A few years ago I played through the Witcher 2 and was captivated. Although the game does have its share of button-mashing sword battles, I spent the majority of my gameplay in interactive cutscenes. The strange thing is that I found myself wanting to soldier through the combat sequences just to get back to the cutscenes. The reason is that the game was like playing an HBO series rich with characters, plots, and consequences. The cutscenes were directed with the same care. I felt like I was playing a movie, not a game.
RPGs have long allowed you to make choices as the hero or villain, but the choices are usually at the extremes of morality. It’s often obvious which choice you’re supposed to make. Ultimately the story wraps up with a quest succeeded or quest failed status. In the Witcher 2, however, something interesting happens after the first act. You are asked to make a split-second decision to free an enemy, throwing him a sword to defend himself, or keeping him bound. The choice is not clear, as you are picking a side between two factions. In my first play session, I threw him the sword and spent the second act in a dwarven city. After completing the game, I tried the other choice. To my surprise, the plot branched into an entirely different human city and I didn’t see the dwarven city or plotlines at all. It was as if the developer had written two games complete with different settings and characters based on the split-second choice I made with the sword.
What I enjoyed most about the Witcher 2 is that it was a good story. The characters seemed real and my choices impacted them. Like life, the choices weren’t straight forward and the story continued on, weighted by the consequences of those choices.
A few years ago I saw a YouTube clip of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain. Designed for the Playstation, the game used the PS controller’s buttons and joysticks to execute actions at the right moment or select choices from a list of options.
The clips were both perplexing and intriguing. In one scene, you swished your joystick back and forth to do mundane things like brushing your teeth. In another, a character fights off an attacker in a high-rise apartment while the game camera swoops and cuts like something right out of a thriller movie scene, complete with movie-scene action music.
The mechanism was Quick Time Events (QTEs) - pressing the right button at the right time. QTEs have been around for a long time. 1983’s Dragon’s Lair was an animated laserdisc game (literally animated - it was a hand-drawn cartoon by Don Bluth) that played pre-recorded laserdisc animation segments requiring you to move the joystick or hit the sword/jump button at the right time. Succeed, and the animation continues. Fail, and there’s a brief stutter while the laserdisc loads up the fail animation, showing your hero coming to an end.
Detroit: Become Human is Quantic Dream’s 2018 interactive cinema release. Similar to Heavy Rain, it follows a handful of playable main characters through a story about androids revolting against their human creators. Sweeping cinematic music and camerawork right out of a blockbuster frame this for what it is: you are playing the main characters in a movie. All of the characters look like their well-known actor counterparts and are fully motion captured with facial mapping. When the camera zooms in on a troubled character who is thinking about what you just said, you can actually read his expressions and see the actor’s response. It’s one of the few games I’ve seen where the character’s faces emote the subtle body language cues we’re used to looking for as humans.
The game starts with a tense scene where you are an android hostage negotiator named Connor who arrives at a high-rise rooftop standoff. A family’s android has turned homicidal, killing the father and several responding cops, and now holds the daughter hostage at gunpoint at the edge of the roof.
Police helicopters and snipers add to the tension. Before you head out to talk, you gather as much info from the crime scene as possible to understand the android’s motivations. These scenes - where you investigate in a way only an android could by zooming in on details, forensically sampling clues by tasting them, and reconstructing events based on where bodies and bullet wounds are located - are great fun. But the real fun starts when you step out onto the roof. Did you find the slain policeman’s gun and take it with you out here, giving you gun options, or are you unarmed?
Will you treat the wounded cop bleeding on the ground despite the android’s threats to shoot you, or will you step over him? When I made my choices, the android decided to fling himself and the girl off the roof. As he started to move, the camera zooming in slow motion, matrix-style, I had the option of charging him because I’d chosen to steadily advance and I shoulder-checked him while pushing the girl back onto the roof, sending both me and the android over the edge. As the camera followed me down to my death, a slight smile pulled across my android face, and the words Mission Successful appeared. It seemed epic. It was a nice twist - sacrificing myself in the first scene but saving the girl - and it seemed like the scene was written to end that way.
Much to my surprise, there is no way the scene is supposed to end. In fact, this rooftop scene can end a dozen different ways with every permutation you can imagine. You can save the girl other ways without flinging yourself over the edge; you can survive but the girl can die, you and the girl can die, you can save the girl but still die in other ways. I think what’s particularly awesome about all of those options is that each is written with such care that it feels like the way the mission was supposed to end. When I chose another path that had Connor promise the the android he wouldn’t be hurt if he released the girl, only to have police sniper’s bullets rip the android apart in slow motion, the android looked betrayed, saying “You lied to me, Connor.” It equally felt epic and set the tone for Connor’s character. Here, Connor was a calculating machine doing what was necessary to save the girl. Similar to games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, where choices nudge you towards the light or dark side, an icon popped up indicating Connor had nudged more towards the machine side.
Connor is a joy to play. He has a Terminator-like focus on achieving his mission, and when he’s off chasing another android they both parkour through diverse obstacles and scenery in a Jason Bourne kind of way. He’s particularly fun if you play him on a journey to become more human, as you see these little glimmers of understanding when he makes the moral choice over the more direct mission-ending choice.
He’s paired up with washed-out human cop Hank (played by the always excellent Clancy Brown), and their relationship is a mix of familiar buddy-cop tropes that works well. Hank of course doesn’t want an android partner, and winning him over is one path you can take.
Hank, played by Clancy Brown. If Connor truly becomes Hank’s friend, you will get this scene after the game’s credits roll.
Connor has the biggest character arc in the game, and that arc is entirely defined by you. Either he will become increasingly more feeling and human, turning into a genuine friend to Hank, or he will become increasing more calculating and cold, turning into the story’s villain.
The other main characters include Kara, a housekeeping android, and Marcus, a caretaker android. Kara witnesses domestic abuse between a father and his young daughter, with Kara fighting off the father and ending up on the run with the girl, Alice.
Her early scenes, where Alice is freezing outside and Kara has no money as an android, needing to find a solution to keep Alice safe, are compelling. You have to chose between morally questionable actions such as stealing clothes, robbing a convenience store, or staying in dangerous locations such as an abandoned car or boarded up house. Alice reacts to your choices. One way to get money is to have Alice distract the cashier at a store. Alice becomes mad at you for using her to steal, but you now can sleep in the motel instead of the car or boarded up house. As an android on the run, Kara is soon pursued by Hank and Connor, and these scenes are really compelling because everyone involved is a good guy. You don’t want any of the characters to die in the conflict, but all of them can depending on your choices.
I think we’re used to video games where, if the situation is “save the child”, the game isn’t really going to kill the child if you fail. Not Detroit, though. Make the wrong choices and it will show you the terrible consequences. The game doesn’t spare you with a game over credit roll, either. The plot continues, the aftermath of the character’s death changing how the remaining events unfold. Because of this, it accomplishes something writers are familiar with: stakes. It’s really quite stressful, actually, when you become invested in characters and are constantly aware the game will kill them based on your poor decision making.
In my first play through, Kara and Alice are captured and rounded up into an android camp, where androids are systemically lined up and destroyed. The entire scene is awful to watch and play through. Alice’s terror is palpable and Kara’s despair, despite her trying to comfort Alice, is heavy.
Yet, the choices I made had a parallel plot in play with Marcus leading an assault on the camps. As the scenes cut back and forth to Marcus’s forces shooting it out and advancing through the guards while Alice and Kara were headed into the disassembly room, I was riveted. It felt like this was the way it was meant to be. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered Kara and Alice didn’t need to be in the camp at all. Had I made better choices earlier, they could have slipped across the Canadian border and not been a part of the fighting. That entire gut-wrenching scene occurred because I tried to have Kara and Alice make a run for it during an earlier scene.
I should mention that the camp scene is an example of one of the criticisms of Detroit: Become Human. The main plot is about androids becoming self-aware and wanting to be treated equally, with the same rights and protections as humans. Fundamentally, it’s a civil rights movement, which tries to achieve its goals through peace or violence. The writing is quite heavy-handed with the real-world analogies, creating quite obvious segregation and concentration camp references. Connor and Markus are critical to the plot, since Connor is trying to stop the spread of android awakenings (“deviancy”) while Markus is causing it and leading the revolution. Although Kara’s story is compelling, it is incidental. She is simply an awakened android on the run who sometimes ends up at places where the plot is happening. Action movies have a long history of sexist tropes where men are heroes and women are there to be rescued or romanced, and unfortunately Kara and Alice exist to be in danger, chased and rescued. Kara is perhaps the most empathic android in the cast, emoting motherly love and concern for Alice, and is still a great character to play. I just wish that she had more of an arc and more importance in the story than to be abused by evil men. There is another prominent female character, North, who is Marcus’s second-in-command, but she defers to Marcus’s orders and falls into the trope of love interest, based on your choices. She is a key mover of the plot, however, and will take over command if you manage to get Marcus killed or kicked out of the resistance.
The other thing some reviewers complained about is tropes. Tropes are recurring situations or characters that writers continually use. Now, full disclosure: I use tropes in my writing. Really, everybody does. There’s a reason these situations are reused: readers like them. In my stories, Beckman is the tough, veteran security officer of few words. Nothing original about that. But, readers love Beckman. Detroit: Become Human is filled with tropes from dozens of sci-fi movies and books. An android cop partnered with a depressed, alcoholic human to hunt down deviant androids; a skyscraper caper with a base-jumping parachute escape at the top; two identical Connors both trying to convince Hank they’re the real Connor and that Hank should figure it out by asking them questions only the real Connor would know. But, here’s the thing - although I recognized the trope immediately, it was awesome to play it. When Hank started asking me questions to prove I was the real Connor, a clock ticking down for my answer, I found myself scrambling to remember what his dog’s name was. Yes! I thought, I’ve seen this scene a million times and always wondered how I would handle it. Even the way Connor says, “Wait! Ask me a question only the real Connor would know,” is said as if Connor were remembering it from a movie he’d seen. The solution to prove myself was based on choices I’d made earlier in the game. If you google this scene, you’ll find a dozen different ways it could play out.
I really loved this game, faults and all. I admit, as I’ve gotten older I’ve been less interested in button-mashing games and more interested in narrative experiences, and Detroit: Become Human was really like nothing I’ve played before. I’m going back and replaying scenes with different choices. From what I’ve seen on YouTube, the endings are wildly different based on choices you make, and I’m looking forward to exploring each one.
When I’m not flying the virtual skies, I’m the sci-fi author of the Hayden’s World series. If you love exploration and adventure, be sure to check it out.