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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.
Beyond: Two Souls PS4 trophies emerge, Director's Cut reported
We're going to level with you. If there is any PS3 game from the last two years or so that you've been waiting to buy, you should consider waiting a little longer – because someone is probably remastering it as we speak. The latest to join the ever-growing pile of prettified PS3 re-releases could be the super cinematic, often goofy Page/Cage joint, Beyond: Two Souls. A Director's Cut version of Beyond for PS4 was spotted on two German retail sites, according to IGN, though the listings have since been removed. Furthermore, online gaming activity site Exophase has posted trophies for the game, providing more evidence that our digital Willem Dafoe nightmares are far from over, and they're about to get an HD upgrade. [Image: Sony]
PSN Store Update: Final Fantasy 14, Trials Fusion, FIFA World Cup
It's football, fantasy, and FMX in this week's line-up of PlayStation Store additions for North America, starting with the full launch of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn. PS4 players can hook up with the subscription MMO for $40, or $60 if they fancy some in-game items from the Collector's Edition. You can also transfer a PS3 copy across to PS4 - Amazon has the PS3 version going for $25. Next it's FMX: RedLynx's next attempt to break your controllers is Trials Fusion, and it's the first in the series to arrive on PlayStation. The PS4 game - also available on Xbox One, 360, and PC - adds freestyle tricks to the trademark mix of motocross and puzzle-platforming. The regular game is $20 but if you're wheelie keen for the upcoming DLC, a Deluxe Edition is $40 and comes with the season pass. Speaking of puzzles, the PS4 also gets a few brainteasers this week. Pure Chess and Backgammon Blitz are $8 each - you can get a game-pack stuffed Deluxe Edition of Pure Chess for $15 - and finally, That Trivia Game will set you back That Ten Dollars. Onto to PS3, and football - the rounder, kickier kind. The catchily titled 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil is only on PS3 and Xbox 360, and you can score it as a $60 download on the former. Meanwhile, Beyond: Two Souls has been out for a while, but it's also now on PSN as a $60 download. Don't forget, this week's PS Plus freebie is the new Castle of Illusion, and that comes bundled with the Genesis original as a nostalgic bonus. Finally, the Vita has plenty of new releases including Conception 2 ($40, also out on 3DS) and Cross-Buy portable versions of Dead Nation ($8) and Ethan: Meteor Hunter ($10). For the full list of new releases, sales, and Plus discounts, head over to the PlayStation Blog. [Image: Ubisoft]
Assassin's Creed 4, Puppeteer among nominees for music awards
The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) announced the nominees for composers demonstrating "excellence in musical scoring" in 2013. The annual awards ceremony includes a gaming category, Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media, in which five games and their respective composers are nominated this year: Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag by Ubisoft, music by Brian Tyler Beyond: Two Souls by Quantic Dream, music by Lorne Balfe Company of Heroes 2 by Relic Entertainment, music by Cris Velasco Puppeteer by SCE Japan Studio, music by Patrick Doyle Remember Me by Dontnod, music by Olivier Deriviere Assassin's Creed 4 composer Brian Tyler is also among four others nominated for the Composer of the Year award, in addition to a nomination for Best Original Score for an Action/Adventure/Thriller Film for his work on Iron Man 3. Tyler also composed the soundtrack for Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel. Previous winners of the Best Original Score for a Video Game award include Austin Wintory's music for Journey (2012), Joe Hisaishi's composition for Ni No Kuni (2011) and the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow music composed by Oscar Araujo (2010). The IFMCA will announce this year's winners on February 20. [Image: Ubisoft]
Beyond: Two Souls sales topped 1 million in 2013
Quantic Dream's Beyond: Two Souls has exceeded one million in sales in 2013, the developer has revealed. Feel free to press X to guitar, Jodie – you've earned that shredathon! Beyond: Two Souls centers around Jodie Holmes, a girl who has a unique connection with a spiritual entity known as Aiden. After being abandoned by her foster parents, Holmes is raised by a pair of researchers working in a fictional supernatural studies group within the US government. Over 70,000 copies of Beyond: Two Souls sold in the studio's native country of France, Quantic Dream co-founder Guillaume de Fondaumière revealed on Twitter. That's better than Quantic Dream's previous game, Heavy Rain, did in its first 12 weeks of availability there, Fondaumière added. Beyond: Two Souls, perhaps best known for its A-list talent in Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, launched in October of last year. In our review, we said the game "lies somewhere between vicariousness and voyeurism," and that ultimately "you're just the ghost in a ghost story, only appearing when the scene calls for a cheap scare."
Beyond: Two Souls channels Portal in Advanced Experiments DLC trailer
Sony gives a quick look at the recently released "Advanced Experiments" DLC pack for Beyond: Two Souls in the new trailer above, showcasing protagonist Jodie's half-hour trek through a series of Portal-inspired physical challenges. The Advanced Experiments DLC is priced at $4.99, and is available as a free download for players who purchased Beyond's GameStop-exclusive Special Edition.
Metareview: Beyond: Two Souls
Reviews for Quantic Dream's Beyond: Two Souls appear to have been delicately placed on a lazy susan and then spun by the force of a truck slamming into the table. We haven't seen scattershot like this since the last time we fed caviar to a baby. Our review used the term "face full of ghost farts" in it, so let's see what delicate words were used by others. Gamespot (90/100): "Top-notch acting makes the characters you interact with sound believable ... Beyond: Two Souls so easily melds story and mechanics that you become enamored with this young woman and her extraordinary life." Polygon (80/100): "While it's exhilarating to see a team that has worked so hard to perfect a new way of telling stories, I couldn't help wishing they had a perfect one to tell." Giant Bomb (3/5): "Maybe there is no simple yes/no recommendation to give this game. For every part of it that comes together almost perfectly, there's another that's stricken by needless cliche or undercooked gameplay." Edge (50/100): "... this is a game almost entirely bereft of tension, one in which failure goes largely unpunished and is almost always inconsequential. There is emotion here, but it's felt passively, as spectator instead of player." VideoGamer (40/100): "There are bright moments, but when a game sells itself on a story, said story better be good. This one isn't, and anyone expecting Heavy Rain 2 is going to be sorely disappointed." [Image: 5432action via Shutterstock]
Beyond: Two Souls review: Ever Tethered
Note: This review contains a mid-game spoiler, flagged in the text. Those who want to play the game fresh may not want to read any further. Seeing dead people must be a traumatizing gift, but it can't be as bad as smelling them. While Jodie Holmes kneels next to a lifeless lump, steeling herself for a violent flash of this poor man's final moments, it becomes my job to funnel his ethereal post-existence energy – represented as a spooky mist rising from the body – right into her meticulously rendered face. Beyond: Two Souls is a game about life and death, except when it's about getting a face full of ghost farts. It's hard to ignore Beyond's insane fluctuations between bravery and bungling as you play the dual roles of Jodie, a delicate but determined woman with psychic abilities (and the likeness of Ellen Page), and Aiden, the spectral entity tethered to her and the true source of her astonishing spoon-bending powers. When scientists try to discern the nature of their relationship, they don't know it's really you flying through the room and the walls, possessing people and riling objects as if you were firing at them with a slingshot. The freedom you display as Aiden has a chilling effect on the people in the room, almost as if the game itself is frightened by an entity with so much agency. Like Heavy Rain before it, Beyond: Two Souls is a restrictive game that sacrifices repeatable mechanisms and emergent scenarios for a cinematic structure, with objectives propelled by the needs of the scene more than the needs of the medium itself.
Must See HDTV (October 7th - 13th)
As the MLB playoffs continue to ratchet up the intensity, we'll also keep an eye on all of the new fall shows to see which ones die off first (ABC's Lucky 7 has the award for first new show cancelled). Appropriately, this weekend also marks the return of AMC's The Walking Dead and its Talking Dead aftershow counterpart. Sony has a major videogame release for us with Beyond: Two Souls, while on Blu-ray we're looking forward to classics like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Look after the break for our weekly listing of what to look out for in TV, Blu-ray and gaming.
Beyond, Heavy Rain creator David Cage loves games with 'soul'
Since he's answered so many questions about Beyond: Two Souls, and since the PS3 game comes out next week, I decided the time was right to ask Quantic Dream CEO David Cage about some other games. Specifically, the ones he admires and that emotionally affect him. "I love games where I can feel there is someone behind [it] ... whatever that means!" Cage said. "Sometimes you play [a game] and just feel like, 'Oh, this is just nice software developed by 200 people and it's nice, and the technology's great,' but there's no soul. And sometimes when you play a game you can feel the soul of someone behind it, and that's what I love. For me, Journey was something like this. For me, Papo & Yo was something like this. [In that game] there's really someone talking about these personal feelings that he experienced, and that's what I really love." Cage added that he tries to put soul into the games he makes; he's both the director and writer of Beyond: Two Souls, as he was for Quantic Dream's previous PS3 game, Heavy Rain. At a BAFTA lecture last month, Cage cited Journey, Papo & Yo, Rain, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Gone Home, and The Unfinished Swan as representative of an indie community compensating for a lack of resources with creativity, and he's clearly a proponent of indie games. I asked him if there were any major games in which he saw a similar auteur quality to what he admired in Journey and Papo & Yo. "There are a couple," said Cage. "I think the games by Fumito Ueda. They are not indie games per se because they were produced by Sony, but there is definitely an auteur behind them, that's for sure. In Ico and Shadow of the Colossus you can feel there is someone with a soul behind them."
PSN Tuesday: NBA 2K14, Rain, Fatal Frame 3
Sony has issued its latest PlayStation Store update today, headlined by NBA 2K14. Sony's Japan Studio makes a splash with Rain today as well, and Fatal Frame 3 scares up a spot in the PS2 Classics section. PS Plus subscribers can transport themselves to the kingdoms of Amalur this week with a free PS3 download of Reckoning. Discounts have been extended to select THQ games such as Darksiders 2 and Red Faction: Armageddon, as well as Rocksmith and Persona 4: Golden. Finally, rounding out this week's offerings is the chance to be Ellen Page in a free demo for Beyond: Two Souls.
Pre-order Beyond: Two Souls at GameStop, get Special Edition free
Placing a pre-order for Beyond: Two Souls at GameStop before its October 8 launch date will upgrade your order to the game's Special Edition for free, the PlayStation Blog has detailed. The Special Edition includes a 30-minute scene focused on guiding protagonist Jodie and her ghostly friend Aiden through a series of test-room puzzles. A soundtrack consisting of the game's four themes will also be paired with "making-of" videos featuring Ellen Page, Willem Dafoe and Beyond's writer, David Cage. A dynamic theme for the PS3 and PSN avatars round out the offering, all of which will be packaged in the Special Edition's metal case. We recently discussed the game's cinematic direction and found it to be an interesting approach to storytelling.
Beyond: Two Souls devs discuss creating over 300 characters
The animators at David Cage's Quantic Dream had quite the challenge ahead of them with Beyond: Two Souls. Not only was the group in charge of rendering and bringing more than 300 characters to life, but they sought to make each as believable and lifelike as Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.
Beyond: Two Souls Video Preview
Spoiler alert: The video preview above contains a smattering of story scenes from Beyond: Two Souls, an upcoming PlayStation 3 game anchored by exquisite recreations of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. One of them drops an F-bomb too, so watch out for that. Director David Cage describes it as spiritual successor to Heavy Rain, polished to a Hollywood sheen and driven more by the events in the protagonist's life than a barrage of repeatable video game mechanisms. The primary source of intrigue in Beyond, and its most liberal form of interaction, is a disembodied character named Aiden. This supernatural entity is attached to Jodi, the protagonist played by Page, and allows the player to pass through walls, manipulate objects and temporarily possess unwitting bystanders. Beyond: Two Souls hits the big screen (in your house) on October 8, 2013.
Start October with a Beyond: Two Souls demo
Ellen Page simulator Beyond: Two Souls gets a demo on October 1 in North America, and the day after in Europe. We jest when we call it that, because Quantic Dream's next PS3 game will clearly be its own complicated beast, much like Heavy Rain before it, and hopefully much more than Hollywood-tinted mo-cap. For the curious, the demo should provide some inkling as to how Beyond plays, but it may be far from the full picture. The PSN demo includes two sections: The first stars a mini-Jodie (Page's character) as she takes part in an experiment scrutinizing her supernatural abilities, while the second sees an older Jodie on the run from government agents. If you'd rather hold out for the full game, you won't have long to wait: Beyond: Two Souls hits North American retail shelves on October 8, and Europe on October 11. Oh, and if you happen to have pre-ordered Beyond from GAME in the UK, you'll get the demo a week early on September 25. In the US PlayStation Blog's announcement, there's mention of "opportunities for a few of you" to get the demo on September 24, so maybe, just maybeeeee there'll be something similar in North America.
Watch Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe talk about their roles in Beyond: Two Souls
We've played bits of Beyond: Two Souls, had some mixed views views on it, talked with Quantic Dream's David Cage about multiplayer and how Jodi can die, but it's arguably two Hollywood actors that get closest to selling me on the PS3 game. Actors are good at that. Willem Dafoe, who plays scientist Nathan Dawkins, and Ellen Page, starring as Jodi, do an excellent job of talking up Beyond here. As do the game clips, to be fair, switching from Jodi's childhood to her teen and adult years, giving glimpses of how the young hero copes with the presence of supernatural companion Aiden. Beyond spans Jodi's life between the ages of 8 and 23, and like Heavy Rain player choices will guide how that life progresses. Beyond: Two Souls will be one of the last major PS3 games out before the PS4's launch in November, arriving for the current-gen console on October 8 in North America.
No 'game over' in Beyond: Two Souls, but Jodi can die
There is no "game over" in Beyond: Two Souls – the screen never fades to black, there's no inspirational quote in sight, and, most importantly to creator David Cage, the story doesn't come to a complete stop. "I've always felt that 'game over' is a state of failure more for the game designer than from the player," Cage told me at Gamescom. "It's like creating an artificial loop saying, 'You didn't play the game the way I wanted you to play, so now you're punished and you're going to come back and play it again until you do what I want you to do.' In an action game, I can get that – why not? It's all about skills. But in a story-driven experience it doesn't make any sense." Instead, Cage said he focused on giving consequences to failures without hindering the narrative. In one scene, two police officers hunt down Jodi, the protagonist, on a moving passenger train. Jodi is able to circumvent the officers and run away, leading to an intense standoff on the roof of the speeding train. "Failing" this scene means the cops capture Jodi before she has a chance to bolt, and in the standard video game design scheme, this would mean cut, fade to black and try again. In Beyond, players are given an alternate story path, this time where Jodi is locked in a train car with the officers standing guard, and she has to escape. Players who "fail" the train scene won't see the rooftop battle, but those who "beat" it won't experience the escape narrative. In at least one of these scenarios, a path can lead to Jodi's death. This raises a question that humankind has asked itself for eons: What happens when we die? "It's a game about death, so you can imagine that death plays a role in all of this," Cage said. "Actually, it's one of the big discoveries – one of the big mysteries in the game is to discover what's on the other side. And it's definitely not a black screen."
Beyond: Two Souls soundtrack from Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe
Hans Zimmer is producer on the soundtrack for Beyond: Two Souls, with Assassin's Creed 3 composer Lorne Balfe at the helm. Balfe and Zimmer collaborate frequently, including on films such as Inception and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Beyond creator David Cage confirmed the music news at Gamescom, adding that the soundtrack is two hours of full orchestral music. "We believe that with the addition of Ellen Page, Willem Dafoe, and now Hans Zimmer with the soundtrack – we were really looking for the best, most talented people out there to create the emotion in Beyond, and we have a beautiful soundtrack in the game," Cage said. During that panel, Cage revealed multiplayer for Beyond, including a free app that turns touchscreen devices into controllers, intended to make the AAA game less intimidating to casual players.
Beyond: Two Souls has multiplayer, an app that turns touchscreens into controllers
Beyond: Two Souls features two-player, co-op multiplayer, with one person controlling Jodi Holmes, the main protagonist, and the other controlling Aiden, the entity tethered to her entire existence, Quantic Dream founder David Cage revealed at Gamescom. Players pass control between Jodi and Aiden, on a single screen, by pressing triangle. Yes, press triangle to Jodi. In multiplayer or solo, Beyond is playable with iOS and Android touchscreen devices, with the "Beyond Touch" app. It's a free app that allows players to control a character – it's a blank slate, with no buttons or on-screen sticks, that players use like a touchpad. Slide one finger around the screen and the character moves. The game automatically switches to easy mode when a touchscreen controller is in use. Cage said the touchscreen feature is an attempt to reel in casual players or those who don't play games often. Most people are comfortable with a smartphone, though avid players will want to use the DualShock controller, Cage said.
Beyond: Two Souls behind the scenes video covers gameplay, crying at payphones
This latest look into the Quantic Dream's development process for Beyond: Two Souls gives insight into how different departments plan, communicate and coordinate their efforts to produce the World's Most-Psychic Ellen Page and a gameplay system befitting her purposes.
