A genuine concern from a long time fan.

[Emotionless]

Let me start this by saying I absolutely adore all Frictional Game catalog (Soma my personal favorite) and their games are partly the reason i entered the AAA industry. With that said i am skeptical on the reasons why this game took the direction that it took. Usually most of Frictional games projects have something to pass to the player, a genuine message. But this game is different and not in a good way. It seems to be adapting the "replayability" root. Something that has destroyed a lot of AAA franchises over this past decade. I will replay the demo a lot and try to figure out if something I did wrong cause my distaste for this title.

Oh and some secondary remarks is that the engine is outdated. By 10 years or so, it seems it trys its best to carry the obviously talented artists texture/modeling and composition work but because of a lot of graphical errors and limitations it takes the player out of any immersive situation that may occur this show in the predictability of the AI as well that take out off of the player experience. Also game its not scale-able to the new hardware generation , its capped to work for older machines thus explaining the rest of the engine problems.
Anyway i really hope all these get ironed out or im super wrong and this game is a success!!!

[thaums]

I'm struggling to figure out what the message of Dark Descent would be, maybe because I haven't played it in a while, who knows. Your complaints don't make any sense though, replayability doesn't destroy games, their disgusting practices do. Darkwood is a good example of a replayable horror game, which is also Indie.
Also the engine remark is just distasteful. Game engines are not like car engines. It's a piece of software, of which every part of it, every line of code is mutable. If you are legitimately under the belief that they should have switched to Unity or Unreal instead of their in-house engine then I have no respect for you, both professionally and personally (since you said you're in the industry or something)

[v00d00m4n]

Old engine is not a problem, you can always upgrade it and add fancy new effects, remove fps lock and so. Call of duty series still run on Quake 3 Arena engine, and Half Life Alyx actually using Quake 1 engine that was upgraded to gold soure then source and source 2, but at core it is still Quake 1 engine! Can you imagine this? A lot of ubisoft games using various modifications of Unreal 2 engine. Recent remedy games like Alan Wake 2 and Control still using Max Payne engine upgraded over decades. Almost every 2nd modern 3d game actually runs on a modified engine of Doom 1 and still has some remains of its code deep inside. A lof of other studios using same engine for 20 or more years but upgrading it often to look up to date!



So devs of Amnesia dont need to change engine, they just need to upgrade it. And this is what they seems to be uncapble or lazy to do, because last time their game was looking good and almost up to date was SOMA, but afterward engine start to degrade with every game and looking worse and worse. SOMA which is pretty old already, looks ways better than Rebirth and Bunker! So problem is not engine, problem are people responsirble for it who are doing bad job at updating it

[JocularJosh]

Originally posted by v00d00m4n:

Old engine is not a problem, you can always upgrade it and add fancy new effects, remove fps lock and so. Call of duty series still run on Quake 3 Arena engine, and Half Life Alyx actually using Quake 1 engine that was upgraded to gold soure then source and source 2, but at core it is still Quake 1 engine! Can you imagine this? A lot of ubisoft games using various modifications of Unreal 2 engine. Almost every 2nd modern 3d game actually runs on a modified engine of Doom 1 and still has some remains of its code deep inside. A lof of other studios using same engine for 20 or more years but upgrading it often to look up to date!



So devs of Amnesia dont need to change engine, they just need to upgrade it. And this is what they seems to be uncapble or lazy to do, because last time their game was looking good and almost up to date was SOMA, but afterward engine start to degade with every game and looking worse and worse. SOMA which is pretty old already, looks ways better than Rebirth and Bunker! So problem is not engine, problem are people responsible for it who are doing bad job at updating it!

They focus more on the atmosphere, story and gameplay.
Which I for one prefer. The game looks good. Not amazing, but good. Which is more than enough.

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by JocularJosh:

Originally posted by v00d00m4n:

Old engine is not a problem, you can always upgrade it and add fancy new effects, remove fps lock and so. Call of duty series still run on Quake 3 Arena engine, and Half Life Alyx actually using Quake 1 engine that was upgraded to gold soure then source and source 2, but at core it is still Quake 1 engine! Can you imagine this? A lot of ubisoft games using various modifications of Unreal 2 engine. Almost every 2nd modern 3d game actually runs on a modified engine of Doom 1 and still has some remains of its code deep inside. A lof of other studios using same engine for 20 or more years but upgrading it often to look up to date!



So devs of Amnesia dont need to change engine, they just need to upgrade it. And this is what they seems to be uncapble or lazy to do, because last time their game was looking good and almost up to date was SOMA, but afterward engine start to degade with every game and looking worse and worse. SOMA which is pretty old already, looks ways better than Rebirth and Bunker! So problem is not engine, problem are people responsible for it who are doing bad job at updating it!

They focus more on the atmosphere, story and gameplay.
Which I for one prefer. The game looks good. Not amazing, but good. Which is more than enough.

No they not, focus, story and gameplay also getting worse after SOMA. Its like studio was spoiled by succes of soma and got lazy and less creative and lost some of key developers (besides writer of soma and 1st amnesia who is writing now for Alone in the dark) and now they not just cant do anything as good as SOMA but they degrading in story, gameplay and atmosphere department. Evey new games looks uglier than previous, plays worse, and has worse story, and getting worse atmosphere. Bunker alone feels like some return to stage to studio development when they released first Penumbra. Like we back in 2nd half of 2000th prior 2010 era!

[Emotionless]

Originally posted by George:

I'm struggling to figure out what the message of Dark Descent would be, maybe because I haven't played it in a while, who knows. Your complaints don't make any sense though, replayability doesn't destroy games, their disgusting practices do. Darkwood is a good example of a replayable horror game, which is also Indie.
Also the engine remark is just distasteful. Game engines are not like car engines. It's a piece of software, of which every part of it, every line of code is mutable. If you are legitimately under the belief that they should have switched to Unity or Unreal instead of their in-house engine then I have no respect for you, both professionally and personally (since you said you're in the industry or something)

Replayability doesnt ruin games, i agree but unfortunately this is not what i meant thats why i put it in quotations, I of course meant the modern industry meaning of replayability, adding content for the sake of content to rank up hours for example AC Odyssey, souless gameplay.

Im not searching for the respect of anyone in this platform , my work speaks for itself and thats enough for my career so far. Also i never suggested to switch to any other engine,it would be far more beneficial for the company to extend their engine to newer tech for future-proofing ,as also has been said by other industry companies namely NaughtyDog.
I know exactly what game engines are since i made my own PBR Game engine back in 2015 in Java, worked on a lot of custom Inhouse game engines since then and even tho now I used Unreal 5 doesnt mean i dont fork around with other projects on the side. Lastly just because you dont agree with my opinions dont make them distasteful cause this implies that there is only one right taste, do you think thats logical?

[JocularJosh]

Originally posted by Emotionless:

Replayability doesnt ruin games, i agree but unfortunately this is not what i meant thats why i put it in quotations, I of course meant the modern industry meaning of replayability, adding content for the sake of content to rank up hours for example AC Odyssey, souless gameplay.

That is not at all what replayability means though.
You are talking about content bloat, longevity.

Replayability means just that, giving us incentive to replay the game.

[Emotionless]

Originally posted by JocularJosh:

Originally posted by Emotionless:

Replayability doesnt ruin games, i agree but unfortunately this is not what i meant thats why i put it in quotations, I of course meant the modern industry meaning of replayability, adding content for the sake of content to rank up hours for example AC Odyssey, souless gameplay.

That is not at all what replayability means though.
You are talking about content bloat, longevity.

Replayability means just that, giving us incentive to replay the game.

I dont like repeating myself so take a bit more time to understand what i wrote. Thank you!!!

[V3RTEX]

Great points

[Terepin]

Originally posted by v00d00m4n:

Half Life Alyx actually using Quake 1 engine that was upgraded to gold soure then source and source 2, but at core it is still Quake 1 engine!

Yeah, and Windows 11 is at the core still DOS!

Jesus...

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by Terepin:

Originally posted by v00d00m4n:

Half Life Alyx actually using Quake 1 engine that was upgraded to gold soure then source and source 2, but at core it is still Quake 1 engine!

Yeah, and Windows 11 is at the core still DOS!

Jesus...

Indeed it is, its not UNIX! Windows is a overgrown shell for DOS core and it still following basic principles of DOS and you can still run bat files made in 80th... with some success as all basic dos commands are still here.

But when people who suggest to switch engines of game is like to suggest to change DOS core to UNIX in Windows!

However there are many examples of mixed engines, like for example using Unreal for rendering but keeping logic of game and physics from old engine, games like Fable 1, GTA 3, VS, SA are examples of such mixed engines. Also Ubisoft has several modular engines they mix like lego for various games (Dunia, Scimitar, Lead etc)... thats why their games all the same, as Ubi even keeping gameplay logic modular and can easily transfer it from one game to another.

So maybe we can actually get good results while mixing render of Unreal 5 with logic and physics of HPL engine, but this will makes textures and other assets not so moddalbe until Unreal will be rewritten enought to easily load TGA and DDS like HPL engine does. Yet combining 2 engine not such an easy task.

I hate that Frictional HPL not getting good graphical updates it needs (i mean if they really wanted they would be able to make it look almost like Unreal 4 or 5 but they dont care to much to upgrade rendered to be on pair with modern games), but i love if for physics and opennes for modification and that gameplay feel of freedom (until you bump into static props that looks like they can be interacted with but they dont).

[Terepin]

Originally posted by v00d00m4n:

Originally posted by Terepin:

Yeah, and Windows 11 is at the core still DOS!

Jesus...

Indeed it is

No, it's not. Not since Windows 2000, when they switched to Windows NT and deprecated Windows 9x.

[JocularJosh]

Originally posted by Emotionless:

Originally posted by JocularJosh:

That is not at all what replayability means though.
You are talking about content bloat, longevity.

Replayability means just that, giving us incentive to replay the game.

I dont like repeating myself so take a bit more time to understand what i wrote. Thank you!!!

I mean, I am glad you aren't gonna repeat your nonsense but I understood what you wrote perfeclty fine. It's just wrong.
That is, factually, not what replayability is and that is precisely what you are talking about.

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by Terepin:

Originally posted by v00d00m4n:

Indeed it is

No, it's not. Not since Windows 2000, when they switched to Windows NT and deprecated Windows 9x.

NT existed before 2000, it was Winodws NT 3.1 that intoduced it, also last time when they used true dos was Windows ME which was .

MS DOS also a PC DOS
And NT core is still based on modified DOS code. Its not that pure dos from non NT, but it still has dos code under hood, it is not rewritten from scratch.

To be more precise - NT is modification OS/2 which was also known as CP/DOS, it was made by MS for IBM but it shared a lot of common libraries and and code with MSDOS and even at parts of code that was rewritten it followed same algroritm and basic princples as MSDOS to keep compatiblity of software between MSDOS an CPDOS aka OS/2. Initially NT was OS/2 3.0 and also NT OS/2 but IBM and MS decide to go solo due of differences in aproach so MS rebranded it to Windows NT.

You can rewrite code for some reason but when it follows same algoritms as previous code and even consists of portions of its code not rewritte its still a fork of older code. Its almost llike a translation of book to another language - you are retelling same story in different word, and not inventing new story. However in this case half of book is in original language as written by original writer. So no, your agrument is invalid and you dont know whole story.

And please learn the concept of code inheritance. No matter how much your code departed from initial code that was 20 or 30 years ago, it was evolutionary process that slowly changed code little by little, and new code is still based on old code and still has at least some of its portion inside and working, so you can safely call this new code a modification od old code, and if you started your super advance Uber Engine 10 like 30 years ago from modifiying doom 1 sources, your Uber Engine is still a modified Doom 1 engine... until at some point you fully rewrote it from scratch and totally changed every algroritm that had absolutely different logic that previous version had. But nobody does that,

So lets stop to argue and lets not derail topic to something unrelated to game.

[Terepin]

Windows NT was a separate product that was never used in client Windows until XP. All the Windows NT versions were based on Dave Cutler's work at Microsoft and they contained subsystem for DOS, but they ware not DOS based. Windows 9x were only systems based on DOS, with ME being the last one. Windows XP was NT.

[PsyWarVeteran]

That "something to pass to the player / a genuine message" is what we bluntly call "pretentiousness". Rebirth had nothing but that and it forgot it was a video game in the process.

The Bunker seems to be on the right track. They are prioritizing the gameplay and horror elements which is what we need from these games. Replayability is great and I don't see how it would "destroy" the game.

The only thing I'll agree is the criticisms about the engine, it needed a major update, years ago even.