Getting on for a full decade after its initial PlayStation 3 release, Quantic Dream’s cornerstone classic – Heavy Rain – is now available on PC, albeit restricted to patrons of the Epic Games Store. Releases for Beyond: Two Souls and the much more advanced Detroit: Become Human are en route too, so what can we expect from the developer’s PC debut?
Heavy Rain made its first splashes as a work-in-progress title with a demo snippet leading up to the launch of the PlayStation 3, showcasing remarkable character rendering technology for the time. The final release developed a cult following of sorts for a variety of reasons (Jason!!) and it’s also known for the craft and great level of detail in put into its individual scenes. A PS4 port followed, upgrading the game to 1080p resolution, adding post-process effects like screen-space ambient occlusion while improving performance and eliminating the original’s off-putting penchant for intrusive screen-tearing.
As I see it, the arrival of these PC ports is very exciting – Quantic Dream’s games have always been ambitious in terms of technology on their respective platforms. Being able to have those historical technological advances catalogued for eternity on PC brings a smile to my face. But just how good are the ports?
Overall, I’d say that Heavy Rain is solid, boding well for the other titles – but there are some teething issues. Booting up the game and setting resolution to 4K, things didn’t look right. Bizarrely, after a spot of pixel-counting (not usually required for a PC game!) I found that Heavy Rain was rendering at 1440p instead. Resetting resolution and restarting solved the issue but the game handles this aspect in a different manner to other PC games.
Borderless and fullscreen options seems to be much the same, where the game internally scales up your chosen in-game resolution to your desktop display resolution. For example, choosing the 1080p in-game on a 4K display scales up 1080p internally to your 4K desktop resolution. It means you have a nice native scaling option and the benefits of borderless window mode, but it’s a also negative as downsampling requires you to downsample your desktop and you can unwittingly lock yourself out of choosing the proper refresh rate you want to be using.