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Any David Cage game is about choice and, unsurprisingly, he's offering loads for Detroit. Fortunately, this time you'll also have the option to replay any of it from any point. So no regretting a decision in the first five minutes for the entire game.
The recent Detroit E3 demo showed two androids trying to rescue other robots, while protesting - a situation that escalated into full scale violence and riots. However, according to Cage we didn't see the full depth of what was possible. "What’s very important, that maybe doesn’t come through in this scene, is that the choices we offer to the player are not binary." Detroit is, he says, offering more than basic options like "do you want to be good or bad, do you want to violent or pacifist?"
"Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you expect. You think you’re doing the right thing and it turns out to be the bad thing."
"The situation is much more complicated" according to Cage. "It questions the player a lot about his values more than about if you prefer blue or red. It’s really like ‘what would you do if it was happening to you?’ What is, for you, morally the right thing to do? And sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you expect. You think you’re doing the right thing and it turns out to be the bad thing. Because, as we know, real life is much more complex than pushing a button and doing a simple decision. There are many consequences. What will the media think? What will public opinion think? Politics think? What will your people think?"
It's not far off the usual Cage pitch, let's be honest, but he's selling a far grander scale this time, claiming Detroit's branching is "probably three times Heavy Rain" and adding, "it’s insane, honestly. We wanted to challenge ourselves and this is spectacularly more bending."
If it delivers on what Cage promises then he claims it'll be possible for you and a friend to end up with playthroughs so different you might not even recognise each other's game. "If you compare your stories of Detroit [they] may not even have a clue what you’re talking about," he says. "You may talk about a character ‘oh this character was so important, he helped me out so much in the end’ but [they] may not even know who that character is."
One thing you will be able to do this time though is go back and replay stuff. "I really encourage people to play one walkthrough without going back, so that they get their very unique version of the story," says Cage. "But you can go back at any time and replay from the beginning or a specific point in the story and see all the different branches."
That's good for anyone who hates being stuck with a bad decision (me) but also good for a studio that could have spent ages making stuff you might never otherwise see. "There’s so much work that’s been put into some things that you might not see in the first walk thought. We really want people to replay and see all the work that’s been done and all the different possibilities."
