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'Detroit', 'Heavy Rain' and 'Beyond' will hit the Epic Games Store
Detroit: Become Human, Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain are all making their way to PC for the first time in 2019 through the Epic Games Store. To date, the games have only been available on PlayStation 3 and/or PS4. The Quantic Dream titles are a bit of a coup for Epic as it takes aim at the likes of Steam, though Epic had plenty of other news about its store at GDC, including a Humble Bundle partnership and deals for upcoming games.
Chinese gaming giant grabs stake in 'Detroit' studio Quantic Dream
China's NetEase may be struggling to get its games whitelisted in its native country, but that isn't stopping it from making waves in the wider gaming industry. The internet giant's gaming unit has acquired a minority stake in David Cage's studio Quantic Dream, best known for its cinematic PlayStation exclusives Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, both of which incorporate interactive storytelling techniques and motion capture technology. According to NetEase, Quantic Dream will continue to operate independently under the leadership of its co-CEOs Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière.
PS4's 'Detroit' doesn't take place in the Motor City I know
When Sony debuted Detroit: Become Human at E3 two years ago, writer-director David Cage said he and his team were taking great care to respect Motown's heritage, its people and what they've been through. "When you set your story in a specific city, it's a very sensitive thing to do," he told me. "You don't want to do it if you're not respectful of the place, of the people living there." I've seen how games like Persona 5 and the Yakuza series have faithfully reproduced their Japanese settings, and I was excited to explore his digital Detroit. Unfortunately, my expectations were set too high.
PS4 exclusive 'Detroit' is a flawed depiction of race in America
Detroit: Become Human begins with a warning: "This is not a story, this is our future." Writer-director David Cage's follow-up to Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls weaves a tale about robots attempting to transcend their programming. But rather being a thoughtful, philosophical examination of consciousness, Detroit, instead, is a tone-deaf look at race.
Test your hostage negotiation skills in ‘Detroit: Become Human’ demo
Detroit: Become Human is out at the end of next month, but you can get a taste of it today. The PlayStation 4 exclusive has a demo out today on the PlayStation Network Store (where else would it be?). It might look a little familiar if you've been paying attention to the game, too, centering on the hostage negotiation scene from the game's E3 debut two years ago. Last year, press at the show got to go hands on with this section, searching a glitzy Motor City high-rise apartment for clues and evidence before dealing with a rogue robot nanny holding a gun to his charge's head.
Explore PlayStation 4's 'Detroit: Become Human' next spring
At E3 this year we finally got to play the latest game from David Cage and Quantic Dream, Detroit: Become Human, but didn't have an idea of when we'd get to do so at home. That's changed a bit. Along with a powerful new trailer showing what happens when one of the game's androids witnesses domestic violence, now we know that the game will come out sometime next spring. That's soon!
Cult classic 'Indigo Prophecy' gets a new PS4 release date
Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls developer Quantic Dream has announced that one of its earlier pseudo-cinematic games, Indigo Prophecy, will be released for PlayStation 4 via the PlayStation Store on August 9th. It will arrive as a PS2-to-PS4 game so it won't be fully remastered, but this version will still support Trophies. The game was originally supposed to come out on Sony's console in July, but was held up for unknown reasons.
PS4's 'Detroit' couldn't have taken place anywhere else
"When you set your story in a specific city, it's a very sensitive thing to do," said David Cage, the director of the upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive Detroit: Become Human. "You don't want to do it if you're not respectful of the place, of the people living there." Cage's next game with studio Quantic Dream deals with a near-future world where androids aren't a mobile operating system for your phone; instead they're "living" among us with hopes and desires of their own. Specifically? Transcending their circuitry and, as the name suggests, being human.
Play the video game starring David Bowie for free
David Bowie was a man ahead of his time across a range of industries, including gaming. The man and his music are featured in the 1999 game Omikron: The Nomad Soul, from the studio that went on to create Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. If you're familiar with those games -- yes, Omikron is a fairly trippy experience. Its publisher, Square Enix, has decided to offer Omikron for free today through January 22nd, in honor of Bowie's life and his surprising death this week at the age of 69. To hold your own digital vigil for The Man who Fell to Earth, use the promo code "omikron" at checkout on the Square Enix store.
'Beyond: Two Souls' hits PS4 next week
When it comes to story-driven gameplay, few developers are quite as ambitious as Quantic Dream. We already knew that its PS3 titles, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, were coming to PS4, and now we've got some release dates. Beyond is coming out digitally next week: November 24th in the US ($29.99) and November 26th in Europe (€29.99/£24.99). If you buy the game that way, you'll also get access to a discounted version of Heavy Rain -- it's due on March 1st in the US, but it's not clear exactly when it'll be available digitally elsewhere. For Europe, Quantic Dream has confirmed a physical bundle called, unsurprisingly, The Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls Collection. That'll arrive on March 4th in the UK and March 2nd for the rest of Europe. There's no word on pricing, and we suspect that's roughly when Heavy Rain will launch digitally across the continent.
'Detroit' is Quantic Dream's debut PS4 game
Detroit is bouncing back from some absolutely devastating economic times, but Detroit from Quantic Dream exists in an altogether different timeline. The team behind Heavy Rain is using the Motor City and its manufacturing legacy as a backdrop for its tale of an AI with human emotions, and the game is an extension of the studio's "Kara" demo from a few years back. Aside from that, lead David Cage didn't give an awful lot of info. Considering the studio's pedigree, it isn't too much of a stretch to assume the game will be highly cinematic, but that could also be a detriment. After all, the team's last game, Beyond: Two Souls looked great in demos too, but fell a bit flat in terms of actual gameplay. Become Human isn't the first time a game about androids and AI's been set in Motown -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution did that back in 2011.
Daily Update for August 21, 2013
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Quantic Dream's 12-minute PS4 tech demo is ready for your viewing pleasure (video)
Now that the dust has settled from Sony's E3 press conference, Quantic Dream's posted the entirety of its PS4 tech demo, The Dark Sorcerer. Over on the PlayStation Blog, the studio's director, David Cage, laid out the finer points of their experience with performance capturing and going from flexing the PS3's graphical muscle to working with the next-gen powerhouse. When it comes to technical details, the Heavy Rain developer's comedic sketch was rendered at 1080p in real-time (lighting and all), includes one million polygons for the set and just shy of a million for every on-screen character, which each boast 350MB of textures and roughly 40 different shaders. Impressed with what you see? Cage says it's bound to get better. As it stands, the engine used for the demonstration is in its first iteration, and is missing features that are scheduled for the final version. "We can feel that we are closing in little by little on the kind of graphic quality we find in CG films," Cage notes. Venture past the break for the video or hit the bordering source link for more background.
Quantic Dream's The Dark Sorcerer demo highlights PS4's graphics power
Remember the Emotion Engine from back in the PS2 days? Well, Sony's still on about the emotional connection its consoles will bring to gamers -- specifically, that of the PS4. And to showcase the console's graphical sophistication, Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida played a 12-minute tech demo of Quantic Dream's upcoming PS4 title, The Dark Sorcerer. The majority of the demo focused closely on the sorcerer in question, giving gamers an early glimpse of the nuance and hyper realistic expression capable in characters' eyes and faces. Only a short snippet was shown on stage here at E3, but if you want to digest the entire thing, Sony's planning to unveil the full 12-minute demo tomorrow afternoon. Follow all of our E3 2013 coverage at our event hub. %Gallery-190986%
Heavy Rain creator details the difficulties of game engines and what he hopes the future holds
Heavy Rain development studio Quantic Dream is notorious for long development times. The studio's also notorious for critically-loved games with strong cinematic cores, and games that often look very different from the competition. Part of that is game design, but another major piece of the puzzle is the engines driving those games -- each game that Quantic Dream makes is built in a unique game engine, which is both very expensive and very time-consuming. The studio's founder and lead, David Cage, explained as much to us in an interview at DICE 2013. "Quantic Dream is a very special company in the sense that we do a lot of things that wouldn't make any sense in any other company. We haven't done any sequels so far, we work on new IPs each time. And we pretty much develop a new engine each time we develop a new game." But Cage doesn't harbor much love for that last part -- the game engine bit. He says that his studio opted out of the current console generation's game engine of choice (Unreal Engine 3) because, "we work with Sony, [and] we want to create the best technology for the hardware and see how far we can go." As a result, even Cage's latest work (Beyond: Two Souls) is crafted in a new engine -- the same one used to build the Kara demo we saw last March -- intended to show off the PlayStation 3's late-generation graphical and processing chops. Yes, even with the next PlayStation (codenamed "Orbis") waiting in the wings, his second-party Sony studio is still showing off the aging PS3's prowess. Beyond: Two Souls is more than just a showpiece, of course, with Quantic Dream employing actress Ellen Page to motion performance-capture the game's main character, and the same emphasis on storytelling the studio's practiced previously. Still, Cage hopes for a future where technology isn't something he and his studio need be concerned with.
Heavy Rain creators produce 'Kara' PS3 tech-demo (video)
Heavy Rain creator David Cage was showing off Quantic Dream's new game engine at GDC, which includes an innovative new performance-capture technology the company's developed. He's directed a seven-minute original short called Kara, which is the story of a female android as she becomes self-aware. Unlike traditional game production methods, this technology is able to record face and body movements at the same time as recording the actors voice -- ensuring natural and consistent performances from the characters. Actress Valorie Curry wore 90 sensors on her face, unlike in, say, Avatar, where the performers wore head-mounted cameras. Cage promises that the short is nothing more than a demo (it was rendered in real-time on a PlayStation 3) and none of these elements will appear in his next game. You can catch the impressive-looking footage after the break with one disclaimer: there's nudity throughout and a reference to adult themes, okay?
Sony partners with Quantic Dream on exclusive PS3 title
Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios today announced a collaboration with Paris-based developer Quantic Dream, one which promises to "redefine cinematic real-time entertainment" with a new PlayStation-exclusive title. Judging by Quantic Dream's past efforts in David Bowie dystopia sim, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, or the multi-angle murder mystery Fahrenheit (dubbed Indigo Prophecy in America), cinematic presentation and integral narratives seem du jour on the developer's list of goals. Quantic Dream President and CEO, David Cage commented on the choice of console and the sheer pleasantness of the folks at Sony. "We always believed that "next generation" meant more meaningful content based on players' emotional involvement. To us, PS3 is the only platform that can truly deliver on this promise, and SCE WWS is a group that is both inspiring and pleasant to work with." Though the name of the upcoming PS3 game isn't specified and could very well be an entirely new game, Quantic Dream's website currently lists Heavy Rain as a "confidential next generation console game." The film-like poster above, which bears the subtitle "The Origami Killer," certainly seems to highlight the title's cinematic aspirations, if not the question of why anybody would want to murder folded pieces of paper. What did they ever do to you?Venture into the Uncanny Valley after the break to see Heavy Rain's impressive and quietly disturbing E3 2006 Virtual Actor demonstration. If the announced collaboration turns out to be a different game entirely, we fully encourage the parties involved to step into the rain and scream, "Gotcha, suckas!"[Via Sony press release]
Sony to publish Quantic Dream game exclusively for PS3
Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios is partnering with game developer Quantic Dream to produce a game exclusively for the PlayStation 3. Quantic Dream have produced games that focus on being true interactive cinematic experiences that allow the player to get emotionally involved. In the past they have developed Fahrenheit (known as Indigo Prophecy in the US). Quantic Dream are looking forward to utilising the power of the Cell processor in order to create an intense cinematic experience that will be emotionally compelling. The founder of the company, David Cage, stated that they "always believed that "next generation" meant more meaningful content based on players' emotional involvement. To us, PS3 is the only platform that can truly deliver on this promise." There will be more information about the game later in the year. Presumably it's a bit short notice to show anything at E3 next week, but you never know. Whether this is confirmation that Heavy Rain will be PS3 exclusive or that there is a new game being developed is not clear. We were shown a tech demo for the game at E3 last year so, with an annoncement like this, it sounds like a deal has been setup between Sony and Quantic Dream for another exclusive title, on the back of Heavy Rain's development. We look forward to finding out more.
Want to work on Heavy Rain? Quantic Dream wants you to...
This is from Quantic Dream's support page: "Quantic Dream is the multiple award-winning video game developer of Omikron and Fahrenheit. Being part of our team means sharing in our excitement and inventing, designing and developing some of the industry's most innovative products. Our future depends on bright, highly motivated and talented people who share a passion for creating the best in tomorrow's digital entertainment. Join our international team based in Paris (France) now and bring your talent to create Heavy Rain, an ambitious next generation interactive entertainment experience unlike any other..."The spots are filling up! Even though we know Heavy Rain is on its way and seeking some help from new people, we still don't know a lot about the game. In fact, we hardly know anything at all except that it's probably going to be good. What do you think the final Heavy Rain will play like?
