So what did everyone think of the 'old SOMA' and the Verticle Slice material?

[SlackerinDeNile]

I watched the Verticle Slice gameplay trailer from 2013 again and i'd noticed not many people here were talking about SOMA's old versions and all the cut story elements. Were they that boring or is everyone still focused on the current release version?

Personally I really dig it, I can see why they made so many changes to this game over its long development time but there are so many cool aspects that had to be left out, for fairly obvious reasons but it doesn't negate their cool factor. For example, the old music is awesome, not that the soundtrack in the final release isn't awesome but this one sounds like a really good Frictional Games soundtrack, very atmospheric. I kind of prefer that old machine being to the WAU in the final release, its more breath-taking, intimidating and omniscient, I have no idea what role it would have played or what its goals and ambitions were, but its scary and badass. What the hell is the Cabal exactly? They don't look or sound like the villains from the Blood games so were they some sort of post-apocalyptic cult? The remnants of mankind? What was Catherine's role? Why was she their prisoner?

However, like some others noted before me, the old personalities of David and Simon are kind of annoying and all over the place in tone, glad the developers changed things there.

Unless someone already knows the jist of the old story (Frictional and their friends probably) I have a few theories as to what was going on in the Vertical Slice version...

Spoiler below!

Simon was either always a 'brain in the jar' victim of the WAU-like entity and was constantly being rebooted, experimented on and toyed with for whatever reason, possibly to explore or enhance human consciousness for AI benefit.

The game was set in a post-apocalyptic far future in a world ruled by a machine race, like Terminator but with much more intelligent machines. The surface was possibly uninhabitable or completely taken over by machines, possibly a bit of both. The 'ruination' the Cabal recorder speaks of could either be World War 3, a giant comet or a war against the machines.

The Cabal are the mutated remains of humanity and worship human ingenuity and craft, no doubt they are enemies of the machines for whatever reason, perhaps the machines wanted to assimilate or experiment on them. Or, like in The Matrix, they already were some sort of machine experiment. They reconstructed the Catherine AI in order to understand their machine enemies better, but Catherine, like Simon was likely from a time before the apocalypse so she may not have known anything useful. They believe Simon is a soldier of the machine race and they're probably right to some extent.

What would Simon and Catherine's goals have been in this crazy world? Stop the machines I guess, find out what they want, why they do what they do and why they're following and manipulating Simon. Possibly even ally with the Cabal if it was an option.

Oh, I also get the impression that the 'mind coral' from Theta would have appeared in the game somehow no matter what. Frictional seemed to really dig that concept.