Iszfury said:
Resource management was an enormous actor in developing Amnesia's psychological landscape - specifically because players DIDN'T want to be in the dark. The scarcity of lantern fuel and tinderboxes beckoned in an almost acute paranoia of being left without them, and enhanced the terror of the dark all the more.
Damn right. And often even when you
weren't using them you'd still want to stockpile as many of the damn things as you can,
just in case. I would scour levels far longer than I needed to just to grab a couple more tinderboxes and a few drops of lantern oil in an almost possessive way. Simple as it as, I don't think any other game's method of resources and how they tie into finding your way around and staying safe has ever affected me in such a way, and this guy dismisses it all as unnecessary and has scrapped it.
The worst part is since the game is very dark and you need to use tinderboxes and the lantern to light your way and stave off insanity, this might also mean the demise of the insanity system. Insanity in Amnesia meant that the dark is a very bad place to stay, but since it's your best way of avoiding the monsters, you really need to work up a balance between hiding in darkness and staying in light to survive, something which can be very difficult and is a
huge part of where the real survival horror aspect comes in. Since you have light sources of your own, the game expects you to make the use of them at the right moments rather than having a bunch of lit areas and pools or darkness simply strewn among the level.
Whatever the case, insanity thing or no the removal of the need to manage resources will almost certainly be an unnecessary blow to the game. Not necessarily a dealbreaker, but I really do not see how changing this will be of any benefit at all.
DjinnFor said:
In terms of how they play, or rather
don't play, it seems everything these guys have made so far are various renditions of Dear Esther.
I really,
really hope that's not the case with A Machine for Pigs, but judging from interviews and the dev commentaries on Amnesia, the Frictional team seem to be pretty smart guys who know their shit and recognize the importance of marrying well implemented gameplay elements with well implemented narrative elements without screwing over one or the other too much to create something really compelling. You'd think thechineseroom must apparently be willing to work with a similar mindset or Frictional would have never collaborated with them on the sequel to something they poured their hearts and souls into... right...?
Somewhat bizarrely, I hope Machine for Pigs is extremely good or extremely crap, one extreme or the other. I'm hoping it's either a very well received sequel that expands on everything the original did well while giving something new, or it turns out to be another unsubstantial pretentious as fuck wankfest and these guys are demonized for screwing up the series.
If thechineseroom prove that they can indeed actually make great games which are both stellar in terms of gameplay and narrative these guys might go on to make all sorts of cool stuff which is both thought provoking and
entertaining. If it's pretty bad and it turns out to effectively be a Dear Esther reskin unworthy of the Amnesia title, these guys will be viewed as having effectively ruined one of gaming's most popular horror titles and the gaming community might further question the place of games without actual meaningful
gameplay in gaming.