Quantic Dream boss David Cage has spoken up to talk about the developer’s new engine and how it’s benefiting the PlayStation 4 game Detroit: Become Human. In a new interview, Cage said the developer’s new engine allows for new strides as it relates to cinematography.
“We wanted to push the limits with Detroit and have an engine that would offer us more features regarding cinematography in particular,” Cage told the PlayStation Blog. “So we wanted to work on realistic lighting, especially. So we developed an entirely new engine from scratch pretty much.”
Quantic Dream worked on a number of new visual elements, including skin and hair shaders, as well as a visual feature that illuminates a character’s ear when there is light behind it.
“We worked on skin shaders, we worked on hair shaders, eye shaders,” he said. “We worked on translucency which allows you to, when you have a strong light behind your ear, see that your ear becomes red.”
Though Quantic Dream clearly put a lot of work into making Detroit a nice-looking game, Cage understands some might not care about all of the under-the-hood tech–and that’s OK.
“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,” he said. “We hope that players, even if they are not interested in the technology behind all this, will like the result on screen.”
Detroit, which tells a story about humans and robots, releases exclusively for the PS4, but its release date has not been announced.