Quantic Dream founder and Heavy Rain creator David Cage has stressed that he’s more than happy to take charge in terms of the output from the employees of his company.
Cage stated to EDGE that the creative input behind story-situated titles such as Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls requires him to take charge:
The games we make cannot be collaborative works. It’s not about 50 people in a room raising their hands to say they like this or they don’t like that. It’s an authorial work, it’s totally subjective; it’s about making decisions you believe in for no clear reasons, just because you feel something in your gut.
He does, however, appreciate the work carried out by his colleagues, including the fact that they offer him valuable feedback:
I give them the script and they criticise it – they point out everything that doesn’t work, they feed that back to me and I start work again to improve it. But I am both the writer and the creative director – that’s the good thing about Quantic Dream. I set the vision in the script and I’m able to go into production and see what works with the vision, what doesn’t… People have to embrace that vision to move forward – you’ve got to allow people to be creative – but you need the captain to chart the direction.
One of the decisions Cage made with Quantic Dream’s forthcoming title Beyond: Two Souls is to deliver an “emotional journey” over offering a “fun” experience.
