New Trailer

[NanayaShiki]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxBuL8lU3Bs

[Yuki]

Looks like there might be another Pyramid Head-esque figure? At least, the last shot shows something really ominous-looking in shadow that makes me think of that sort of thing. Design looks entirely different, though, which is really nice. I wonder how this'll pan out.

[jdnation]

They teased that monster in the reveal. Everything looks a lot more 'Hellraiser'-ish to me. But 'eh... this is the GAAS attempt, so everything seems more Escape-Room / Monster-chase, and I imagine they'll be changing up the roster of enemy types as the service goes on. Maybe with one possible overarching baddy. This is the one title I don't expect a lot from, especially given that the story is being made up as they go from what seems to be based on in-game decisions / voting.

They seem to be playing on the idea of pandemic-paranoia in the description... The emphasis on a global audience and the idea of fear spreading like a disease suggests that the Silent Hill phenomena is spreading globally.

Today’s release of the latest SILENT HILL: Ascension trailer and artwork gives fans a look at the exciting, forthcoming interactive series
“I can feel it. Your guilt. So thick it chokes the air. You want to know how you can escape from this place. But you can't... any more than you can escape yourself... and the pain you carry. It fills you up. Like a sickness. A disease, that you pass on to everyone you meet. Everyone you love.”

SILENT HILL: Ascension ‎follows multiple main characters from locations around the world tormented by new and terrifying SILENT HILL monsters. Lurking in the shadows, these monsters threaten to consume people, their children, and entire towns as they're drawn into the darkness by both recent murders and long suppressed guilt and fears.

In SILENT HILL: Ascension ‎the actions of millions will determine the outcome. By the time the last scene streams, which characters have survived? Will those who are left be redeemed, damned, or suffer? Even the project’s creators do not know how SILENT HILL: Ascension ‎will end. Instead, the character’s fates are in the audience’s hands.

Long-time fans of SILENT HILL and newcomers alike have a lot to look forward to with the launch of SILENT HILL: Ascension ‎later this year.

“We’ve gone the extra mile to create a dreamlike world in SILENT HILL: Ascension ‎with disturbing, hyper-detailed characters, other-worldly monsters, immersive atmospheres, and an overall audio and visual design that our team is very proud of,” said Chris Amaral, Art Director at Bad Robot Games. “The detailed environments, the eerie ambiance, and the realistic characters and monsters should really enhance the horror experience, creating something that is pure SILENT HILL, while also feeling unique for the franchise.”

This time around you won’t be experiencing fear alone. Instead, you, along with a global audience, will have direct and permanent influence over how the fate of the characters and story plays out. It is your chance to shape the canon of SILENT HILL forever.

"SILENT HILL: Ascension ‎will captivate audiences with its immersive experience, spotlighting stunning visuals and live community-driven moments, all while exploring the psychological horror that has made the SILENT HILL series so beloved by fans worldwide. For the first time in the SILENT HILL history, the collective audience will be able to influence the story, determining crucial outcomes for the complex, evolving characters in this series,” said Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid Entertainment.

Motio Okamoto, a producer of the SILENT HILL series for Konami Digital Entertainment had to say, “SILENT HILL fans and horror audiences everywhere have a lot to look forward to. We are pleased to tell a new interactive story, in never-before-explored locations, alongside new characters that will be introduced to fans of the SILENT HILL universe. It is you who will decide the fate of multiple main characters, which will unfold simultaneously around the globe.”

So, that really leaves one big question: What legacy will you leave on SILENT HILL?

https://www.genvid.com/news/redemption- ... e-the-outc

Ascension should very likely be considered it's own independent spin-off thing and not 'canonical' in terms of the story-line, assuming that Konami even cares about maintaining that consistently anymore.

[Droo]

I'm still intrigued and am cautiously optimistic about this one.

[Yuki]

The Genvid CEO has been pretty active in the related threads over at ResetEra - however the end product ends up being, it's pretty clear to me that the team is passionate about it and really wants to do good by the fanbase. One thing of note is that they'll rerun the story at the end of the season, so even if the worst-case scenario happens and all the characters die midway through, we'll still potentially be able to see the rest of the narrative.

The thread is here (direct link to one of the CEO's posts): https://www.resetera.com/threads/silent ... -106465974

Some quotes:

SHA's not a game, it's an interactive streaming series. For those of you who want games, there are multiple coming. This is more like interactive Netflix.
The series is not a simple choose your own adventure, and it's not voting. We'll share more on how you participate a bit later, but there are multiple systems in place that will shift the results, and every day is new content and cinematics.

Our experience with multiple titles is that the majority audience always tries to get characters to survive to the end. I can understand why people are skeptical about trolls, but in practice it rarely happens and we have ways to counter their influence.

Walking Dead's not the right example of for how Silent Hill will be given that it was built for a specific client's needs (Facebook instant games).

We're quite proud of our monster design. They're a fit for the story we want to tell, and we have more that are not in the trailer.

If we were building a video game we would have built the trailer differently. More focus on atmospherics, slower paced. I think in games you want to focus on your personal immersion. My favorite part of Life is Strange titles is when I get to just sit in a location and listen to the music and background noise.

Since this is a show, meant to be watched and cannot be individually played, we have to focus on scenes that are visually stimulating. If you look at this trailer and the original Silent Hill movie's trailer, you'll see they have a similar way that they're cut, starting with isolated characters and then building up to crescendo with monsters.

You are watching and playing the stream. There will be a level of interactivity not dissimilar to Telltale titles insofar as there are QTEs, puzzles, and decisions. But it is a show meant to be watched; the anchor point should be Netflix, not Telltale.

In a game, you can focus on a solo protagonist and when you die in the game, you just load from your last save point. I worked on Final Fantasy titles for the better part of a decade; at the end of the day you're still going through the same story with the same heroes. The story and its beats are pre-determined.
In a movie, you can focus the audience on the outcome you want to tell, because you as the storyteller have full control.
What does it mean to create a product where neither the audience nor you the creator have full control? For example, if we give the audience the agency to determine death for a character, and they kill that character off within a few weeks, the story's now ended before we get very far. That's satisfying for neither us nor the audience. So we have developed systems and characters to give the audience agency while also being able to tell enough of the story in case too many characters are on a path toward destruction.

Yes, we plan to re-run the narrative at the close of the season. We call it "What If?" and this will let the audience unlock all the missing branches and story content. We are generating a huge number of branches, more than Telltale made in its games. And we have more content in this product than every cut scene from every Silent Hill every made combined. So we will have a lot of alts to unlock and not all will unlock.

The goal is to make some of the outcomes available in the non-canonical run. That said by my current calculation there are 36(!) right now between live/dead states and redemption/suffering/damnation, and that's not counting some of the smaller branches, so most will still be unseen.
With regard to trolling- we can control for this because we are the dungeon master. I will never violate the community's decisions, so once it locks in, it locks in, but we can tune the values for input to make it much harder to troll.

To be honest though we're mostly fighting against what we think will be a strong audience incentive to "win" the show by making every character survive. If everyone gets the good ending, it makes it too sanguine.

Additionally, Polygon did an interview with him: https://www.polygon.com/23742338/silent ... vid-konami

[Wigeke]

I really don't get this self imposed limitation that whatever is decided ends up happening in the story. In the end they won't be able to tell the story they want if watchers decide something else, and as an added bonus we end up with something less interactive, it's just a terrible decision to try and sound unique. I'd much rather have a more traditional until dawn like game set in SH.

[Droo]

I really don't get this self imposed limitation that whatever is decided ends up happening in the story. In the end they won't be able to tell the story they want if watchers decide something else, and as an added bonus we end up with something less interactive, it's just a terrible decision to try and sound unique. I'd much rather have a more traditional until dawn like game set in SH.

I'm getting the impression that's what Townfall is going to be.

[jdnation]

I really don't get this self imposed limitation that whatever is decided ends up happening in the story. In the end they won't be able to tell the story they want if watchers decide something else, and as an added bonus we end up with something less interactive, it's just a terrible decision to try and sound unique. I'd much rather have a more traditional until dawn like game set in SH.

Despite what they say, there are most likely several generous, but fixed outcomes that are designed to be interesting and will funnel players through to one of these through a mix of scenarios with just enough actual-freedom and just enough illusion-of-freedom, akin to wide-linear game design. Many routes that eventually wind up at several fixed spots.

The developers aren't lying, but are being very loose with what they mean by how things will end up. They have fixed events and an end scenario. Whichever character or characters make it there is left up to the audience, including whether or not they develop certain relationships or injuries. And Season 1 ends without the devs knowing what season 2 will be about... that will be written based on whatever crash lands by the end of season 1 (which characters survive, which characters solve their issues or are damaged by them, is the big bad guy still alive or dead etc.). But all the beats/encounters/puzzle solutions of Season 1 are set.

If the sleight of hand is good enough, then people will have a good time.

---------------------------

Update: That Polygon interview has interesting stuff. It's more ambitious than I thought in terms of content.

- Operates on the same back-end as Twitch
- The project was inspired by the Twitch Plays Pokemon phenomenon. Had hoped to try and attempt something like this on Stadia.
- Chat responses are the gameplay commands.
- Commands are received in real-time to affect outcomes that will be rendered in real-time on the game engine.
- Seems that the choice emphasis is largely on which main characters make it through to the end. Nothing more complicated than that.
- Players seem to choose which character goes down what part/section of the game, and their inputs depend on character actions and whether they are successful at surviving or not.
- Series planned to last for months. New content every day.
- If you miss playing anything on a previous day, you get a recap of what happened the previous day and can only affect things moving forward.
- These previews will be done manually by the team at the end of every day's session.
- Eventually entire episodes will be cut and people can watch them like a TV series.
- Writing team is led by a Telltale writer who also worked on God of War Ragnarok
- More ambitious than I thought, the writing team and new cutscenes will be mo-capped continuously adjusting to the audience's decisions.
- The 'game' will be run on the website as well as apps, even for consoles.
- The trailer is representative of the visual graphics, run on the cloud, comparable to PS5 in power.
- People will see 'Fate-Rails' where they will know up-front what particular outcome the character will go towards based on a decision (redemption, suffering, or damnation). They want the community to argue and debate on the best path to take.
- Currently a potential of 36 different endings.
- The first initial playthrough will be the canon.
- People can still have fun doing non-canonical runs after-the-fact exploring different branches. But not every branch will be available.
- Based on previous experiences, the devs are not too worried about trolls trying to get everyone killed as the overwhelming majority of players always tend to try and help everyone survive, so they expect troll attempts to be minimal.
- They will be trying to make it difficult to have everyone survive, difficulty will be adjusted based on observing how things are going and it will be a very long shot (extremely unlikely) to have every character survive.
- People who just want to watch, can just watch and not engage.
- Business-model/payment plan is not yet ready to be revealed, prices will be variable, being neither $70 for the whole experience, nor $10/month.

[The Adversary]

Looks like there might be another Pyramid Head-esque figure? At least, the last shot shows something really ominous-looking in shadow

I imagine so. It's the same figure shown in the Silent Hill Transmission, with the texting:

Sundayroast03: I hear it.

Hypeeeebeasst: Is it after Amina?

lilyzlimmer: oh shi oh shi oh shi

Hypeeeebeasst: Can we save her?

itsjustmark45: RUN!!

Then The Thing appears.

[jdnation]

You know, originally I felt that Ascension might've been similar to whatever Hideo Kojima was doing with Overdose. But in Overdose, it looks like you have actual control of the game's character in 3rd person. It's possible Kojima was aiming at a similar style of community involved cloud game.

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=26881

[jdnation]

Bump

Cutscene Footage and images leaked from SDCC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjmsXsngUCU&t=146s
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/leaked-s ... e.1659123/