The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[WALP]

Why would you want to interact with every single object in game? I have trouble understanding the common fuss about that, and the outcry because that wasn't present in AAMFP. What meaningful action can be derived from that other than pointless dicking around?

I think it's more to do with an overall sense of presence and agency, rather than being of practical use.

There's also the immersion-breaking "thing" of ludonarrative dissonance, e.g. you can knock a pig mask over by hitting it with a chair - so it clearly has physics and presence in the game - but you can't touch it with your hand. It's a little bit jarring and feels like something's wrong.

On top of that, there's the practical problem of "which objects can I interact with?" and how that affects the game's flow; I spent a lot of time scanning my cursor over objects in the game world, waiting for the hand icon to appear. Not because I wanted to fuck around with the physics, I just wasn't always sure what I was supposed to grab. This is less of a problem in TDD because practically everything is "grabbable", so the action of grabbing things to see if they're of use is done almost without conscious thought. It's like second-nature. In Pigs, it was always a conscious process because I knew there were only a handful of things I could grab and I had to discover them by a process of elimination.

I'm sure different people have different thresholds for this, though.

If I had to choose between TDD-levels of interactivity or the greater visual fidelity of AAMFP (which is why the interactivity was reduced in the first place) I'd opt for the former, without hesitation.

Ludonarrative dissonance, such an awesome couple of words. I have been quite obsessed with a certain aspect of its meaning for quite a long time, but it was only today when I read an article that I learned the actual word itself. yes I needed to write this.

On subject I think that the decision to make objects non interactable was mainly for the sake of players not getting stuck, as players would often try to use the wrong objects when solving puzzles in TDD and Custom stories. TCR has multiple times post-release said that player completion was priority and narrowing down the amount of objects that can be interacted with increased the probability of doing so with the right one.
Sure performance might have been contributing but with all the things that are having physics I doubt making them interactable would have made enough of a difference. I mean if you forget to turn off physics for closed drawers that shows how little you really care.

Now seeing that this is a SOMA thread I refrain from talking further on AAMFP physics, that is unless Paddy insist, because Paddy is a smart human being.