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Amnesia: The Dark Descent (makers of Penumbra)

Gragt

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DraQ said:
Well, that was the whole point of imbibing the mixture in the first place.

Sure, but that doesn't mean it worked as intended. Just consider what Daniel did and what happened as a result of that.
 
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Yeah it's just annoying when the game is too slow. What kind of human enjoys walking in a painfully slow manner? It's like in Morrowind, who could bear to use walk instead of run?

Also I love this game but you make a lot of good points that I share as well. Yes the sanity thing is ultimately just an annoyance. I also don't like games that rely on making tons of scripted "poltergeist" events, because it feels forced, especially when you lose control in the process. The game screams at you: "Oh my God look at how SCARY this is!!", as if you weren't able to realize it for yourself.

It's also a shame that enemies disappear when they're avoided, where is the sense of danger in all of that? Nothing is scarier than having to deal with a dangerous enemy that you never know when you're going to face (see Resident Evil 3 and Clocktower).
 

Gragt

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Penumbra had this same sort of problem: if you entered an area with an enemy, you could exit the area from where you entered it, come back, and the enemy would likely be gone. Having one enemy randomly spawning would be more fun to keep the tension on, but would likely make the adventure elements harder, though would that be a bad thing?

I remember having fun with the Hellnight game for PSX. That one had you explore various dark locations while pursued by one enemy. Depending on the character accompanying you, you could track it on the map if it was close or be able to shoot it to stun it, but not kill it. Also it could disapear of the map and respawn at random of scripted event. Now that was tense. Oh, and it evolved over time and became bigger and faster!
 

Nano

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Big update just released. How random.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/09/21/amnesia-the-dark-descent-adding-hard-mode/

Amnesia: The Dark Descent adding Hard Mode for hard nuts
Alice O'Connor
News Editor
21st September 2018 / 3:52PM

70

I was jolly pleased when Frictional Games patched a ‘Safe Mode’ into Soma, letting fraidypants like me freely explore the undersea horror. Conversely, I said “Ha ha ha NOPE” aloud after Frictional announced today that they will next add a new difficulty level to Amnesia: The Dark Descent – a ‘Hard Mode’ to freak your nut out and murder you hard. No thank you! But I know some Amnesia players had wanted their minds more fragile and its ghoulies deadlier, so good for them? Agh.

Frictional are adding Hard Mode to their 2010 breakout hit as it comes to Xbox One in a new collection. That’s due on September 28th, “after which the mode will be available on Xbox and PC,” Frictional say. As for the specifics of what makes Hard Mode different, they explain:

  • Autosaves are disabled, and manual saving costs 4 tinderboxes
  • Sanity dropping to zero results in death
  • Less oil and tinderboxes throughout the levels
  • Monsters are faster, spot the player more easily, deal more damage and stay around for longer
  • There is no danger music when the monsters are near.
Naw I’m good, thanks.

Amnesia’s horror is more about mood than systemic challenge, so some of this is curious. The danger music they’re removing here is part of what builds that mood, and I always find that I stop being scared of a horror game when it starts to frustrate me, too. But hey, Hard Mode is an option I can easily avoid. Regular and Hard mode will be separate, with no way to switch between them once you’ve started your spooOoky adventure.

Babies like me can remove Amnesia’s enemies by fiddling with some files if we really want, but I don’t quite want that. I liked that Soma’s Safe Mode kept its monsters, making them docile rather than removing them; they were still wonderfully horrible just hanging around. I like how I’m saying all this as if I will ever return to Amnesia, as if I’ll ever unlock the cursed digital crate of horror games I have flung away in terror. Very brave.

If you’re interested in Frictional’s spook ’em ups, do also read Samuel Horti’s recent chat with Frictional co-founder Thomas Grip and other spookmarkers.

Anyway, right, go ahead, start boasting about how you weren’t scared AT ALL during Amnesia and how anyone who says they heard your mam had to sing you to sleep while stroking your hair for a week after is a liar.
 

Unkillable Cat

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Nice that they updated Amnesia like that, I might actually give it another go to try this out someday.
 

garren

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So yeah, the Hard Mode is pretty bullshit. You get extremely few tinderboxes and it requires four of them to be able to save, so you have to play pretty long stretches without saving. Wouldn't be a problem but you also die if your sanity falls too low, and you get hit by so many sanity reducing effects (by script) while playing that your sanity needs to be crystal clear all the time just to be able to survive.

I first died in the wine cellar when walking to the scripted event where the box falls on your head and you pass out. My sanity was pretty low so I was risking it but I didn't think the scripted event of passing out would reduce it even more, so I got hit in the head by the box and promptly died from that (hp was full), so hooray a restart because I was saving my 6 tinderboxes for saves.

Next try, kept my sanity as high as I could, survived the box and the wine cellar, got to the refinery and thought what the hell, ill use up my first save when I get to the water monster. Still only had the six tinderboxes, and used the lantern pretty excessively so my sanity wouldn't drop too low. Entered a room with a health potion and got a scripted event where the monster starts banging at the door. OK shit hide and turn the lantern off, ok monster gone, lantern on. Checked my sanity meter that said "a slight headache", ok good enough, entered the next room WITH THE LANTERN ON, the monster starts making noises again from somewhere, the screen turns red and my character falls to the ground and dies. What the hell? This is some next level bullshit. I think I'll pass this mode.
 
Last edited:

Boleskine

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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...-descents-horror-relied-on-a-bit-of-cheating/

Video: Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s horror relied on a bit of cheating
"War Stories" shines some light on what lives in the game's madness-inducing darkness.
Sam Machkovech - 4/16/2019, 11:10 AM


Video shot and edited by Justin Wolfson. Click here for transcript.
2010 video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an obvious candidate for our eventual "best games of the '10s" list, owing to its revolutionary take on interactive horror. The indie game ushered in a new era of horror gaming, thanks in part to its brief, focused scope and its utter lack of weapons or combat. But how did the designers at Swedish game studio Frictional Games pull off Amnesia's scariest stuff?

The mouth of madness
In our video interview, Grip talks about how Amnesia came about after the completion of a creepy puzzle-platformer series called Penumbra. That series was built upon a physics system that let players pick up, stack, and contend with objects in the world in order to proceed, and Friction wanted to follow those games with a "good horror" experience, inspired in part by Konami's Silent Hill series.

The studio's original thinking for Amnesia revolved around forcing players to survive with a very old-school system of a life bar, but play-testing revealed that this focus either annoyed players or didn't scare them. The above interview delves a little more into experiments with things like a light-and-dark hiding system and how the game's "sanity" meter originally worked like a traditional "hit points" counter.
But as the game began taking shape, the team struggled with how to find the right balance so that players would confront the scariest content no matter how well or badly they played. The solution: "We had basically nothing!"

The power of suggestion
Instead of building a complex solution, the team turned the "sanity meter" into a persistent system that applied no matter how well or poorly a player traversed through the game. Players always saw the sanity meter on the screen, and they saw crazy visual effects fill the screen when that meter dropped to a low number. What's more, the designers made sure that no matter what path you took in the game, you'd always see the sanity meter drop.

The secret, Grip says, is that "there was no real fail state. And it worked better! We don't really [tell players] what the consequences are for [losing sanity]. But the player assumes, right, if I lose my mind, I'm not going to be able to play. I might die or be harder to control." What's more, Amnesia's early in-game text outright lies to players by telling them to beware the consequences of a full sanity meter drop.

There are indeed ways to die and restart in the game, owing to the monsters that players must hide from. But the sanity meter's job is to keep the player off-base and unbalanced rather than to contribute useful information—and going purely by player reaction videos on Youtube (warning: loud swearing!), it works—it works really, really well.
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Viata JDR13 I brag about liking horror games but I kind of didn't get this one. I think I got stuck behind a bunch of desks in a library and found a piece of paper that said spooky stuff and I opened a bunch of desk drawers that were all empty and I couldn't get out sooooooo somehow I never went back to this.
 

LESS T_T

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:necro:

https://frictionalgames.com/2020-09-amnesia-is-now-open-source/



Amnesia is now open source!

Modding has been a huge part of Amnesia. For instance, over the years The Dark Descent has accumulated over a thousand mods and addons on ModDB. This flood of user content has been amazing to see and we are extremely grateful for the whole community surrounding it all.

It is time we gave something back!

So today we are releasing the full source code for Amnesia: The Dark Descent under GPL v3:

https://github.com/FrictionalGames/AmnesiaTheDarkDescent

https://github.com/FrictionalGames/AmnesiaAMachineForPigs

The code release contains all the game code for both The Dark Descent and A Machine For Pigs. It also contains all editor code.

Very important note: This doesn’t mean that the game is suddenly free. It just means that people are free to use the source however they want as long as they adhere to the GPL3 licence. The game and all of its content is still owned by Frictional Games. Just like before.

Think of the release as “free speech”, not “free beer”.

It feels like we could have released this source code a long time ago. Unfortunately there has always been something else we had to attend to instead. But now that Amnesia: The Dark Descent has had its 10th anniversary and Amnesia: Rebirth is less than a month away, we just couldn’t wait any longer!

We are all really excited to see what comes out of it! The modding community has been incredibly creative over the years and it will be fun to see what it can do with the full source code at its disposal.

I also hope this release can be of help to anyone wanting to create their own engine or just wanting to learn more about game programming. While the code is not the greatest in places and the tech used is not the latest, it is a fully contained game engine in a fairly easy-to-understand package. It is also a testament that it is possible to do this sort of thing, even with a very limited team.

Noteworthy features include:
  • Shadow mapping with soft edges.
  • Realtime visibility culling system that also works for dynamic objects.
  • Automatic render batch system of static objects.
  • Deferred shading system.
  • A full editor with lots of interesting feature that such as picking algorithms and view fitting.
  • Very simple state machine AI that still gives rise to fairly interesting and intelligent agents.
  • Fairly advanced system for physics sounds.
  • Physics based interaction system.
  • Own sound system implemented using OpenAL
  • Lots of other basic rendering and gameplay tech all implemented in an a coherent engine structure
Obviously, all these things are decade old and nothing new. But I think they can all be quite interesting for anyone learning gamedev, or that are just curious how Amnesia worked under the hood.

Again, thanks to everyone who has created Amnesia-related stuff over the years, it has been a blast to witness!
 

Wirdschowerdn

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I have finished the King's Sorrow demo, and was surprised how well it was made. It's on the same eye-level as the original game in terms of professionalism, and understanding how to build up tension.

People who make these mods are the reason why PC gaming remains an undying passion to me.
 

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