Sony Computer Entertainment has released a new video featuring Detroit: Become Human director David Cage, who discusses the newly announced PlayStation 4 game‘s setting, new 3D engine, and more.
Get the video and transcript below.
“Detroitis Quantic Dream‘s latest project. It takes place in the near future in the city of Detroit, and it features the character of Kara that we introduced in this short video back in 2011. We’re incredibly excited to announce it here in our own country in Paris at Paris Games Week.
“There are Androids that to look and speak and move exactly like human beings so they’re really in this society and they are used to do different tasks and different things. We didn’t want to do sci-fi, we didn’t want to invent any technology that doesn’t exist in the labs today. We wanted the world to look familiar to the player so we really feel like, ‘Oh, I know this place. This is a real place.’ But at the same time be surprised at each corner.
“We developed this short video featuring this character of Kara, I think back in 2011, and it was a very, very exciting piece for us. It was a very interesting journey working with Valorie Curry, this great actress, but it left me a little bit frustrated because I wanted to know what would happen to this character when she leaves the factory, and what the world would be like and what she would think of it. And this is how Detroit started.
“Detroit is really a fascinating place. It’s a great place for industry but also for creative people, for artists of all kinds, and we thought, well if one day and an Android industry has to appear somewhere, it should be Detroit. It would be a logical place in many, many ways. We went there and really explored the city inside out. And yes, we’ve seen the abandoned churches and the abandoned places, but at the same time we saw fantastic places, we met fantastic people, and we could really feel the energy that was there, and that was very, very inspiring.
“Detroit is featuring a brand new 3D engine. We love to do one engine per game, which is a bit crazy, but the idea is of course to really leverage the power of the console and really try to offer visual experience and a gameplay experience that will be hopefully much better than the previous generation consoles. And we tried to use the technology to improve the graphics but also to improve the emotion that the player will feel, having better facial animation, having better lighting having larger environments with a lot of life that passes by and things happening wherever you look around.
“I think there are some common points with what we’ve done the past. It’s based on storytelling, it’s based on emotion, and the emotional involvement of the player and the experience. But I think that the game has its own voice and it’s really a different experience from Beyond and from Heavy Rain in many, many ways
“The entire game is really this idea that the player is the co-writer of the experience and he will tell his own story through his actions. So he can have a very, very significant impact on the story and, more than the story, on the world itself.
“Our theme is really what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to have emotions and this kind of thing, and this is really what we want to talk about.”