Beyond: Two Souls - A Conversation With David Cage

We chat with the man behind Heavy Rain to find out what's in store for his upcoming game, Beyond: Two Souls

While buzz may be building up about the PlayStation 4, there's still plenty of life left in the PS3, Developers are still churning out quality titles for the current generation of Sony's console, and the team at Quantic Dream is no exception. With their upcoming title Beyond: Two Souls, the studio is looking to push the envelope on driving emotions with game characters, and really making the players feel the consequences for their actions. I sat down with David Cage to find out just how high the stakes are in his upcoming title.
IGN: You’ve pioneered cinematic story telling in videos games with examples like Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy and then you went with Heavy Rain. What kind of advancements in storytelling can we expect in Beyond: Two Souls?
David Cage: Well Beyond: Two Souls is a different experience than Heavy Rain. First of all, it’s the story of one woman but through fifteen years of her life, so we will see different moments in her life. And the story is told in “chronological disorder” and the player has to put the things in the right order by themselves. It’s a new approach to storytelling in the game and the other main key feature of the game is that you not only control one character, but actually two characters; Jodie and the Entity. You should make both the characters collaborate so that the story can progress.

How is the story distinguishable between the two characters? Which one, do you think, takes a greater role in the story or are both relying on each other?
What’s really interesting to see is that Jodie is physically present on screen whom you can see, whereas the ghost is first person view so you never see what you exactly what it looks like. But the ghost happens to have the same presence and the same reality for players as Jodie so it’s a 50-50 kind of split. What is really interesting is that it’s just two characters but at the same time because you play Jodie at different ages – you will play her when she’s a little girl and when she’s an adult –and it’s like controlling different characters because she doesn’t look the same, doesn’t move the same way, doesn’t speak the same way and in each scene the looks totally changes.
In the latest trailers we’ve seen and some of the gameplay videos, we were introduced to the dynamic action sequences the game offers. How were you able to balance those action packed areas with the subtle story and drama segments of the game?
That was one of the big challenges that we had to face, that the fact that Jodie’s life there were moments where she was in love, moments where she was happy, she was sad, she was in action or there were more intimate moments. I think one of the strengths of the game is the fact that we managed to find a balance between these epic moments and these more smaller intimate moments, and end up with something that is really a surprising and emotional journey.

Now both Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain had a very nonlinear way of moving the story depending on what your choices were and that’s again present in Beyond. How are you taking that to the next level?

In Beyond it’s two characters at a time, all the time. Everything becomes more complex because you can make decisions that can greatly affect the course of the story, and some of the decisions will entirely change even the meaning of the entire experience so it’s really something that’s at a bigger scale than Heavy Rain.
For Beyond you are working with two very well-known Hollywood figures, Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. How is working with them changed the game or were there any challenges that you came across when integrating them into the game?

It didn’t really change the game because I wrote the game really with their faces in mind and I really wanted them for these roles, so I really wrote with the idea Ellen will be this main character pretty much from day one.

Now with the rise of tablet and mobile gaming, do you think Quantic Dream would be interested in doing smaller, shorter projects on that kind of platform?
Yes, why not? These are very interesting platforms and maybe there are things that we can do in relationship with the games that we make PlayStation consoles so we are thinking along these lines.
And finally, what would your expectations be for Beyond, that would declare it successful? What would be that defining factor for you?

Well there are some figures that are, of course, defining factors like how many sales you made and what the reviews had to say, but at the same time for me the most important things is that by the end of the game, people will feel really attached to the character of Jodie and they really cared for her. By the time they are done with the game they really feel like they miss her and this is what I’m looking for.