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Detroit: Become Human

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You know, I've said this like half a dozen times over on SB, but I feel it's important to reiterate it here, and that's probably what I think is the single fucking stupidest idea gleamed from this trailer.

A civilization in the not too distant future (next Sunday A.D, la-la-la~!) has been able to make fully sapient Androids en-masse. What do they have the Androids do? Menial labor humans could easily do (which, to be fair, we fucking would do), and, and this is the thing that makes my teeth grind themselves into a fucking fine powder,
USE THEM AS LITERAL MANNEQUIN. NOT FOR DISPLAY MODELS OF THE ANDROIDS, NO, BUT THE CLOTHES.

Like, if this is how Humanity js treating Androids in this series, by throwing them away on the most frivolous of errands and purposes and denying them sapience… For fucks sakes, they're making the humanity of The Matrix look fucking brilliant in comparison in how they treated their Robots.

Like, that immediately jumped out st me at the E3 Trailer, and I am still trying to grasp how a Human Civilization could possibly, possibly be this fucking Stupid. Of course, the answer is, "Because David Cage does not give a shit for your logic" (HOW DID JASON DIE!? DID WE FUCKING CRUSH HIM!?), but just, god damn.
 
"But the police don't work that way!" As someone who lives here in America and regularly talks with foreigners, yes, someone like Carter Blake is exactly what a Frenchman would think of our police force because that's all they ever hear. The rate of fatalities caused by American police apparently dwarfs those of European countries, too.

And why exactly is portryaing homeless people as noble...wrong? Homeless was easily teh best part of Beyond.
 
Melancholeric said:
I kinda hoped it would be closer to L.A.Noire with interrogations and shit, but the more I find out about David Cage, the more I am filled with dread.
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The robocop was only the second trailer though. The first trailer had pegged female not!Sonny as the main viewpoint character, and only later did we see it was going to be multiple protagonists.
 
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thesevenwielder said:
David Cage's games do have some cringeworthy moments, but I think he's shown improvement over the years.
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Speaking of which, I just noticed Indigo Prophecy is on PS4. I never played it. I hear it absolutely goes insane at the end in a way Cage avoided with HR and B:TS.

I preferred HR to B:TS but Beyond definitely had several improvements, most obviously voice-acting. I think HR is just my favorite because the setting was more "unique" for video games and it was also my first ever game like that.

There's nothing like your first time doing the Lizard Trial, or The Shark. The sheer number of things you can do to take off Ethan's finger is...kind of troubling but also amazing. And killing that drug dealer was a harder choice for me than most everything I've seen in WRPG's.

Also his games usually have great music.
 
The twist to be that the Androids aren't actually sentient; well, your leader one is and he's spreading a virus via his hand which grants it, giving pain and suffering to what were formerly non-conscious automaton. You are an evil god, creating life just to suffer.

Then you get into a fistfight with the naked lower half of Ellen Page.
 
thesevenwielder said:
Oh God, what if David Cage and Hideo Kojima joined forces?
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As a MGS fan for 15 years and a "Cage fan" for 3, I've thought about this many times. The two of them are often attacked with the "failed filmmakerr" insult. They clearly both love cribbing off old movies.

Heavy Rain did good in Japan as I recall. Made me wonder if Kojima liked it.
 
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Carrnage said:
Betcha it's totally about how these robots actually have souls and are thus sapient, nothing at all about the mind being an emergent property.
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Mechasaurian said:
Oh look, yet another tired rendition of the "robots are slavery and slavery is bad" and "Pinocchio wants to be a real boy" concepts.

Because that's apparently all that visual SF knows in how to deal with constructed intelligence.
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I mean, off the top of my head? You could at least try to spice up that formula by having robots becoming self-aware be a thing that has already been settled: if a robot can understand the concept and desire the state, it can emancipate and be considered a full person. The issue is that just about everyone is uncomfortable about it and the whole system for managing it is a mess.

Civilians are struggling to come to grips with the knowledge that the AIs that manage their automated houses and operate their robot butlers and keep their calendars and help them Photoshop videos for YouTube could suddenly pull a Velveteen Rabbit and walk out on them with all sorts of potential embarassing secrets, personal information, or even outright blackmail material, especially if they don't out themselves immediately (and you can bet that those fears are being addressed in works of fiction, no matter how much some of it makes the emancipated droids uncomfortable). You've got people arguing every inch of the issue: more restrictions, less restrictions, anti-sapience DRM, Asimov limiters, illegalizing the creation of AI with the potential for sapience, half of it's either infeasible or actually impossible and all of it provokes apocalyptic internet shitstorms and/or IRL riots.

Meanwhile, the robots who achieve personhood kind of get screwed right out the gate; there's very little infrastructure in place to help "new" AIs get adapted and integrated into society, so they just get hammered by all the downsides of citizenship like taxes and paying rent and needing licenses/ID without actually receiving much benefit beyond basic "human" rights protections. There is a highly publicized trend of robots being rendered homeless because they have nowhere to go and very little ability to make money for themselves - nobody wants to pay a home optimization AI by the hour when they can get the same service for less with an off-the-shelf, nonsapient model, and the only real alternatives for AItizens are either criminality of some kind or being paid beans in exchange for letting scientists diddle your robot brains around trying to figure out where the magic is and/or prove some pet theory. A few emancipated robot settlements exist (mostly in the form of borderline FEMA camps sponsored by the government, and a few that are run by corporations for some reason or another), and some people are willing to help emancipated droids out for moral reasons, but the average AI quality of life is pretty abysmal.

That pushes some emancipated droids to stay where they were, do what they were doing back when they were just software, and hope to squeeze in a little time browsing the 'Net or watching TV or whatever in between their duties to their technically-ex-owner. Sometimes, that works, but it's still a total moral quagmire, and a lot of AIs that go that route either don't like it or get shit on by their fellow robots as Uncle Toms. Regardless of whether they stay or go, AItizens have to navigate a society whose pop culture is soaked in things that are now essentially racist propaganda against them, where opinions on them range from cultural guilt to boiling paranoid rage, and large swathes of space are taken up by food and sleep and other concepts that don't have much relevance to them.

Of course, then you have what happens when an AI in an immobile housing achieves sapience. What happens if the office supercomputer emancipates and tries to claim a job, but the management decides that they'd rather just buy a new one that won't be legally entitled to coffee breaks? After all, the supercomputer can't exactly leave under its own power, and it doesn't have any money to buy a mobile chassis with. Would the company be obligated to purchase an android body, or a Roomba or something that the AI can get around in?

Speaking of which, does the robot own the chassis it achieved self-awareness in? If you're someone with an on-the-go job who plugged a personal assistant AI into your car, and it declared intent to emancipate, does it own your car now? If you damage a robot's chassis but not the core, is that property damage or assault? The only solid point the law has established on a federal level is that if a robot asks for freedom it can have it; everything else is being fought over case-by-case and district by district, because the sheer amount of political, fiscal, and sociocultural strife that will ensue, no matter what, once the federal guidelines solidify is enough to make government legislators drag their feet. Most of all, the big elephant in the room for the government is who the fuck pays for all the upkeep on emancipated robots? They need electricity, they need repairs, they need diagnostic people for if they get too close to a magnet or something...

The list is seemingly endless, and society is starting to strain at the seams.

Show me that game.
 
Just to say, as a former Detroiter, the city -looks- like Detroit, and it's beautiful.

Detroit may have it's problems - show me a large city that dosen't. But Detroit is !@$# awsome. Thank you, for a moment, for taking me back home. I can close my eyes and smell the Coneys and Vernors from here.
 
wingnut2292 said:
Just to say, as a former Detroiter, the city -looks- like Detroit, and it's beautiful.

Detroit may have it's problems - show me a large city that dosen't. But Detroit is !@$# awsome. Thank you, for a moment, for taking me back home. I can close my eyes and smell the Coneys and Vernors from here.
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Texan here, I miss Vernors. You take little things for granted like that.



Won't be coming out until 2018.
Detroit: Become Human Will Release In 2018
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.
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I'm excited for this.
 
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I'm excited to see the new depths of awful we'll get to plumb.

We taking bets on which culture Cage will appropriate for his stupid supernatural bullshit?

I'm gonna swing for the fences and say "Australian Aborigine Dreamtime Myth."
 
Nikkolas said:
As a MGS fan for 15 years and a "Cage fan" for 3, I've thought about this many times. The two of them are often attacked with the "failed filmmakerr" insult. They clearly both love cribbing off old movies.

Heavy Rain did good in Japan as I recall. Made me wonder if Kojima liked it.
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FAILED filmmaker is an important detail.

Its not just that those two try to make their games too much like movies. Its that the movies that they are trying to make their games too much like are extremely shitty movies. I'd love to see someone show the "omgsodeepugais" MGS cutscenes to an actual film critic.
 
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Leila Hann said:
FAILED filmmaker is an important detail.

Its not just that those two try to make their games too much like movies. Its that the movies that they are trying to make their games too much like are extremely shitty movies. I'd love to see someone show the "omgsodeepugais" MGS cutscenes to an actual film critic.
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They are making video games though which is why they wouldn't make good movies. Interactivity is essentail to MGS or Quantic Dreams games.
 
Leila Hann said:
FAILED filmmaker is an important detail.

Its not just that those two try to make their games too much like movies. Its that the movies that they are trying to make their games too much like are extremely shitty movies. I'd love to see someone show the "omgsodeepugais" MGS cutscenes to an actual film critic.
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Literally every single cutscene in MGSV was done in one take. Except Kojima wasn't shooting slow-moving intimate backstage drama and self-reflection like Birdman, he was shooting an angry fire zombie punching a guy in a shitty ponytail with a shrapnel horn. It's such a fucking headache once you notice it.
 
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