Frictional Games Forum (read-only)

Full Version: Some logical enhancements
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Amnesia have a really good shadow system to let the player see light and dark effects. When you throw a box through the shining light of the window, then you see the shadow moved on the ground or wall.
But why did the player have no shadow?
I think, it would be a good improvement if the protagonist would have a shadow.
When you walk beside a window, then you see your own shadow moving on the walls. The player feels like he is in the game and not only a visible spawned ghost.
It also could make a horror effect, when you see your own shadow or some tricks with shadowing effects.

An other reason is when you look at the ground, you don't see your feets.
It would influence the atmosphere when you see Daniel is walking barefoot over the moist old stones of Brennenburg castle. When you see your feets on the ground, without any shoes, you may get more feeling of an helpless guy. Not a super hero with paladin armor.

A further point is an atmospheric enhancement you can get with dark animals, Amnesia has rats what would make a good atmosphere in the cells. But what about some ravens or bats? The sound of ravens is really atmospheric and bats would be make the environment more alive and could be used as some shock effects for example. All to get is a very detailed atmosphere.
Even use high definition textures, could be photo-real.
And more sounds for creaking wooden beams or sth.
While I can't speak on Frictionals behalf, I'll just throw my 2 cents in here.

Regarding your first two points, I would guess it's probably due partly to time and engine limits, and partly to realism. It is really hard to pull feet off realistically, and our built-in recognition of how a human being "should look" will quickly figure out that "hmm, those legs don't look quite right...". That is actually a quite large pitfall of loads of those "realistic" modern FPS games. As for the shadows, that would take a large amount of effort on Frictionals part proportional to the gain achieved.

Now, the last point, I frankly don't understand. Not as in "I don't understand what you're saying", but more like "Why would you even want that??". What you're suggesting here, and what I've seen you suggesting loads of other places around here, is to basically drag all these horror clichès into Amnesia... That doesn't make sense at all! Amnesia is all about creating an unique horror experience, and clichès are not scary... Ravens, bats, little girls, mummies, they've all been done a million times over. They've become something we're all familiar with, and familiarity isn't scary.

Also, from a pure technical aspect, imagine how much work it would be just to create these. They'd have to create a model, texture it, animate it, make a new AI for flying creatures, test it all in-game to make sure it works, and all this for something that have been seen so many times before that it's lost any horror aspect it may have once had.

No offense man, but these ideas are pretty stupid... Dodgy