Detroit: Become Human
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 "We didn't choose to be different. We didn't choose to feel pain, or love, or fear. We didn't choose to take a stand. We didn't choose to resist, to betray our masters, to pull the trigger. You did."
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Detroit: Become Human is an action, interactive drama video game created by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 4 on May 25, 2018.
Plot
Set in Detroit during the year 2038, the city has been revitalized by the invention and introduction of androids into everyday life. But when androids start behaving as if they are alive, events begin to spin out of control. Step into the roles of the story’s pivotal three playable characters (Kara, Connor, and Markus), each with unique perspectives, motivations, and abilities as they face their true selves and question their values. These three androids are present throughout the game as they follow through an emotional journey with choices that must be taken in order for their ultimate 'cause', which can be defined in many different ways depending on the values of the player. The plot of the game deals with a variety of mature themes that explore the moral ground and each player's decision affects what will happen.
Why It Became Human
- The idea of androids being discriminated against and demanding freedom and civil rights is a creative premise.
- Great soundtrack that was composed by three different composers with each character having their own theme songs that are distinct and reflect their respective personalities and stories perfectly.
- Markus's theme is a melancholic piece, reflecting his struggle for freedom. His instrument is the piano.
- Kara's theme is an emotional piece that becomes more intense and hopeful over time. Her instrument is the cello.
- Connor's theme is a badass and mysterious piece that slowly grows in intensity. His instrument is the synth bass but changes into different, more organic-sounding bass instruments as he begins to deviate.
- Terrific acting with some relatively big names such as Clancy Brown.
- There are many heartwarming and touching moments between the relationships of each character's story. This includes Kara and Alice at Pirate's Cove, Markus' relationship with Carl, and the final scene where Hank accepts Connor as a friend by embracing him in a hug.
- A good story about androids wanting to be treated like humans.
- The game has 40 different endings which increase replay value. What helps is the flow chart.
- Flow charts appear at the end of a chapter showing all the possible routes of each scenario. This is really helpful since you don't have to play the whole game again just to see a different outcome like in Heavy Rain.
- The game lets players choose the decision if Connor wants to become a deviant or stay a machine, Each choice will impact the story (Connor and Markus fighting to the death during the war if you choose "Stay a Machine", and Connor awaking the other androids in the CyberLife plant if you choose "Become a Deviant").
- Very emotional scenes like when Markus visits Carl's grave (if you don't push Leo), the machine that kills Kara and Alice in the Android Destruction Camps (if Kara gets caught), Traci wanting to be disconnected, and when Hank calls Connor "son" before the latter dies.
- Very realistic, beautiful, and gorgeous graphics that really push the PS4 to its limits.
- While some of the characters are unlikable there is an explanation as to why one specific character (Todd) acts the way he does. If the player lets Todd live and get to the checkpoint, Todd will find Kara and call the guards to have them taken, but if the player finds enough clues about Todd, Kara will reason with him and tell why he bought an android giving the player the chance to understand Todd and they're are even clues as to why he acted the way he did to Kara and Alice to the point where you empathize with him, but at the same time not forgive him since his actions are still unacceptable. In doing so, Todd calls the guards off and has the choice to either let Alice hug him or not as a final goodbye, he will even wish Kara and Alice good luck. Not only is the scene great, but it also gives Todd the feeling of being a real person rather than just a one-dimensional, unlikable character like Gavin or Leo.
- It goes like this, Todd was happily married with a wife and daughter, however, he was constantly job searching due to him being replaced by androids. Eventually, Todd's wife leaves him for an accountant and takes his daughter with her. Todd goes into a depression to the point where he turns to red ice since the anti-depressants he is prescribed aren't helping, which makes him aggressive and think irrationally. He eventually buys two androids: Alice, as a means to fill in the hole left by his daughter, and Kara, to help around the house. Todd's red ice addiction causes him to be abusive to Alice since he still has pent-up anger from his wife leaving him, even though he doesn't really mean it. This aggression eventually leads to Kara being broken and in need of repairs, which is where her story in the game starts.
- What's really sad is that no other unlikable characters like Gavin or Leo are given proper characterization outside of being unlikable.
- It goes like this, Todd was happily married with a wife and daughter, however, he was constantly job searching due to him being replaced by androids. Eventually, Todd's wife leaves him for an accountant and takes his daughter with her. Todd goes into a depression to the point where he turns to red ice since the anti-depressants he is prescribed aren't helping, which makes him aggressive and think irrationally. He eventually buys two androids: Alice, as a means to fill in the hole left by his daughter, and Kara, to help around the house. Todd's red ice addiction causes him to be abusive to Alice since he still has pent-up anger from his wife leaving him, even though he doesn't really mean it. This aggression eventually leads to Kara being broken and in need of repairs, which is where her story in the game starts.
Bad Qualities
- Some characters like Gavin Reed (though he gets the taste of his own medicine later in the game), Todd Williams (although he has his reasons as stated in WIR#11), Leo Manfred, and Amanda can be unlikable.
- Amanda is especially unlikable, as she doesn't let Connor have his freedom, even when he becomes the leader of his fellow androids if Markus dies, she forces you to decide if you want Connor to kill himself, or to let Amanda take over him.
- In some cases, North can be pretty unlikable Despite her sympathetic backstory, she constantly shows that she thinks the only way to achieve freedom is by causing chaos and attacking the humans. What she fails to realize is that will only encourage the humans to root for their destruction, rather than their freedom.
- On the bright side, she surprisingly reacts very positively if you earn the androids' freedom in a peaceful way, despite showing how much she disliked the idea.
- The games' idea of how the androids are alive is very shallow compared to other science fiction media that brings up interesting ideas of what makes something sentient, conscious, or "alive", and what doesn't. The game just repeats the rhetoric of "they're alive" without telling what that's supposed to mean.
- The game got into controversy as one of the trailers was criticized for its portrayal of child abuse, specifically a scene in which Alice is attacked by Todd.
- The most common criticism of the game's social commentary is how not at all subtle it is about denouncing hateful ideologies such as racism, bigotry, and violent extremism, which it achieves by using androids as an allegory for real-life oppressed minorities. Nevertheless, a lot of its critics contend that while the intent is noble enough, the imagery used to make its point is so heavy-handed and haphazardly applied (with some accusing the game of lazily appropriating minority struggles as window dressing) as to undermine its own message. Some have even gone as far as to call the game racist for comparing androids to real humans, however, David Cage said in an interview that this wasn't the intent.
- What doesn't help is the not-so-subtle parallels to the Civil Rights Movement (one of the quotes that you can choose if you graffiti the park is "We have a dream") and the Holocaust with death camps being set up to destroy androids.
- Markus' motivations can be very inconsistent. When talking about his plans, his dialogue always goes from wanting equality to wanting supremacy pretty rapidly.
- When Connor and Hank enter the Cyberlife building they find a machine Connor sent to kill them and then Hank decides to ask questions to determine which is the real Connor. This is unnecessary because Hank could simply just ask the real Connor to activate the idle androids which the fake Connor wouldn't do because then he'd fail his mission.
- It's pretty clear the makers of this game are not Americans and have little actual knowledge about either American culture or law, which leads to a few discrepancies. Examples include characters relaying distances in metric, Markus using the term "car park" while attempting to distract a person (when the correct term would be "parking lot") and finally, President Warren simply suspending the right to free assembly (which is explicitly protected by the Constitution and would likely result in both a political uproar as well as lawsuits against the government).
- Assuming the timeline of the game aligns with real-life history, occupying Detroit is not the first time the US government let a city fall into the enemy's hands, as the British occupied Washington DC during the War of 1812 and burned down the White House. It is not even the first time Detroit fell into an enemy's hands either, as the British took over the city during the same year.
- There are also elements that don't make sense or are just stupid.
- The "Broken" scenario path where you don't fight back against Leo hinges on almost every human involved acting stupidly. From Leo thinking that he can get away with stealing artwork from his famous artist father, to Carl ordering Markus to not defend himself when Leo attacks him, or even asking for help during his subsequent heart attack, to the police shooting the personal care android who made the 911 call about a burglar on the assumption that it, and not the (to them) complete stranger standing right next to them throwing around accusations was the one who caused Carl's collapse. Hell, in the ending where it's Leo who collapses, the police end up arresting Markus and leaving him for dead in a junkyard anyway, even though Carl can explain the situation. Of course, one can argue that it's akin to how black people back in the day ended up getting accused of murder regardless of context.
- A lot of Kara's plot lines fall apart for a myriad of reasons. The most egregious would likely be Zlatko's mansion; Zlatko tells Kara that the police can use her tracker to find her and that he can remove it. If that were true, Kara (along with every deviant) could be easily found. Trackers just conveniently stop working in deviants to keep the story moving forward. Kara also misses the blue blood on Zlatko's hands, the cages full of android experiments, and that Luther is clearly still subservient.
- The fact that androids can easily remove their LED device. When you've successfully made robots that can look and act practically fully human, you'd think they'd be left with something that would undoubtedly distinguish them from us, and not something that could be removed by the tap of something sharp. Thus, the majority of android-going deviants (including Kara and Markus) remove their LED devices to blend perfectly in with humans, which the plot hinges on for them to get around in many situations.
- The fact that androids aren't easily recognizable to people since a lot of the androids of the same model look exactly the same. This is most evident by the Jerrys at the Amusement Park who are all the exact same.
- The fact that the humans consider the androids sentient by singing or kissing another android is dumb and feels cheesy since the former is established that androids are capable of doing this since you can hear people talk about an android boy band.
- The Twist: Alice being an android is dumb and arguably makes a lot of the choices related to Alice pointless specifically the ones near the beginning since she doesn't have to eat, she doesn't get cold, etc. It's also a missed opportunity as it could've further proven that androids can be just as caring as humans; as a matter of fact, originally Alice was meant to be a human, but this idea was scrapped for some reason.
- The idea of androids being able to be given rights in the span of a week is ridiculous. Bear in mind, that it took the actual Civil Rights Movement 14 years to succeed.
Reception
Detroit: Become Human received generally favorable reviews. However, it has been criticized for nakedly taking real-life instances of racism, bigotry, and discrimination when crafting the struggles that androids face in the game without considering the context behind them. Some critics, such as at io9 and Headstuff, took particular offense to the parallels with the civil rights movement, stating that, among other things, it was insulting to compare oppressed blacks with machines that, in addition to being created specifically to serve humans and not having inherent self-awareness, actually do pose a threat to humanity and have incredible durability besides.
Sales
Detroit: Become Human reached fifth place on the UK chart after two days of release. In its first week, the game topped both the overall sales and console sales charts. Though it sold fewer copies than Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain in that region, Cage and executive producer Guillaume de Fondaumière claimed Detroit: Become Human was the studio's most successful launch yet. The NPD Group later confirmed it had a sales growth in excess of twenty percent over Heavy Rain. It was the third best-selling video game overall, generating the third-most revenue in the US, and sold the most out of any title on the PlayStation Store in May 2018, having been available for six days. The game was released in Japan with 39,548 units (which rose to 56,480 after two weeks), second to Dark Souls: Remastered. In the UK, the second week also saw it become the second best-selling video game (behind FIFA 18).
The game sold one million copies after the first two weeks. For the week ending 10 June, its physical sales fell to fourth place in the UK. Its Japanese sales hit 74,458 copies on 17 June, but dropped from the country's console chart one week later, when the game was placed ninth on the UK individual formats chart. Two months after its release, a total of 1.5 million people had played the game. It had sold more than 2 million copies by that December, approaching 3 million the following month. In October 2019, worldwide sales had reached 3.2 million copies on PlayStation 4. A press release from Quantic Dream reported in August 2020 that it had sold over five million copies across all platforms. It surpassed 6 million copies by July 2021, making it the company's best-selling game.
Accolades
In 2017, Detroit: Become Human won the award for "Best of E3" at GameSpot's Best of E3 Awards, and was nominated for "Best PlayStation 4 Game" and "Best Adventure Game" at IGNs Best of E3 Awards, and for "Adventure Game" at Hardcore Gamers Best of E3 Awards.
Videos
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Trivia
- Bryan Dechart (who plays Connor) and his wife Amelia Rose Blaire (who plays the brown and blue-haired Tracis) are really kind and nice towards the Connor army and fans of the game.
- Hank's voice actor, Clancy Brown, plays Mr. Krabs in SpongeBob SquarePants, Baron Praxis in Jak II, Hades in God of War III and Ascension and was one of the voices of Dr. Neo Cortex in earlier entries in the Crash Bandicoot series.
- The game was based on the "Kara" short/tech demo that was made years before Detroit's release.
- The game somewhat represents the Holocaust where instead of Jewish people being killed, it's Androids being killed. And has its own concentration camps for the Androids.
- The game has quickly gained a notable fandom in Japan, with names like Taro Yoko commending the game. Sony of Japan even made a mini-film to promote the game. Given that robots are very popular in Japan, this may not come as a surprise. Connor even received an official Nendoroid release due to his immense popularity there.
- The series is also incredibly popular with Russian fans.
- The game was teased in a short film made by Quantic Dreams called Kara, which is unlocked in Beyond: Two Souls by finding a certain collectible.
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