NEW ON PS4 | 'Detroit: Become Human' is a game for our generation
A PlayStation 4 exclusive, 'Detroit: Become Human' is an adventure game played in third-person by Quantic Dream and lead by David Cage as writer and director.
The team behind Detroit are known for the games 'Heavy Rain' and 'Beyond: Two Souls', in which Detroit follows a similar choice-based narrative that affects the rest of the game. Throughout, you'll play three different android characters in Kara, who escapes the owner she was serving to explore her newfound consciousness as an android; Markus, who’s by far one of the most interesting characters of the game, devoting himself to releasing other androids from servitude; and finally Connor, the weakest part of the game, as he hunts down deviant androids like that of Kara and Markus.
The game itself is based on Quantic Dream’s positively received PlayStation 3 tech demo 'Kara', starring Valorie Curry. Curry would later reprise her role as Kara in Detroit. Apparently, Cage wanted to develop the game further and took inspiration from Ray Kurzeil’s 'The Singularity Is Near', which explains the development rate of human intelligence when compared to that of artificial intelligence; this soon inspired the idea that androids would one day have emotions. The city of Detroit was chosen as the setting to revitalise a place that succumbed to a severe ecumenic decline despite a historical contribution to the American industry.
With such a huge game, it should come as no surprise that Cage’s script was 2000-3000 pages before its completion two years later. While the traditional video game script may be a little different, Cage used charts and diagrams to visually explore the choices and where they would end up. On top of the 3000-page script, according to reports, there were said to be 5-6 thousand pages of notes. All of this was handed over to the same team behind 'Heavy Rain' and 'Beyond: Two Souls', who helped develop a new and improved engine with advancements in dynamic lighting, shading, depth of field, rendering, and physical cameras. The technological feat behind 'Detroit' is impressive with its 74,000 unique animations, 35,000 camera shots, and 5.1 million lines of code.
Despite being set in the future, the team visited Detroit, Michigan to research the setting to make it as realistic as possible. Cage, as a writer/director, consulted with artificial intelligence experts and took over two years to complete his research. Because of this, the team was able to develop an intricate story where a variety of outcomes can be achieved. Each character has the ability to die and the story will continue without them. As a result, there’s essentially no “game over” in 'Detroit'.
Through dialogue decisions and quick time events and a countdown timer that forces players to make decisions quickly, characters can either improve or worsen a relationship with others, and the story will expand depending on the choices you make. After each chapter, a flowchart can be viewed, and you may choose to rewind to particular points of the story to change the decisions you’ve made.
Despite Quantic Dream's preference of the detective storyline and Connor’s character being more of an annoyance than anything else, the game itself is absolutely captivating, the more subtle moments becoming the most powerful. Including the perspective of the androids was a definite bonus in providing an effective viewpoint in a second-class citizenship status.
While there should be no surprise that a game like this was received well, with specific praise to the amazing visuals, characters and their acting counterparts, there were significant issues with motion controls that seemed awkward at times.
Kara, Connor and Markus were engrossing - the actors arguably giving the best video game performances to date. Leading trio aside, even the side characters were convincing - from facial expressions to voice acting.
The main storyline takes players just over ten hours to complete, but with an abundance of decisions and storylines to explore, it could take anywhere up to fifty hours to really complete everything.
'Detroit: Become Human' is something truly special and a game of this generation.
'Detroit: Become Human' is out on PlayStation 4.
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