One of many issues we’re most happy with in Amnesia: Rebirth is the vary of environments in recreation. So proud, in reality, that we made a complete trailer about it:
As you may see there’s a variety of inside and out of doors environments, in addition to ranges taking locations always of the day, from nightfall to daybreak. In reality, the range is so nice that just about each single degree takes place in a brand new sort of location or a twist on an older one.
The most important purpose for us to go to all of this bother is that we needed the sport to really feel like an epic journey. Our protagonist, Tasi, is making an attempt to save lots of her family members and get residence, and this may play out as a battle via a hostile world. By arriving in several places at
completely different occasions of the day, we can provide a a lot stronger sense of journey and development, and of the sheer scale of the hardships that Tasi has to endure.
One more reason for having this number of environments is to supply an incentive for the participant to maintain enjoying. In a horror recreation the core expertise that you’re making an attempt to evoke is terror, which isn’t very nice. That is in stark distinction to most different video games the place the core gameplay loop is often satisfying in its personal proper. In a horror recreation, you’re at all times working the danger of the participant quitting, due to the sport being too profitable at doing what you got down to do! If the participant is aware of that there will probably be one thing new and thrilling forward in the event that they handle to beat their present ordeals, then they’re much much less prone to drop out. The promise of latest environments works nicely for this, as do different issues similar to charming narratives or unsolved mysteries. In fact, Amnesia: Rebirth may have these items as nicely – a few of them are hinted at on this trailer!
When deciding on the environments within the recreation, it shortly dawned on us that setting most of it within the desert wouldn’t do. In full daylight a desert seems to be an excessive amount of like a day on the seaside, which wouldn’t invoke the sense of dread we needed from this recreation. So we thought up plenty of different, scarier, environments that will change into a part of Tasi’s journey. This consists of caves, outdated forts, misplaced ruins, and different a lot stranger environments.
Creating this many environments was one of many hardest issues that we did throughout improvement. When making the primary Amnesia recreation every little thing occurred inside an outdated fortress. The entire recreation was based mostly inside the identical fundamental construction. Because of this we might use the identical door at virtually anyplace within the recreation.
Issues are usually not that easy in Amnesia: Rebirth. The issue is that most of the environments don’t have a lot in widespread. This results in the primary huge situation we bumped into: we couldn’t actually share sources between ranges. In Amnesia: The Darkish Descent, and to a sure extent our newest recreation, SOMA, most elementary sources – for instance flooring, partitions, and pipes – might match wherever within the recreation. Rebirth has it a lot trickier. Many of the belongings for the caves actually solely work inside these caves, and so forth. So after we wanted an inside for the fort, we needed to create every little thing from scratch.
The issues don’t cease there. One other situation is that it’s arduous to even re-use related
gameplay parts between the maps. For instance, we will’t have plenty of doorways when working round in caves; and the form of containers you would possibly discover in outdated ruins could be very completely different from these discovered inside a fort. This was made worse by the truth that now we have a bunch of gameplay programs that depend on these sorts of belongings. So we frequently wanted to rethink how fundamental gameplay would work within the completely different environments. How do I disguise if there are not any doorways? What mild sources may be lit in an atmosphere the place no-one has candles or oil lamps? What sources would it not make sense to seek out right here?
I believe this will probably be an ideal enhance for the participant expertise because it means there’s at all times selection as you go from one degree to a different. However it was an enormous pressure on us when making an attempt to construct all of it. Ultimately although I believe it was price it.
Amnesia: Rebirth will probably be out on PS4 on October 20. I hope you’ll all be terrified and intrigued as you discover its environments!