Quantic Dream, developer of Heavy Rain, showed a new tech demo at the Game Developers’ Conference, which portrayed a bicentennial woman named Kara.
As unfortunate as it is, Kara is not Quantic Dream’s next IP, but it definitely shows the future potential in the gaming industry. The explanation for the tech demo, in terms of a potential new IP from Quantic Dream, was very vague, but David Cage spoke with the Official PlayStation Blog about it:
"After Heavy Rain, we wanted to push the envelope in terms of quality, starting with the visuals. We wanted to improve many things — things that were not possible with the Heavy Rain engine. So we had to develop a new engine from scratch.
We also wanted to improve the quality of the acting. With Heavy Rain, we did what many games do — split performances, recording a voice on one side and a body animation on the other, putting everything together and crossing your fingers that you get a consistent performance. It worked okay for Heavy Rain, but you lose a lot of a performance by splitting into two and rebuilding it artificially.
We wanted to do what Avatar did by having one full performance where we capture everything at the same time. And we wanted to demonstrate these new performance capture techniques and the new engine before going into production, so we developed a short showcase that would allow us to test these ideas and technologies. This is how “Kara” was created.
“Kara” is not our next game. It’s not the character, it’s not the world, it’s not the story. …We do things in a very strange way here, things that have nothing to do with the games we make. But I think that’s a part of the DNA of the studio, and hopefully something that people like about us – they never know what they’re going to get!"
Personally, this performance of Kara in the tech demo blows so many other performances out of the water, and, even though Heavy Rain was a graphical marvel and a stellar plot, it even makes Heavy Rain looks like it belongs in the previous generation of games. Really, in my own words, it’s a sight to behold, in both graphics and acting ability. The video posted below is seven minutes of glorious storytelling, and we, the fans of both Quantic Dream and overall progress, can only wait anxiously for what is to come from this tech demo.
Enjoy Quantic Dream’s "Kara," and let us know what you think of it!