20 réponses à ce sujet

[FlyingSquirrel]

I've been playing SOMA the last few days and been having as much fun with a non-Mass Effect sci-fi game as I have in quite a while. It got me thinking about the role exploration plays in ME - with perhaps the exceptions of Feros and Noveria, it seems like exploration and combat are pretty clearly delineated most of the time in ME. Namely, exploration happens on the Galaxy Map and in the Mako in ME1, and combat happens in relatively tightly enclosed spaces, more often than not indoors.

 

I think what's kept my attention in SOMA so far is that, while I occasionally have to hide from robots, the game is mostly about exploration in smaller spaces. At first I was a bit wary because I thought I knew what was "really happening" before the prologue was even over, but even before an alternative explanation came to my attention (as it eventually did), I was fully caught up in finding all the clues about what exactly had occurred before my arrival in the underwater complex. At one point I was honestly torn between taking the easier approach to hiding from a robot and trying something riskier so that I could go check one more room for lost recordings and data files.

 

While I know they are obviously in different genres - Mass Effect is an action RPG series, and SOMA is a mostly linear survival horror game - I'd like to see ME do a little more with the "deserted facility" trope in the future, and maybe even a level or two that goes in more of a survival horror direction by having your characters' weapons disabled or lost for a period of time. A mission like the Pragia lab in ME2, for example, is IMO at its weakest when the Blood Pack turn up for more gunfights. Instead, why not have Aresh set up some sort of forcefield that deactivates Shepard's and Jack's weapons and then require them to sneak around the varren in order to get to the end?

[DeathScepter]

i haven't played it but I saw a playthru by H2ODelirious. So Yes Bioware should take notes on that game

[Big Bad]

Having never heard of SOMA before, I looked it upon on Steam, and now I'm intrigued.  However, I generally have a hard time with horror/survival games.  They make me really, really stressed.  I couldn't even get through the original Dead Space in its entirety.  I've got Alien: Isolation in my library, but I've barely played it (I find myself wanting to hide in lockers and never leave!).  Nevertheless, this game sounds interesting to me - should I give a shot?

[iM3GTR]

Having never heard of SOMA before, I looked it upon on Steam, and now I'm intrigued. However, I generally have a hard time with horror/survival games. They make me really, really stressed. I couldn't even get through the original Dead Space in its entirety. I've got Alien: Isolation in my library, but I've barely played it (I find myself wanting to hide in lockers and never leave!). Nevertheless, this game sounds interesting to me - should I give a shot?

It's got some interesting themes, unfortunately they're not touched upon as much as in some other games. It's not really horror, the monsters aren't creepy and when you've seen one they have very little impact.

On the other hand it's quite interesting, the atmosphere and exploration is good, and it's not really horror-y that you'll get stressed by it.

[Panda]

Having never heard of SOMA before, I looked it upon on Steam, and now I'm intrigued.  However, I generally have a hard time with horror/survival games.  They make me really, really stressed.  I couldn't even get through the original Dead Space in its entirety.  I've got Alien: Isolation in my library, but I've barely played it (I find myself wanting to hide in lockers and never leave!).  Nevertheless, this game sounds interesting to me - should I give a shot?

 

Well I have only seen it on youtube, not really fan of horror games myself so I rather watch others play them- but it has very good story- probably best I have seen in video game- so I think it's worth the shot for that reason alone ^^;

 

It has it's moments where you need to run and hide, but overall there isn't that many really. Although the music and pulse that you hear rising from your character make you feel like you are in constant danger most of time you are actually completely safe.

[Big Bad]

Thanks for the information!

[SKAR]

I've been playing SOMA the last few days and been having as much fun with a non-Mass Effect sci-fi game as I have in quite a while. It got me thinking about the role exploration plays in ME - with perhaps the exceptions of Feros and Noveria, it seems like exploration and combat are pretty clearly delineated most of the time in ME. Namely, exploration happens on the Galaxy Map and in the Mako in ME1, and combat happens in relatively tightly enclosed spaces, more often than not indoors.

I think what's kept my attention in SOMA so far is that, while I occasionally have to hide from robots, the game is mostly about exploration in smaller spaces. At first I was a bit wary because I thought I knew what was "really happening" before the prologue was even over, but even before an alternative explanation came to my attention (as it eventually did), I was fully caught up in finding all the clues about what exactly had occurred before my arrival in the underwater complex. At one point I was honestly torn between taking the easier approach to hiding from a robot and trying something riskier so that I could go check one more room for lost recordings and data files.

While I know they are obviously in different genres - Mass Effect is an action RPG series, and SOMA is a mostly linear survival horror game - I'd like to see ME do a little more with the "deserted facility" trope in the future, and maybe even a level or two that goes in more of a survival horror direction by having your characters' weapons disabled or lost for a period of time. A mission like the Pragia lab in ME2, for example, is IMO at its weakest when the Blood Pack turn up for more gunfights. Instead, why not have Aresh set up some sort of forcefield that deactivates Shepard's and Jack's weapons and then require them to sneak around the varren in order to get to the end?

Yeah that sounds interesting.

[capn233]

ME1 sort of combined exploration and combat, even on the uncharted worlds.  But I do agree that even there they could seem isolated from one another, at least on missions where the entirety of combat is in a prefab.

 

Flying around the galaxy map never really felt like exploration to me, even if some of the planets had interesting descriptions.  So ME2 and ME3 didn't really feel like they had any exploration, outside of the minimal amount required in whatever area for each mission.

 

While on the whole I really like the uncharted worlds from ME1, especially the skyscapes, I am hoping the game won't require a lot of time spent simply driving around and exploring.  DAI has some strong points, but spending ages traveling in very large maps and fighting respawning random mooks repeated is not something I care for either.

[FlyingSquirrel]

I definitely don't want them to go DA:I with Andromeda where you have to spend a ton of time just driving around and/or shooting at generic enemies. That's part of why I think BW ought to expand the concept of exploration. A relatively small space can be ripe for exploration if there's some challenge involved in getting from one place to another, finding clues, and figuring out what's been happening. They do a little of this from time to time, especially in Overlord and Firewalker, but often the path to take is pretty obvious and it still culminates with another shootout.

 

The main drawback to SOMA so far is that you're pretty railroaded as a character. I've encountered a few moral choices so far, but you're also required to unplug a robot near the beginning even though choosing whether or not to do that forms the basis of most of the subsequent choices, and you can't shape your dialogue at all - all you can do is choose whether or not to exhaust all the dialogue with somebody at once or move on and come back later.

 

As far as the horror elements go, they're actually a relatively minor aspect. I've probably only spent about 5% of the time hiding or running away. It's "survival horror" in that you have no weapons and can't fight back, but it's way less intense than Dead Space, and the enemy encounters aren't as frequent as in Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Though I should warn that it can be quite psychologically intense and bleak at times, and it definitely merits a trigger warning for self-harm, which turns out to be a significant plot point.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Finished the game today. Fair warning - it does get creepier and a little more intense towards the end.

[ArabianIGoggles]

Game does look interesting.  Not sure why they'd name it after a muscle relaxer though.

[Wulfram]

Game does look interesting.  Not sure why they'd name it after a muscle relaxer though.

The muscle relaxant is presumably named after the ritual drink from the Rigveda. I'd assume the video game is named either directly after that, or after the drug in Brave New World

[SimonTheFrog]

Soma is one of my all-time favourites because of its philosophical ideas and how you can actually relate to them. It doesn't just ramble about ideas and concepts, it makes you feel them, understand the advantages and repercussions. 

I don't want to spoil too much but some of the concepts you really get you universe expanded is: how would an out-of-body experience feel like, how important is life if there's consciousness without it, how important is it to have humans existing, what is more important: protecting life in the way we know it at all costs or keep on living even if it means transcending the current way of existing.

ME tried occasionally to touch interesting concepts but it never, never had the gravitas to really make anybodies mind blown. 

ME is emotional, dramatic... but not as clever to be frank.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Yeah, I think the ending of this game is going to haunt me for a while. I do think it would have benefited from Bioware-style dialogue choices, if only because there are times when it seemed like Simon should have asked Catherine a question or reported something he saw since the last time he talked to her, and he just...doesn't.

 

And incidentally, without giving too much away - for those of you who have played SOMA, this is why I've long been skeptical of the notion that EDI or the geth could be "rebuilt" in a Destroy scenario and still be the same people that they were before. (It's also why I think AI-Shepard in the Control ending is a different entity from the human Shepard who activates the Crucible and subsequently dies.)

[o Ventus]

My favorite game of 2015, easy.

[o Ventus]

It's got some interesting themes, unfortunately they're not touched upon as much as in some other games. It's not really horror, the monsters aren't creepy and when you've seen one they have very little impact.

On the other hand it's quite interesting, the atmosphere and exploration is good, and it's not really horror-y that you'll get stressed by it.

 

The Jiangshi (the teleporting enemy) can be a bit off-putting, especially when it teleports across the room to near where you're hiding. Jin Yoshida (the dead guy stuck in his diving suit at Site Omega) is visually disturbing, what with him having tentacles and structure gel breaking through his helmet and no longer having a face. The robotic woman can be a little creepy by the way she talks to you and still seems to have some level of sentience left in her, despite being a heavily mutated cyborg monster. The anglerfish is probably the most effective jump scare in a video game in recent memory if you fall for the schmuck bait leading to it (which is actually quite easy to do if you don't already know it's there). Finally, Johann Ross can definitely be a little freaky going with the way he jump scares you from time to time and his eerie voice from the structure gel mutation.

 

All in all, SOMA is not as scary as, say, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but it's bursting at the seams with atmosphere more than Amnesia, IMO, which makes up for it.

[o Ventus]

Yeah, I think the ending of this game is going to haunt me for a while. I do think it would have benefited from Bioware-style dialogue choices, if only because there are times when it seemed like Simon should have asked Catherine a question or reported something he saw since the last time he talked to her, and he just...doesn't.

 

And incidentally, without giving too much away - for those of you who have played SOMA, this is why I've long been skeptical of the notion that EDI or the geth could be "rebuilt" in a Destroy scenario and still be the same people that they were before. (It's also why I think AI-Shepard in the Control ending is a different entity from the human Shepard who activates the Crucible and subsequently dies.)

 

Spoiler

I disagree, since the scans of people in SOMA are just that, scans of people. They're copies of already lived experiences and memories uploaded to whatever machine is available. Compared to the geth or EDI, who don't have a pre-built template and have no set-in-stone personality to begin with. Theoretically you can just create more geth or make more AIs like EDI, but if John Smith's copies are gone, then John Smith is effectively gone since John Smith no longer exists in any form.

 

The geth and EDI are not similar to what is in SOMA, and I think this is an important distinction to make when comparing them. The people in SOMA are lost, there's nothing to indicate that the geth or EDI can't be rebuilt.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Well, that's not quite what I was getting at.

 

Spoiler

The reason I think it may not be possible to rebuild EDI and the geth per se, and that AI-Shepard is not the same entity as human-Shepard, is that consciousness is a subjective experience, and so when you're talking about someone's mind making a "platform jump," you don't know if the existing consciousness somehow travels to the new platform or if a new consciousness with shared memories is being created. SOMA suggests that the latter may well be the case, in that Simon's memories and personality transfer without his consciousness also transferring - from present-day Toronto to 2104, from the first diving suit he's using to that high-pressure suit, and finally from the high-pressure suit to the Ark. In each case, the "old" Simon and the "new" Simon are separate entities, even though in one case, the old Simon died long before the new Simon was activated (i.e. with the original Simon and the one that first woke up on board Pathos-II).

 

So I don't see why it would be any different for EDI and the geth. If EDI dies from the Destroy beam, maybe it would be possible to recover all her memories and personality from the Normandy and transfer her program into another body, or back into a ship's AI core, or whatever. But there would be no way to verify whether the consciousness that existed within the original EDI is still there or whether a new consciousness that share's the original EDI's memories is now present instead.

[Panda]

Game does look interesting.  Not sure why they'd name it after a muscle relaxer though.

 

Soma actually means "cute" or "pretty" in finnish ^^; Which the game is not

[BioWareMod08]

This thread is off topic and is now closed.