On the PlayStation 3, Quantic Dream released Heavy Rain in 2010 and Beyond: Two Souls this month. Despite it only being 3 years between the two titles, David Cage played the trailers for both titles side-by-side and, as he told TechRadar, “my gut feeling when I saw Heavy Rain was that this is either a PS2 or PS3 title. And to me there is really a generation difference between the two games although they’re both on PS3. But Beyond looks so much better it’s scary.”
Part of the reason that Beyond: Two Souls looks better than Heavy Rain is that Quantic Dream decided to use some of the PS4’s features on PS3, with a new special effects engine, new animation engine, and new performance capture as well. One big area Cage pointed towards is the lighting, which is “actually something that comes from the PlayStation 4. It’s called physically based shading, which means that the different materials have different ways of reflecting light. So if you take wood or iron or plastic, the way they reflect light is totally different. And before this feature all materials were reflecting light the same way.”
Even with all these improvements to the engine, David said, “We were pretty happy with the Heavy Rain engine, but we thought we could go further, so we started everything from scratch and developed this new engine which was inspired by what we discovered on PlayStation 4.”
As for the PS4 and what Quantic Dream was able to do with The Dark Sorcerer, “Some people were really impressed with The Dark Sorcerer but this is just the beginning, it’s the minimum quality you can get on the console,” Cage said. “It was done with a very small team, a very small amount of time and small resources. Now we have a full team and we hope to make something really impressive.”
To finish up, Cage was asked if Beyond: Two Souls demonstrates how powerful the PS3 can be:
You never know exactly if you’ve done 100 percent of what the hardware can do. But our gut feeling is that yeah, pretty much.
Is Beyond: Two Souls the best looking PS3 game you’ve ever seen? Or is there another game released this year that you think looks better? Let us know in the comments below.
