Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is the next title from Frictional Games and Dear Esther dev

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Yeaboy, you've read it right, we've got ourselves a sequel in the near future to play.

Source=http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/22/amnesia-a-machine-for-pigs/

Shit's gonna be pretty cash, I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Amnesia was a fantastic game, I'm trully happy to see another one comming, but Dear Esther was a great concept turned into a shitty, pseudo-art, empty "game", that coudn't hold a candle to The Stanley Parable. I have no idea why it gets such praise...

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.

"A machine for pigs" sounds like it's some kind of Minecraft contraption.

And this is so different to Amnesia how, exactly? Aside from the (quasi-)freeform exploration, the game suffered from obnoxiously heavy scripting. Dear Esther is the logical destination for Frictional's design philosophy.

Well Amnesia exploration can be challenging if you aren't much good at remembering directions or navigating through the darkness. Does that count as gaming?

Because you actually do stuff in Amnesia. Might as well say Dear Esther is the logical end of Valve's design philosophy because HL2 is way more linear and scripted than Amnesia. Amnesia has problems, enemy encounters being too scripted is one of them, but it's nowhere near an interactive movie. In fact, it almost never takes control away from the player, nor does it lock them into a room until a scripted sequence can finish (like HL2 and tons of FPS games do).

Cautiously optimistic.

Dear Amnesia: A Pick and Flick Adventure

It is. The relevant point is whether or not the games being made by that studio are continuing in said direction. Valve have stayed at roughly the same (high) level of linearity between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 (in fact, the latter probably requires more player initiative then the former), but it's difficult to judge with Valve due to their unusual recent history (consultation roles etc). Obvious examples of series that have a clear and definitive path of decline are Medal of Honour/Call of Duty. You can see how the process began (MoH) where it significantly accelerated (CoD) and where it is now (BLOPS/MW3). Or you could simply take the trajectory of the entire FPS genre as a whole.

The Servants/Brutes encounters are a core component of the game, so it's not like saying "okay, there were some scripted bits, but they don't represent the general experience". And I'm sure the Dear Esther devs would be right at home designing the entirely-scripted auditory flashbacks/hallucinations.

If I were being pedantic, I'd point out that during some flashbacks it reduces your movement to a crawl and makes it impossible to see anything for about twenty seconds. It's obviously not as bad, but FPS games aren't really legitimate comparisons to a weird adventure/stealth-horror hybrid like Amnesia. You could either compare it to other first-person-ish adventure games in the style of Myst, Scratches et al (which hew much closer to interactive movies) or to Frictional's previous games - ie the Penumbra series. Penumbra was obviously scripted to fuck, but less so than Amnesia - at least many of the enemies are actually capable of patrolling and require slightly more thought than "wait for scary music - hide in a room and stare at the wall for ninety seconds - wait for music to subside - carry on like normal because the enemy despawned". I'm not saying that Pignesia can't be a step back from these experiments with linearity - merely that (based on Frictional's history) one shouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be Myst-with-a-sanity-meter.

I think that's going a bit too far with the "interactive movie" accusation. A game being linear and scripted does not mean it aspires to be a movie necessarily. In a way, Painkiller is even more linear and restrictive (huge, open environments notwithstanding), but it's one of the most "pure gameplay" games of the last decade.

That's true, and I do think it's one of the game's bigger problems. However, I don't think this justifies calling it an interactive movie in the making.

For the record, I liked Penumbra more than Amnesia, and consider Black Plague the best Frictional game, by far. I'm also expecting the new game to be pig shit. I guess I kind of expected more from them. Black Plague was really good and a major improvement over Overture. Amnesia has a lot of problems, but a lot of them can be attributed to its tumultous development cycle (the basic mechanics were finalized like 9 months before release afaik, they almost went out of business making it, it's a pretty interesting story). And even with its problems, it definitely confirmed that the dudes at Frictional understand horror.

Also, with all the stuff Grip wrote on his blog about gameplay mechanics, I'd have expected him to actually make a game. Not an interactive movie. Truthfully, it still could be a game, but I'm not expecting it at the moment.

Just curious, do you talk that way in real life?

I was hoping this was just a case of the Dear Esther guys actually co-developing with Frictional. That would've been awesome. Imagine a Frictional game with Dear Esther graffix

A lot less optimistic now that it seems that Frictional isn't really particularly involved in the development.

Well... I don't really know what to think. I really like Frictional's work and I at least enjoyed the atmosphere of Dear Esther, but hated just about everything else. The problem being I think Frictional nails atmosphere down as well or even better... so what is the Dear Esther team gonna do? Probably write... *shudder* Some of DE's writing was ok, but much of it was pretentious as fuck.

While i will admit that I tend to repeat those same sentences pretty often around here, still, don't be silly, I'm not exactly on Vanilla-Ice's level of stupidity and social-awkwardness.

Anyways, I'm pretty pumped for this here sequel, mainly because I've enjoyed Dear Esther quite a lot, even though it's not really much of a video game, it's still one of the more memorable experiences i've had on the pc for a while now. The same goes for Amnesia, so it all feels like a match made in heaven for me.

Absolutely love the offbeat name, dark full-on Victoriana setting interests me, Dear Esther...is concerning. Dammit, I'm still more excited about this than most games.

Tell me, have you ever played the free game called "The Stanley Parable"?

If so, how can you still praise anything about Dear Esther?

If not, go play it.

Loved Amnesia.

Never played Dear Esther. No idea why they're teaming up.

Regardless, I'm hoping for the best.

Bless you for that, I had a blast watching the full playthrough right here:

Because on their blog they've talked a lot about "immersion" and making games into "experiences" instead of, you know, games. I've been reading their updates with apprehension over the past year, because you can tell they are somewhat obsessed with making their games "art".

Some quotes from the blog:

They are going to sacrifice gameplay for "emotional attachment".

Less goals, less gameplay.

I'm not even sure what this whole quote exactly means.

Oh sweet holy mother of fuck. LARPING! They're talking about larping!!!!

And you know, the writer likes Heavy Rain.

And he said this about their next game:

Basically what's going on here is that the devs think they are "artists!!!" and that they must make an art at all costs. The game (the fun, the challenge and everything else) must be sacrificed for "the art". What that essentially means is that the game will suck more, and the "art" part will also suck because these people are not authors or accomplished movie directors but game developers. These people are coders and 3d modellers and mappers! So focus on the game part for fuck's sake. And I hate this notion that there is some magical invisible part called "art", an innocent childlike part that is somehow at risk and must be given equal attention to in development. If these people just focused on making a kickass game then they'd end up with a piece of art. Thinking about "the art" while you're making it is just pretentious faggotry.

I have followed that blog, and overall it's a mixed bag of good ideas and reprehensible artfaggotry. I think the "we need immershunz" idea can be somewhat excused, because you really do need immersion to make a good horror game. So it does make sense for the head of a studio famous for their horror games to think along these lines.

The "narrative art" shit is indeed worrisome, but a lot of his comments do imply an understanding that games aren't movies. He does say he liked Heavy Rain, but spends the entire entry complaining about the QTEs, linearity and lack of freedom. And then, the next game he talks about is Limbo, which is a way better example of a narrative in a game than shit like Heavy Rain or Dear Esther. So I was cautiously optimistic, or at least not writing it all off as awful wannabe-art without gameplay. Especially since most videogame artfaggots analyse games in the same terms they would movies or novels, while the Frictional dude writes almost exclusively about gameplay and immersion.

With all that said, this "partnership" probably means Frictional will never make a good game again. Which is a goddamned shame.