PS4 Power Means Heavy Rain Dev's New Game Has Better Graphics and "Improves the Emotion"

A new video for Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls developer Quantic Dream's new PlayStation 4 game, Detroit: Become Human, sheds some more light on what players can expect from it. Quantic Dream isn't yet ready to talk specifics, but studio head David Cage did speak about how Detroit leverages the power of the PS4 (Detroit is the developer's first PS4 game) to offer better graphics, which in turn should "improve the emotion" that players feel. Take a look at the video below and read on for some quotes.

"Detroit is featuring a brand new 3D engine; we love to do one engine per game [laughs], which is a bit crazy," he says in the video above. "But the idea of course is to really leverage the power of the console and really try to offer a visual experience and a gameplay experience that will hopefully be much better than on the previous generation of consoles."

Quantic Dream's most recent games, Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain, were released on PlayStation 3. For Detroit, Cage says players can look forward to better visuals across the board than those games.

"We tried to use the technology to improve the graphics but also to improve the emotion that the player will feel; having better facial animation, having better lighting, having larger environments with a lot of life and passerbys and things happening wherever you look around," he added.

Also in the video, Cage talks about how Detroit, though it shares some common threads with Quantic Dream's past games, is entirely its own game that is very "different" from Beyond and Heavy Rain.

"I think there are some common points with what we've done in the past; it's based on storytelling, it's based on emotion and the emotional involvement of the player in the experience," he said. "But I think the game has its own voice and it's really a different experience from Beyond and Heavy Rain in many, many ways."

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Be sure to watch the full video for more. In it, Cage also talks about why Quantic Dream chose Detroit as the game's setting and what the developer learned by visiting the city itself.

Detroit was announced at Sony's Paris Games Week briefing on Tuesday. The PS4 game follows the sophisticated android character Kara from Quantic Dream's previous tech demo.

"We imagined our world in a near future where androids like Kara would look, speak, and move like real human beings," Cage said in a PlayStation Blog post. "We wondered how we--humans--would react if we were confronted with a new form of intelligence, how androids conceived as machines would be perceived if they started to have emotions.

"We didn't want to do another story on AI (there are already so many great ones), we wanted to talk about what it means to be human and what it would be like to be in the shoes of an android discovering our world and their own emotions…"

No release date for Detroit has been announced.