When David Cage and his studio, Quantic Dream joined with Sony some four years ago to create a new experience never seen in the gaming industry before, they knew the risk was high.
How would it be received? is among the many questions they asked themselves. Furthermore, the game was originally designed with motion controls in mind, making for an even steeper hill to climb. But since then the latter have been thrown out the window, Heavy Rain is now out and doing exceptionally well.
So what’s Cage’s reaction to the overwhelming positive reception? Well, let’s just say it has been beyond his “craziest dreams”.
“It’s way above my expectations in my craziest dreams, to be honest with you,” he told Industry Gamers in a recent interview. “We thought the feedback would be very polarized until the game was released, but now that it’s been released we see that out of 373 reviews the game has an average of 9 out of 10.
So it’s actually not polarized at all. What is very interesting also is that the mainstream press reacted very positively to it; these people usually only talk about games because of violence or addiction issues or whatever. But they talked about it because it was very new, really original and innovative. Most of all, it’s gamers who know whether it’s interesting or not, and the game really exceeded any expectations during the first two weeks. It’s sold out in many countries and the sales definitely exceeded what we expected.”
Cage also gave credit to word of mouth from gamers which he said helped garner a positive perception.
“The word of mouth seems to be incredibly positive about the game, when reading reviews and talking to gamers. Sony did some investigations about satisfaction ratio and it’s between 90 to 95 percent. So it’s polarized between the people who played it and didn’t play it, because for those who played it’s really, really positive.”
Heavy Rain is now available worldwide exclusively for the PS3.
2nd best game i have ever played!
i feel so sorry for heavy rain, it came out and blew everyone away, was the best title i had ever played and ive been playing games for 20+ years.
than GOW3 comes out and blows it into next week!
poor heavy rain, out shined in such a short time.
its infamous happening all over again, but at least that held the spot for a while till batman AA came out.
speak of the devil batman AA GOTY edition is out next week, cant wait to give the 3D functions a try!