HPL3

[Paddy™]

I wonder if the devs are working on making more advanced NPC functions. I'd like to see some smarter monsters in SOMA to hunt me down, since my usual defense is to put a chair between me and the monster.

Thomas said this about the sophistication of the enemy/creature AI in SOMA:

Spoiler below!

RPS: You were talking about the fact that Amnesia had fairly simplistic monster AI overall. Are the monsters in Soma going to be any more sophisticated?

Grip: No, they’re not. What we’re trying to do, though, is that they’re going to have different ways of interacting with the player. We’re not overly reliant on things like really sophisticated AI models. I think it works well when you have simplistic models that can work in many different situations. Having some AI that works really well, but if the player screws up a little bit, then it goes really wrong.

We’re going to have something pretty much like in Amnesia, but the enemies are going to be a lot more varied. The monster encounters are really short in the demo, but they have some special abilities that ends up making life for the player a bit more worrisome, more than the Amnesia monsters.

What happens to thinking in games, it’s the opposite of reality. The more you interact with a character, the less real and complex they become. They become more and more mechanistic, an automaton. In real life, of course, the more you interact with someone, the more you understand them. But in games it’s the opposite. You have to be very careful about the interactions you’re going to do. That’s why I think it’s interesting to cut back on the actions instead of having this really sophisticated behavior. That sophisticated behavior tends to reveal itself a bit more. If you can tone down the things that the player can do with different creatures, the possibilities in their mind open up a bit.

EDIT: Also, is it me, or does HPL3 support ingame interactable computer screens? Judging by some of the trailers and videos I've seen about SOMA.

Yeah, that stuff looks pretty slick:



I wonder if it could be done in HPL2 with the correct scripting, or if it's something unique to HPL3.

Along with the cool interactive computer terminals, the way notes/documents are handled seems to have undergone a major overhaul; documents are suspended in front of you to be read when you interact with them, then when you're done they return to their original location (in previous games, the notes would disappear from the level). I'm still not sure if there's a journal you can consult later to re-read the things you've discovered, but I would assume so, otherwise you'd need to develop Rain Man memory skills!