Sulphur on 29/8/2020 at 03:23
Quote Posted by heywood
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 disagree with this in principle, but the problem with criteria like this is that there's no gold standard for it. One person's obtuse puzzle from Riven is another person's meaty problem-solving experience. The best developers can hope to do is design something that doesn't talk down to players while still giving them nudges in the right direction. Which, you know, SOMA does for its puzzles.
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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.
I'm going to call this out as a hard disagree with you here, because one, you're conflating the very different argument of 'what do I define as a video game' with 'what do I define as intelligent'. And two, you're dressing up what is essentially wanting validation from the power fantasy games can afford as intelligence, not actually defining it in any appreciable way. Player agency does
not always require consequences, because that's part of making a choice - reality may not have anything to say about your actions.
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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.
I don't have as narrow a viewpoint on this, but then as you mentioned, this is fairly subjective. Deus Ex was a hodgepode of a lot of things, and some things it did well, while the story most of the time was clunky at best.
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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.
Again, you're actually simply asking for more agency here. While I would
love for video games to give everyone every single option their minds can come up with to deal with a situation in a dialogue tree, I'm also putting my designer hat on and saying, 'yeah, fuck that'. The exponential branching of allowing for just three different options for a quest and the way that propagates across NPC dialogue trees to reflect and match as well isn't trivial, let alone factoring that into the voiceover script, so if I'm going to do multiple choice, you bet it's going to be only for ones with actual, game-changing consequences.
Having said that, this has almost nothing to do with SOMA, since it's not a game about dialogue trees.
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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.
You're free to have your opinion, but all I hear in the end from everything you've written is a single complaint about agency. Which this game was subverting all along - and you don't like that, that's fine.
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The choices are meaningless in the game but they are also not thought provoking or morally challenging.
Like I said, you get out of it what you bring to it.
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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.
I'm going to echo ZB here. What?
Simon never asked to be put into a cyborg body in the future. The story's about him reconciling the difference between when the experiment was done with him waking up into a nightmare, and then understanding what happened with the WAU - there's no actual grand reveal that the WAU pulled his data and activated it. Simon merely eventually accepts that he's not human instead of going, 'oh wow, I was a robot all along!'. Most people playing twigged onto this fact early on and understood it wasn't the story talking down to them because Simon was taking the time to grok and accept his situation, but you seem determined to interpret that as an insult to your intelligence instead.
Niborius on 29/8/2020 at 16:29
Back on topic: just finished the game. What an amazing creepy atmosphere where you constantly feel unsafe, especially in the first 5 decks. The graphics dated pretty well I have to say for a 21 year old game.
After that, I really didn't like the huge amount of monsters the game was throwing at me. Especially in late game. I felt as if it has lost its creepy atmosphere and just became an action shooter instead. But the worst of all must have been the ending cutscene ("nah"), although I did read that they had other plans for that ending originally.
Still, very glad I played this. It was a great adventure overall :)
heywood on 31/8/2020 at 20:12
The low point of the game for me is the body of the Many level. It's too big and the second half of it is grindy if you're not an OSA character. The big tooth jumping puzzle and the brain boss battle are too "gamey". And all the way up until that level, the Many is presented as a collective consciousness/hive mind, but you can kill it all by destroying its brain? That seemed like a logic gap in an otherwise very good story.
I was happy that the game didn't end there. The final level was a nice homage to SS1 and I was happy to finally get a bit of cyberspace. A lot of people didn't like the ending cutscene, but I thought it was serviceable. I wouldn't have given Goggles a spoken line though.
Starker on 1/9/2020 at 04:46
It even looks like ass! For me, the game really starts to drag from Rickenbacker, where it becomes exceedingly linear and boring, but I start losing patience somewhere between Recreation and Command, which is probably more due to the game jerking the player around one too many times.
Sulphur on 1/9/2020 at 05:09
Quote Posted by Starker
It even looks like ass!
Considering what you're travelling inside, that's kind of appropriate.
Starker on 1/9/2020 at 12:49
Yeah, I don't know... I do like the concept and the body horror elements of an alien hivemind taking over a spaceship and its inhabitants and transforming it into a different biome, but I'm not sure I liked the execution all that much. I didn't feel the visuals (especially the textures) really supported what SS2 was going for in that aspect and they often seemed kind of cartoonish and a bit too much on the nose, such as the rumbler having a face on its body as if it was just pasted there -- I felt like the shape, the sounds, and the danger level it represented did much more in that regard. Likewise, for me, the Body of the Many failed to deliver what Prefontaine's audio logs promised. For sure, it's impressive how they took someone's colonoscopy video and based the textures on that, but it felt more like a video game level with flesh-coloured textures than the body of a living organism.
Sulphur on 1/9/2020 at 13:43
Oh, I wasn't defending it, just making the obvious joke. Pretty sure I felt underwhelmed too when it came down to that section, but it's a weak area in an otherwise excellent game. Part of the problem was you couldn't really do 3D organic environments well with the state of graphics tech in '99, and the other part of it is has there ever been an organic-based level that actually felt good to play? And then there's the overall issue of using Dark to create that when its speciality is hard, angular edges, which would have been quite the challenge in and of itself.
Starker on 1/9/2020 at 14:22
Quote Posted by Sulphur
and the other part of it is has there ever been an organic-based level that actually felt good to play?
I haven't played it myself, but a cursory Google search seems to indicate some people like the Riftworm level in Gears of War 2.
But that's kind of aside the point. Movies have figured out quite a while ago (Alien, Jaws, etc) that just the idea of something being present is real enough to the audience without having to directly show it. Yes, the tech wasn't there to do a convincing organic level inside a living creature, but I think it would have been far more effective if the level was that of a spaceship section where you could just see the flesh outside of ship's windows and maybe make a few brief excursions into more fleshy areas. I think something more like Hydroponics with organic matter on the walls would have worked much better.
Sulphur on 1/9/2020 at 14:41
Haven't played it either. Microsoft, get the rest of the goddamn Gears games on PC already. :erg:
I liked Hydroponics as much as anyone else, and I suppose it would have made sense if they could asspull a reason to not go inside the Many. (I only just realised what I wrote after I wrote it, I promise.) Maybe control a drone with a fuzzy video feed instead to detonate inside it? You're saying that suggesting instead of outright showing works better, and I get that, but even Jaws and Alien had to reveal the monster in the end after an entire movie's worth of setup. The problem is that if the monster isn't particularly terrifying after all the setup, the reveal falls flat - and that did kind of happen with the Many, yes.
But look, we basically have a level set in someone's sentient colon where Goggles has a hoedown with muscular worm enemies and then kills everything. I'd say that, metaphorically and philosophically, that's pretty horrifying. Haven't any of these future people heard of anthelmintics?
catbarf on 1/9/2020 at 16:47
Quote Posted by Starker
Yeah, I don't know... I do like the concept and the body horror elements of an alien hivemind taking over a spaceship and its inhabitants and transforming it into a different biome, but I'm not sure I liked the execution all that much.
For me, the problem is that one minute you're on the relatively-normal-looking Rickenbacker, and then the next minute you're in endless twisty caverns of flesh punctuated by the occasional bit of spaceship. There's little connection to the two, beyond some hints (flesh on the windows) that something is going on outside. The reveal that you need to go into the Body of the Many occurs suddenly and is immediately executed.
I know a lot of people have compared BotM to Half-Life's Xen, in both being a late-game change of scenery that marks a drop in quality. But as much as Xen is criticized for its level design, I feel it's paced well and integrated into the overall structure of the game. There's a gradual narrative build-up to it as you fight to reach the teleport complex and get the teleporter operational, and once you get to Xen the game slows down the pace. It plays up the strangeness of your environment, gives you time to adjust before it eases back into the combat gameplay, and gradually reveals the new setting to you. SS2 is a lot more rushed- get to the shuttle, launch the shuttle, and after ten seconds of intestinal tract you've seen pretty much everything you're going to see.
Going back to the body horror idea of an alien form slowly taking over a ship and its crew, I think a good example of this done right is Dead Space. As you revisit areas you've previously been to, they become gradually more overrun, giving a sense of change and creeping threat as the alien life starts to reshape the environment. It's not just window dressing, because it inhibits your movement and features enemy types that grow out of the corruption. There's more backtracking than SS2, but each time the environment changes, and so places that were scary at first because of the monsters hiding in them start to become scary because the environment itself is trying to kill you. Nothing about it is especially clever, but it works.
If Irrational had more time, then having something like going back to Hydroponics, only to find that it's changed- some passages are blocked off, new passages exist through the fleshy growths, and the direct path to your objective no longer exists- could have really hammered home the sense that the ship was being taken over by The Many. Then again, as far as I understand it, if they had more time they didn't originally plan to do the BotM at all.