David Cage's 'biggest concern' about Heavy Rain - gamers who wouldn't try it

In a new feature interview, the director of the upcoming Beyond: Two Souls tells Gamasutra that his "challenge as a game designer" is getting those who ignored Heavy Rain to give his new game a chance. "My biggest concern about Heavy Rain was not so much what people who played it thought, because the feedback has been consistently very positive about the game. It was much more about the people who didn't play Heavy Rain, what they thought of the game. Just the image they had of it," Cage tells Gamasutra. Cage says he's "shocked" when people say "Oh, Heavy Rain, it's like Dragon's Lair, with prompts sometimes, and that's not really a game." "Wait a minute. There are less cutscenes in Heavy Rain than in many first-person shooters that I can see these days," Cage says. The game, he said, was not about cutscenes -- "It was not about watching. You were in the shoes of the character. You were making the choices, and you were telling the story through your actions, and not through prompts, or whatever," he says. Unfortunately, says Cage, "some people just stay stuck outside the game, having an image, an idea of what it is that in my mind was wrong." But getting more gamers to give Beyond a chance is not a question, he says, of selling more copies. It's more a situation where Cage wants to say to gamers, "Hey, we worked really hard to create something we believe in. Please try it, give it a chance!" "So we really worked on how we can find a way of making the entry barrier as low as possible," for Beyond, he says. "'Please come in.' Open doors. 'Come on and, see, look. It looks like something familiar. But once you're in, I can take your hand and show you stuff that will really surprise you.'" "That's my challenge as a game designer: to deal with all those things, and stay true to the experience we want to make, of course," says Cage. The full interview, which covers his thoughts on the evolution of the industry, writing for a female lead character, and exactly why he cast Ellen Page as lead character Jodie (pictured) in Beyond, is live now on Gamasutra.