The Walking Dead Game -vs- Heavy Rain
 

I have read many times posts about people comparing Heavy Rain to TWD and I think it is legitimate.

If we compare the 2 games they are very similiar: both games have are heavily story driven, strong character development, minor focussed on gameplay mostly quicktime events, many choices.

Now if I compare both games I have to give telltale 1 pluspoint: I got more attached to the characters than I did in Heavy Rain. But if we compare choices, and IMPACT of choices TWD falls behind majorly. None of the choices make any difference besides some dialoguechanges or other temporary effects that are NOT "profound and lasting" (like advertised) but they have no influence on the story and no impact on the outcome whatsoever. Heavy rain on the other hand has like.... nearly 20 different endings and results depending on your choices. I think there are 17 different endings alone. This game has truly profound and lasting consequences to your choices - unlike TWD where it seems you only have "the illusion of choice".

Now, I see why that many different endings might not be possible for Telltale, as it would be near impossible and ludicrously expensive to start a 2nd season with that many endings, but at least give us 3 or so different results depending on what we did throughout our game? Or anything at all? I played this game 3 times, with 3 times totally different choices yet everything plays out the same and ends in only 1 ending.

After I played Heavy Rain I immediately played again, and the result was COMPLETELY different. My choices had MAJOR IMPACT. In fact I played it 6 or 7 times and every time it played out differently. The characters ended up totally different and the endings were completely different depending on my choices.

Now, with TWD after only my 2nd playthrough (opposite of 1st playthrough) I noticed there is no point in the choices. Everything feels so minor and temporary I have never seen a single choice that was profound and lasting.

Now, TWD was one of the better games I have played in 2012 due to story and character development. But gameplay and choices are rather poor.

Bottom Line is I wished they would take a route further down to Heavy Rain, where your choices actually altered the outcome.

Anyone with me on this?

But you can't change who is kidnapped, or who the murderer is, you still end up in the same place?etc. There are times when "you are in control", yet there are things, that you, as the character, do not actually do; yet it still happens (n the same time frame you are meant to be controlling them). I didn't really like the characters, so I didn't want to play it again... What are the possible 17 endings? Do they include FBI guy being alive/dead, being with the woman or not etc?

I don't know... for me it felt much more like my choices mattered. In my games once Madison died, the other time she didn't and I started a relationship with her, the other time I died myself and the origami killer was alive, the other time I was locked up as the killer, the other was the the real origamikiller dead.... I just felt I had so much more impact with my choices... here are the endings I think http://heavyrain.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Endings

I feel that, in the end, the facts of the ending of Heavy Rain are not different as all, as rachel above me posted as well. It is just the details of the ending that are different. And yes, I realise details matter when it comes to endings with characters you have come to care about.

Thing is though, TWD does that similarly. The details are different along the way as well as a few minor differences in the end. It is just not 17 endings because the story itself is not entirely done at the end. The story is about Lee preparing Clementine to do what she has to do and her being ready to do that in the end.

I like that the differences are in how the things feel instead of how they occur. This is what makes you emotionally attached to the characters more and this is also why you don't feel you did it wrong because a person died (something Heavy Rain does have). There is no best way to play TWD, and this is its strength.

The epilogue, what happens after the end? To me you have many different endings on TWD. The game could have ended with you having helped kill Larry or not,You could have killed Ben or not, Lee being left to turn, or killed before that happened etc.

The ZA would still be going on regardless of what you did, and most of the people who were affected by your choices are dead, or unknown.

Exactly, this is the key here. The continuiing world may not have been affected by your choices much, but the world around you was when you were still alive. The way people lived their lives until their time was up is what you helped define.

I guess one of the themes this also gives is one of: You cannot shape the entire world around you, no matter how much you try.

I've only played the Heavy Rain demo. I must buy the game in the future. :)

Well, Telltale is an episodic game company. I feel like a final episode branching into 20 endings is an unrealistic characteristic for their game structure at the moment. :c (Maybe 5 endings could be manageable.)

With saying that, I think the short length of the episodes and limited choices make the characters and journey memorable. It seemed like Telltale wanted to loosely tell one story where you struggled with making decisions in specific situations, rather than experimenting with 20 stories.

Also, a similar ending or consequence is useful for encouraging a specific emotion. (For example, it was hilarious to see a shared hatred for Larry on the Telltale forums after episode 1. :P ) I think multiple outcomes may take away this (awesome) phenomenon.

Of course I would love a zombie apocalypse themed game like Heavy Rain, but maybe such a game should be led by a different company so Telltale can stick to their episode structure. :)

Those aren't really things your character needs to have control over, unless you're playing the game with a kind of 'director's mentality', instead of one of controlling a character with some degree of agency over the things you do.

I never played Heavy Rain, but I did play Fahrenheit a pretty long time ago. I'm not sure if it had more than one ending either but I felt it gave me more freedom than TWD. Part of that wasn't necessarily because it had great consequences, but because the gameplay allowed you to experience certain events, negative or positive, just by interacting with objects in your proximity.

For example, you could cover up a murder scene at the start of the game, or simply run away in panic. There was a significant amount of freedom between messing things up entirely for your character, or succeeding, and a lot of this happened through either puzzles or QTE.

I think I'd like to see Telltale use puzzles or ways to interact with objects that would allow a character to succeed at what he's doing, or mess things up entirely, or everything in-between.

This doesn't need to alter the plot immensely, only change up the gameplay and add certain references (kinda like the fight with Kenny, if you lose it or win it the game will still continue, and failure is an option.)

please don't bring fahrenheit in this thread. It has a horrible story further down the end is seems rushed and stupid. In the end it didn't make sense with all the cyberclan bullshit.

I was only talking about TWD and Heavy Rain. Fahrenheit is an extremely bad example for comparison in my thread as it doesn't fullfill any of the criteria I mentioned. Thank you.

I wasn't saying it was, I was pointing out there are fixed things.

regarding this I was referring to a specific thing, where there is like a flashback, to the time you are controlling the character. (the event is supposed to be happening in the same time you're controlling the character) It's hard to explain, hopefully people who have played HR know what I'm referring to XD

...I was like..wtf? I didn't do that! At the time it went over it, because I was supposed to be the character at that time

I didn't even mention the ending. It had nothing to do with my post, and I believe Heavy Rain is in many ways similar in that it lets you win or lose events through gameplay, but continue the story.

Absolutely agree with OP. Heavy Rain and the walking dead go different routes though. Heavy Rain is heavily based on your decisions and makes the outcome entirely based on what choices you made within the game, what clues on the killer you found etc. In the end, it feels very satisfiyng to know everything you had choosen or investigated resulted in the endresult. The walking dead is very different. yes they give you very similiar choices on who dies etc but in the end everything leads to the same result. for example in heavy rain my actions could result in a character permanently being dead or pemanently being a live. not so in the walking dead. I save doug? don't matter he dies anyway the same as carley infact in the very same way. All choices are temporary and minor unlike heavy rain where all choices are the exact opposite: they are ever lasting and extremely profound. Would I prefer the heavy rain model? For sure, but i think it's a cost factor. walking dead has choices only to give some temporary effects and trick the people who dont replay into thinking what they did changed anything. if anyone ever replays they find out this trickery. not the same with heavy rain. both are great games, but walking dead goes much more linear and forced into the same spot.

let's hope they make it better next time and make our choices count such as your example in heavy rain.

I think the most important evidence is if you do anything "wrong" in TWD the screen fades out and you get a "GAME OVER", until you do it the "right way".
In Heavy Rain there is no "Game over" per se. The game just continues even wheather you "failed" or not - and most of the time you don't even notice whether your choice or actions were "right" or not. You just gotta live with the consequences. messed up? Well, you continue without that person and it's contributions then. Ending? Entirely different depending on what you had done or had not done.

I think that's because you control more than one character.

Heavy Rain has so, SOOOO many different outcomes, TWD barely stacks up to it that way.

In terms of characters and interacting with them? TWD put real emotion behind these pixelated characters that made me love them all, which Heavy Rain just didn't have for me.

I don't see what that has to do with anything tbh. For example in EP2 when the rescued guy jumps on Katjaa, if you fail -> game over.
In Heavy Rain you "screwing up" it would have simply killed off Katjaa and continue the story without her. There are many many more situations like this. And In my opinion lasting and profound decisions like these are what is currently missing in TWD Game. That was the point of this thread.

How can it have nothing to do with it? You have more than one character, so you can still participate after 'your' character is dead. If all the characters are dead, then well...game over (story ends)(after reading about deaths, the characters cannot die until certain points either anyway), which is about the same as TWD's chars not dying until they're 'allowed' to

When they release heavy rain for the PC I'll compare it.

That's a hard choice but I would have to go with Heavy Rain for the simple fact that it's longer, more story driven, and dying doesn't end in "Game Over."

To me the big biggest difference in HR was that you couldn't die. If you failed at something, the story just continued on, with the effect of your failure either just being your opinion of yourself, or how much information you had at the end of the game.

Harder to do with zombies though, since its hard to fail at killing zombies and not get bit...