Official Thread The Witness

MR SCHULTZ

MR SCHULTZ

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Sep 12, 2013
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"The Witness is an exploration-puzzle game, on an uninhabited island."





Some links:

http://the-witness.net/news/

http://kotaku.com/5893336/jonathan-blows-the-witness-is-an-exercise-in-symphonic-game-design

http://www.psu.com/a021345/PS4s-The-Witness-game-length-revealed

"The Witness will always bear the honor of being one of the first PlayStation 4 games announced, and it was one of the first that I saw in intimate detail. Early PS4 buyers will still have to wait until early 2014 to play it, but according to its creator--independent developer Jonathan Blow--the game world's sheer size will be worth that wait."

Specifically, Blow details (to the official PlayStation Blog) that his team, Vekla, Inc., has found the game takes between 25 and 40 hours to complete, depending on how thoroughly you're exploring its enigmatic island and how swiftly you're piecing together its secrets. Blow specifically cites that some of the game is optional, likely referencing the hidden audio logs that reveal some of the game and island's backstory.

Jonathan Blow suspects that The Witness contains "the biggest and most-intricate world ever built for a puzzle game" and informs the PlayStation faithful that much of the location and puzzle design is finished. At this point, Vekla is texturing, polishing, and preparing the final product to land on your shiny new home console early next year."

 
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Looked through pages of the Multi-platform & Playstation forums, as well as used the search bar, but didn't see a thread for this game.
Good to see a huge puzzle game like this. Seems like everything is action/sports/shooting oriented in videogames, for the most part.
Heh, I know this will cause smoke to come out of my ears, and probably stump me over and over again.
Looks amazing.

Inb4 someone says it looks bori....nevermind.
 
This game looks intriguing. The video with Adam Sessler was a good preview. I hope there are some living beings somewhere in the game, and it's not just a series of mechanical puzzles. That might get dry after a while.

25 to 40 hours? Wow, that's a long game, especially for an indy/arcade title.

Good thread, thanks for putting it together. It's one of those games that is on my radar.
 
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Looks great and like a place I'll enjoy exploring. Still don't know what to make of those puzzles though. I'm hoping they are just holding back the interesting parts in order not to spoil any solutions.
 
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MR SCHULTZ said:
Good to see a huge puzzle game like this. Seems like everything is action/sports/shooting oriented in videogames, for the most part.
Heh, I know this will cause smoke to come out of my ears, and probably stump me over and over again.
Looks amazing.

Inb4 someone says it looks bori....nevermind.
Click to expand...

LOL. Don't get me wrong, it definitely has an appeal to it. It reminds me a lot of Myst in some ways. But I also believe this may just be one of those games where trailers don't do it justice, and you need to play it for yourself.
 
These are the type of games i am more likely to try at a launch when fewer AAA games are out. Thank you for starting this thread, i hadn't heard anything about this game prior to now and its seems like something i would like.
 
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Very interesting vid (the interview two posts up). His emphasis on the "joy of discovery" ... it's similar to how he talks about The Witness being a game of "insight." He's right, the hand holding approach robs you of the joy of poking around, trying to work things out, and then the "aha" moment where you get it.

I don't think that hand holding is unique to Japanese games. Seems like most modern games use it. I imagine it comes from data that show a lot of players will bail out when they reach something they don't understand.

I like his point about different genres and the over-emphasis on the word "fun." He's right, talking about CS or a similar game as "fun" doesn't really describe it very well. "Grueling, punishing" experiences can be enjoyable, too, for the challenge (although personally I usually avoid those games).

Sounds like the Witness will be a brain teaser. Hopefully the puzzles aren't too tough, since I tend to give up on games that make me work too hard.
 
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People give Blow a lot of crap and he probably deserves some of it because, let's be honest, he is a bit douchey. That said, I find myself agreeing with him more often than not and Braid is still one of my favorite games of all time. Hope this game can also leave a lasting impression and make me look at gaming just a little bit different like was the case with Braid.
 
Obscene Jester said:
People give Blow a lot of crap and he probably deserves some of it because, let's be honest, he is a bit douchey. That said, I find myself agreeing with him more often than not and Braid is still one of my favorite games of all time. Hope this game can also leave a lasting impression and make me look at gaming just a little bit different like was the case with Braid.
Click to expand...

I don't know that I'll ever be fond of the man himself, but I loved Braid. He could whiz on a parade of toddlers and if this game is anywhere near as good as Braid, I'll end up buying it.
 
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John Blow's talking point from Indie Game the Movie is amazing. He basically explains what's wrong with the gaming industry and how lazy everyone has gotten with creation of games and dumbing things down for gamers.

I wanna unwind when I play a game, but I don't want to be a vegetable pressing buttons.
 
http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2014/05/14/witness-ps4-progress-report/

The Witness is a game where you explore an abandoned island and solve puzzles. We’ve been working on this game for a long time (it’s been over five years since I began working on it, myself! The rest of the team joined at various times after that). We don’t know the release date yet; it is still officially “when it’s done”, but these days “when it’s done” is getting closer and closer. The Witness is an ambitious game with a lot of things for us to get right, and getting it right takes time; I don’t want to rush the game out at the cost of quality.

14175337261_de6471e693_b.jpg


Here are some of the things we’ve been working on lately:

Design

All the gameplay along the “main line” of the game — the stuff you would expect to do from the beginning to the end of a standard playthrough — is done. But, this is a game that has a lot of extra things for players who are really into the game and want more; we are still designing some of those extras.

Modeling and texturing

The game has a lot of different locations and it’s very important that they all receive the same degree of care. Most of the island where The Witness takes place is fully modeled at this point, but there are a few very important locations that are still in a draft stage, and several others that could use another pass of detail.

14178648515_f43739cefc_b.jpg


Frame rate optimisations

At release on the PS4, we are planning to render at 1080p and 60 frames per second. Right now we meet this target in many areas of the game, but not everywhere. But with more old-fashioned hard work we should be.

14175988692_38e9358d60_b.jpg


Level-of-detail management and streaming

For example, making sure that it doesn’t take too long to stream in new parts of the world as you move. When we do stream in higher-detail versions of far-away geometry, we don’t want the graphics to pop, so we’ve recently implemented a smooth blend between LOD levels. The Witness is an open-world game with no loading screens; the feeling of just walking around and looking at things is very important. We work hard to make this happen as smoothly as possible.

Audio
Since the game is so much about a sense of place, the audio design is crucial. Right now there are 1.2 gigabytes of sound (much of it compressed!) in the game, which represents over 40% the game’s data.

This last statement about the audio made me curious about what our data looks like, so here are some numbers on how much data is in The Witness. (These are all the size of files in the game as it would be shipped, not the source files!)

  • Texture Maps: 1196 files, 446MB
  • Meshes: 4588 files, 507MB
  • Sounds: 2435 files, 1.2GB
  • Animations: 197 files, 0.6MB
  • Entities: 1 file, 4.3MB
  • Lightmaps (these are auto-generated): 17916 files, 453MB
Total (including other files not listed here): 39387 files, 2.7GB

It’s a lot of work, but we are now in the downhill stretch of the race and looking forward to tying the game up completely. We’ll have more updates for you before too long!
 
i left a post on the witness blog a few years ago saying the the trees (in the autumn picture; first) should be a light tone brown instead of the previous dark drown/almost black that was implemented. no idea if they if they took what i said on board but it appears they have indeed changed it to something like i suggested (i even made a crappy mock in paint). that's pretty cool
 
Thanks for the update, naty. I was curious about where this game was at, in terms of development. Sounds like maybe we'll see it by the end of the year. It looks interesting but maybe a bit too cerebral for me, unless after each puzzle is solved, something really interesting or mysterious happens that will keep me working at it.
 
Wow, was I way off base about this game. I assumed it was some Hitman game or some shooter. Jesus, what was I looking at or thinking at the time. So, now that this has totally changed what I thought was coming, I have to take this one in a little bit.

No loading, open world, solving puzzles with a huge focus on audio submersion....this looks like a game I could just chill out on the couch with and not be bothered....have a beer...and relax and take my time. I think it's pretty cool how the developer has revealed certain details that the general public really doesn't care about, but us gamers do...such as file sizes. To me that shows transparency, community involvement and a true desire to create a great game from a gamer.

Any chance of having co-op puzzle solving in this game, similar to the way they did with Portal 2?
 
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Kvally said:
Wow, was I way off base about this game. I assumed it was some Hitman game or some shooter. Jesus, what was I looking at or thinking at the time. So, now that this has totally changed what I thought was coming, I have to take this one in a little bit.

No loading, open world, solving puzzles with a huge focus on audio submersion....this looks like a game I could just chill out on the couch with and not be bothered....have a beer...and relax and take my time. I think it's pretty cool how the developer has revealed certain details that the general public really doesn't care about, but us gamers do...such as file sizes. To me that shows transparency, community involvement and a true desire to create a great game from a gamer.

Any chance of having co-op puzzle solving in this game, similar to the way they did with Portal 2?
Click to expand...

Co-op portion would be nice but I'm not sure if it was ever planned to be included.
 
From Jonathan Blow on the Playstation Blog:

20856603743_90df4982c6_z.jpg


Hi everyone!

We finally know the release date for The Witness: it’s January 26, 2016. That’s about four months from now, and it will be a very busy four months as we work hard to make the game the absolute best we can.

We’ve also got a new trailer, which you can watch here:



We’ll be very happy to get the game out into the world, because we’ve been working on it a long time! We originally thought The Witness would be coming out toward the end of the PS4 launch window, but … there’s just been a lot to do. I think when the game is in your hands, you’ll find it to be intricate and deep, and also unlike anything else you have played.



There’s a lot here. When we started making this game, I figured it would have between 8 and 12 hours of playtime. As it happens, the game we’ve finally built is around 10 times as big as that: if you are a completionist who wants to wring every last drop out of the game, you might expect to play for 80 hours, or possibly 100. For people who don’t want to go quite that far, the game’s still got plenty for you.



For the most part we are fixing bugs, refining the feel of play, and making sure everything is just right for January.

20855001304_4c096f7417_z.jpg


That’s all from me for now — back to working on the game! — but your fine PS.Blog host Justin has been playing the preview version of The Witness and will be sharing his impressions soon.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/09/17/the-witness-launches-on-ps4-january-26-2016/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+PSBlog+(PlayStation.Blog)
 
Has anyone witnessed The Witness? I can't find it on the PSN Store, Sony's store, on Amazon...anywhere. It's supposedly coming out tomorrow and there is no way to pre-load it or find out the price. Is this a way to prevent shock factor? Hearing you can put 50-80 hours into are they going to price it like a TripleA title? I was hoping $29.99 or less otherwise I may have to hold off.
 
I wasn't really anticipating this because the puzzles looked like the type that don't really interest me. But it sounds like the whole island is a puzzle, which makes it more interesting.

I loved Braid. So I may check this out at some point.
 
Good scores, I didn't know it was a puzzle game though. The last one of those I enjoyed was portal.
 
I started dl'ing this morning (like 3.6Gb) and will jump into it much later this evening as I'm booked up all day. My understanding is that spoiler-free talk is of extreme importance with this title.
 
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JB was talking about development on twitch. No resolution options on Microsoft Windows version, dropped LOD on console versions to get a more solid FPS, iOS version in under way, game was 6-8 million to make, patch incoming for control sensitivity.

Indie game is $40.00.
 
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