In an interview with David Cage, writer and director for Heavy Rain, he explains that it isn't necessary to save the world just to tell an exciting story.

In Heavy Rain, you won't be a superhero or a gangster. Instead, you'll be someone normal:

We tend to believe in our industry that we need to tell simplistic or spectacular stories, where the hero saves the world, destroys evil, or has supernatural powers.

This is because the videogame, as a medium, has been too immature to tell complex and subtle stories. I made this mistake myself at the end of [Indigo Prophecy], where I felt my story needed something spectacular because all I had so far was normal people leading a normal life.

I realized that the "normal" part was the one that worked the best, and that it wasn't necessary to save the world to tell something exciting anymore. Heavy Rain will be about normal people in real life, and I believe it'll be much more emotionally involving, as gamers will easily relate to the situations and characters.

This is a new approach. In Heavy Rain, you won't be a superhero or a gangster. You'll just be someone real.

Unfortunately, keeping it real also means the game will only be a single-player experience:

Heavy Rain's an experience about interactive narrative and emotion, and we really wanted to focus on making these core elements right. The game will support the Trophy system and may offer some kind of extra content online, but Heavy Rain is a single-player experience.

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