Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs by Frictional Games and Dear Esther devs

[commie]

My God, someone is trying to make a game based on what THEY want instead of what some faceless publisher wants...get out the pitchforks!

 

[Kingston]

My God, someone is trying to make a game based on what THEY want instead of what some faceless publisher wants...get out the pitchforks!

A game they want to make instead of what the customers want. I haven't really seen people demanding a less gameplay-focused artsy game with less horror. Why should I praise their self-indulgence? Granted, there is barely any info about the game yet, so I'll try to not to make judgements yet (but I already see some warning signs). They want to try something new, ok. But if it sucks they need to get right back to what they were doing before (for which there is clearly a big demand). Frankly, I think this is a bit early for them to start experimenting. People are still hungry for more of their puzzly-horror games, they should feed that appetite first before they start making all their own dreams come true.

 

[The Vault Dweller]

The makers have balls to title the game "A Machine for Pigs". That's awesome.

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller

 

[Konjad]

Yeah.

Sincerely,
Konjad

 

[felipepepe]

The makers have balls to title the game "A Machine for Pigs". That's awesome.

Meat Loaf had the balls to title his album "Hang Cool Teddy Bear". It was still a bad album.

 

[DwarvenFood]

Dear Gustav,
One should not pay too much attention to rumors .
If it would have been a less scary Amnesia it would have been called "Amnesia: A trip to rainbowland" or perhaps "Amnesia: A machine for cookie baking". Our dear collaborators, Chinese Room, has gone to great length to conjure up the most disturbing and repulsive subtitle for a game yet. There is nothing friendly, cuddly or cozy about a machine for pigs. Men do not make machines that play with pigs, or sing cute songs for pig. No, there are only horrible and terrifying implications with this kind of machinery.
But please do continue with the conviction that A Machine for Pigs will be a nice and mellow experience. When it becomes a available on a dark and stormy night this coming fall, do let your guard down. Do think as you boot the game that this will be nothing to worry about. Put out all lights and play it in your damp and gloomy basement, far away from any kind of comfort, convinced that your are in for an relaxing trip.
You will then be unprepared for what will hit you, and will perhaps never dare to start your computer ever again, fearful of coming close to that machine. Your dreams will be filled with creaking machinery, the desperate cries of pigs, the rattle of chains and the dreadful feeling of something unspeakable is watching you from beyond. That is when you will regret thinking that A Machine for Pigs would be not a very scary experience.
Have a nice day!
Regards,
Thomas Grip Frictional Games

 

[Berekän]

of Frictional Games.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Oh, wow. That response. Frictional Games, one of the Last Great Developers?

 

[Luzur]

This can only be viewed as the decline of Frictional. I don't really get why they would do this, because their games betray an understanding of what makes the medium good (which is why you need to operate everything manually in Penumbra and Amnesia, for instance). So why are they joining up with people who've only made a pretty interactive movie? The mind boggles.

Exactly, Dear Esther had no purpose in being a game, you just follow linear paths and hear stories. Is as much "intercative storytelling" as randomly hitting play & pause on a dvd remote.

you are not even allowed to jump off the radio tower by yourself either.

 

[Steve]

First trailer is out:

 

[Darth Roxor]

Was about to link this. Wereboars confirmed.

 

[CorpseZeb]

A game they want to make instead of what the customers want. (...). People are still hungry for more of their puzzly-horror games, they should feed that appetite first before they start making all their own dreams come true.

Well. Really? If they start pleasing the "crowd", they may end like EA or Bio. Art is all about self realization, not the pleasing anyone. So, art in the form of game is only possible as realization of author sole intentions, not the publisher marketing plans or focus groups mythical 15 seconds of orgasm. There's not middle ground. Commercial success of that kind of products is a second matter, I think.

 

[Kingston]

Well. Really? If they start pleasing the "crowd", they may end like EA or Bio. Art is all about self realization, not the pleasing anyone.

Are you looking for a dumbfuck tag?

The artist's purpose is to stimulate the imagination of the audience. That's it.

A shitty artist makes his "vision" and dumps it on the viewer. He thinks the viewer is nothing but a passive receptacle of the artist's output.

A good artist knows that the viewer is not a passive agent, but an active one. He / she makes art around this notion. It is the audience's imagination that matters, not the artist's.

An artist cannot directly transmit his / her ideas to the viewer. He must break it down and funnel it through a medium (pictures, music, words, whatever). The viewer takes these pieces and reconstructs them, in the process applying their own imagination onto them. A good artist respects the viewer's imagination, a mediocre one tramples all over it.

Why is Amnesia scary? Because your imagination is doing all the work. I was terrified by the creatures that roamed the halls. Until I saw them up close. The fear was gone. They looked kinda stupid, the ones I imagined looked better. It's why most horror movies tend to go shit after the monster is revealed.

When we see the latest work of a renowned modern artist, we see that it is essentially an over-the-top "statement", and we feel insulted. The artist has taken their "vision" and displayed it for the world to see. I'm sure the artist had a fantastic time creating it. But I'm not having any kind of experience except mild annoyance. What am I supposed to do with this? There is nothing for me to interpret, nothing for me to have fun with.

Self-realization is the excuse of the artist to not work hard. If you want to unlock people's imaginations you must master a medium, you must have talent, you must sacrifice your own wants and needs to maximise the audience's enjoyment. Frictional Games' recent direction, as pointed out by their blog posts and their partnership with Dear Esther, is towards self-realization. People want them to make horror games, but they want to "dig into deeper and more intellectually demanding subjects."

What you are parading is selfish shitty art.

 

[CorpseZeb]

Are you looking for a dumbfuck tag?

Nice argument... but, anyway... You reading too much between lines, because I can agree with most of your statements, except this one:

The artist's purpose is to stimulate the imagination of the audience. That's it.

I'm sorry, says who...? As I don't accuse you for soc-realism love, so I think you just make mistake, equaling craftsman with an artist.

While you can judge quality of (for example) craftsmanship, you can't do the same with art, because... what is an art? What's sharing can of tomato soup with Gothic cathedral? Many artist, famous in their time, are forgotten now, many forgotten then is now famous. And a few become immortal as part of common culture. Why...? There's no one answers. Or, whole culture is an answer. I like to share my definition of art: "art is whatever expands my freedom". This can be soundtrack, a book, a game - whatever thing able to "in-rich" my world and expands its boundaries. Thus gives me more freedom. So, art is a personal matter - or even, let me rephrase it - it's my duty, duty of an "audience" - not a duty of an artists. In this very personal view, of course.

Core of problem, lies, I think, in the pure free will to create. One create to fulfill own desires. Because one can. And the end of day, who can judge him, really? Only history. Only future art, texts, books, metaphors will tell a true story - is in them, or it is forgotten thus irrelevant to the culture. To the "audience", if you will.

Also, dunno where you get idea, that kind of work is "work-less" or "lazy". On contrary, pursuit own creative demons, is a hardest, merciless thing, while lazies job in the universe is trying to "please" others. Hard work is just so natural part of art, that is not worth even mentioning (and, yeah, crap artist often works equally hard as good ones...).

 

[Guido Fawkes]

At least wait for the game to be out before making such a fuzz. Geez...

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

FG has pretty good track record for making horror games. I remain optimistic.

 

[Guido Fawkes]

FG has pretty good track record for making horror games. I remain optimistic.

This. Some of the pessimism I see over this game seems irrational, specially the people picking on the title.

 

[piydek]

I'm playing Amnesia: dark descent for the first time. I'm still at the beginning and haven't even encountered my first "enemy" yet (I've just entered the wine cellar), but i already see some things that are wrong with this game. I just hope these guys have realized what's wrong with Amnesia and they'll change it in A machine for pigs. Two big things i see at the moment that are very wrong with dark descent are:

- whenever you read notes that you pick up and also whenever a scripted event starts occuring, the control in the game is taken away from you and you become merely a spectator. That feels safe. So that's a huge mistake. Even inventory shouldn't feel like a "safe place" that effectively pauses the game. Inventory should be done differently in this game. Definitely not like a separate "screen" and definitely not as something that pauses the game.

- scripted events are so freaking obvious. The whole thing has a feel of a very designed scare. When you look through the logic of that design, mentally you are outside of the experience. And with this level of scriptedness it's very easy to see through the design logic and fall out of the experience.

 

[Phelot]

I think most people's fears is with the involvement of the people that did Dear Esther.

 

[piydek]

I think most people's fears is with the involvement of the people that did Dear Esther.

Haven't played Dear Esther, but i know the concept. What else did people behind it do? If not much and if they don't consistently make such "games", then nobody can be sure that only that type of concept is their thing. That's all speculation anyway. But the two problems I mentioned above are very real and need to be overcome since they water the experience down very much.

 

[Berekän]

Well, a huge deal of horror games it's the atmosphere of the game (and from the comments I read about Dear Esther they pretty much nailed the atmosphere thing, since it was the only thing it had ) and they also have Frictional Games for tutoring them, don't think they would throw around a IP that's proven so profitable for them and just be done with it, I think something nice will come out of this.

 

[Phelot]

Yeah, it would have been more intense to have the game not pause when you go to inventory. Heh... makes even BG intense when trying to load a potion into the quick inventory.

As for the " scripted events are so freaking obvious."

Well... I'm not so sure how much you knew about the game going into it, but they weren't obvious to me my first time through. Also, I think some people just don't get disconnected from reality which is required for this sort of game. Though I might just be a baby. piydek have you been genuinely scared or tense when playing a game?



As for Dear Esther... I believe that was the studios first game. It started off as a mod for it if I'm not mistaken. I think it was... interesting, but that's it. I don't see why FG can't simply make the game themselves.

 

[LoPan]

Well, a huge deal of horror games it's the atmosphere of the game (and from the comments I read about Dear Esther they pretty much nailed the atmosphere thing, since it was the only thing it had ) and they also have Frictional Games for tutoring them, don't think they would throw around a IP that's proven so profitable for them and just be done with it, I think something nice will come out of this.

Dear Esther only got properly atmospheric when they did the fancy version off of the indie fund, and even that version has some detrimental gameplay design even though it is so ruthlessly linear; in order to supply an atmospheric mountain hike they made the player walk in a curvy, linear line yet supplied alternate routes which went nowhere forcing the player to backtrack in the game's dismal walking speed and along with that walking speed the player was further incentivized not to explore by making the player character unable to properly swim or jump, or walk over anything higher than a half a metre.

The reason to go down the less than obvious or entirely obvious side passages were to get another sound file played which, as I found out, was an uncommon exception rather than a rule, I did this religiously because I wanted to figure out what the story was about only to find that they apparently had no intention to tell a story.

I felt something whilst playing it, thought it was rather pleasant on the whole, but whatever feeling you get is meaningless (largely because the game concerns itself with neither story nor gameplay). Atmosphere has a purpose in a horror game and the atmosphere of a horror game is enhanced and made real by the gameplay design, Dear Esther proved that the Chinese Room can light a dungeon and make a pretty horizon and that Jessica Curry can make a good soundtrack for a long hike but they have no proof at all of understanding how to make atmosphere out of gameplay. I just can't stand them getting praise for something they have never done.

I've read both their blogs but I don't follow them, and haven't read them in some time now, but I suppose no new scoop has come out as regards the involvement of the Chinese Room. I'll play another Frictional game, for now, no matter who else is vaguely involved but I can't say I'm all that excited considering how suspicious the Chinese Room is as a game developer, considering Dear Esther and their blog. Though I do like the title.

 

[piydek]

As for the " scripted events are so freaking obvious."

Well... I'm not so sure how much you knew about the game going into it, but they weren't obvious to me my first time through. Also, I think some people just don't get disconnected from reality which is required for this sort of game. Though I might just be a baby. piydek have you been genuinely scared or tense when playing a game?



As for Dear Esther... I believe that was the studios first game. It started off as a mod for it if I'm not mistaken. I think it was... interesting, but that's it. I don't see why FG can't simply make the game themselves.

I knew nothing of the game. But scripted events are obvious for me because when i look at the level design, "trigger points" that start those events or sounds are quite obvious. I know what you mean about having to be disconnected from reality to play this type of game and i definitely am a suitable type of player for this kind of experience. I don't over-analyze and i don't try to be "above" it all. I am able to experience games like these. I have genuinely been scared/tense when i played first part of "Call of Cthulhu: dark corners of the earth" and Silent hill 2/3 (haven't played the first one). Even when i played Doom3 (at night, with headphones). So yeah, I'm well able to get disconnected from reality.

 

[LoPan]

I have the same thing, I am a sucker for horror.

I recall there were some things in Amnesia which were bound to happen, but I also recall a lot of things happening differently if I died. From my one, and terrifying, experience of Amnesia I do recall quite a lot of areas having random or at the least variable spawn locations. I remember dying once in the game after opening what amounted to a closet and having the enemy come at me, when I returned I was all ballsy, opened that closet like water off a ducks back, but there was nothing there--turn around and the skin demon is hobbling through the door I came from, I have nowhere to run, fail to hide in the closet, wonder if I can kill myself in-game.

 

[Brayko]

Amnesia was great, perhaps the scariest game of all time, but it really lacks replay value. I just tried replaying it yesterday after a couple years or so and it feels like I just played it within the week. They need to add additional features and tools whilst keeping the same atmosphere or else it's no more than a nice $10 price tag similar to buying an 18 pack o' beer.