Quantic Dream Wants to “Push the Limits” With Advanced Visual Features for PS4-Exclusive Detroit: Become Human

Fahad Arif

Quantic Dream, the developer behind hit, visually impressive action-adventure titles Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, is currently working on its new game called Detroit: Become Human. The upcoming PlayStation 4-exclusive is being developed using a new game engine, and the developer has just revealed some new details on how the team planned to “push the limits” with advanced visual features for its upcoming neo-noir thriller with the help of new game engine Sony’s eighth generation console.

Quantic Dream Boss David Cage Talks About Pushing the Limits With New Engine for Detroit: Become Human

There’s a whole lot of major triple A titles available on PlayStation 4 right now, but only a few have managed to really utilize the hardware to deliver exceptionally beautiful visuals. Quantic Dream planned to do just that by setting visual benchmark on Sony’s latest console with the new game engine that is being used to bring Detroit: Become Human to life. In a recently published interview, Quantic Dream boss David Cage told the PlayStation Blog about the new engine and how it allowed the team to improve the cinematic storytelling.

"All our character are real people. We do a casting session and we find the right actor for the role, then scan his face in 3D, scan his body, recreate his avatar, get him on set and performance capture, and record his performance.”

"We wanted to push the limits with Detroit and have an engine that would offer us more features regarding cinematography in particular. So, we wanted to work on realistic lighting, especially. So we re-developed an entirely new engine from scratch pretty much."

To make lighting more realistic, the French game developer had to come up with numerous new pieces of visual tech that help in accurately rendering light effects. The new visual elements that Quantic Dream worked on includes skin and hair shaders, as well as visual tech that illuminates an in-game character’s ear when light falls on it from behind. Though the team has been working hard to make Detroit: Become Human a visually stunning game, Cage is well aware of the fact that most of the players won’t care about what went into creating this beautiful game, and he says the team is okay with that.

"We worked on skin shaders, we worked on hair shaders, eye shaders. We worked on translucency which allows you to, when you have a strong light behind your ear, see that your ear becomes red."

"We play with all this technology and players don't need to care about all this because it's just interesting for geeks and developers. We hope that players, even if they are not interested in the technology behind all this, will like the result on screen."

Detroit: Become Human tells a story about humans and human-like androids. The game is set to release exclusively for the PlayStation 4, but its release date has not yet been announced.

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