SOMA (Frictional Games)

[Darth Roxor]

Considering this is scheduled for 2015, I would assume 90% of the stuff is placeholder. And in fact, this scene from the trailer won't even appear in the game.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Frictional is a small team, so that's my best guess why it's gonna take longer. Duh.

Art and sound are great. Graphics whores gonna graphics whoring.

 

[sexbad?]

I'm liking the science fiction setting, and fortunately the pussy in the trailer is just a background character. I wonder the setting was driven into being by how much Pigs fucked up its own rogue AI. I thought the rogue AI part of the story was an excellent idea that showed potential, for the half hour that it lasted.

 

[DefJam101]

Why bother making Cameronesque FMV trailers if the actual game is going to completely abandon that visual style

 

[DeepOcean]

Why bother making Cameronesque FMV trailers if the actual game is going to completely abandon that visual style

I was way more interested in those videos than on the gameplay trailer. I just hope the game starts before everything going to hell, the 90s style art direction for sci fi + an omnious presense on the ship then everything goes to hell. This gameplay section made me believe it will be Amnesia on space, what isn't bad but underwhelming after watching the movies. I hoped for more of a mind fuck kind of experience.

 

[1eyedking]

That awful Resident Evil-tier voice acting, just ugh. I don't need to hear to the protagonist cuss and shit his pants every five seconds. The anxiety from a horror game needs to be felt by the player himself, not some noisy nasally guy who sounds like he's about to have an asthma attack. Very annoying.

For a moment I thought the trailer had voice comments by some stupid YouTube Let's Play uploader, like PewDeePie or whatever that annoying fuck's name is.

 

[KidBoogie]

fuck you guys this looks terrifying. I really like how they have the surface level of horror that comes from unfamiliarity with environments/running from monsters (everything they did right in amnesia) AND:

What sets SOMA apart is that it gives a first person account of some deep and really disturbing ideas regarding the self, mind and consciousness.

which if done correctly (frictional will) would hit the player on a level that sound effects and dark shaders couldn't

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Just take a deep breath and enjoy.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Looks like a boring version of Stasis

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Reminds me of Black Mesa's spooky environments.

 

[Servo]

Why bother making Cameronesque FMV trailers if the actual game is going to completely abandon that visual style

I was way more interested in those videos than on the gameplay trailer.

This and this. FMV trailers were pretty cool, but the gameplay hardly reflected them. Excessive gore does not a good game make. Why are those giant needle probing tentacles so damn violent? The (supposed) aliens went through the trouble attaching a human brain to an elaborate machine so they could fucking smash it?

And why is there blood coming out of everything? How are these machines supposed to keep functioning with blood crusted all over them? Can't they have a bucket under the table so they don't have to clean all that shit up?

 

[sexbad?]

Frictional did a blog post about their design philosophy for Soma that looks an awful lot like an apology letter for A Machine for Fags. Underlined emphasis is to show where it made me cum.

http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-five-foundational-design-pillars-of.html

1) Everything is story
First up, we want the player to constantly feel as if they are inside a flowing narrative. It is so common that a game is distinctly split into story and puzzle/action moments. We want to blur the boundaries here and make it impossible to distinguish between the two. Whatever the player does it should feel as if it is part of the story. We do not want to have sections that simply feel like blockers to the next narrative moment. From start to finish the player should be drenched in a living, breathing world of storytelling.

A good example is how we design puzzles. Instead of having the puzzle by itself, as a separate activity, it always springs from and is connected to some aspect of the story. For instance, if the player encounters a locked door, there are more reasons for getting it open than simply to progress. There are always short term narrative reasons and rewards for getting it unlocked. On top of this, the very act of solving it results in the player taking part of a narrative scene.

Encounters with hostile beings are handled in the same way. A creature will never attack you without good reason; they never do it out of pure gameplay necessity. We want every encounter to feel like a bit of storytelling is happening. To get this working properly, almost every single creature has unique AI.
2) Take the world seriously
This leads us to the next point: that every detail in an environment is connected to the story somehow. Nothing should be written off as simply a requirement for gameplay or exposition. For instance, if you find an audio log you will be able to learn more about the story by pondering its placement alone. There should be no need to "double-think"; the game's world should be possible to evaluate on its own terms.

We constantly think about what each character would have done in a situation, and shape the environment accordingly. For instance, in one level, we started out with scratches on the walls but later realized the character had access to a whiteboard pen and changed the graphics accordingly.

It's so easy to justify design "because the game needs it" even if it doesn't make sense to the story. But for each such thing you do, the less seriously the player will approach the environment. In SOMA a big part of the game is to ponder the situation you are in.Therefore it's crucial that players consider the world from a story view, and in order for that to happen we must provide them the opportunity to do so.
3) The player is in charge
When you invest this much in a setting, it's important to make sure that players feel connected to it. In order to this we need to put a bigger responsibility on the player. An environment quickly loses its sense of realism if it is extremely streamlined and does not allow you to make choices. The player must be the one that drives the narrative forward.

The game never tells the player exactly how to progress. There may be hints and other implicit guidance, but in the end it must be the player that figures out what to do next. If a game is constantly flashing up cues with objectives or showing arrows pointing where to go, the player will never take on the world at a deeper level. If it takes some effort to progress, players are forced to understand and mentally map the surroundings in a way they would not do otherwise.

4) Trust the player
This brings us to the next point: that we trust players to act according to the story. We do not force players to notice events by use of cutscenes and similar, but assume they will properly explore the environment and act in a rational fashion. We simply set up situations and then let the player have full control over their actions.

This means that we will let players do stupid things even if they might break the experience a bit. For instance, if they skip talking to a character with important information then they are on their own after that. And if they get hints that a dangerous creature is approaching, they need to figure out that hiding is the best course of action by themselves.

While we do our utmost to make the narrative unfold in a fluent and intuitive way, we will not cater to players that make irrational decisions. The environment is set up to be taken seriously and we expect the players to do so too.

5) Thematics emerge through play
Now for our last foundational design rule: that the game's thematics will emerge through play. SOMA is meant to explore deep subjects such as consciousness and the nature of existence. We could have done this with cutscenes and long conversations, but we chose not to. We want players to become immersed in these thematics, and the discussions to emerge from within themselves.

It feels wrong to just shove information down the player's throat. What I find so exciting about having these thematics in a game is that the player is an active participant. There are plenty of books and movies that cover these sort of subjects, but videogames provide a personal involvement that other mediums lack. We want to explore this to the fullest degree

Just like all of the other design goals, there is a bit of risk in this. It requires the player to approach the game in a certain way and it will be impossible to make it work for everyone. But for those people where it succeeds, it will be a much more profound experience. I also find that it is when you are dealing with uncertainties that you are doing the most with the medium, and am extremely excited to see how far it will take us.

The in-engine trailer doesn't really back this up, but it appears to be like Amnesia 1's first in-engine trailer. It's just there to show off that they're working on something without actually revealing anything substantial.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I'll believe it when I see it. Not D1Ping a Frictional game after Pigs.

 

[Outlander]

A video that features lamps. Astounding.

 

[tuluse]

Frictional Games must be John Waters fans.

There’s no such thing as a bad movie, If you’re bored, just watch the lamps. You get obsessive and you look for the details.

 

[Metro]

I got about three hours into Amnesia before I got bored. Their earlier games were okay but now… notsomuch.

 

[Infinitron]

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/03/05/soma-update-new-trailer-crafting-survival-horror-on-ps4/

Time for a little update on how SOMA is doing. (A brief summary for those who don’t already know: SOMA is a sci-fi horror game from the creators of Amnesia: The Dark Descent that will tackle unsettling questions about consciousness. It will be released on PS4 in 2015.)

SOMA’s current status
We are currently about a week away from the alpha of the game. This is a build in which a bit more than half of the full game is playable. It’s currently clocking in at around 5 hours, meaning the final game will end up at 8 hours or so.

A game like SOMA is a bit different to have in alpha than most other games. Normally, a game relies on a core mechanic that creates the basic engagement. While graphics and sound are important, you can mostly test the game pretty early on with only temporary assets in place. This lets you get a feel for the game at a very early stage. Not so for us.

We can play our game at last!
SOMA doesn’t rely on a core gameplay loop – such as shooting baddies or jumping platforms – to create a sense of fun. Instead, you’ll take part in a wide range of activities; it’s impossible to narrow it down to one. You’ll search for notes, solve puzzles, hide from dangers, explore unsettling places, take part in strange events and sometimes just run away. All of these come together with the graphics and soundscape to create a larger whole. This means that we couldn’t properly test SOMA without having all of these things implemented in a fairly final state. Making matters worse is the fact that the game lets things take their time; slowly building up the atmosphere, narrative and themes. It is hard to condense all this into a short prototype; a large chunk of the game is required.

Because of this, we haven’t been able to get a feel for how SOMA plays until very recently. The alpha is our first opportunity to really find out what the game is like. This means that we’ve had to take a lot of the design on faith, simply hoping that it’ll all work out. So it came as a great relief to us – when we’d managed to pull together everything for a pre-alpha test a few weeks ago – to find out that the game does hang together.

This doesn’t mean that we’re totally happy with everything. Now that we know how our game plays, we also know what needs to be fixed. There are a number of goals that we wanted to hit with SOMA, and now marks the first time we can properly evaluate how well we’re doing with them.



Goal 1: The feeling of playing a narrative
It’s important that SOMA is constantly drenching the player in storytelling. We need to make sure there is always a red thread of narrative running through the game. We don’t want you to say “Oh, here comes a puzzle section”, but to constantly feel as if you are being told an interactive story. Getting this right is tricky as there still needs to be some challenge in progressing, but not so much that solving a difficult puzzle becomes your sole focus. Now that we’re close to alpha it’s possible for us to test this and tweak where needed.

Goal 2: A coherently crafted world
When creating Amnesia our setting was basically just “Old castle where supernatural stuff happens”. This allowed us to get away with just about anything and explain it with “because, magic”. But in SOMA we are building a world that is supposed to be tied into the real world and to make sense. Our goal here is to make proper sci-fi and not just a magical fantasy with futuristic designs.

This raises a whole load of issues that we might not have cared about in Amnesia. Puzzles that don’t make sense in the world, tech levels that vary throughout the game, basic physics principles that are broken and so forth. When you have a large part of the game playable a lot of these become visible, and we intend to squash them all!

Goal 3: Gameplay with plenty of variation
As mentioned above, SOMA does not rely on a core gameplay loop. There is a very good reason for this: we don’t want the player to become too fixated on figuring out the game’s underlying abstract systems. We want players to approach the game from how it looks, sounds and feels. In order for this to work the game’s different scenes can’t have the same setup, as that would make you familiar with how everything works. Instead, we need to keep things fresh and avoid repeating ourselves.

Now that we are in alpha we can more easily identify patterns and similarities in scenarios. If anything overstays its welcome it needs to be replaced by something else.

Goal 4: Deep, disturbing themes that make you think
A crucial design goal for us is to allow a deep exploration of what it means to be a sentient being. The first step towards doing this is to make sure that SOMA’s gameplay, plot, characters and setting reflect the subjects we want to discuss. If you approach the game in the right way, some seriously unsettling implications should be become clear.

And here lies the problem. Are we getting through to you in the right way? Will the really interesting details just rush past you, or will you stop and give them some serious consideration? What’s crucial here is that we don’t simply spell everything out for you, but that you can come to conclusions on your own. These sorts of things take a while to come together, and it’s not until this alpha that we’ll get a clear idea as to how it is working out.

Goal 5: A pervasive sense of horror
Finally, the game should be utterly terrifying. We do not want you to calmly stroll through the various environments; it must be emotionally tasking to progress. We want this blanket of oppression and fear wrapped around the entire experience. Sustaining this through eight or so hours takes some finesse – if we repeat something too often, you’ll get used to it and be able to predict upcoming events. The buildup must take time without becoming dull, and there needs to be a nice rhythm of ups and downs throughout the journey.

All of these are things that we’ve had a hard time getting a grip on until now. Now we can playtest a complete experience. A task that requires a dark room, a pair of headphones, an empty house and a tired, slightly hallucinating developer. You can’t leave this up to reports from your playtesters, you must experience the atmosphere firsthand to truly understand it.

The road left to travel
That should give you a good sense of the kinds of issues we’re currently struggling with. Hopefully it has also given you a bit more insight into what kind of game SOMA is.

We still have a long way to go; SOMA is still a year or so away from its 2015 release. We feel we are on the right track though, and we think this is shaping up to be our studio’s best work so far — by a wide margin.

Oh, and sometime soon, we’re going to reveal a big secret about SOMA. Keep your eyes open for it!

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Day 1 because I know brilliance when I see (and hear) it.

 

[Blaine]

It will be released on PS4

It’s important that SOMA is constantly drenching the player in storytelling.

When creating Amnesia our setting was basically just “Old castle where supernatural stuff happens”. ... Our goal here is to make proper sci-fi and not just a magical fantasy with futuristic designs.

[pretentious, vague existential nonsense]

Day 1 because I know brilliance when I see (and hear) it.

Confirmed for popamole shit.

 

[Servo]

Confirmed for popamole shit.

Wait, there's guns in it?!

 

[potatojohn]

First they made the good Penumbra games, then they make the forgettable Amnesia, then then loaned their name to the shitty developer that made a non-game, now they're making a console game?

Seems like exponential

 

[Servo]

Amnesia was a'ight.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

First they made the good Penumbra games, then they make the forgettable Amnesia, then then loaned their name to the shitty developer that made a non-game, now they're making a console game?

Also on PC. It would be almost stupid not to develop this on the PS4 too, since it's practically a PC. Good economics.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Yeah, PS4 release basically confirms braindead puzzles, small and linear environments, and spoonfeeding the narrative to the player as if he's a retard.

 

[Infinitron]

small and linear environments

Penumbra wasn't exactly Skyrim

Aiming at a mass audience is one thing, but this is a genre that doesn't really lose that much from the transition to consoles technically speaking.