(06-18-2014, 02:29 PM)i3670 Wrote: I think it would be pretty hard to have real body due to the interactivity with the environment. I agree that it would be nice to have a full body but that would mean that FG would have to animate a grab-animation to all of the interactable items and if they mess any of those animations up it would be an immersion-breaker.
I agree with you; it creates more problems than it solves.
Spoiler below!
So much of how we connect with games is based on metaphorical substitutions for real-world concepts like attention, intention, interest, etc., that I'm not sure how much importance we need to give to full body representation as an aid to immersion when we're already so "pliable" in our relationship with games. Tim Schafer explains it quite nicely in his play-through of Grim Fandango [click]. In this case he's talking about how the mouse cursor is like a metaphor for your attention; no one feels unimmersed in adventure games because they don't control a floating mouse cursor in real life. We assimilate and adapt to the game unconsciously.
When I'm opening a door in Amnesia, I don't assume Daniel is opening it with his mind because I don't see his arm extended out in front of him; it feels completely intuitive and immersive to me, and that immersion only strengthens the more I play the game. If you introduce an animated arm, you're also introducing many new opportunities for shattered immersion which didn't exist before, as i3670 pointed out. It's like trying to plug a hole in a wall with a beehive. I don't consider the lack of a fully rendered body to be a "hole", though. In Amnesia, the only time I even noticed it at all was when I looked straight down at my "feet" and realised I was floating, which isn't something I did during normal gameplay.
The trademark FG hand icons, and their extensive contextual variability in SOMA (scroll down a little to see pics), are just fine. They're metaphors which work every time, in place of animations and graphics which have a much narrower bandwidth for believability and, crucially, cost way more, in every sense of the word.
Trespasser is an infamous example of where the ambition to intricately simulate the movement of the body outdid the technology available at the time. It ended up being like QWOP, if the player only had one distorted arm to work with.
All I'm really hoping for is something slightly more sophisticated than the previous series Frictional has worked on. Having played some rather old games where the in-game avatar has a body to work with, it feels off for a 2015 game to still stick with the old "non-entity protagonist" concept.
Unless revealing Simon's body to be heavily modified with cybernetics would be a huge spoiler. :p
Still, I doubt that we will see a player body in SOMA mainly because we haven't seen one in the trailer. If SOMA would have a player body they would have marketed the game with one.
"What you think is irrelevant" - A character of our time
I would like to see the protagonist be forced to do or unknowingly do something terrible like in Penumbra Black Plague:
Spoiler below!
Clarance tricks you into killing Amabel Swanson
Nothing is better for generating raw emotion. That moment in Black Plague had me so furious and so ashamed of myself I had to go outside and punch a tree. Frictional games has generally been very good at generating emotions not only horror but they have made me feel. Shame, Fury, Desire (I realy wanted to see Amabel I desired a companion more than you would believe). I would like to experience powerful emotions when I play your game. I want to not sleep not just out of fear but because I'm crying because of the things I'v seen and done.
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What do you hope to see and not see in SOMA?
