hogso Posted May 17, 2013 Share Posted May 17, 2013 Scheduled for release on October 8, Beyond: Two Souls is the next game and final on PS3 from Quantic Dream, creators of Omikron, Fahrenheit, and most recently Heavy Rain. They're set to continue the tradition of that most recent game with this one, which is going to be along the similar lines of an 'interactive movie' with 'moral choices' type jobby. Interesting interview with Ellen Page below, who is the lead for the game. It emphasises just how close this game is going to be to actually being a playable movie, from what I can gather. Heavy Rain was massively divisive, but I enjoyed it. The picture of Ellen Page that you can see above is an illusion. She hasn’t been Photoshopped, she wasn’t in make-up for hours and we haven’t been messing around with the filters on Instagram. You are, in fact, looking at a computer-generated image of the Juno star from astonishing new video game Beyond: Two Souls. So good is the rendition, though, that from the other side of a coffee table in Lower Manhattan I’m struggling to tell the difference. This is Page’s self-confessed most challenging part to date as the star in a game promising such cinematic quality it’s just been recognised by the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The 26-year-old underwent months of exhausting motion capture sessions, similar to those used in the movie Avatar, to shoot countless scenes and alternative outcomes for the game, which relies on players to make moral choices – including whether to kill yourself and how best to deliver a baby. ‘I didn’t know how to wrap my head around it,’ she says. ‘I mean, what does it mean to be in a video game? I had no concept. I hadn’t played anything in, like, ten years. I kind of stopped at Crash Bandicoot… great game, though,’ she adds with her trademark dry wit. However, when David Cage, co-founder of French games developer Quantic Dream, came calling with a lead role written specifically for her, Page was instantly curious. ‘It completely intrigued me, then I got Heavy Rain [Quantic Dream’s previous title] and I was completely stunned,’ she says. ‘I had such limited gaming experience at the time and the technology just blew me away. To see this combination of interactive gameplay with cinematic scope of narrative was fascinating.’ Page plays Jodie Holmes, a girl with a supernatural secret she calls a curse – being joined at the hip to a tempremental spectral entity called Aiden. The game follows her through 15 years of her life from the age of eight. The psychological thriller also stars Willem Dafoe as a scientist studying Jodie’s powers while she’s on the run from the government. ‘David told me about Jodie’s story and I was in there and then,’ says Page. ‘I had gratitude alone for creating a character like that and then to have the opportunity to play her and have an experience like this is unlike anything I’ve done before. ‘With a movie, you might shoot, like, a page a day. With a video game, you don’t really know what you’re walking into. I had a 2,000-page script and every day we’d shoot 30 to 40 pages. It was absolutely the most challenging acting job, a really, really emotionally intense and gruelling experience.’ Motion capture uses tiny sensors placed on an actor’s body to record their movements. This is the first time a video game has captured movement, facial expressions and voice at the same time, meaning Page and her 160 fellow cast members had to give complete performances in just one take. ‘I would go into shoot stuff and have about two seconds to get into the right emotional state,’ she says. ‘Wearing the sensors was strange at first – you can’t physically touch your face and I thought: “What if something is emotional and I’m crying?” But in the end it was kind of nice just coming into work and putting on my little suit without having to go through hair and make-up.’ Page, who still lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she was born, says parts of Jodie’s story mirrored her own upbringing. However, she becomes uneasy when I ask for specific examples. ‘David had written the character so beautifully that I felt deeply connected to her,’ she says. ‘A lot of people will relate to feeling like an outsider, feeling misunderstood, not fully seen, lonely, you know. So I think it’s going to be a game a lot of people connect with – dealing with this element of herself that Jodie can’t live with but can’t live without. That love-hate feeling of being different is something universal.’ Critics are calling Page’s performance the most convincing digital acting display so far, while also praising Beyond: Two Souls for its photorealism. The game isn’t out until October but anticipation is already intense. At Tribeca, a long line of patiently waiting fans are treated to a 35-minute trailer, including a scene where a homeless Jodie contemplates throwing herself off a building. Should video games feature topics such as suicide? ‘Why would you not want to explore that format of storytelling?’ she says. ‘I’m fascinated to see if people feel emotionally attached and compelled in these intense moments of Jodie’s life to make choices from those feelings.’ Despite this, Page admits she struggles with watching anything too harrowing. ‘It can’t be too scary or I will have bedroom incidents. I’m a bit of a wuss with stuff like that, which is funny because I make movies and I should be like: “Ellen, there’s a boom over that person’s head.”’ There are heart-warming moments in the game too, though. You can’t help but be moved when Jodie borrows a busker’s guitar to earn some money of her own with a wonderful rendition of Beck’s Lost Cause. ‘I suggested it and then I played it, and then David liked it, and then we used it,’ she laughs. ‘That’s about the extent of my guitar skills, though. OK, I sang in Juno but it was a two-chord song so it was pretty easy. I wish I was a talented musician.’ Musician she might not be but busy actress she is. Page stars in thriller The East, out in Britain this month, and she’s reprising the role of Kitty Pryde for X-Men: Days Of The Future Past, due in July next year. ‘We’re shooting in Montreal right now,’ she says. ‘I love getting to be Kitty Pryde. We started shooting a couple of weeks ago so it’s early days but the movie’s going to be huge.’ Quantic Dream: Screen magic Parisian games company Quantic Dream was co-founded by David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière in 1997. The company made its name with titles Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain, both of which were lauded for their cinematic qualities. Working with top Hollywood stars represents an amazing rise to prominence for Quantic and especially Cage, given that his first credit in gaming was producing the score for Cheese Cat-Astrophe Starring Speedy Gonzales on the on the Sega Master System in 1995. Beyond: Two Souls is something of a last hurrah for the PlayStation 3 before the PlayStation 4 follows later this year. To create the spell, Page flew to France and was locked away for months in Quantic’s motion capture studio. Advanced 3D graphics, rendering processes and special effects were employed, while Quantic also used a photographic technique called the bokeh effect to add an eerie, shiny blur to shallow-focus shots. A new animation engine also used real-time physics and inverse kinematics to produce the organic movements seen on screen. Beyond: Two Souls is out on October 8 exclusively on Sony PlayStation 3. Saurse 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chindie Posted May 18, 2013 VT Supporter Share Posted May 18, 2013 I'll look forward to seeing how much pretentious arse this is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingram85 Posted May 18, 2013 Share Posted May 18, 2013 Your such a happy chap chinds I take QD games for what they are, interactive movies. The imprtant thing to do is ignore the rhetoric and dont buy into the hype Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chindie Posted May 18, 2013 VT Supporter Share Posted May 18, 2013 Your such a happy chap chinds I take QD games for what they are, interactive movies. The imprtant thing to do is ignore the rhetoric and dont buy into the hype Eh, I'm having a particularly shitty weekend I tend to look on QD games slightly disdainfully - they're never as smart as they think they are. And David Cage always seems to be a bit unlikable. Bleh. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kiwivillan Posted June 7, 2013 Share Posted June 7, 2013 Just played Heavy Rain first time and loved it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hogso Posted October 9, 2013 Author Share Posted October 9, 2013 (edited) Played the demo. If you didn't like Heavy Rain go NOWHERE NEAR IT. But if you did, yeh, try it out Seems to me that the right ideas are there , but the execution could be better. On the plus side, it looks amazing, and the voice acting / motion capture is absurdly good. On the negative side, the plot seems a bit silly and there's some awfully cheesy dialogue in there. Couldn't help but feel that controlling a poltergeist and basically **** shit up shouldve been a bit more...fun. Bit like being a detective, I guess? Edited October 9, 2013 by hogso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villa4europe Posted October 9, 2013 Share Posted October 9, 2013 will try and squeeze it in between GTA and the ps4, think it might get lost between those 2 and the other xmas releases, they're giving it a marketing push to be fair to them, not overly convinced it will be worth £40 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villa4europe Posted October 9, 2013 Share Posted October 9, 2013 gamespot gave it a 9, ign a 6... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hogso Posted October 9, 2013 Author Share Posted October 9, 2013 Oh, it'll split opinion, alright. And rightly so, really. It's quite the technical achievement, but as a video game, at a time when GTAV and FIFA 14 are at the top of the charts, it...well, isn't much of one, in all honesty. Flick the stick this way, press that button, walk/float over there. The biggest criticism of the (sparingly little) gameplay is that there seems to be zero penalty for failure. It appears as though the game will just ignore or do it for you in sections, lest it stop the pace of the action taking place. A most curious design choice, I'm sure all will agree. I'll get it, but I'm not pre ordering. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StigVillan Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 Hoping, as with Last of Us and GTA5, that there will be a PC release of this... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingram85 Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 (edited) I'll wait until its the same price as a film on blu-ray. Edited October 12, 2013 by Ingram85 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hogso Posted October 12, 2013 Author Share Posted October 12, 2013 I'll wait until its the same price as a film on blu-ray. Heh, that must be the perfect way to look at it. Well said. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P3te Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 Hoping, as with Last of Us and GTA5, that there will be a PC release of this... there'll be one of GTAV, but you've no chance on the others anyway, it's pretty crappy. calling it a game at all is pushing it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StigVillan Posted October 12, 2013 Share Posted October 12, 2013 Hoping, as with Last of Us and GTA5, that there will be a PC release of this... there'll be one of GTAV, but you've no chance on the others anyway, it's pretty crappy. calling it a game at all is pushing it Is it very linear? Seems it might be control-a-movie in its approach... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingram85 Posted October 13, 2013 Share Posted October 13, 2013 It is which is why I won't be paying £40 like I would for a 'game'. Its practically the same thing as a Pixar blu ray with all the special features, interactive guff and commentaries replaced with minimalistic controls. £15 tops for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villa4europe Posted November 2, 2013 Share Posted November 2, 2013 £26 in closing down blockbusters, don't think I've got time for it so gave it a miss Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IainG Posted November 16, 2013 Share Posted November 16, 2013 I quite liked it. It's not your average game that's for sure, and if you're all about action then you might want to run away, but it's got its charms... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hogso Posted November 23, 2013 Author Share Posted November 23, 2013 Not quite at the level of Ingram's £15 mark, but it is down to £22 online from Game. Maybe it'll hit £15 in the new year sales? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hogso Posted December 24, 2013 Author Share Posted December 24, 2013 £15.95 on shop to now, pretty much have the same as a new blu ray, right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ginko Posted December 24, 2013 Share Posted December 24, 2013 Are you talking about the price or the game? Because if it's anything like Heavy Rain then you might as well be watching a Blu-ray Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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