heywood on 21/8/2020 at 12:10
Snark comes with the territory.
i'm glad you enjoyed it ZB. And I know a lot of people did. I give it high marks for attention to detail in the level design and sound, but as a game it's one of the weakest I've played in recent memory.
Sulphur on 23/8/2020 at 11:20
SOMA is absolutely not perfect in a lot of respects, but I don't understand your criticism.
Quote Posted by heywood
The problem with the example I gave is that it's pointless. It serves no gameplay purpose and no narrative purpose.
In any reasonably immersive and believable fiction, you'd have a conversation with Amy about her predicament and what options exist to resolve it and what her wishes are. But nope, the game doesn't let you do what any actual person would do. The game just presents you with a random woman and asks "Do you want to kill her? (Y/N)?" It's an annoyingly contrived forced choice, it has no consequences, and the game denies you enough information to make it interesting or morally ambiguous. So it's just as empty as the surveys. The other encounters are like that too, with the exception of
Carl, where your decision determines whether the construct spawns. But even in that case, at the moment you make the decision, you're not asked to weigh your own needs against his suffering. So again, it's an empty choice.
What I'm hearing here is that you want consequences for your actions. SOMA isn't trying to do this because it's an existential story firmly rooted in exploring what it means to be alive - it's telling you to make a choice based on what you feel is right.
Amy is the last living person on Earth, and what you do there serves as a precursor, or foreshadowing as such, to your decision with the WAU. The consequences are entirely what you choose to leave the game with having done them as one of the last people in that story. It refuses to judge your actions because that's
your job.
Quote:
All of these decisions in the game are really just one decision.
Do you wipe out the last remains of humanity out of mercy because they are stuck in a nightmare situation, or do you leave them alive, either because you can't bring yourself to kill, or out of desperate hope that maybe, someday, they can be rescued or at least improve their situation. That's the whole game in a nutshell and it's kind of obvious from the very first encounter. Once you've made that decision, it's rinse and repeat because the game just keeps asking the same fundamental question over and over.
See, here's your viewpoint from the other side of the mirror: the game's about whether people - that is, you - want to believe in something, and want to have something to hope in or not despite the impossibility of it; its choices are clearly keyed around this.
Humanity is already dead in practical terms, there isn't much left to 'save'. The entire game is essentially set in purgatory, and asks what you'd do to define existence in it as a freshly minted soul.Quote:
Another thing that insulted my intelligence is that right after the intro you ought to know (or can pretty well guess) that
you're a cyborg but Simon plays stupid for far too long before the game reveals what is already obvious. I think most fans of sci-fi will notice the plot is just one trope after another and it's predictable. People hyped up the story so much that I kept waiting for a twist that would surprise me or make me think "oh, that's clever" and it never came. Likewise, it was said the game would make you think about morality, but I found it to be shallower than even Bioshock in that respect.
The game categorically does not treat this as a twist. The 'reveal' is so prosaic and matter of fact, I think anyone expecting it to be a twist was looking for things in the text that aren't there. Simon is a bit stupid, I think we can all agree on that not least based on how the game ends. But all of the hints over time and
Simon's simple, weary acceptance of what he is point to it being intended as a gradual realisation instead of some shocking revelation.
As far as morality is concerned - like I said, SOMA isn't a story that judges. I don't know who these people are who hyped those aspects of it up to you, because they seem to have misunderstood it. While morality is a part of the decision making process, the game really isn't
about morality. You get out of it what you bring to it.
It's definitely not a great
game, if you're looking for something with systems and loops and skill curves. But as a story that gives you agency and then shows you how laughable that idea can be, it's a fundamentally great piece of sci-fi.
chk772 on 23/8/2020 at 16:05
That's probably the problem. I play a game to... play a game. Not watch a movie, or read a story.
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Sulphur on 23/8/2020 at 17:10
It's definitely a game, because it threads interaction and puzzling through the experience; it just isn't a traditional FPS or surhor because its priorities very much do not centre around 'shoot and defeat enemy to win gaem'.
chk772 on 24/8/2020 at 10:45
The question is why we even discuss a game which so vastly differs from the game this thread is about. :)
Oh, right... because I said that there are no more intelligent games these days. Well, fair enough. SOMA is still something entirely different than System Shock 2.
Sulphur on 24/8/2020 at 11:31
No one knows what your criteria for 'intelligent' are, because if SOMA's narrative doesn't qualify, then it boils down to 'games with gameplay like SS2', which we've had a bunch of including the relatively recent Prey and Dishonored 2 and Quadrilateral Cowboy. And I don't see how it's relevant to exclude indie games from this question.
chk772 on 25/8/2020 at 09:46
Quote Posted by Sulphur
And I don't see how it's relevant to exclude indie games from this question.
Again, I talked about games like System Shock 2 (which this threads is about). I don't see how adventures or indie games fit here. Or games like "Quadrilateral Cowboy", which I had to look up to know what it is, and which looks like a low budget Minecraft, in regards of the graphics. System Shock 2 is not - a adventure; a indie game; a game which looks like Minecraft.
You can of course go on discussing about "intelligent" games though, even though it doesn't fit the topic.
Sulphur on 25/8/2020 at 10:46
See, that's the problem. People like throwing about terms like 'intelligent' when waxing nostalgic, when they only have a vague notion of what that even means, except that it harks back to a time when they were younger and enjoyed playing a certain kind of game that, oh dear, is no longer being made.
Except that isn't true, and if you wanted games with SS2's gameplay, they clearly exist if you look for them, arbitrary criteria like 'not indie/shouldn't have a lo-fi aesthetic like Minecraft' notwithstanding.
If your general observation is that AAA gaming is mostly creativity-free and a production line for cookie-cutter products, that has always been the case. SS2 wasn't as popular as Quake 3; SS1 wasn't as popular as Doom; and so on. The only real change is that the creativity you so wish for is now the province of the relatively recent indie scene - which you have implicitly acknowledged by noting that AAA games have to be risk-averse due to their production costs - and it is baffling that you would reject that out of hand because te grafx aren't always to your taste.
heywood on 28/8/2020 at 18:27
There are different ways to assess the "intelligence" of a game, but one aspect that's important to me is a game shouldn't assume the player is an idiot, either in the gameplay or the story telling. Intelligent games should challenge players. They should expect players to explore and discover things on their own and learn how the game systems work. They should reward players for developing good tactics and punish players who just jump into situations without thinking. Intelligent games feature gameplay with depth and meaningful choices, to get players to think strategically and encourage people to replay it and master it. They don't need to be complex for complexity's sake. Take chess, the rules are simple enough that anybody can start playing right away, but the gameplay is deep enough that you could spend a lifetime mastering it. Intelligent games should not have objectives that are so obtuse or arbitrary that they either require players to exhaustively brute force search the solution space, or rely on quest arrows or other player aids to make finding the solution reasonable.
I don't know any game that really nails ALL of those criteria, but my favorite games meet most of them. I consider SS1 to be an intelligent game, although it does have some arbitrary/obtuse objectives that are essentially just hunting for a key in a random location. SS2 has objectives like that too, and for those objectives the SS2 devs decided to lead players around by the noise rather than expecting them to exhaustively search. But SS2 has deeper gameplay and more replayability than SS1 because of its RPG elements, and its RPG system is not such that you can succeed easily no matter what combination of choices you make, it really rewards players who follow a strategy and punishes players who don't. Prey is one of the better games to come out in a while, but it falls short of SS2. Like Bioshock, it copies many elements of SS2's gameplay, but everything feels shallower to me because your choices just don't have as much weight. Like most modern games, it's success-oriented. It's more concerned about making sure that players can progress no matter what choices they make, and less about rewarding players who put in the effort to try everything and figure out what works the best for each situation.
I find it very hard to accept as "intelligent" a game that affords little/no player agency, because without player agency all you're really doing is telling a story. If that's what you want to do, you can do that with a novel. An intelligent game doesn't just put you on a rail and tell you a story, it allows different players to have different experiences, and allows a certain degree of freedom to create your own story that varies from one playthrough to the next. Player agency requires 1) choices, and 2) consequences.
The relative importance and intelligence of a game's plot/story/narrative is more subjective. Different people are going to be attracted to different storytelling styles & methods, different topic and themes, etc. The stories that I tend to think are intelligent are either original and (often) high concept, or if they are based on simple or recycled themes, they can still be intelligent due to great writing or a unique perspective on a well-trodden theme. The film Inception is a good example of the former. Among games, SS1 is not bad either. Deus Ex is a good example of the latter.
Next there is dialogue. If you're going to let the player speak to NPCs, it had better be good enough to be somewhat believable and not immersion-breaking. And if you're going to allow the player to take different approaches to the game (benevolent, non-violent, assassin, psychopath, etc.), there should be dialogue to match. I don't play Bethesda RPGs anymore, and one of the things that turned me off in their games was that I could rarely say what I wanted to say. The choices were either binary (yes I'll take your quest or no I won't) or super shallow and cliched or sometimes nonsensical. I'd rather be mute than forced to talk if there's no dialogue options that are believable. Also, if you're going to give players options, like lethal vs. non-lethal, or ending a quest a certain way, NPCs should respond accordingly. An intelligent game that includes dialogue will respond to your actions, to provide the illusion that you're part of a living world. I don't want to play in a world that feels static, with everyone & everything disconnected from each other and just waiting around for me to appear.
That's why, to me, SOMA fails to be an intelligent game on any level. Gameplay-wise, I shouldn't have to explain that to anyone on TTLG. The only purpose any of the gameplay serves is as filler to spread the story bits apart in time. Story-wise, it's nothing original. The themes and concepts have been covered before. In fact, I'm not sure there's anything that wasn't covered in just Star Trek:TOS alone. There's no player agency. The choices are meaningless in the game but they are also not thought provoking or morally challenging. I can elaborate on that, but I'm not sure there's a point in doing so. And the dialogue insulted my intelligence more often than not. I don't know what you are talking about re: Simon having a gradual realization of who/what he is, because the very first thing that Simon does in the game is choose to be what he is. The stupidity just continues from there.
ZylonBane on 28/8/2020 at 22:04
Quote Posted by heywood
the very first thing that Simon does in the game is choose to be what he is.
The hell are you talking about? The very first thing Simon does in the game is answer his phone.