Heavy Rain dev shows off ‘Kara’

“We never thought it would work on a PlayStation 3,” Cage told an audience at Game Developers Conference. He then showed off “Kara,” running on Quantic Dream’s new engine for the PS3.

March 7, 2012 3:15 PM31

Quantic Dream, the team behind Heavy Rain, is working on a brand new game for PS3. While it will take advantage of lessons learned by their last adventure, creative director David Cage said that they wanted to create brand new tech for their next game.

“We never thought it would work on a PlayStation 3,” Cage told an audience at Game Developers Conference. However, after experimenting, he announced “then we discovered that it could.”

Repeating the footsteps of 2006’s “The Casting,” Cage revealed a brand new prototype that isn’t necessarily related to their upcoming game. “We wanted to see if what we learned on Heavy Rain could be applied to a different genre,” Cage said when describing his new game. As the lights turned down, he revealed “Kara,” a new prototype. Before the video played, however, he announced that in all-caps: “NOT OUR NEXT PROJECT.”

Running in real-time on the PS3, Cage said that the new engine would allow for a low-cost motion capture solution with a “direct-to-engine” pipeline. He said that the team is aiming “if not the quality of Avatar, something really high quality.”

The Kara demo is already one year old running on “version 1” of the engine. Since then, Cage claims the team is currently utilizing a “version 3.” While he wouldn’t talk about the studio’s next game, he did say that the final product would look even more realistic than what we saw. “I think you’re going to get much better than that in the game,” he confidently told the audience.