SOMA - new game from the creators of Amnesia

whats anesia?

Looks cool

It made me look forward to half-life 3 because the design was similar to the combine's

  On 10/12/2013 at 4:18 PM, SR4 said:

whats anesia?

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

everytime when i hear about this game i have to think about this:

Voice acting made me cringe

but

this looks unbelievably good otherwise.

PS4?!!!! - OH NO YOU DIDN'T...!

I've been waiting forever for a console release of a Frictional Game, and now they're putting it on that piece of shit I'm not going to get unless I win it at a Tombola in 2019.

It's especially annoying since Amnesia could almost run on PS2. If the new game makes proper use of the PS4 hardware (that isn't all that different from the PS3 hardware anyway), I'll be more than surprised... And by proper use I mean not just drive the fan up to maximum volume due to sloppy programming and poor optimizing. It's all just stupid contract bullshit, purposely not releasing it on the "old" console even though it's perfectly capable...

About the trailer:

These guys keep getting better at sound design (or employ better people?) - the environment feels really threatening and real when things respond to your interactions by making such harsh, aggressive noises. Good choice. However, the voice of the main character is a bit odd for Frictional, since they're all about immersion and identification, and a speaking main character (in a game that probably has close to no humanoid NPC-encounters that would require conversation) takes that away a little ... we'll see.

I feel a bit cheated to have bought Machine For Pigs while the "real Frictional games" had been working on SOMA all along. Bitter post. Probably gonna be a good game though.

idk about the voice acting bit, i think we should wait for the game to judge if it fits the narrative, atmosphere etc. is machine for pigs any good?

I started a thread about it back when I had only played the first bit - it's not bad. But it's not as scary as Amnesia. Some brilliant ideas meet with some bad ideas, e.g. the inclusion of more traditional or even cheesy horror-clichées like echoing children's voices and such. And it's pretty damn short even for a slow player like myself. Also there's too much to read. The texts are very well written, better than in the original game, and definitely have a very strong horror vibe, but you pick up a note every half minute, and it interrupts the gameplay too much, doesn't let you focus on one thing or the other. Sanity meter is gone, inventory is gone, and because of that, puzzles are even more reduced than in the original Amnesia.

If you can live with these things, I'd say play it for the strong atmosphere, story and sound design! The game definitely had some horrific moments for me, despite the bad points.

hmmm, thanks, atmosphere, story and sound design are the most important things for me anyway, too much texts sound painful, ill check it out.

It's because the developer was primarily The Chinese Room, Frictional was only looking over their shoulder. And Chinese Room loves their artsy text adventures (they made "Dear Esther" before) - but the texts are very well written and also a creepy element of the game. I just wish they had decided to put maybe fewer notes with more pages instead of many one-page-notes. But maybe this isn't so bad when playing alone, I played with a friend and it's kind of an awkward situation when you have to stop talking every two minutes and just sit there reading together.

We did play the game as a 4-meter-projection on my wall and with a big ass sound system in an otherwise completely dark house, which is about as creepy as it gets for games like this!

  On 10/17/2013 at 6:22 PM, Terpentintollwut said:

PS4?!!!! - OH NO YOU DIDN'T...!

I've been waiting forever for a console release of a Frictional Game, and now they're putting it on that piece of shit I'm not going to get unless I win it at a Tombola in 2019.

It's especially annoying since Amnesia could almost run on PS2. If the new game makes proper use of the PS4 hardware (that isn't all that different from the PS3 hardware anyway), I'll be more than surprised... And by proper use I mean not just drive the fan up to maximum volume due to sloppy programming and poor optimizing. It's all just stupid contract bullshit, purposely not releasing it on the "old" console even though it's perfectly capable...

You sir, are a troll of the highest order - almost nothing you said in your sad tirade was even close to true...

Now wait a minute, as far as I know, the PS3 is a pretty powerful beast still - I'm not too much into the technical specs of gaming systems, but nothing I saw on Sony's presentation of the PS4 looked really groundbreaking or impressive to me. It felt more like Sony's mandatory answer to the console fight (which Microsoft lost anyway due to their embarrassing presentation and limitations of their new piece...) - I'm pretty sure Sony won't release an ACTUAL piece of shit of a console, I still kind of like them, but the PS4 - at this point - isn't something that's really ... necessary. Some guy, I think it was on here, said the console should be there to support the game, and not the other way round. That's where I'm coming from here. I'm not trolling, I'm just pissed off I might need to pay more money than necessary for a game I'd like to play.

Regarding Frictional Games: They are an indie developer studio who aren't exactly known for their amazing graphics or anything, so I seriously doubt their new game will be the next ... I dunno, Crysis or whatever, graphics-wise, unless they somehow got a major budget-boost from someone (but their games have a tendency to only run on up-to-date machines, I'm guessing because it's more difficult to program a proper downwards-compatible engine, hence my comment about the "poor optimizing").

You probably have some advanced knowledge of the console specs in comparison to me because I'm only a casual gamer, but I'm still pretty sure SOMA wouldn't NEED the PS4. The graphics shown in the trailer looked decent, the lighting was well done (as would be expected when dealing with these guys!), the sound design was especially neat, but none of it looked like it wasn't entirely possible on PS3, or even a weaker machine than that. I've been following Frictional's blog for a good while and until recently, the company was just these ~6 guys. I'm actually surprised the game's going to be on a console in the first place! Maybe Frictional aren't even to blame for this PS4-thing, maybe it's easier to team up with a developer team for next-gen-consoles, maybe Sony gives those developers more support in order to get a nice line-up for their next hit console. Who knows. Do you? If so, enlighten me please (I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I'm honestly curious), since I really don't know how my post is supposed to be so dramatically flawed.

By the way, you never replied to the results of my "experiment" regarding our last nerd-battle , the one about the upscaling and stuff.