Speaking with Edge magazine, Quantic Dream's David Cage explained his design philosophy for Beyond: Two Souls, emphasizing that emotion, not fun, is his main priority:
My goal is to surprise people, to give them something they want without knowing they want it. I want to create an emotional journey, a unique experience.I am not interested in giving them 'fun', I want to give them meaning; I don't want to challenge their thumbs, I want to challenge their minds.
Maybe this is irrelevant or just overly ambitious. Maybe this is not what most people out there actually want. But this is the goal I set myself with Beyond: to create something different.
It would probably won't surprise you, but I don't particularly care for fun either, particularly as a word because I believe there are numerous ways that video games can be entertaining without the narrow definition of "fun". This doesn't mean "fun" isn't a worthy goal for video games, since creating a fun game somehow still alludes many developers this generation. It's that for a full $60 title, we expect more than just a fun title to pass the time.
Creating an emotional title, at least, is a challenging goal and I hope David Cage is able to transfer the lesson he learned on Heavy Rain to Beyond: Two Souls. Particularly the one where everything doesn't need to be covered in heavy-handed melodrama to be dramatic.
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