Beyond: Two Souls was released as a PS3 exclusive video game on 8th of October. It comes less as a typical video game and more as an interactive drama with action-adventure features developed by the development team at Quantic Dream. Of course, the Paris-based developer has been known to produce such works that walk on the borderline between a game and a movie such as Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain. But the beauty of Beyond: Two Souls was in its casting which included actress Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. The game features advanced motion-capture techniques in telling the story with great amount of details given to facial expressions and features recaptured digitally from live performances.
Of course when a game boasts of such technology implementation, it comes as an embarrassment to Sony that there were a few reportedly leaded images of nudity from the game. The first of these images were reported to have released from a Reddit user on its forum earlier this month which were included in an Imgur album which, we can safely say, has been scrapped and deleted. Apparently the Reddit user mentioned above had taken the screenshots from one of the game’s scenes on a PS3 running in debug mode.
The leaded images were screenshots of a character in a shower
In the actual game footage, Ellen Page’s character Jodie Holmes is taking a shower; and although there is no nudity in the actual retail version of the game, users can easily access some alternate camera angles only when they play on a PS3 in debug mode. This alternate camera angle can then be used to obtain a full view of the character’s body and screenshots can be taken. Additionally these screenshots have a mark embedded on the top of the screens that identify it as running in “quality assurance” menu. This was first reported by Kotaku which confirmed that the nude scene in the game was accessible via debug mode.
Although the original images posted on Imgur account have been removed completely, it is reported that many websites and blogs ran stories of this news and now Sony is intervening directly by asking those sites to take down the articles related to this unfortunate incident. Sony has even gone on record to report that the nude images are in fact not of actress Ellen Page at all. When speaking to Cinema Blend, a Sony representative told that “It’s not actually her body. I would really appreciate if you can take the story down to end the cycle of discussion around this.” He went on to add that these images were basically from an illegally hacked console and they can be very damaging for Ellen Page’s career.
Beyond: Two Souls features exceptional motion capture technology
But anyone who has played Heavy Rain must know that this is not the first Quantic Dream game to feature nudity as players were privy to see a character called Madison nude in that game as well. According to the Eskimo Press, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe is waving the flag of legality in curbing down on this mess by saying that these leaked images had to be taken down for “legal reasons”. We are sure Quantic Dream has got more than it hoped for by getting this kind of publicity with Beyond: Two Souls.