Frictional Games talks about their secret project

[lolmaster]

http://beefjack.com/news/amnesia-devs-fr...-new-game/

Amnesia: The Dark Descent developers Frictional recently teased a new horror game – and now studio co-founder Thomas Grip has revealed some early information about what it’s set to entail, and why…

Indie studio Frictional Games has outsourced development of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the follow-up to a bona-fide horror classic, to Dear Esther developers thechineseroom (whom we chatted to about the project a while back). While they’re working away on that, Frictional are scurrying around planning their next in-house game – and co-founder Thomas Grip has been speaking to BeefJack about what it might involve.
A tight-lipped Grip was reluctant to reveal too much information about the new game, but did go over some of the basics, and the thought-processes behind the game.
“It will be a first-person horror game, and a lot of it will be built upon lessons learned from Amnesia,” Grip explained. It’s set to be a more thoughtful and thought-provoking game than its predecessor – a terrifying game that, according to the developers, sometimes struggled to convey a deep enough message.
“The way we handled horror in Amnesia was that we just threw stuff in without thinking too much about why it was there,” he said. “Our main goal was simply to build up a scary atmosphere, and whatever contributed to that was added. This means that you as a player can not really think too deeply about any element, since there often was not any deeper intent with it.
Some of the best bits of Amnesia arrived when visions linked directly with the player character’s past forced the player to think more carefully about their role within the game world, said Grip – but these moments didn’t come along frequently enough.
“For our next game we want to have more thought behind everything that happens, and tie things together, so if the player thinks some more about it, it will take things a step further. So we want these extra layers to the gameplay that will really get below the skin of the player. The small stuff we had in Amnesia felt like a good indicator that this could have excellent results, so it felt like the logical next step to take.”
The best of the horror genre forces people to confront subject matters that they’d normally shy away from thinking about, said Grip – and that’s what he hopes Frictional’s next game will do.
And perhaps, as unlikely as it sounds, Telltale’s Walking Dead adventure series – which forces players to make morally ambiguous choices that have an effect on the story – might be providing some inspiration.
“I think you can say we will go with a similar approach, but it will play out differently because our gameplay strengths are quite different from The Walking Dead,” said Grip. “With first-person, you get very involved in this insider’s perspective, and that is something we wantto make use of. The plan is to create a first-person narrative which places the player in the middle of these subjects.”
But perhaps the biggest surprise is that Frictional’s new game didn’t start out as a horror title at all.
Grip told BeefJack of his passion for horror, but said this doesn’t mean the studio won’t ever approach another genre. “In fact,” he revealed, “our upcoming game did not start out as [a horror game], but because of the subject matters involved it slowly turned into one.”
The new game doesn’t have a name yet, but it’s due out some time in 2014.

[Zaffre]

2014?! FUCK.

[Macgyverthehero]

2014?

I'm going to be graduated from high school by then!

[Adny]

"A tight-lipped Grip". Hehe.

[the dark side]

look, would you rather it came out in 2014 and had a long single player mode, a great story, and worked properly with very few bugs and glitches as it was playtested?

or would you rather it came out in 2013 with a 2 hour at best single player mode, no story what so ever, and is so full of bugs and glitches it gives your system blue screen death?

stop complaining, better late and perfect than early and of "typical AAA industry standard", IE, Rushed out and Broken.

[Zaffre]

Chill. I was only joking. I'm patient; I haven't complained about Half-Life 3 not coming out. Which is saying something compared to a lot of people on the Internet.

[the dark side]

sorry, i cant tell if someone is joking or not in Real Life half the time, so i am darned if i can tell on the internet. in future, if you are going to joke, could you PLEASE make it more clearly witty for those of us who struggle with humour.

i genuinely thaught i was seeing some "i wnt it NAOW!!11!!" behavior there, sorry.

A rushed out game to satisfy the "i wnt it NAOW!!11!!" brigade is the last thing we need, as well, we get a bad game, and WHAM, Frictional runs out of cash due to low sales thanks to crippling Arstechnica and PC Gamer scores, so Frictional ends up getting baught out by some greedy american megacorp, you know, like what happened to People Can Fly (albiet it was Evil Alliance that baught them out) when the 3rd painkiller flopped because it got rushed out for the "i wnt it NAOW!!11!" whiners, and thus, was a rushed out badly made game, and i think we all know what that is going to result in!

no, thank, you.

sorry for the misunderstanding, but i hope this post shows the reasons why i am taking this seriously.

PS. post edited, bitterness got the better of me again. (see Statyk's Post) SORRY!

[Statyk]

sorry, i cant tell if someone is joking or not in Real Life half the time, so i am darned if i can tell on the internet. in future, if you are going to joke, could you PLEASE make it more clearly witty for those of us who struggle with humour.

i genuinely thaught i was seeing some "i wnt it NAOW!!11!!" behavior there, sorry.

A rushed out game to satisfy the "i wnt it NAOW!!11!!" brigade is the last thing we need, as well, we get a bad game, and WHAM, Frictional runs out of cash due to low sales thanks to crippling Arstechnica and PC Gamer scores, so Frictional ends up getting buaght out by some greedy american megacorp like Activision, you know, like what happened to people can fly (albiet it was ea that baught them out) when the 3rd painkiller flopped because it got rushed out for the "i wnt it NAOW!!11!" whiners, and thus, was a rushed out badly made game, and then its hello future of making nothing but GUI for this months CODZombiez expansion pack (charged at only $5000 for 1 map, unless your on PC, then you get Nothing post launch!) for Frictionals devs.

no, thank, you.

sorry for the misunderstanding, but i hope this post shows the reasons why i am taking this seriously.

I think we get the AAA CoD clone thing nowadays. No need to repeat it. Though yes, it is hard to tell sarcasm over writing.

[Arvuti]

Figured that the game would release sometime in 2013-2014, considering that amnesia development time was 3 years.

[Robby]

2014? Not so far away if you ask me.