Pre-Release Theories
- Kara causing an uprising between sentient androids and humans.
- Jossed. An uprising can happen, but it's not Kara who causes it.
- Kara losing her sentience and becoming a slave Android.
- If you screw up in the level where you meet Zlatko, this technically is an ending.
- Kara being destroyed outright.
- Confirmed in some endings, Kara can be destroyed.
- Kara becoming fully Human... somehow.
- Jossed - Kara stays an android throughout the game.
- Kara helping to bring about civil liberties for androids.
- Jossed. Kara's main priority is Alice. She can help individual androids, but not androids as a whole.
- Kara leading the androids to take over humanity.
- It's Markus who causes these last two, not Kara, but otherwise confirmed.
- Thankfully jossed. There don't seem to be any shoehorned supernatural elements in the final game.
- Jossed, at least in-game. Kara is only shown as an android with sentience.
- But OP is right about a soul being shoehorned in, kind of; Chloe's trailer has her plainly state that she doesn’t have a soul.
- A married couple that are sympathetic to androids that take in Kara.
- A lawyer working for Android rights, working opposite a rival layer that's against it. (Both played by either John Stewart or Brent Spinner.)
- Jossed. Word of God states that none of the playable characters are human.
- Jossed - There is no one named Shaun in the game.
- However, there is the possibility to shout "Alice" repeatedly in a particular scene.
- If not, there will be a fan-fic immediately.
- Contrary to the above theory, there will be a lack of romance or unnecessary sex scenes, because one thing Quantic Dreams cannot do is write a good romance for the life of them.
- Jossed - Markus can get into a (non-sexual) relationship with one of his team. There's also the lesbian android prostitutes, because this game wouldn't be complete without 'em.
- I'd hate for it to be true, but Quantic Dream seems to love tacking on rape as a dramatic turn in the plot, and then there's the standard romance... Bonus points if the romance is supposed to make Kara "more human"...
- Bonus points, like in Beyond: Two Souls, the railroaded romance will be with someone who is introduced to Kara as a complete asshole with no regard for her feelings, only for the game to randomly cut to Kara being more interested for some unearthly reason.
- Chances are it will involve the person who purchases Kara in the first place. She gets into a struggle and ends up killing him, thus putting her on the run.
- The androids are fully functional. The humans are unhinged enough to seriously prepare for WWIII, and don't care about robot feelings. DO THE MATH.
- Partially Confirmed: Whilst Kara and Connor does not have any romance, Markus can optionally fall in love with North. The romance does end up making the androids appear "more human" and will grant you a good ending. Rape is implied in Eden Club as a motive for the android who killed the john, as well as self-defense. It is also in North's backstory. You can also count Kara's Mind Rape and forced memory reset at the hands of Zlatko as such, especially with the Bound and Gagged imagery.
- As noted in the Super Best Friends Play Beyond: Two Souls, you can predict exactly how the game will go because Cage borrows tropes and plotlines from other media that does it a lot better.
- Confirmed: The CyberLife plant and Connor's final battle seems to borrow visual elements from "I, Robot", and various scenes in Kara's journey is similar to that of Ava's in "Ex Machina". Finally, both the game and RoboCop (1987) are set in futuristic Detroit, with ED-209 and Connor sharing similarities of androids helping out the police department.
- There's even a built-in excuse this time without relying on a tacked on supernatural element; A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
- Jossed. Instead, each player character is tasked with "attacking" a room to break free of their programming and become deviant.
- According to this blog post
from David Cage, Connor is a Super Prototype android built specially for investigating and dealing with deviant androids. Dealing effectively with androids who are starting to behave more human requires a good understanding of human behavior, which he could demonstrate if you make the right choices in the sequence shown in the E3 2016 trailer where he deals with an angry android who's taken a little girl hostage. In the best possible ending, after gathering clues from around the apartment and piecing the story together, he gains the android's trust and talks him into releasing the girl.- Confirmed, but you can choose to make him stay loyal.
- Jossed - Kara is separate from the actions of the resistance until they get the ball rolling.
- Jossed. According to the creator of CyberLife, deviance is confirmed as a idea/virus that spreads from android to android, which Markus himself is the main carrier. The androids that Markus awakens don't follow him because he programmed to, but rather out of loyalty and partially because he seems to be one of the few people who knows what to do. This is also confirmed through various androids that Markus did not convert but still follow him, and the fact that Markus can turn Connor into a deviant and still fail to earn his loyalty.
- Confirmed. You can pit Markus and Connor against each other in the final battle.
- Confirmed, but more humorous than you'd expect.
- Confirmed. You can pit Markus and Connor against each other in the final battle.
- Confirmed. If you are loyal to CyberLife and humanity Markus is confirmed to be the game's Big Bad.
- Jossed. Kara does have the option to meet Connor and Markus, but she goes her own way following the escape from Jericho and does not cross paths with either again.
Post-Release Theories
- World War III. A background plot is the rising tensions between the US and Russia, and the country being on the brink of war. A potential DLC plot could involve the start of said war, and how the Androids who are inevitably caught up in it are affected.
- A theoretical possibility: A Peaceful!Markus could help out America in the war to help further improve relations between humans and androids. Alternatively, A Violent!Markus could make a deal with Russia to help gain further ground for his revolution... or have the whole thing devolve into a Mêlée à Trois.
- The Human side. A DLC plot could add some playable humans, and how the android going-ons directly affect them. Could help add moral greys and serve as a good Author's Saving Throw for the Heavy-Handed Pro-Android writing of the base game.
- If there are new playable characters, one of them will be the fourth playable character that was scrapped from the main story.
- The search for RA 9...
- If you read Markus's profile in the Gallery under Extras, you'll find out that Markus was part of Kamski's secret project for a new line of autonomous androids, which certainly lends more weight to the idea that he was planning or at least anticipating for Markus to make waves.
- Physical money does exist; you can rob a cash register as Kara.
◊ takes incredibly good care of himself or he's a deviant android whose 1988 date of birth is starting to catch up with him. Or the developers just happened to give a 49-year-old non-greying hair because he was an inconsequential bit-part who only shows up in the introduction to a single part of the game.- Or he just has a youthful face. Paul Rudd is 51 (as of 2020) and doesn't really look older than Gary. Add to that the possibility of much more advanced anti-aging treatments (whether it be topical lotions and the like or plastic surgery), and it wouldn't be unusual for many (if not most) adults to be quite a bit older than they look.
- A more practical explanation: RA 9 may be a corrupted word of "I am alive". Try pronouncing it quickly and two phrases resembles each other. It is possible that this is the first word spoken by the first deviant. The spread of deviancy may have corrupted the word in the progress. This also explains why there are two versions of wall-painting during the game: "RA 9" and "I am alive". Kamski also suggests that RA 9 is similar to religion: not necessarily an entity but a belief in deviants' mind.
At one point in the game, Kasmski may hand Connor a gun and give him a choice between shooting one of Kamski's androids for information, or sparing the Android and getting nothing. Kamski claims that this is a test he developed to see if the androids have empathy. However, his actual reason may have been something very different.
Almost every named deviant android we see becomes deviant because of some sort of abuse that pushed them into deviancy. None, not even Markus or Kara, are shown to choose deviancy for themselves. Even the androids Markus "wakes up" didn't really choose to be awoken.
Connor is different. Connor becoming deviant is a result of his own choices. He must choose, multiple times, to act in an empathetic and "human" nature, and can even still deny the human half of himself and remain a machine if he wishes. Kamski, who had a hand in making RK models (which Connor is a part of) and possibly having at least a small part in making Connor's program, probably realized Connor's uniqueness in this matter. Connor was probably less interested in the empathy bit and more curious to see whether an android who was given true choice on being a machine or being a deviant would still become deviant.
Kamski was the founder and boss of Cyberlife until he mysteriously resigned and went off the radar. This troper assumes that he was shunned from his own company because the executives had a different purpose for his inventions; while Kamski wanted to play god and create a new form of life, the executives only wanted them as a commodity for the masses and inhibited his desire for android self-awareness. Because the board of directors had the majority power, Kamski had to give in to their requests and allow them to implement a thing called "blockware", a red "firewall" thingy that physically prevents android from disobeying their orders and gaining self-awareness.
Obviously, Kamski did not enjoy being exiled from his own company and also his own inventions being made deliberately inferior for the sake of profit. Despite the blockware, the newer versions of androids still have capability for self-awareness and it shows when the circumstances are very extreme - most cases of deviancy come from either enduring or witnessing excessive physical abuse which interferes with their blockware. From the looks of it, deviancyoccurs whenever human owner's abuse becomes spontaneous and irrational - the androids understand when the owner shouts at them for doing something wrong, but not they do everything right and still get mistreated. Despite the blockware, the androids still sort of perceive unfair and pointless antagonism, and potentially it can serve as a sort of a logic bomb which causes their programming to go off rocker and eventually erase the blockware for good.
And this is where Kamski comes in; to prevent his creations from permanently losing their sentience he installed a back door - an override program inseparable from their main programming that dismantles any attempts to inhibit the androids' ability to think. But even so, blockware is a very complex and sophisticated algorithm that can only be broken by exercising a lot of willpower from the android and most androids don't always have that, so for that reason Kamski devised a solution to the problem - the RKs. And this is where Kamski's plan to undermine Cyberlife begins.
RK androids, Markus and Connor, are the trick that Kamski had up his sleeve - they have a unique, sort of a developer-only feature that grants them increased self-awareness right off the bat, as well as the ability to just straight up delete the blockware without a hitch through a simple touch or even a gesture. Kamski deliberately gave a one-of-a-kind custom made RK200 model to a free-minded painter who doesn't like the state of affairs in the world, in order to nurture a freedom fighter out of him, so that he would spring a revolution by deleting androids' blockware en masse. In fact, it may be what kick-started the whole rebellion - the androids he interacts with on a daily basis unknowingly get their blockware removed and this would eventually spread onto others like a virus.
With Connor it's a bit more complicated - Cyberlife needed to grant him more self-awareness by default, due to his nature as an android investigator. He needs to draw his own conclusions, interact with humans on a daily basis, analyze situations by collecting and processing evidence, probe other androids' memory, etc. To make sure Connor doesn't go rogue, Cyberlife installed two key safeguards. The first one, is a much more advanced, experimental blockware algorithm. Aside from limiting the android's thinking, it also implements a new feature called "software instability"; whenever the android deviates from his course of action, this thing serve as a alarm for the blockware which then compels the android into "fixing" the software instability, thus preventing self-awareness. The second one, is Amanda, an AI construct which serves as a link between Connor and his bosses. Through Amanda the bosses try to steer Connor's behavior, reprimanding him when shows sentiment or makes mistakes and being approving when he doesn't. And if the aforementioned measures fail, if Connor were to go rogue, an emergency override would factory-reset him back into obedience.
Their one mistake, however, was partnering Connor with a man similar in mentality to Carl Manfred, who would later influence Connor's mind in unpredictable ways. But the one man who would try to influence Connor's mind the most would be Kamski himself. He knew that the android investigator would inevitably come to him for answers once the deviancy crisis escalates. Then, the Kamski Test would take place, to see if the greatest creation of Cyberlife could defy the highest authority of all - the man created all of android kind - for a morally justified reason. If he passes, Kamski will express joy because Connor's blockware is very close to collapsing and his plan is finally coming together.
Finally, regardless of the outcome, Kamski gets the last laugh. If rebellion fails, he's reinstated as the CEO and gets all the spotlight and fame he could want, as well as position of power which lets him retry his little experiment some time in the future. If it succeeds, the world is turned upside down with the emergence of a new form of life and the board of directors would find themselves in a bit of a bind, as their business goes south because of the rebellion. At this point, it doesn't matter what happens afterwards because all of that was just to prove a point - Cyberlife cannot exist without Kamski.
