09-18-2012, 08:27 PM
http://beefjack.com/news/amnesia-devs-fr...-new-game/
Quote:Amnesia: The Dark Descent developers Frictional recently teased a new horror game – and now studio co-founder Thomas Grip has revealed some early information about what it’s set to entail, and why…
Indie studio Frictional Games has outsourced development of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the follow-up to a bona-fide horror classic, to Dear Esther developers thechineseroom (whom we chatted to about the project a while back). While they’re working away on that, Frictional are scurrying around planning their next in-house game – and co-founder Thomas Grip has been speaking to BeefJack about what it might involve.
A tight-lipped Grip was reluctant to reveal too much information about the new game, but did go over some of the basics, and the thought-processes behind the game.
“It will be a first-person horror game, and a lot of it will be built upon lessons learned from Amnesia,” Grip explained. It’s set to be a more thoughtful and thought-provoking game than its predecessor – a terrifying game that, according to the developers, sometimes struggled to convey a deep enough message.
“The way we handled horror in Amnesia was that we just threw stuff in without thinking too much about why it was there,” he said. “Our main goal was simply to build up a scary atmosphere, and whatever contributed to that was added. This means that you as a player can not really think too deeply about any element, since there often was not any deeper intent with it.
Some of the best bits of Amnesia arrived when visions linked directly with the player character’s past forced the player to think more carefully about their role within the game world, said Grip – but these moments didn’t come along frequently enough.
“For our next game we want to have more thought behind everything that happens, and tie things together, so if the player thinks some more about it, it will take things a step further. So we want these extra layers to the gameplay that will really get below the skin of the player. The small stuff we had in Amnesia felt like a good indicator that this could have excellent results, so it felt like the logical next step to take.”
The best of the horror genre forces people to confront subject matters that they’d normally shy away from thinking about, said Grip – and that’s what he hopes Frictional’s next game will do.
And perhaps, as unlikely as it sounds, Telltale’s Walking Dead adventure series – which forces players to make morally ambiguous choices that have an effect on the story – might be providing some inspiration.
“I think you can say we will go with a similar approach, but it will play out differently because our gameplay strengths are quite different from The Walking Dead,” said Grip. “With first-person, you get very involved in this insider’s perspective, and that is something we wantto make use of. The plan is to create a first-person narrative which places the player in the middle of these subjects.”
But perhaps the biggest surprise is that Frictional’s new game didn’t start out as a horror title at all.
Grip told BeefJack of his passion for horror, but said this doesn’t mean the studio won’t ever approach another genre. “In fact,” he revealed, “our upcoming game did not start out as [a horror game], but because of the subject matters involved it slowly turned into one.”
The new game doesn’t have a name yet, but it’s due out some time in 2014.