Heavy Rain 2 never seriously discussed between Quantic Dream and Sony

Quantic Dream CEO David Cage confirms that Sony never pushed him to create a sequel to Heavy Rain after the success of the crime thriller. When asked about the amount of leverage Cage received for his newest project, he responded "total freedom".

"Many publishers, after the success of Heavy Rain, would have said, 'Well, you need to do Heavy Rain 2. And do what you want, but it's going to be called Heavy Rain 2.'" said Cage to Gamasutra. "We never had this conversation with Sony. They just asked me, 'What's next? What do you want to do?' 'Well, I have this idea, what do you think?' 'Yeah. It looks great!'

"We talked about it, explained the concept. They never asked for me to change anything in my script. And, no, total freedom. I think this kind of project can only be made in complete freedom, because otherwise it's not the same experience at all. I'm not the kind of guy who works on command and someone tells you, 'You should write something about sci-fi, or about this, or about that.'"

"I think the real value of this type of experience is that they are true and they are sincere," declared Cage. "It's really a story that I needed to tell, and Sony gave me the opportunity to do it. Which is quite unique. It's really incredible in this industry to have the possibility to work like that."

"Very few developers are in my position, so I feel incredibly fortunate to be here, having this level of creative freedom, and at the same time having the financial means of a triple-A title. Usually, you make indie development, and you have limited resources, but you have freedom, or you work on a triple-A and you have the resources, but limited or no creative freedom. And I'm in the strange position where I have both."

Cage also believes that Heavy Rain helped meet a demand for different types of games on the market. He thinks that doing games that are unexpected is important as a game creator.

"The thing is that, if you just give people what they expect, I think you're not doing your job as a creative person. You're just a marketing guy," he said. "Your job as a creative person is to give people what they don't expect -- or what they expect, without knowing that this is what they want. But your goal as a creative person is to surprise people all the time, and give them something different."

"So, when you look at the market at the moment, you can see more of the same, fair enough, and a few people trying different things. I mean, recently, there's been Journey, for example, which was a very huge surprise. It was a very unexpected game in many ways, not entering into any genre, really, but it was very new, very creative, very original, and very successful. There are the guys working on The Walking Dead, right now, which is a different approach to narrative storytelling, and is also interesting in a way."