Spaces that contain a bunch of everyday items, such as drawers, pictures, tools, televisions, coffee cups, keyboards, clothes and so on and so forth. The game takes place in one of the most challenging environments there is design-wise: inhabited real-life spaces. The first topic of this blog is how Detroit: Become Human handles affordance. In this blog post I will talk at length about affordance, then touch upon branching and themes. It is clear that Quantic Dream are aware of the flaws they have had in their previous games, and there are a bunch of new feature that try to address the issues.īut with new features come new issues, and lots of juicy design lessons. Mixing film and games gives rise to all sorts of interesting design decisions and issues – issues that are hard to see in other games. Just like with previous titles from Quantic Dream, Detroit tries to be what is essentially a playable movie. However, the game starts to stumble as it tries to be just that – a game. So, it is fair to say that production-wise Detroit is quite a achievement. In Detroit, flow flaws are basically nonexistent. Other branching games, such as Hidden Agenda, have a much more jarring presentation where the inserted lines and cuts in the flow are obvious. The scenes are constantly constructed from a wide array of options, but everything flows together into a coherent whole. Everything to how crime scenes change to how characters make remarks depending on how you played some previous scene is amazingly well done. It is a lengthy game, taking well over 10 hours to complete, and yet as the story unfolds there is a constant stream of differences that all depend on your previous choices. On top of this, the branching and the choice possibilities in Detroit are insane.
It’s not an easy feat to create scenes that are not just narratively compelling, but also engaging play-wise – especially not in the sort of story that Detroit tells.
What made up for the so-so narrative bits were the production value (such as some very cool environments), and the myriad of exciting scenarios. I had issues with how they tackled some of the themes (especially in regards to robots), and felt they could have taken some aspects of the world they created more seriously. And since I just played through Detroit: Become Human, that’s what I decided to write about.įirst off, let me say that I quite liked the game. It has been a while since my last design blog, and I felt it was finally time to write one again.