Detroit: Become Human, the game with 'a thousand different endings'

A scene from Detroit: Become Human, which focuses on artificial intelligence in the near future.

It has three playable characters, multiple overlapping story arcs and requires players to make constant decisions.

So just how big is the video game Detroit: Become Human?

"There are over a thousand different combinations of ending," warns Adam Williams, the game's lead writer.

"You can lose any or all playable characters before the full extent of the story, giving you a whole new array of endings."

This will be familiar news to anyone who has played David Cage's previous titles Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, slow-build games that lean heavily on interactive narratives.

But Detroit is different. For starters, it's a bigger game, with a script that ran to 3000 pages and offers more interaction than ever before.

Then there's the story, which focuses its attention on the near-future when artificially controlled droids are the norm.

You can play as one of three: Nurse Markus, cop Connor or housekeeper Kara in an intersecting story that revolves around a robot uprising.

Williams says the story is more about the players than what they put down on the page.

"Our job as writers was not to encode Detroit with a message for you to decipher, but to give you the tools to create your own story," he says.

"Detroit is interested in posing questions rather than providing answers: how should humans relate to technology? Can a piece of technology ever become something more? If it does, what could it ever become?"

Williams, who comes from a linear TV background, says adapting to Cage's ever-changing story with multiple threads was hard to get used to.

"I've had to adapt to the fact that we're not writing a story but rather allowing the player to write their own story," he says.

"But that's been hugely rewarding, because you're actually collaborating with your audience and giving them an experience that is totally unique.

"It reflects them and what they think."

LOWDOWN
Who: Game writer Adam Williams
What: Detroit: Become Human
Where and when: Out now on Playstation 4