were moments where it bugged even me.
From some of the gameplay videos for Beyond, it looks like an evolution, to be sure—Quantic Dream developed a brand new engine, nearly from scratch, for it—but it also looks like it could suffer from some of the same frustrations.
But these are growing pains.
Quantic Dream is trying to do something new with game narrative. Maybe not new in the sense of totally off-the-walls, no one’s ever done anything like this, but they’re certainly pushing an experience which is a unique product of their studio. They’re not the first studio to emphasize narrative, but they’re emphasizing it in a particular way, and they are still exploring (with some success) the intersection between player agency and the cinematic experience.
In a way, looking from Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain to Beyond seems like a case study in the evolution of gaming narrative. It’s representative of the growing pains of the entire industry—or at least, that section of the industry which highly values narrative.
So I hope you’ll join me in forgiving these growing pains, and getting excited for Beyond. I think Quantic deserves the support of the gaming community for their efforts.
Don’t forget that you’re not just buying a game when you buy a game.
You’re also voting with your dollars; you’re telling the industry what you want more of, what you value. The more love (and money) we can give to developers who are doing great things, pushing the limits of gaming, and exploring new angles, the better off the medium as a whole is going to be.