Detroit: Become Human’s script is 2,000 pages long

In Detroit: Become Human, video games auteur David Cage is trying to outdo past narrative efforts like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls with a branching storyline that, in his words, can fork sentence-by-sentence. "It quickly becomes, honestly, a nightmare," he told Geoff Keighley in an interview at E3 2017.

What kind of script does this require? "The script is about 2,000 pages," he said. It took a year to write and then a year to film.

"It's big. Its a big process," Cage said. "Everything is locked down, and once it's locked down, there's little room for change."

So while all of the story and its paths have been written and all of the motion capture has been performed and recorded, Detroit: Become Human still has no specific launch date for PlayStation 4. Cage told Keighley that Quantic Dream is still "working on the game, tweaking and polishing."

"We wanted to push the envelope on the branching narrative," Cage said. "We really wanted to see how far we could go with this and not play with smoke and mirrors. But really, like there are entire branches of the story you may see or entirely miss depending on how you play. So there are characters who die the first time you meet them, or accompany you until the very end and become a very important character in your arc."

Cage added that "There is no game over in the story of Detroit; if one of your characters die, you have to carry on playing, bearing the consequences of your actions."

When it launches, Detroit: Become Human will be a PlayStation 4 exclusive. For more on Detroit: Become Human, see Polygon’s interview with Cage from E3 2017.