David Cage, creator of Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit and the forthcoming Detroit, says he is encouraging his staff to experiment with virtual reality, but that he won’t commit to the medium unless he feels he confident he can do something unique with it.
Not many of David Cage’s games are available on PC. Here are some of the best games which are.
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, Cage said:
“We all have VR systems installed in the studio and I encourage my teams to try them out,” but “the idea is not to do VR for the sake of doing VR. It’s about saying something on this medium that hasn’t been said already.”
Cage’s games have tended to divide opinion, being very linear (if branching), cinematic, and reliant on context-sensitive gesture controls. It’s not hard to see how this approach could be made more engaging if done in VR; the relatively mundane tasks – such as brushing one’s teeth – that Cage actuates by asking players to rotate a controller’s thumb sticks would immediately feel more natural if done in VR, with a wand.
“I try to invent an interface that’s not based on mechanics or action loops, one that’s purely contxtual. I really like this idea because it’s about not limiting the amount of actions my characters can perform based on the number of buttons on the controller. I try to go beyond that and work on a sense of mimicry between what you do with your thumbs and what happens on the screen.”
That sense of mimicry would be a lot stronger in VR, so it seems like a perfect fit. Hopefully, with both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on PC, we can expect a few more David Cage games on our platform – two of his biggest games, Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain, were console exclusives.