Heavy Rain is still regarded as one of the best games on the PS3, which is why we here at PSLS are eagerly anticipating Quantic Dream’s next game. While the developer hasn’t revealed there next title just yet, they have debuted an impressive looking tech demo showing off the game’s new engine working in real time on PS3.
The video came is from David Cage’s “Technologies to Support Emotion” GDC talk, which was an hour long presentation on how virtual actors and performance capture can trigger emotions in games.
He said:
What you are going to see is this prototype I told you about. It’s running in real time on a PS3. It’s not CG, it’s not pre-rendered. It is displayed by our new engine we created after Heavy Rain. The capture is almost raw.
The video is about Kara, a factory built robot that becomes self aware. The point of the demo was to show the range of emotions the engine can portray, and the character was played by Twilight: Breaking Dawn actress Valorie Curry:
The video, while impressive, doesn’t even fully show what the engine of capable of. Cage said at GDC that the video is a year old, adding:
Kara has fifty percent of the features we have now. What we are witnessing with the likes of Omikron, of Heavy Rain, of Hollywood’s Avatar, of Kara is a steady walk out of the Uncanny Valley.
Cage told Eurogamer:
So we invested a lot in our motion capture studio. Heavy Rain was shot with 28 cameras, and we’ve upgraded the studio to 65 cameras. Now we can shoot several actors – their body and their face – at the same time. It’s not a small change, but at the same time this is how Avatar and Tintin were shot, and it’s how the CG industry works because they know how much you gain from shooting face, voice and body at the same time.
The video is much like Quantic Dream’s “The Casting” which showed off the Heavy Rain engine – but as you can see below, looked far worse than Heavy Rain:
If QD’s next game manages to improve on the visuals to the same degree, then the results will be truly incredible.
What did you think of the vid? Let us know in the comments below.
