Heavy Rain + Natal: The “Missed” Opportunity

I’ve been a Quantic Dream fan ever since playing Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (at least the early part of the game, before the plot went simply insane). Anyway, I pre-ordered Heavy Rain many months ago, hoping that the game would deliver on its early promise.

Having only spent a few hours with the game so far, it’s too early for me to have a reasonable opinion on that. However, something struck me early on, and I just haven’t been able to shake it: Heavy Rain and Natal were made for each other, and it’s a shame the two will never meet.

Playing Heavy Rain is a fascinating experience. The game tries to map contextual user input onto a controller – something that, in itself, has absolutely no context in the game world. It attempts to immerse you into that world by showing you a motion which you need to duplicate on the controller – examples include having you swirl a stick to show a badge, or holding down an awkward series of buttons to simulate a difficult movement. The problem is that the controller itself simply doesn’t exist inside the game world – so the user is being asked to try and translate a motion that’s intended to suggest a real-world analog, then trigger it appropriately on a device that isn’t in that “real” game world. Unfortunately, this just isn’t that intuitive, even to a oldschool gamer like myself. And when I tried to have a non-gaming friend of mine play, he gave up in frustration saying that the controls were “just annoying.” He didn’t buy the immersiveness argument at all.

That led me to imagining what Heavy Rain might have been if time and space (and competitive interests) had allowed Natal to be the control interface. Suddenly you’d have an immersive story with digital actors that you could control by actually doing the appropriate movement. Pretend to flash that badge by swiping it from your side and holding it up. Slap the guy by literally slapping the air. It would all have to be tuned and playtested of course, but you’d have the huge advantage of every user already knowing how to play intuitively. As Natal promises, your body is the controller, and you already know how to play because the actions are the same ones you would naturally do.

It’s too bad that Natal and Heavy Rain end up being a “missed” opportunity (albeit exceedingly unlikely). I’ll be curious to see if Quantic Dream is able to anything with Sony’s motion controller… especially since no matter how good the implementation, you won’t be able to escape the fact that you’re still holding an actual controller. Guess I’ll just have to cross my fingers that the game will do really well, and we’ll have a chance to have Quantic Dream do something on the Xbox sometime in the future.

Related posts:

1. Speaking of Heavy Rain…
2. Attending Microsoft Gamefest (with Lots of Natal Love)
3. Natal on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
4. PS360 Controller
5. Opportunity to Suggest Xbox 360 UI Changes