KSubzero1000 wrote: ↑May 29th, 2018, 9:44 pm
Honestly, I wouldn't mind reading your unfiltered, properly tagged, spoiler-filled thoughts. Or anyone else who's finished the game for that matter!
Is it that bad?
It's actually not a train wreck; technically and (I assume) cinematically it is excellent - the environments are beautiful, it is really well presented and the issues you don't tend to notice when they are done well (the conflict between the cinematic camera and what the player does and sees for example) have all been resolved really well.
The problem (for me) is that it was all very workmanlike. As Kintaris said, this can be ascribed almost 100% to the writing. You have the usual Quantic Dream thing of choosing well-worn cliche as shorthand instead of anything original, so we have the oddly-matched cops, we have the traumatised child, we have the messiah-like leader of a movement. Then the individual characters are cliches within that - the alcoholic cop, the abusive father, the drug addict son. Nothing you do seems meaningful within this framework, as you feel, if they can't be bothered, why should I?
In previous QD games, there were tremendous highs and lows. The opening scene in Fahrenheit, Jodie preparing for her first date in Beyond. There was some great stuff being done in these scenes. There's nothing like that in Detroit, it's just pedestrian and bland. I feel that, in order to keep a disciplined story, they decided to make it more on-rails than previous games. Maybe I'm imagining that, and the user choice will be revealed to be extremely subtle and meaningful instead, but it felt like much more of a guided experience to me than previous games. There were a lot of banal actions - the whole game felt to me like that bit at the start of Heavy Rain where Ethan is brushing his teeth and setting the table and crap like that.
So for me, admirable in its presentation and technical complexity, but everything else felt like I was just going through the motions.