Munge

I will not be playing through the derpy nonsense that was cut just because it fills a handful of the egregious plot holes in the original. These guys already proved they can't figure out how to get Heavy Rain to tell a decent story. I'll wait till their next title to maybe give them another chance.

I'm a bit underwhelmed by the fact that some of the BS plot holes that they called "intentional red herrings" in early interviews were in fact originally explained by weaksauce paranormal garbage. I'd have liked to see them a bit more humble about botching it so hard. They're not really painting a picture of a studio that's capable of producing good narrative. What should I expect from a game studio that sounds like a feminine hygiene product. I guess we'll see, but so far it's not looking good.

The discussion is actually interesting, but it's hard to take these guys seriously when they can't figure out how to mute their damn microphone when they're not talking. The echo is pretty unbearable.

@xFenixKnightx

I think there's a difference between being cocky and being confident. The issue I have with this is that they're outwardly trying to build a buzz about the studio when they've released no details about what they're even working on.

It would be like Runic announcing the fact that they're ex-Diablo developers at the beginning of the Torchlight dev cycle and inviting people to come talk about what they might work on, rather than just working on Torchlight and letting the game speak for itself. In this case, they've also been pretty clear about their disinterest in working on CoD-type games, so it's unclear what the genre of their first project will even be and they've only really proven themselves to be competent in that very specific genre.

If Respawn does anything legitimately newsworthy, any competent game journalist will mention the fact that they're driven by the old CoD team, but in this case the announcement is simply, "We're making a game, come guess what it is!" They want to drive traffic to their site and build a community, but they don't seem to have a use for one yet. They're literally trying to drum up excitement about the fact that they merely exist and are working on some sort of game. To me, that seems pretty cocky.

I have to be honest, this reeks of adolescent cockiness. It's the same tone on their website. One of the featured news blurbs in the scrolling banner at the top reads: "Our First Game: Yes, we are working on a game. No, we haven’t revealed it yet. Yes, at some point we will. What do you think it is?" with a link to a thread they've graciously created specifically for "fans" to speculate on what their first game will be.

I imagine their office to be a big empty warehouse where they cruise around on toddler trikes while wearing sunglasses and high-fiving each other about how awesome they all are.

To be fair, it's entirely possible they just have a really bad marketing/community department, but I get the strong sense that this campaign is driven from the very top and there's a small part of me that kinda wants their first project to fail miserably just to humble them a little bit.

@Flapjackal: Jesus christ, thank you. Not just fax it - but fax it to their legal department.

I feel like we need to clear this up for folks outside of the industry: this is not normal.

This sounds like squeenix knew GRIN's burn rate and knew they were tight, and were trying to force them into defaulting on the contract due to being forced into bankruptcy, rather than just firing them. They had a contract for work on Fortress, and squeenix was trying to nitpick on the details of the deliverables in order to delay payment to the point that GRIN would be forced to close its doors because they couldn't afford to pay their staff. It happens all the time when new or naive developers are too trusting of the wrong publisher.

It's a really dick move and it sucks for GRIN. Even if you're not a fan of the studio, it's morally indefensible to put people out of work rather than buying out of a contract because you changed your mind about working with someone. I'd like to hear squeenix's side of the story, but damn.

@Enosoma Yeah, that's the most likely scenario. He probably taped a camera to his face and then set up a complex head rest so the camera wouldn't shake.

@Rankore I was totally wrapped up in it too. A friend and I played through twice back to back: first trying to do everything right, and then when that ending didn't clear anything up, we played through again failing everything on purpose just for shits and giggles - which made even less sense. I thought the dialog was mostly fine and the story got me sucked in, but I didn't feel like it really tied up all the loose ends in any of the endings.

SPOILERS: The "bad" ending made no freaking sense at all. The killer got away, yet the boy was still discovered in the well, rather than in a field with origami like the rest of the victims. The father ended up thinking he was the killer and making origami constantly in an insane asylum, which he apparently doesn't know how to do. There were a bunch of little things that were also left unresolved, like the fact that (depending on your choices) the woman will have the option to call the detective at one point, who she's never met.

Understandably, gamers give a lot of leeway to writing in games (mostly because it's typically bad), but for a game in which the story is the whole point, I thought it fell way short. The real game of Heavy Rain is to see how long you can maintain your suspension of disbelief with all these glaring plot holes and painfully obvious red herrings popping up all over the place.

Am I the only one who was underwhelmed by the writing in Heavy Rain? Most of the dialog was fine, if not a bit stilted and forced at times, but the plot made no freaking sense. They touted the game as having all these different endings, but only the "good" endings even come close to maintaining continuity, and none of them explain the fact that the protagonist blacks out and miraculously knows how to make origami - something that the writers have expressed several times they don't see a problem with.

Seems like Cage should have taken his own advice and written just about the relationship with the son, rather than tying in a murder mystery, because he clearly doesn't "have a clue what that's like".

I was mostly joshing about the subscription comments, but if you follow the 'streaming service' link there's an article that explains it in detail.

This isn't strictly thin-client like OnLive/Gaikai. If you meet the system specs, the actual game downloads and you can start playing when only a fraction of the game is downloaded - on your machine. It launches the game locally with just the bare minimum it needs for the beginning of the game and then downloads the rest of the game as you play - streaming the game assets to you, not video of the game being played. It only uses thin-client streaming when you don't meet the system specs to run it locally. Basically, making it available as fast as possible to as many people as possible. That's the idea, anyhow.

Also, it's not a subscription service. There's a free trial and you can buy the game and play it whenever you want from anywhere.

I'm baffled at how many people aren't getting this. It says all this right in the article. There's only like 300 characters.. are you guys just posting in response to the title of the article?