It seems like Beyond: Two Souls will take all the great parts from Heavy Rain and make them even heavier, both in moral scope and gameplay. Speaking with the Guardian UK at E3, Quanttic Dreams' David Cage mulls over what the ideas behind his two-in-one game is about:.
""There is a moral journey but not in a religious way, It's much more about Jodie's personal journey, about what she wants to do with her life – where she wants to go, how she sees the 15 years she's spent through the narrative. This is not about heaven and hell; there is no God in my story. It's another vision of the afterlife."
Building on the concept of loss, which Cage admits early in the article he dealt with recently with a loved one, and evolving emotions is central for Jodie (Ellen Page) and her spiritual companion, Aidan. Both work in tandem through story and gameplay, which came across in the gameplay footage from E3 that started on a train and ended with Aidan taking out an entire town, in a completely sandbox format according to Cage. Likewise, his plotting and even exploration of Jodie's story is something that happened naturally:
"I never think about a story without gameplay, or gameplay without story. Each must support the other in order for it to work. But what's really interesting is, when you start working, you think you know what you want to write; then after a year you realise that this is not actually what you're writing about – there are other themes that appear.
It's like your unconscious writes for you, in a way. I thought I was writing about this journey, this road trip, I was quite blunt about everything – but actually what I ended up with was very different. That's what I love most about writing – that point where you discover what you actually wrote!"
Beyond: Two Souls will end up the same as Heavy Rain on the Playstation 3 later in 2012.