Until Dawn?

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matt
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Until Dawn?

Post by matt »

Has anyone played it? I didn't like what I played at E3, but E3 demos are really tough to do. The reviews have been quite good, but I was curious what everyone else thought since I don't know how much time I'll have for games now that I'm a dad. haha
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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LobsterSundew
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Re: Until Dawn?

Post by LobsterSundew »

I've been watching the Two Best Friends Play playthrough. The graphics are impressive. With an adventure game like this the PS4 also doesn't have to do a big bunch of physics calculations per engine tick like a first person shooter with various weapons and vehicles has to budget for. The human models are very well done in my opinion.

I do like a twist they did on player's expectations of expectations. I looked at a few wiki pages not too worried about spoilers since I don't have a PS4.

I'd say wait to see the reviews for SOMA if you were in a situation where you had to pick that or Until Dawn. SOMA looks like it will be the scarier game.
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matt
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Re: Until Dawn?

Post by matt »

I'll definitely be picking up SOMA no matter what. :)

That's cool the graphics are good! I actually suffered through "The Order: 1886" to see the graphics. hahah I don't think it was worth it in hind sight, but now that I'm a father, my gaming time is more limited.

Despite all the complicated simulations in FPSes, I suspect they still GPU limited on the PlayStation side of things. Until Dawn is actually built on the Killzone engine, and I imagine Guerrilla Games has optimized it since launch. We are still relatively early in the lifecycle of PS4, so graphics will continue to get better as technology matures. I played Condemned: Criminal Origins somewhat recently (Xbox 360 launch title), and it is crazy to compare that to something like Bioshock: Infinite.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Cridone
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Re: Until Dawn?

Post by Cridone »

If you like cheap B-Horror styled movies, you'll probably like Until Dawn.

Anyway yay, I'm alive again. I've been studying in the past months of my absence.
I was 14 y/o when I joined this forum and 14-15 y/o during the entire duration of my time posting here, so just keep that in mind when reading my posts. Trust me, looking back at my posts here as an adult, a good chunk of it is unreadably embarrassing.
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matt
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Re: Until Dawn?

Post by matt »

I do, but usually I root for the killer, which puts me in an interesting predicament. When I played it at E3, I wanted to keep the super annoying teens alive since that is presumably the goal, but they sure got on my nerves... Maybe I'll pick it up one of these days!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Googolplex
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Re: Until Dawn?

Post by Googolplex »

Thomas Grip posted his thoughts about Until Dawn in his blog.
frictionalgames.blogspot.de/2015/11/thoughts-on-until-dawn-and-interactive.html
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matt
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Re: Until Dawn?

Post by matt »

I saw that! I've played Until Dawn to completion since posting this, and I came away with a different impression. It is tough to find time to record dev diaries these days with a baby, so I won't give my full thoughts any time soon, but here are a few thoughts:

I felt like the characters were ridiculously exaggerated horror movie cliches, so I didn't really care if they lived or died.The story and atmosphere didn't really grab me. Again, it felt kinda cliche. The jump scares were pretty weak too. I have the playstation camera, and all of the "captures" were me with 0 reaction, and my wife and baby sleeping peacefully. hahah

I also felt like a some of the live or die was completely arbitrary and especially at the end, some were tied to QTEs, which kind of came out of nowhere. I also grew tired of the game for the last 2 hours and just wanted to end.

Overall though, I would say it was "ok". They did some really interesting things with the butterfly system, and I loved looking behind the curtain so to speak with the menu for that and seeing how the events propagated. Some of them had little story impact (somone gets cut or doesn't), but it still added some element of "control" to a game that is scripted.

A ton of effort went into the game, and it does succeed in many of the ways Thomas Grip outlined, so I think the Supermassive team did a pretty impressive accomplishment, but I didn't really find it scary at all, so in that sense, I think they missed the mark. However, fear is subjective, so perhaps I just have a high tolerance for scares at this point...

I think it is worth playing if you are interested in the ideas of adding some control to an interactive story.
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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