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The dark pictures series download free8/26/2023 Samuels: At the outset, some five or so years ago, we determined the themes and high-level stories for eight games that make up the first two seasons of the Anthology. How do you settle on the horror themes for your anthology and are you trying to tell a bigger, metastory across the titles? Man of Medan digs into the haunted ship trope and Little Hope is about a ghost town, and House of Ashes seems to be about awakening a sleeping evil. Again, we will look to feedback from fans to see whether and how we develop those systems and interfaces for the future. The House of Ashes team has put a lot of thought into how best to empower players to set the game up to be played the way that they want to play it. It’s not realistic for us to assume that we can make everything perfect for everyone people are different and have different preferences for how they play the game and enjoy that experience. Samuels: Our philosophy is that nothing is nailed, ever, but from game to game, we do place most focus on protecting those things that fans of our games like the most and improving those things that we receive the most requests to improve. What are your plans for House of Ashes in that regard? Did you find the sweet spot for difficulty with Little Hope, or is that something you’re still trying to nail? In your second in the anthology, Little Hope, you seem to have made the game a bit more accessible to a broader audience by making controls a bit easier and response times a bit longer. The interface being quite big and bold and in your face is a cue to stop and think, “Do I want my decision to be based on what I feel is right, or what I think is best, tactically, to keep everyone alive?” Samuels: The mechanics around choices in The Dark Pictures are designed to be a constant reminder that the decisions made in the game, every decision, has a consequence. Man of Medan, the first in your anthology series, focused on the players’ moral compass and having to choose head or heart when making a decision. We look forward to telling these stories and creating these games for many years to come. We’ve released a number of games since Until Dawn – including some VR titles-but storytelling is something that really defines us as a studio now. We got very excited about the concept of multiplayer short-form horror. Sometime after Until Dawn’s release, we started talking about an idea that would later become The Dark Pictures Anthology. Not specifically horror, but interesting storytelling, cinematic presentation, and narratives strongly influenced by players’ actions. The opportunity to create Until Dawn opened our eyes to what we could become, and where we might focus for the future. Until then, we had been doing a lot of varied work and hadn’t really focused on many of the things that people now identify in a typical Supermassive Games game. Looking back, it’s clear that Until Dawn was a turning point for us. Supermassive Games CEO Pete Samuels: We’re 13 years old this year and I think it took us half that time to really find our real identity as a studio. How would you say the studio evolved from its early days working on titles like LittleBigPlanet and Killzone, to its current state so deeply invested in an eight-part, narratively-driven horror anthology? Looking at Supermassive’s thirteen-year history as a game developer, it seems like the 2015 release of Until Dawn and the overwhelmingly positive response to it had an outsized impact on the studio and what it creates. We chatted with Pete Samuels, CEO of Supermassive Games, about the company’s evolution, how it creates such horrific masterpieces, and where the anthology stands as it approaches the first season finale: The Devil Within. And this year, House of Ashes will have players trapped in an underground Mesopotamian temple during the 2003 Iraq War. In 2020, Little Hope delivered players to a ghost town. The anthology premiered with Man of Medan, which drops players onto a ghost ship. In 2019, the studio revealed its opus: The Dark Pictures Anthology, a series of eight interactive-storytelling survival video games that explore a swath of horror genres. In the years since, the studio has worked on a plethora of games across a few genres but seems most comfortable doling out terror-tinged stories to a variety of platforms. The release of that year’s Until Dawn and the positive response to the horrific bit of interactive storytelling (not to mention winning a BAFTA) changed the direction of the studio, and more importantly, helped it find its identity. Sometime around 2015, Supermassive Games had an epiphany of sorts.
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