melmer

P.T (Playable Teaser for Silent Hills)

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Is this real life

 

Yeah, the FOX engine's whole trick is its soft, and realistic lighting. Created some fucking pretty realistic looking shit. Added with the slight film grain, motion blur, and slight HDR, the fucking game looked pretty as fuck. And if Kojima is to be believed, this the engine at its most basic graphical output. I can't imagine how much more detail and effects they could cram more into this already beautiful looking game.

 

Also:

 

+ He should really be watching Kindergarten Cop and taking notes.

 

 
I just found this out now from your post. WAT.

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I'm watching a Twitch stream of this that Junior Mints is on, and uh... this is the most drag-ass thing ever. Like I appreciated it at first, but... how are you supposed to know things? There's too much openess to wander around without 'progress' or seeing anything worthwhile. Impressions were high at first and rapidly diminished.

 

Also I was reminded that I can't stand Kojima. Oh boy text on the screen randomly thanks again Kojima.

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Like I appreciated it at first, but... how are you supposed to know things?

You aren't. I feel like a lot of people are missing the intent here.

Only a "chosen" few we're supposed to succeed. Kojima said he expected it to take a week before any one person completed it. If that's the case, it was created intentionally so that tens of thousands of people would spend hours upon hours aimlessly trapped in this looping corridor with a ghost lady.

And those chosen few that do succeed only do so through complete random luck. If you sit one thousand monkeys in front of one thousand typewriters one of them will eventually see the silent hills trailer

SsbX9yC.gif

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I don't agree with that! I think it's pretty cool.

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I think it's good for a mainstream game to introduce the idea that the game doesn't have to serve the player. Plenty of books films and TV shows have done good things by not being direct and allowing the audience to easily consume them. This was made in a world where most players will just investigate the result online and find out what they missed. Very few people need to know how this ended, and really it serves the purpose of hooking people in better to make them have to investigate and discuss it online.

 

That said, it makes for bad marketing when people think this is representative of how the full game will play. I'm assuming that's not true though.

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It unfortunately forces the game to devolve into "zoom view on every detail." And that's how people will walk through it. It stops being a game and just going through the motions.

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I think it's very intentional that they labelled this a preview trailer as opposed to a demo, preview, or any such thing. It was created as a sample of the feel rather than the particular details of mechanics or implementation. This is supported by Kojima's comments on how little has actually been decided on what the actual game will be, hence it would be more fair to treat this more akin to concept art as opposed to a fleshed out game or demo.

 

Mington's comment bears repeating: the interactive sections of the P.T. were meant as something akin to an ARG where the intention was that it would take the community week or more to discover what P.T. was. The mechanics were intentionally obtuse and clunky because it was both meant to extend the duration required to reach the reveal trailer at the end as well as attempting to mimic a rough finish to make it plausible that P.T. was created by an unknown indie team. The original intention was not to reveal who or what P.T. was until someone reached the end of the preview trailer.

 

Though it drags on by design, there's no denying that the first impressions of the P.T. are very visceral. The space is believable enough that even with minimal interaction with the game space, people buy into the fiction immediately and that's quite an amazing feat considering that the interactive trailer consisted of a single hallway where your interactions were largely limited to zooming in and walking around.

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Exactly right.  If it was a demo then it'd be terrible, but it's designed to establish tone and mess with your head.  It succeeds there.  I'm sure Silent Hills proper will be an actual game.  The very nature of PT is sort of a riddle in itself and I think one of the points is that it's a riddle you don't know how to solve.  You feel trapped, just like all those poor saps that keep visiting Silent Hill.

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I dunno, I guess maybe it's a genre that isn't for me. Something that is constructed specifically to "mess with your head" is something that I'll see through right away. The original Silent Hill was actually rather terrifying to me because the impending danger and unknown qualities also carried gameplay consequences with them. As in, you die. In this game, even when I saw a moment that implied death, the people streaming just found themselves waking up in a room and continuing on like nothing happened.

 

But being presented with, "Whoa isn't that weird and scary?!" doesn't do it for me. I think Rob Zombie films were the last straw in my realization of this and it's carried over to video games I guess. Or maybe I'm truly desensitized to things. Knowing it's fiction just has me shrugging it off.

 

I doubt this will end up happening since it isn't Kojima's style, but if it turns out Silent Hills is a character drama more than a plotplotplot thing or a horror sideshow, then I can get behind it. I actually tried applying some of it to the PT, suggesting that maybe we were seeing someone's time-broken perspective of something terrible they did or survived. Which would have more meaning if I knew who the players were playing as, but the implication was nice for a time. Then, of course, the hallway was traversed for the 30th time and I realized I was wrong.

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Something that is constructed specifically to "mess with your head" is something that I'll see through right away. The original Silent Hill was actually rather terrifying to me because the impending danger and unknown qualities also carried gameplay consequences with them. As in, you die.... But being presented with, "Whoa isn't that weird and scary?!" doesn't do it for me. I think Rob Zombie films were the last straw in my realization of this and it's carried over to video games I guess. Or maybe I'm truly desensitized to things. Knowing it's fiction just has me shrugging it off.

 

I think that's a matter of immersion in the sense that if the tangible aspects of experience are sufficiently convincing, you're willing to believe the presented situation. Part of the reason why things like VR are so seductive is because they allow a greater degree of immersion and more people to cross that line of suspended disbelief.

 

The big thing with P.T. was not only very well realized environment, crafted to be realistic, but also perhaps the first fleshed out example of how powerful physically based rendering (PBR) techniques can be in interactive mediums, which is to say this is possibly the first time a physically "accurate" approximation of how light reacts in reality has been leveraged in the games medium, or at least the first one I've seen.

 

With P.T.'s degree of graphical realism, many people were able to believe in the environments and situations they were presented in minutes if not seconds. You saw people who regularly play horror games and typically weren't easily scared caught in moments where they would lose reason and just run through the environment in futile attempt to escape. That's an accomplishment.

 

I don't believe that anyone is immune to this kind of immersion, it's just a matter of to what degree of realism is required. For example, in reality, if someone told you to not worry that the gun they were holding was not loaded then put it against your temple, how many people could really say they felt nothing at all at the action? Probably only those with psychological conditions. As powerful as the neocortex is, the limbic and basal ganglia are not things you can simply ignore.

 

I get what you're saying  actual consequential situations inspires belief — but P.T. wasn't meant to be comparable to a fleshed out game. P.T. was all about tone, not mechanics or narrative or anything else.

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I get what you're saying  actual consequential situations inspires belief — but P.T. wasn't meant to be comparable to a fleshed out game. P.T. was all about tone, not mechanics or narrative or anything else.

I get what the rest of your post is saying, but on this point, I just wanted to note something. You're right that it was meant to establish tone, but they gave it a goal to chase, and in chasing that goal there's an increasing chance of monotony to settle in (rather than terror and hesitation). Even in Danielle's stream of the PT, as much as they were terrified to start, they eventually broke down into jabbing at Kojima the same way I was. There was too much time spent in the same place doing the same thing. If Kojima had practiced some brevity, maybe the impact could've struck at its best. Timing is everything.

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I get what the rest of your post is saying, but on this point, I just wanted to note something. You're right that it was meant to establish tone, but they gave it a goal to chase, and in chasing that goal there's an increasing chance of monotony to settle in (rather than terror and hesitation). Even in Danielle's stream of the PT, as much as they were terrified to start, they eventually broke down into jabbing at Kojima the same way I was. There was too much time spent in the same place doing the same thing. If Kojima had practiced some brevity, maybe the impact could've struck at its best. Timing is everything.

 

For sure, I didn't mean to discount your experience: it does lose a great deal of it's impact over uneventful repetitions, but I can't help but feel that some of that comes from having the intended surprise ending spoiled. All of these establishments playing P.T. knew that it was a Kojima game that had a definite ending before they even started playing and I feel like that this knowledge coloured their expectations going into it.

 

If they had gone into P.T. having heard it's an interesting thing to check out that didn't really have an ending, I feel like people would have played what was there without this drive to play exhaustively until they reached the end. They would have played what was interesting then left it at that thinking that it just never ended, but instead people like Patrick Klepek and the crew over at Shacknews played P.T. incessantly past the point interest because they knew there was a definite ending and reveal trailer waiting for them at the laborious end.

 

If you consider that all most all of the monotonous materials towards the end is entirely geared towards unlocking the reveal, it feels a bit more fair to say the actual intended content was only a few minutes and the rest only existed for the sake of the intended quasi-ARG.

 

It did drag on, it did lose impact, and it was monotonous after the content was exhausted yet the game didn't end, but I don't think it's fair to blame that on Kojima's typical loquaciousness: it wasn't done for the sake of exposition, but rather because he thought that people wouldn't realize there was a trailer at the end it would take the dedicated few week or more to find it.

 

I guess the crux of what I've been trying to say is that because P.T.'s experience is affected so much by the intentions under which it was made, we should give some consideration to those intentions when looking at P.T. in a critical fashion.

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I think the P.T. and the whole stunt were well executed but I find it interesting to think how they could have made it stronger - by that I mean increasing the time of mystery without increasing the amount of possible player frustration? Also it's pointless but I still wonder what would the impact of the reveal have been and how much guessing and speculation about the demo's true nature we would have seen if it had been days instead of hours until the truth came out.

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They should have brought Phil Fish on board...I'm pretty sure there are people that believe there are still secrets hidden in Fez. This stunt would have been amazing if something like it were done, say, in the PS1 era and the game was on some random demo disc.

 

Anyway, I played this last night. Didn't finish but I liked what was there. I thought the atmosphere was great and though yeah, some of it's a bit cliche, it's well executed. I've never played any of the Silent Hill games but I'm curious to see how this one turns out.

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I get the feeling that the design of this game was predicated on most players losing interest because it seemed like there was not much else to discover, except that people found the ending too quickly so everyone knows there's a reachable ending, and the way to reach that ending is capricious and annoying because you're supposed to think 'oh, it's just looping' and quit.

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Okay, so a friend was really insisting that I watch the Game Grumps play through the PT. One of them had played it before and knew how to get through things, but he didn't tell the other, and was BS'ing himself along.

 

 

This sold me on the concept way better than a couple streams I watched. It was more concise and tightly woven together. It sucks that someone has to have foresight to make it this way, but now I enjoyed it.

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Okay, so a friend was really insisting that I watch the Game Grumps play through the PT. One of them had played it before and knew how to get through things, but he didn't tell the other, and was BS'ing himself along.

 

This sold me on the concept way better than a couple streams I watched. It was more concise and tightly woven together. It sucks that someone has to have foresight to make it this way, but now I enjoyed it.

 

You should try playing P.T.  watching someone play a game isn't the same thing as playing it yourself and some of the game is dynamic, though it's a bit hard to pin down what makes it tick. If you're going to try out P.T. yourself, you might want to skip these, but here are some examples from other playthroughs that have different things occurring:

http://imgur.com/ou4dQWb

http://i1081.photobucket.com/albums/j345/growthetruth/window-ghost-silent-hill.jpg

http://images.pushsquare.com/news/2014/08/guide_how_to_complete_the_spooky_pt_demo_on_ps4/attachment/0/original.jpg

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I think it's amazing that Del Toro is involved in the project with someone proven in game making like Kojima, but as others said, I hope Kojima doesn't put much of his style in this game story, he should leave that to Del Toro IMO.

Anyway, if the game is as scary as this demo, I'll need some extra balls to play it. I don't remember the first silent Hills to be that scary, there were few jump scares from what I can recall.

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Remember Del Toro was working on a trilogy of games called Insane which got cancelled (proclaiming it would be a trilogy before even releasing the first one was a bit presumptuous)

 

 

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the conceptual work and ideas from that game have been merged in to this baby.

 

I've heard rumours that this will be open world (taken with a huge grain of salt as its so early in development) but that makes a lot of sense to me if they're using the new fox engine considering the size of the map they've created in MGSV

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Too creepy. I quit fast. I find horror movies utterly boring, but horror games destroy me. I think I was playing this for 3 minutes and I could already feel my heart beating faster and myself getting stressed.

I'm a baby, and this did what it was meant to do. I guess some people like being scared. No fucking clue why.

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Too creepy. I quit fast. I find horror movies utterly boring, but horror games destroy me. I think I was playing this for 3 minutes and I could already feel my heart beating faster and myself getting stressed.

I'm a baby, and this did what it was meant to do. I guess some people like being scared. No fucking clue why.

 

I second this.

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Maybe it's a thrill thing. I don't personally care to be scared, but also don't mind / care if other people desire it. It's just not for me. On top of that though, it is really difficult for me to consume media and be scared as part of the experience. I've looked into video games too much to be scared by them, because I'm just reading the Matrix. "Where's the trigger volume" type shit. And it's the same with films / television (I have some amateur education in production). And in both cases it's that writing has gotten predictable with creating fear.

 

- show something gross

- show something abrupt / sudden

 

I actually give Don't Starve a lot of credit for its presentation of fear / paranoia, via its sanity system. If anyone hasn't played it still, as your sanity decays the game's presentation changes over time, to the eventual point of the game world changing. It starts off with seeing shadows dash about at the edge of your vision, which is a really delicate, masterful stroke. It isn't just playing on the character in the game-world, it kinda plays on you. "What the fuck was that?"

 

That said it didn't terrify me, and I wasn't seeking it, but the presentation was something different than what game tend to do. Like was discussed in the latest episode of Idle Thumbs, the Silent Hills PT felt like a haunted house structured thing, which to me is just cheesy, predictable, and ineffective. I guess part of me is dead or I'm flawed as a person. I just hate that this was the direction being taken because I do enjoy the Silent Hill series. It was less about being terrified and more about the mystery of what is going on exactly.

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Maybe it's a thrill thing. I don't personally care to be scared, but also don't mind / care if other people desire it. It's just not for me. On top of that though, it is really difficult for me to consume media and be scared as part of the experience. I've looked into video games too much to be scared by them, because I'm just reading the Matrix. "Where's the trigger volume" type shit. And it's the same with films / television (I have some amateur education in production). And in both cases it's that writing has gotten predictable with creating fear.

 

- show something gross

- show something abrupt / sudden

 

I definitely get where you're coming from wrt: suspension of disbelief. It's easy for me to start counting shots, or think about the lighting in a given scene, etc, when I start to get spooked.

 

But I really enjoy being disturbed by horror fiction, even if it's cheesy as hell.

 

While we were in the car on the way back from the stream you mentioned, I was musing with my friends about *why* I like horror so much. Horror bothered me when I was young. Now, I love that there's something I can engage in that reminds me I'm not crazy for being absolutely terrified by things like disease, aging and death, loss of control/agency or the possibility of hurting/being hurt by loved ones. The fact that these themes are explored (often in the most unsubtle ways) in horror means a whole lot of people are scared right alongside me. It's not always so literal in real life, but those fears are always there, lurking.

 

I like to think of myself as a brave lady, but even after watching a P.T. stream, I was terrified when I physically took over the controller. I kept staring at the floor in-game to take "breaks" from the tension. 

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