I got my first look at Quantic Dream’s new noir cyberpunk game Detroit: Become Human at this year’s E3. The first thing that caught my eye, like all Quantic Dream games, was how gorgeous everything in the game looks. But, more so than any other game by this studio, Detroit: Become Human has a story that is full tilt centered at me as a player. While I’m not sure if this game is full-on cyberpunk, the game looks like it takes place in a hyper-connected future Detroit that will most likely be run by the same mega-corporation who creates these androids.
I have played every Quantic Dream game and, while each one is sublime in the visuals department, they usually all have some kind of issue with plot or playability. I enjoyed Heavy Rain but, while the story had a good noir style feel to it, it felt like more than any other Quantic Dream game that it needed to be played multiple times to get the most out of the story and I wasn’t interested in playing it again after my first time. Beyond: Two Souls had some really tense moments but I thought the overall plot of the game was stupid. It always seemed like Beyond was a game that, when the studio heard the original pitch, the team members should have pipped up and asked a lot more questions about how the mechanics of soul and human are going to keep the player interested for 20-some hours.
The story of each game has interesting moments but David Cage, the lead writer on all of these games, probably wants to be a movie director and he doesn’t realize that keeping an audience’s attention for 20 plus hours is much more difficult than doing so for two hours. Hideo Kojima, another game producer who wants more than anything to be in Hollywood, at least has been working in the medium long enough to understand that longer games and franchises need to be paced in a very different way than movies.
As for now, we know that the game will feature multiple playable characters so the two characters that we know of right now, Kara and Connor, might die during a playthrough and that might be the end of their part in the story. The developers have talked about how the game will not have a “game over” screen.
Kara is a newly created android who escaped the production line and is trying to figure out her place in the world. The world of Detroit is a magnification of what it is like today; a city that has largely died because of it’s reliance on the very machines that it once created. Androids do everything in this new world and humans and androids alike are trying to figure out how we fit into this new world.
Connor, on the other side of the fight, is an android working to try and recapture those androids who have gone rouge. We see in the E3 demo that Connor tells the fugitive android that it is their job to serve. I am sure that Kara and Connor will meet at some point during the game or at least in some timeline.
The stories of robots/androids and their creators have captivated audiences for decades. It is a real issue that people need to start thinking about but I am worried about Mr. Cage’s ability to address this topic in this very fractured storytelling method that he has been curating over the last two decades in France.
I am excited to play Detroit: Become Human but I have also been excited about each and every one of Quantic Dream’s games. Much like, Peter Molyneux, I think David Cage tends to over-sell what he can actually accomplish.