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Frogwares' The Sinking City - that other Cthulhu game

Explorerbc

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Nov 22, 2012
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I don't know about you guys, but (in)conveniently placed machine gun on that guy's back already has me nervous.

Then it's a good thing you didn't check the rest of the concept art in their site +M

 

Angthoron

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[Witcher Sense] This gargantuan transdimensional squid seems to have been murdered with a projectile weapon.
1. Investigate bullet holes
2. Observe bullet casings
3. Perform autopsy
4. Conclusions

RK47
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
axii.png
Plough yourself.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Many of us would enjoy a successor to DCotE. Shooting lightning bolts from one hand with a rocket launcher in the other, not so much.
 
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Angthoron

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Many of us would enjoy a successor to DCotE. Shooting lightning bolts from one hand with a rocket launcher in the other, not so much.
Devs of Call of Cthulhu have been heavily influenced by previous works in the franchise: Call of Duty 2, 4 and Ghosts.
 

vortex

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Many of us would enjoy a successor to DCotE. Shooting lightning bolts from one hand with a rocket launcher in the other, not so much.
Well, I didn't mean exact spells and guns as in Bioshock, only reimagined System(Bio)shock in lovecraftian setting.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Unexpectedly academic post from one of this game's developers: http://frogwares.com/urban-planning-lovecraftian-horror-first-steps/

Urban Planning for Lovecraftian Horror: The First Steps
Urban Planning for Lovecraftian Horror: The First Steps

By Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Cultists can worship ancient and essentially unknowable deities in or around any city. A basement in New York, a posh London apartment, a secluded New Orleans swamp, a derelict church in Kiev and, in extraordinary cases of summoning something truly gargantuan, Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución can all work brilliantly. Cultists operating in them and strange things happening hidden in their shadows wouldn’t though make New York, London, New Orleans, Kiev or Mexico City Lovecraftian cities in and of themselves. It would only make them cities in which something Lovecraftian is going on.

Happily, when Frogwares approached me to work on the Sinking City’s open world city, they already knew they weren’t just looking to create an intriguing, living 1920s urban environment, and then simply flood and fill it with horrors in order to create a passable background of urbanism. They wanted to create something fundamentally different. A city the foundations of which had been subtly but definitely shaped by the Cthulhu mythos. A truly Lovecraftian urban environment with a strong sense of place –a Genius Loci— and the ability to feel disturbing even on a lovely autumn afternoon.

But, how would such a city differ from, say, a haunted version of Providence or Boston? Well, let me indirectly answer this by giving you an example; the very same example that helped me approach the matter. Think if you will of Lovecraft’s ‘The Horror At Red Hook’ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. The first is taking place in a brilliantly presented yet still metaphysically mundane Brooklyn, whereas the latter in the decidedly different from your average city Innsmouth. Innsmouth, you see, is not merely a place inhabited by strange people with alien customs, nor is it just the hiding and mating place of the Deep Ones.

It is instead a very unique town built around the needs and desires of a hybrid and Deep Ones population, which simultaneously allows for some semblance of seemingly normal city life and maintains a facade of humanity. Innsmouth serves the monstrous religious needs of its inhabitants, lets them, among other things, move around unseen, live in relative comfort and have easy access to the sea, but it also has a small network of shops, residences, hotels etc to offer to the unsuspecting mortal. Obviously, it can never feel absolutely right, even though people who’ve lived there for years still can’t exactly describe what is wrong with the place. They know they should be scared, but cannot tell what of exactly.


A spoiler-free glimpse at the 90-pages long ‘Urban Manifestations of Lovecraftian Horror’ I wrote for the Sinking City team.

The main question I and the Sinking City team had to answer was thus what the city of Oakmont would look and feel like, and that was a question that, handily, could only begin to be approached in a perversely traditional geographic way. The works of H. P. Lovecraft simply wouldn’t be enough in providing us with all the answers, though admittedly re-reading HPL’s urban focused stories felt too good to be considered work. And, uninhabitable as it might be, R’lyeh is quite the metropolis…

Anyway. I was certain that the first thing we’d have to do would be decide on what the functions of such a city would be, and acknowledge the fact that they would have to be divided into two broad and necessarily intermingling categories. Not dissimilarly to Innsmouth, on one hand there would have to be normal urban functions such as traffic, commerce, and production, and on the other hand there would have to be the secret functions serving ancient inhuman goals. Both sets of functions would have historically shaped the city, while dialectically tending to the dark soul of Oakmont and allowing for a hefty 1920s urban center to exist and retain its population in pre-Depression New England.

Until the flood* struck, that is, and promptly submerged great chunks of the place under water, while allowing its less advertised set of functions to take over and start inviting every passing Old One to the city. The flood that helped Oakmont’s dark core to emerge and make itself obvious.

Said majestic and terrifying core cannot emerge in an unshaped vacuum though; nor in front of a flimsy, obviously fake urban background. The horrors of the flood and those unearthed by it have to manifest themselves in a city that actually feels and behaves like one. No matter how strange and disturbing Oakmont might at times (and places) be, it will have to feel lived-in and real, and that’s why we have to excavate its present in its history. That is why crafting its detailed history has been so important to me.

It will be –and to a point already is– a history that even when invisible has informed planning choices ranging from the mundane (what street furniture do we need?) to the architectural (how does this temple look like and has it changed during the past 100 years?) to the urbanistic (why is this house here?) to the occult (when were those half-hidden monoliths erected?) to those important matters of everyday life (what do people do on a Sunday evening when not running away from eldritch horrors?). Planning choices both collective and individual, both spontaneous and institutional.

The Sinking City is not being treated as a collection of buildings. Its streets are not merely an opportunity for Frogwares’ artists to show off their skills in creating facades. We are not limiting ourselves to horror or architectural elements either, and the whole team has realized that cities are much more than even their functions. They are way more complex than that. They are the people. The public spaces. The climate, the sky, the smells and colors. The impromptu festivals and the strikes. The looming factories and the old harbour.

In the case of Oakmont the city is also the roaring ’20s, New England, speakeasies, Prohibition, and most emphatically the flood, and we’ll be doing our very best to create a complex, living, breathing Lovecraftian urban environment unlike anything else and possible only in the interactive medium of videogames.



[Konstantinos Dimopoulos is a game designer, writer, urban planner and geographer of cities with a PhD on urban matters and a tendency to consult on games.]

*This is not your average garden-variety New England flood. It is a flood stranger and way more persistent than even the 1936 one that devastated much of New England leaving behind over 150 dead.
 

agris

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Hey that sounds great, this guy actually read the stories, and isn't inspired by pop culture inspired by Lovecraft.

I read Dreams of the Witch House, at the mountains of madness and Centipede's Lovecraft compilation around halloween last year to get in the mood of the season, and really appreciate seeing references to his writing outside of done-to-death cthulu. It's great to hear the dev drop R'lyeh and the Terror at Red Hook with its insane psychotic narrative.

He makes it sound like it could be almost a... good open world game?
 

Zombra

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Frogwares CEO Wael Amr says basically nothing in this latest interview. Some nice high-res versions of some of the concept art without the annoying logos.

http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2016...ries_with_sherlock_holmes_developer_frogwares



Frogwares next title is The Sinking City, an open world investigation game based on the work of HP Lovecraft. Has there been any challenges in the transition to open world design?


We feel that us creating our first open world game is a natural evolution of the path that we've been taking. We are gamers ourselves, and we know that an open world design has its own set of rules and challenges that need to be tackled in their own specific way. The biggest one – making sure that the world "lives". There is nothing hard in creating a huge map, but it is the little, subtle things that make the world great. We want players to feel like they wondered into a liveable, breathing, macro-organism – with its own set of rules, stories, and people. This is what we want to create in The Sinking City – a world that is real.



The concept art for the game is rich with tentacles, is this going to be full on horror?

There will be elements of horror in The Sinking City, but not just your typical "giant, evil looking monster is coming – be scared" type of horror. We know that the things that we are scared of the most are those that we don't know. As a player, you will also dwell into the world of the occult and mysticism, seeing and experiencing things that are truly out of this world. This will be a game that will go after your senses and emotions – not just after jump-scares.

Like Conan Doyle, Lovecraft has a rich universe to mine, could this be the start of a new ongoing series?

For the moment, we are only concentrating on The Sinking City. What will the future bring? Only time will tell. Right now, we just want to make sure that our first Lovecraft-inspired game will be as strong as possible.
 

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