Detroit: Become Human

[Forsaken Lover]

ayCsD43qjxI

I have played Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. HR was really good. Beyond had its moments but was underwhelming.

I'm still interested in this. Definitely gonna pick it up.

P.S.

The internet seems to have it out for David Cage but this is the guy who put himself in his game and in that game he had an office with a sign that reads E.G.O.. As such, he's cool in my book.

[Sephiroth]

I thought Heavy Rain was embarassingly bad and love Beyond Two Souls. The first Detroit Trailer I saw made me think it might even be better than Beyond which is very hard for me. The new trailer does not look like that at all but I just have to wait.

[Formalhaut]

I really liked Heavy Rain and started Beyond: Two Souls but never finished it (which I need to get back to) so I'm keen on another game from Quantic Dream.

[KleinerKiller]

David Cage is a man who comes up with incredible non-traditional premises for games, but he has zero ability to flesh them out properly. Omikron, Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, Beyond -- all impossibly tantalizing hooks, all soiled by a mixture of endless rehashed tropes, out-of-place homages, clunky dialogue, and general baffling and often disgusting writing decisions. He is a bad writer. I make no claims to know what he's like as a person, but when it comes to writing, he's one of the biggest hacks there is, and the amount of attention and praise he gets from the industry is groan-inducing.

This premise looks incredibly strong. The trailers look really promising. It's always been that way. Round and round the cycle of disappointment goes. I will buy and play it, but I expect no different this time.

[Psychotic]

I liked watching other people play Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls, and didn't feel like I missed out on a whole lot by not actually playing them myself. I suspect it'll be much the same with this - I'm interested and will follow along with development, but I'd be surprised if I actually play it.

[Vyk]

I haven't played anything other than Indigo Prophecy/Farenheit, and watched my girlfriend play through Heavy Rain. And only barely ever had a passing interest in Beyond, never even watched a playthrough or anything and don't feel like I missed anything

Cage is kinda similar to Peter Moleneux, with the great ideas with tantilizing promises, but yeah. He's a bad writer that likes to put awkward make-out sessions in all of his games

Though I have no problem with him or his games existing. He's not outright lying to people the way Moleneux dose/did. People like his games, and he's got quite the imagination, and I think the industry needs more like him. They just also need people more capable of pulling it off. A lot of his stuff falls flat by the end no matter how much it's enjoyed. I've heard a lot of people enjoy Indigo, Heavy Rain, and Beyond, but there's a good portion of those fans who all say things got weird by the end of those games. So either he can't land the ending, or he can't bring out his vision properly in the long hall and makes weird exceptions towards the end to push his games out

This one does intrigue me, way more than Beyond Two Souls ever did, and I may actually watch a playthrough of this one. Which may actually cause me to buy it. It's happened many times before. So I guess it just depends on if impressions keep up through release

[fat_moogle]

I absolutely loved Heavy Rain as it was so different to anything that I had ever played. Sure, it had flaws, but overall I enjoyed the story, even if it was a bit farfetched. Beyond was pretty forgettable and I didn't like how the timeline was all over the place because it was like "what the hell is going on now?". I hear the PS4 version had the option to play through chronologically, which would have made more sense to me in the original release. Still, I don't think it would have made the game anymore enjoyable. Faranheit was...strange. I didn't play it on PS2 so I played it when they released it on PSN for PS4 and it was just weird. I enjoyed it even less than Beyond. Detroit, though...I think it has a lot of potential and I'm really intrigued by it. Fingers crossed that it'll be up there with Heavy Rain!

[Sephiroth]

Fingers crossed that it'll be up there with Heavy Rain!

God, I hope not. I hope it is better. But I know you mean it different.

[Formalhaut]

Actually the 'Fable' link with Molyneux makes sense with these games. I did like them, like I liked Fable, but they aren't great games. They definitely have flaws. For Heavy Rain I feel like the plot meanders slightly. There's a few plot holes with Ethan's dreams. There were high points and low points.

Become Human could be something really good. I've never been disappointed by a Quantic game. Hopeful for more, sure, but never outright "I wasted time playing this game."

[fat_moogle]

^ I felt like I wasted my time with Farenheit, but it might have been a different story if I had played it back in the PS2 days. I was expecting it to be amazing judging on how many people praised it from back in the day, so I think the hype killed it for me.

[Forsaken Lover]

Won't be coming out until 2018.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/detroit-become-human-will-release-in-2018/1100-6451024/

Also includes an interview with David Cage.



David Cage's latest game, Detroit: Become Human, was shown off for the first time in over a year at E3 2017. Sony's E3 2017 press conference gave us another look at Detroit's futuristic world in which Androids serve humanity, only to rise up and resist upon gaining sentience. Detroit's story touches on suppression, terrorism, slavery, and exploitation--serious, real-world issues that are rarely discussed in the bright lights of the video game world.

At E3, we got the chance to speak to Cage about these issues, and how they affected his thoughts while writing and developing Detroit. We also spoke about storytelling in games, about he wants the player to be the co-star, co-writer, and co-director, and about creating content most people will never see. Take a look at our full chat below.

GameSpot: How do your decisions in Detroit affect its story on a grander scale, rather than just on a moment-to-moment basis? Are your choices mere illusions or can you actually change the whole direction of the story? How much power do you have to shape the story into separate arcs?

David Cage: So that was a very important thing for us when we started working on this, was to say, "We don't want to do smoke and mirrors with this, we want to go the hard way." Let's create assets that maybe 10% of people will see. And let's embrace this idea that usually you reject because we're not going to create scenes for the 10% of people who make that choice. But we said, "We should," because that's the heart, the DNA of the experience that we wanted to create. So the tree structure is very complex: in each scene, in each arc, we added another layer of complexity which is that the arc of one character--we have three playable characters--can have an impact on the arcs of the other characters. So you can imagine the complexity of the tree structure.

There are entire branches you may never see. There are some scenes that you may see or miss or you may see differently. There are some characters that you may see only once or become your friend and accompany you until the end. And of course the three characters can die, which won't lead to a 'game over' situation, the game will carry on with the remaining characters. I won't tell you that you can tell any story and that there are a zillion stories that you can tell, there is a narrative space that we create, that the player can really travel a lot within this narrative space and tell their own version of the story. And for us the goal is that two players comparing their story playing Detroit will realize how different they are. They may talk about things that the other doesn't even know what they're talking about.

If I wanted to see everything in Detroit, how many times would I need to play it through?

That's gonna take you a while. Honestly, it's impossible for us to say how many versions of the story there are because it really depends what you take into account and the tree structures are so complex that I don't really have an answer. But it's not this kind of game where you get three different endings and that's it--there are many paths, many ways of playing the story, of traveling through this tree structure, leading to many different endings, but the goal for us was to give the feeling to the player that they are in control of their destiny, that they are telling their own story. The co-writer, the co-director, the co-actor. I created the space, but they decide what they want to do in it.

What does Detroit offer people who loved your past games, such as Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, and how does it grab people who didn't like your past games so much?

Detroit is a very special game for us, it's probably everything I learnt in 20 years doing this job into one game. So I hope it's going to be the essence of what I learned, and I hope it's going to be a good thing. The reaction here at E3 has been pretty insane, seeing how excited the fans are, so all the people who love my work will find what they love: emotion in games, the strong narrative and the branching narrative and all this stuff, it's all there, just on a bigger scale. More spectacular, more branching, more everything.


[For] people who didn't like my games so much in the past, I think it's an interesting experience. We try to do things a little bit differently in Detroit. We have bigger areas. We have much more exploration. We probably found a better compromise between what players are used to and what we want to do. Let me give you a concrete example [of that].

We always try to have a sense of cinematography with our cameras. Not during cutscenes, but during gameplay sequences. Having the feeling that it's filmed by a director, even when you're in control of the character. It's great for people who like that, but for gamers, sometimes [they're] like, "Oh, I want to move my camera and I can't," so we've developed this system where if you don't touch the right stick, the camera is managed and you have a sense of cinematography, but at any point, once you just move the right stick and you control the camera and you can look around. It's these kinds of--not compromises, because I don't like this word--but these kinds of choices that we made in the design to make sure more people will want to play and enjoy the experience, because I think it's action-adventure, it's nothing else than that. It's also really funny to see how many QTEs there are these days in action games and if you look at the demo we presented, there are none. It's a trend. I think the industry makes a step in our direction. Maybe we make a step in the direction of the industry.

There's a lot of turmoil in the world right now, for example with the recent attacks in London and, before that, Paris. Has that changed your thoughts and your attitude about this game, given the scene you've shown off at E3 is, essentially, an attack?


Yeah, absolutely. The events in Paris happened while I was writing the script and it happened very close to the studio. We are very close to the Bataclan, very close to the supermarket that was attacked, and my kids, they were at school, very near the supermarket where this thing took place and they were locked in school, so I was at home, watching TV about what was going on, calling my kids, no answer, and you can imagine what goes through your mind when that happens.

I have one guy in my team who was in the Bataclan when it happened, so I was writing scenes and I'm very clear and very honest and very sincere and ... I was totally comfortable with the story I wanted to tell, because I think it's a very positive story in telling something very important and meaningful, but at the same time, I didn't want any ambiguity in my story.

There are a couple of scenes that I cut, because I felt [they] could be misinterpreted and could be understood in a way that wouldn't be right. I cut them away and it made me think about the story I was telling and how I was telling it and, at first, I was really scared, because I thought, "Wait a second, we're dealing with very sensitive issues here. This is so important and so serious for real people in the real world, how can we create a game that would even resonate with this kind of thing?"


Your first reaction is to step back and way, "Whoah, what am I doing?" But then, the second reaction is to say, "Wait a second, that's important. That's meaningful." It's definitely sensitive and sensible. I'm going to need to be careful, but at the same time it's very interesting to be able to talk about such important things in the game. As long as you feel respectful and careful about what you're saying and how you say it, why wouldn't games be qualified to talk about real-world issues? Do we always have to talk about zombies and aliens and stuff, or can we talk also about the real things?

My take was this is a creative opportunity to see if a game can talk about these things or not, so don't see [the scene shown off on-stage] as, "Oh, this is the [entire] game." Each scene is different and the meaning is absolutely not binary. Don't take away from this scene that it's going to be, "[Do] you want to be violent or pacifist?" because that's not what the game is about. The game is much more complex than that and you show all the complexity and the repercussions of your choices, on opinion, on media, on your people, and being violent is not the wrong thing or the right thing. It's not about being right or wrong, it's really questioning what would you do if you had to fight for your rights and it's one of many questions in the game.

Do you think more games should tackle those sorts of issues in real-world politics?


I don't know. What I feel is that games are a respectable medium and that there is nothing they shouldn't talk about. It's a fantastic medium, because you put the player in the shoes of the character and you confront them in a very unique way, that is totally different from feelings, or TV series, or theater or literature, because you are in control. What I do with Detroit is ask the player questions. I don't give the answers. I don't say, "This is right, this is wrong, you should think this, you should think that." No. I just ask the question and I let the player answer by themselves and face the consequences of their choices in the story. This is what makes Detroit very unique and exciting to me.

What date are you targeting for release?

We've not announced a date, but it's going to be next year.


I'm excited for this.

[fat_moogle]

I like how it's going to be deeper than option a + option b = option c. If he can pull this off it's going to be fantastic.

[DMKA]

I'm enjoy Quantic Dream games, although I completely understand why so many people aren't into them. I plan on playing this down the line. Like all of their games, I'll probably wait until it has been out awhile and can get it cheap (unless it gets stellar reviews).