SOMA

Nigger could you be more mad about nothing?

Could you be more new?

Sage

I guess you were able to be more mad about nothing.

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Project all you want, but please stop bumping your faggy thread

Did Grip fondle you in your sleep or something?

hey trip dubs, I think this is a great example of what books will be like in the future. of course there will still be books, but they will be much more niche and the larger narrative driven idea conveyance will be what is essentially walking simulators now. I never understood the "danger" or "combat" or whatever element of the game. I guess it added a little bit of tenseness or drama, but I think largely the game is about what it means to actually BE human, and I think that is an amazing concept that was really well executed.

What's the matter, do you not understand what projecting is? Too mad to comprehend?

Oh, look another retard to play with OP.

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Be honest OP, you made this thread to get attention because you know Soma is shit on here, right? This is your low-rent cuckchan form of trolling isn't it? It's okay, you can be honest with me.

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This sure beats playing the game though.

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It wants to tell a story where continuity is a major plot point and never used the fact that it was an interactive story to help convey this.

Would have been nice to have moments where time skips as you upload and restart your mind and time has passed. Download yourself into a omnipad or whatever they were called and have to have yourself put into a new body.

The reality is that this game could have been good but the devs were telling a melodramatic story with lackluster enemies outside of one area.

Not much of a game but decent story. There's not much to it

I get the feeling they dumbed the story down at some point. The exposition dump you get from Katherine points to this.

Oh gee I dunno

This was released just now, ages after the launch. I don't really see the problem.

These are "journalists". A fucking typo before the article has even started.

OP is a faggot yet again

Try reading it again, faggot.

bump :^)

I've only ever watched people play it during speedrun marathons. Story is the most depressing shit I could possibly imagine. Show me the surface world in that scenario, show me the "handful of survivors". I'd kill for a post apocalyptic setting that wasn't rife with 50's aesthetic or paranormal. I thought RAGE was alright for that but even rage was fucking loaded with mutants. Give me a game like wurm where you have to try to rebuild a post apocalyptic society and find survivors or something.

It was an awful walking simulator and I'm still mad I was rused into buying it.

If the MC did not turn in to such a bitch along the way it would have been much better. His complaining and wining was really irritating by the end.

as its been already said Holla Forums hates everything
but I liked it a fucking lot, 10/atmosphere&story
and try your best at not to spoiling it

agreed that it was annoying at points, but at least he wasn't stupid, he at least understood things at the same pace that the player

Not a video game.

Would have been better as a movie. The horror isn't even consistent. It dies off near the end. You can get away with that in a movie but in a videgame it's an abrupt change of genre. Gameplay becomes less survival horror and just action adventure with a mini game at the end.

< Resident Evil
< Outlast
< Alien
< Evil Within
care to fill in more?

When your game's focus is the story and your story has to do with life after an extinction level event, I would expect the writer to do at least a five minute google search about what happens when something impacts a planet. It would have helped to have an MC that wasn't completely fucking brain dead, too.

The protagonist is pretty fucking retarded, and that's my only real gripe with this game. I enjoyed the rest of the story, and that teleporting fucker was pretty damn spooky

>"Hey, it was made by the same guys that made Amnesia:The Dark Descent. It couldn't possibly suck, right?"

Soma is a walking simulator, that's all you need to know
I didn't play this game, instead I watched my roommate play it and I ended up getting the exact same experience he did, you can to by just watching a Let's Play of this on youtube, there is no gameplay so you can just get as much enjoyment experience this "game" as a movie

While there are some pretty interesting story concepts in this game, the complete idiocy of the main protagonist kills it. He needs to be explained things several times by other key characters in the game and the games 'twist' is a good one, but ultimately fairly obvious for everyone except the character you play as. Because this is a first person walking simulator and you live so much through the main character, having to see him have shit fits and be a total moron really disconnects you from the experience.
Once again, if you are really interested in this game, just watch a condensed let's play video somewhere, save yourself the time and money

check 'em

I came here to request that people stop making threads wherein the op addresses the name of the board, but i see a couple other dudes are already on it.

It means Journalists found a walking simulator too hard.

I don't think the devs ever had the chops to handle a story about this subject matter with the complexity and horror it could lead too.

Don't know about that, Frictional and especially Thomas Grip strike me as pretty autistic. But they were obviously looking to expand (they got their first office just this year) so dumbing the game down for a wider audience to get those fat stacks of cash was obviously tempting.

all valid arguments
BUT
how would one change that? what gameplay aspects could have been added without sidetracking the mostly fun and entertaining story? Expanding on the run and hide from monsters? adding guns and forcing some run and gun bullshit ala' Biocock Infinite? Or maybe some autismo survival simulator with food, water and poop mechanics? C'mon guy's lets be idea fags and try to theoretically fix SOMA

I really enjoyed it, even if it was a walking simulator it was still more fun than resi 7 which is just another walking simulator.

I feel that it's missing both in puzzles and exploration. It's a straight line (so far at least) and nothing along that way really tries to stop you. I'm not convinced more enemies would help, or even better AI with the few enemies there would help, as if you look at Alien: Isolation that only became really good when you modded out the alien.

Honestly speaking, even the Penumbra games aren't very well written when you look at the topic of isolation and such. They are all hamfisted plots but the atmosphere and pacing are what is top notch. Them losing their pacing really happened with Amnesia despite how well the game sold critically; you can probably point to that as the point where they really went for mass appeal but I don't think it's the only reason for the poor execution of SOMA.

I never played Amnesia because it seemed pretty bad

It was an okay walking simulator but a bad game. To be fair i didn't think Amnesia was anything special but Holla Forums jerked themselves off over that game until slender clones showed up and they tried to pretend that never happened. To me it was just a shallow as fuck "reach hub, pick up parts to solve puzzle with no chance to get it wrong then go to next hub and repeat like 6 times" game that was dull and stupid. You crab walk crouch like a fucking crabspy from a early 2000's tf2 meme video and deal with jelly vision. Thats 90% of the game. So i went into SOMA expecting little and less.

The live action shorts got me interested. The concept of machines appearing to be sentient and nobody knows why -later with machines being copies of living human consciousness that dont know they are machines- was an attempt at the 'philosophical zombie' debate which is basically the consciousness version of 'The Ship of theseus' to a degree. How much do you take away before something is no longer the original but a replacement essentially. Videogames with ideas like extra lives, restarts and game overs is actually a good venue for this and to a degree it looks like Hideo Kojima is doing this with Death Stranding but since deep sea horror is my fucking [A E S T H E T I C] i gave this a go.

I beat it in two sittings and i can say its a good 'debate game' i could see used in first year philosophy classes. What is consciousness? was any of the shutdowns of other machines Simon 2 and 3 do morally right? does continuity of memory make you the same person or a newborn imitation? These arent the most heady ideas but they are interesting talking points. Even before the expanded looks into the cast with ideas like 'was Catherine actually autistic?' and real autist not meme autism or 'How do we know simons toronto section even happened and it wasnt his 'brain filling the blanks' like with his body? It is a game that gives you something to think about sincerely. Not high brow but it makes you think and that alone makes it one of the few walking simulators that isn't pretentious -as in simulating an experience you want to look deep without actually saying anything or promoting independent thought- like others such as Everybodies Gone to the Rapture or A Machine for Pigs did.

I thought the voice acting was great. The art design was fantastic and the ending is a gut punch that is well deserved. Beyond all that as a videogame? eeehhhh "crouch and hide for a bit! now walk around for 20 minutes, have an argument, repeat" is about it and again thats the same shit i disliked in Amnesia the Dark Descent. Its serviceable sure but its still the absolute bare minimum.

Would i recommend it? to fans of horror and science fiction sure. But i would recommend it in the same way i would recommend something like Gears of War or The Witness. Theres is good shit in there if you are the audience for them, but there is a lot of jank as well that if you are not the audience will make the whole experience insufferable.

It was nihilistic as fug but i would have liked if that pull out to orbit showed that the WAU was literally everywhere and Simon didn't stop it and couldn't.

I agree with this, as much people said, the MC is usually ok but has retarded fits at some points, these really obviously are key plot moments to explain things to the audience
it makes it seems like they had a original story and did tryout runs with "gamers", and they weren't getting the story properly, so they had to make it obvious
whereas other games, story tidy bits where left for the player to find out and piece together

I get a feeling people who complain about this didn't even play the game, its valid to watch it on jewtubes, but put it on like if it was a achievement
its kind of a walking simulator + exploration and finding out things about the world, there is definitely a lot of stuff you can miss if you don't attention to
the game also had a trade off with more scripted enemies than the previous iteration from frictional
but the thing is, even with the fewer enemies, it still managed to be stuff of nightmares, the teleporting aquanaut, the weeping bitch, and had real tension and scares
another point is that trade off bigger more open environments for exploration with smaller more straight forward sections
what could really be done is attempting to catch that feeling of exploration the puzzle solving from oldie times games like silent hill, eternal darkness, original resident evil,
but then again, it is just following the whole industry tendency to make quicker more impactful games for a broader audience

agree with you most things, something that people often don't mention is the atmosphere and how well sound design fits with the game, this was something key from their previous titles as well

and this one point why it perhaps changed from the previous formula of amnesia with obvious hubs and puzzles to solve, making it shorter and more straight to the point

and this is the reason I really thought the game was one of their best so far, it really made you think and put you in sort of depressed state for a while,
unlike other games this one really invokes emotion and makes you think, (real spoilers ahead)
the point where you see the literal last human and leave her to die, and the point where simon cries at the end "please don't leave alone", are real punches in the gut

supposedly they had to ask for help from adrian chmielarz to try and salvage their story.

Still horror (action in later games). How is having big monsters make it not horror?
Still horror. "Shooties" doesn't make it not horror for some reason
same as above
never played but I'll hedge my bets on it being the same as above

Literal lobotomized protagonist and a wasted potential walking sim

I guess my point of contention is that I've seen far better stories deal with the aspect of transhumanism and this game doesn't really capitalize on the fact that it's an interactive story to do things with it. The idea that you are a human mind displaced through time and body isn't really well done outside of maybe one moment where you have to kill your previous self.

I hate to belabor a previous point but I don't really remember the game as it was a "one and done" affair; but I remember that continuity was a big plot point and there was one good moment where that was presented at the beginning of the game right after you do the brain scan and immediately are in the facility.

I feel like moments like that should have been the focus instead of being used at the beginning and at the end of the game. Having puzzles revolving around uploading into a new body better suited for the task and having your companion never telling you that you're just copying yourself each time would make that ending moment where you finally realize what's happening hit a bit harder.

I also remember getting upset with the idea of Simon not realizing that each time he's doing this it's "Ctrl+C" and not "Ctrl+X". He's not the original dub, and his anger at not making it onto the satellite was ridiculous if he hadn't realized what was up by that point.

It was frustrating because the protag was an absolute retard who never understood how brain scans work.
Seriously the only verson of that fucking retard who got it through his thick skull that his consciousness is duplicated got left behind to die.

Jesus, how stupid can some people be? I also didn't play Soma, instead what started as a search for some videos to see if I would like a game turned into a binge-watching session of all cutscenes on youtube. Great story, but from what I saw the gameplay didn't entice me much. Then again, most horor games rely heavily on atmosphere and watching the whole story ruined it for me anyway.
My point is: If you don't want to play a game and enjoy it for it's story, there are already options availeable. If you feel like a game just needs the option to forego gameplay, then you should watch a movie. Asking not to play a game is like refusing to go watch a movie and requesting a written run-down of the plot instead.

No point in asking. Holla Forums rule 1: always call something shit, and be really offended about it too, because then it looks like you understand quality. And when someone disagrees you can just say they're too stupid to get it. It's both the safest & coolest opinion.

So yeah, the game is absolute shit. The gameplay sucks. It doesn't even have any bossfights. Graphics are pretentious and the story is lame. I already knew exactly what was going to happen, so you have to be very stupid to like the story. It's a walking simulator, but without guns, so it's bad. Also W = forward, this has been done to death.

Resident Evil isn't horror, it was scary because of atmosphere in 1 and 2, but that was mostly due to tank controls
it hasn't been horror/scary since, the last one tried to get that element back, but still falls into big action
Outlast and Alien were also scary in their own right but fall more into more action later on,
the point is, they all change "genre" midway between the game, mostly being just a change of pace, so your argument is shit

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that would really be brilliant, but I can't blame the devs for not doing it, because either you already have concept and story to go with, or it would be patched up and poorly executed
I think it has more to do with and denial at being left behind, maybe he expected to be shutdown or something
but you can't deny anger after realizing you're gonna be left behind with the shit world stuck at the bottom of the world alone, (and not even being able to die)
and this is why I think they focused more on this side of the story and the continuity

Did someone call your favorite game shit, user-kun?

you just answered bait, but in case, that mode was released for people who wanted to play the game but were too much of a wuss to handle it
I played my second run with it, and even though it reduces the difficulty element, it actually enhances the creepyness factor, and it was actually a goof fit for the game
basically because: the atmosphere of the game its still pretty much the same, most of the part you're just walking sim anyway,
most of the enemies pacified, really had no reason to aggressive, besides being confused, in this mode they you will just follow you spawing nonsense which is really fucking creepy
the WAU doesn't really want to kill you either way, which makes the teleporting dude sad (he still jumpscares you though), the weeping lady is still fucking disturbing and seems like pushing you away
either way, everything has the same creepy feel, and all the enemies that are actually offensive remains dangerous with the mode (the chasing one and deep sea monsters)

You don't belong here. You would be much more happy wherever you came from.

Amazing.

I will never understand the anons that want to treat Holla Forums like the tumblr. You are anonymous. Nobody gives a fuck about what you like but you.

Unless its Shortstacks or Oppai Loli, only then will true debate occur, but thats beside the point.

You can feign smugness as long as you like, your nature is blatent.

Except this thread generated tons of interesting perspectives on the game, most which detail how it could be made better. Holla Forums will always be autistic, just see 79e274 for example, but if you can't talk about vidya then there really is no point to be here other than to bully Mark.

I unplugged her and stuck around listening to her stories as she died

It was ultimately the wasted potential that turned me off from the game. It didn't need WAU as some nebulous enemy, the game could have just had the enemies be the copies left behind by yourself or other people who have lived for longer than the human mind should be allowed.

I don't mind games that don't match my headcanon of what I think it could have been, but SOMA really lost me between the start and it's conclusion because it was overly simplistic for a work on transhumanism, and the Devs really phoned in the puzzles and level designs. I miss their Penumbra days and even Amnesia had hubs.

He can always take a nosedive into a trench and see if oceanic pressures will cave his unit's brain in.

I didn't realize that talking about opinions was exclusive to Tumblr.

Definitely. I have payed much attention to this game and seen some footage of earlier alpha versions and it is obvious they basically made the game twice, the earlier versions being much more complicated.

youtube.com/watch?v=QlXtvymTdV0

It's an amnesia clone. Actual walking simulators are just about taking in the sights and narrative, without stress for fail states.

Everywhere outside is tumblr, user

t. game journo
>>>/twitter/
>>>/cuckchan/

I think user is referring to the retards shitposting non opinion and debating whether "you don't belong here"

so did I, and in that sense the game is success because it inspired feeling and thought

it is true now that you've said it, but I really haven't thought about it until now, so I think its more on what they chose to focus on
but that's the thing, the WAU is not really an enemy, the only real enemy there is phantom guy that shows up near the end
me too, but looking back on it without nostalgia lenses, both of these really didn't great stories, I think my favorite part about them are the little tidy bits you find around telling the in-between
like for example the torture chambers they needed to use in Amnesia, or the notes from the guy who went crazy and cut off his tongue in Penumbra
these bits are the ones that really give me the eerie chills, and just send my imagination wild

nice find, I do actually remember this from its early trailers/teasers, initially it had a much more sinister looking environment, more like alien shit than a human underwater base
eitherway I'm sucker for this genre, scifi, and even done underwater is pretty fucking cool, they took much away from tension, like the fact that breathing underwater without restriction, infinite flashlight and no resources

low quality bait user

They couldn't depict a retard without going full retard well. They should've had a game mechanic where memorized notes would sporadically blank out and be censored to represent his memory problems for instance. imagine that you get the code and look up the notes right when you need to use the keypad but oh wait half the numbers are blurred out. Journos would probably be butthurt from that cause they have even worse short term memory cognition then me.

I completely agree and said such earlier in the thread. Penumbra had great atmosphere but I couldn't take the story seriously whenever it took front stage. At least as far as the one crazy guy, or the Virus were concerned. The notes were better at setting the mood as you point out.

this video goes into much more detail on whats is in the supersecret file

the games a god damn mess it feels like half the team wanted to make amnesia underwater but the other half wanted to make half life 1. look at the beta it had so much promise but they fucked it up.

Pretentious walking simulator that likes to think it knows what its talking about but really doesn't, eg anytime they talk about the "coin-toss".

you a pretentious fucker who doesn't even know what you're talking about do you?
I don't actually remember any "coin-toss" talk in-game, aren't you just referring to markiplier?

and your trying to tell me i don't know what im talking about.
youtu.be/x790AjID0FA?t=3m43s
and to expand on my point this game somehow thinks that their is some kind of 50/50 chance that you just magically beam yourself into a computer when you make a copy of your brain instead of you staying you and just making a separate copy.
its just fucking wrong but everyone makes out to be some masterpiece of philosophy.

also im too stupid to embed
polite sage

oh yeah my bad there,>>14008273
nope, its pretty obvious in the game and to everybody else that its a copy two of the same conscious, while the continuity for the copied one seems like it just been transferred,
the "coin toss" she speaks off is just to make him understand that he got the bad side of the deal, this is literally why everyone on the thread comments on Simon being a stupid shit
but the way I see it its just him being in denial after being the one carried over in the previous transfer

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Soma more like NIGGER

haha nailed it my dude haha