The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[Paddy™]

Does anyone know the name of the male actor(s) from the second teaser video?

[Damascus Rose]

You also forget that:

1. 1.5-2 more years development time.
2. Thomas complained that the graphics in the trailer look shoddy compared to what they look like in game. Besides, the only parts that looked worse were the first two rooms in the trailer. The alien environment looked incredible.

Really, he said it was the textures? I thought he said something about the video quality being bad. Can you tell me where he said that? And I thought the first two rooms looked solid, my only complaint was the textures in the alien environment. Also I never forgot about the development time.


And really, guys? I think the textures are valid enough to talk about. I just wanted to discuss this because it's pretty much the only thing I noticed that was bothering me from the teaser after watching it so many times.

[Cuyir]

Does anyone know the name of the male actor(s) from the second teaser video?

It's bothering me cause he looks familiar. But then again, a lot of faces seem familiar to me so take that with a hint of salt.

At first I thought he was Arin (Egoraptor) but then I decided that i'm silly and was just grasping at straws haha.

[Alardem]

And really, guys? I think the textures are valid enough to talk about. I just wanted to discuss this because it's pretty much the only thing I noticed that was bothering me from the teaser after watching it so many times.

The game looks like a modern game i.e. it'll make my computer beg for mercy. I find 'graphics' complaints rather presumptuous. Not everybody has the time, money and fortune to get a state of the art machine.

[Sakonosolo]

I think it's just as bad to think that companies should hold back because there are some people who don't have the time or money to get a state of the art machine. Graphics at least scale. Making a game whose gameplay wouldn't work on lots of machines is one thing, and I can't even think of how that would work, but graphics are meant to scale, and that's what's so good about PC gaming. You can allow settings that are unplayable even on high end machines for years to come, ie TW2's ubersampling, and also allow people with weak computers to play the game. Frictional's games have never really been graphical powerhouses though so I don't think there's much to worry about there. And this game looks much better than the Amnesia games just from what we've seen so far anyway.

Edit: Although textures, which is what we seem to be talking about, don't really impact framerate anyway given you have enough vram to use them.

[Alardem]

I did smile upon seeing the good old "screen tremor" when the corpse in the video got its brain back. That's become a hallmark of the HPL engine. :p

[Tesseract]

The game looks like a modern game i.e. it'll make my computer beg for mercy. I find 'graphics' complaints rather presumptuous. Not everybody has the time, money and fortune to get a state of the art machine.

I agree, personally I don't find graphics to be the point of the game; however, it's always nice to play a game with a pretty looking environment. From what I have seen in the trailer the textures look very crisp and very well made.

[Kein]

Really, he said it was the textures? I thought he said something about the video quality being bad.

Yes, he said "output video quality", ie final render of the video. No idea what was broken and why they couldn't use Avidemux, for example, but Moviemaker sure shows it was last resort haha.

The game looks like a modern game i.e. it'll make my computer beg for mercy. I find 'graphics' complaints rather presumptuous. Not everybody has the time, money and fortune to get a state of the art machine.

No, it does not, to be honest. And no, I'm not talking about textures, I mean mostly lighting and [occlusion] shadows. Especially lighting, It looks so... Amnesiash? I mean, don't get me wrong, Amnesia looked fairly decent at the moment of release. But if we compare lighting in SOMA teaser video to some videos (to be fair) of Outlast - the latter looks much better in this aspect. For a game that will be released n 2015... I dunno. Unless the engine is STILL far away from finished version (which kinda funny, they already spent 4 years but it is not half ready?).

But that was just a simple fact I observed, as I said before - GFX isn't the strongest point of FG games.

[pinkribbonscars]

Graphics look gorgeous to me

[plutomaniac]

An hour-long interview with Thomas, conducted by Giant Bomb:

http://v.giantbomb.com/podcast/dumptruck...582466.mp3

Where is dat info portal?