Silent Hill 8 (Vatra Games)

[Dante]

 

Details:

Developer: Vatra Games

Director: Brian Gomez

Producers: Devin Shatsky, Tomm Hulett, Andy Pang

Executive Producers: Kazuya Takahashi, Jeremy Airey

Composer: Daniel Licht

Story: KONAMI Screenplay: Mira

Platforms: PS3/360

Release: 2011

Title: Silent Hill 8 (working title)

 

Story: Apparently it will have an escaped prisoner finding the town of Silent Hill, which is a little surprising. Haven't they closed the doors and locked the locks on that place yet? Every other year, it's somebody wandering in there to be chased down by evil nurses or pyramid heads, or whatever else they've come up with.

[Dante]

Press Release:

 

Konami Digital Entertainment GmbH has announced it is to return to the mist-shrouded streets of Silent Hill (working title), as the eighth title in the series heads to PlayStation®3 and the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft.

 

Scheduled for release in 2011, Silent Hill remains true to the franchise’s original roots, and again takes the form of a third-person horror experience. With an all-new thought-provoking storyline, players will once again find themselves face to face with their deepest sins and fears in the strange world of Silent Hill.

 

The new game begins after a prison transport vehicle careens off the road, leaving lone inmate Murphy Pendleton stranded in Silent Hill. As Pendleton takes in his new surroundings, users will encounter mind-bending puzzles and horrific creatures and otherworld terrors. Armed only with the everyday objects they can find - from wooden chairs to glass bottles - to fend off their enemies, fight or flight responses are left to the player as they unravel a dark, thought-provoking storyline which will appeal to fans of the early, classic Silent Hill series.

 

Silent Hill enjoys a wealth of new elements to create a deep, psychological horror experience. In addition to the main storyline, players will also be presented with variable side quests that will change depending on the user’s play style, revealing further unknown evils within the town.

 

“We are honoring the rich history and strong following of Silent Hill, and working hard to build another unforgettable horror game that the fans truly deserve,” commented Martin Schneider, European Marketing and PR Director for Konami Digital Entertainment GmbH. “Silent Hill introduces an all-new storyline and unique evolutions in gameplay, building on innovations and successes from over a decade of true survival horror and terror.”

 

Silent Hill (working title) will be available for PlayStation®3 and Xbox 360 in 2011.

[Dante]

Named -

Silent Hill: Downpour

 

Info -

-demo takes place in the outskirts of Silent Hill

-the town is so large that you can use a subway system to travel between focal points

-sidequests

-avoid fights when possible, better to deliver incapacitating blows and run away (so good!)

-boss fights with quicktime events

-water plays a huge part in the game, article implies that water will be to "Downpour" as ice/snow was to Shattered Memories

 

Scans -

[Oxigen_Waste]

God damn it, would you please stop ruining Silent Hill, konami?

[Fierce_LiNk]

Is there going to be a Wii Version at all? It sold reasonably well/pretty well, didn't it?

 

Really enjoyed Shattered Memories so would like to play another Silent Hill game.

[Dante]

More information:

 

- "If you look at the whole series, and the way that we chose to look at the series - Silent Hill has an entity, a genius loci - is the main character," says Brian Gomez, design director of Silent Hill: Downpour. "Silent Hill the town is the star of the show. In the way that Jigsaw is in Saw, he's the inciting force and events transpire around him. That's what Silent Hill is like. So we see Silent Hill as the only consistent character across the whole series. It's really about who you plug into it. You get a different result whenever you plug in a different person with different psychology, a different load of guilt or remorse that they're carrying around with them."

- Guns will play a role in the game but Vetra doesn't want to discuss the gunplay right now

- "You're never going to dig up Murphy's past and discover that he's the great, great, great grandson of The Order [silent Hill's enigmatic cult] or something like that," Gomez promises. "You'll find some nice little tie-ins for the fans, but Murphy's story is Murphy's story. It has nothing to do with Alessa, or James, or anybody."

- The female cop from the trailer is named Anne Cunningham and the mail man is named Howard

- The actions you make to change the story can be much more obvious time, although the cryptic things (such as enemy kills or examining specific items) are still in there. One example is that characters will react to your differently depending on how you're dressed.

- They're going back to the old Silent Hill style of having a fixed camera along with a player controlled camera. They say that it's much easier to set up scares when going into a fixed perspective. But they point out that you won't always experience scares when it goes into a fixed perspective.

- "Thematically, psychologically, story-wise, obviously water is playing a big part in it," says Gomez. Vatra wants to break the predictable mold of the nightmarish parallel world presented in earlier Silent Hill games. "Our world isn't nearly as uniform as some of the more recent Silent Hill games were," he says, "With Silent Hill: Shattered Memories there was always a chase sequence every time the otherworld happened." They go on to say that Downpour's otherworld's are meant to play out like standalone levels instead of remixes of the environments.

- They say that the reason for having breakable weapons is to make the player feel vulnerable. They mention that you can't feel vulnerable when you've got a big gun or an unbreakable axe.

- The damage Murphy has taken is indicated by a pool of blood that will grow on his back.

[Oxigen_Waste]

Is there going to be a Wii Version at all? It sold reasonably well/pretty well, didn't it?

 

Really enjoyed Shattered Memories so would like to play another Silent Hill game.

 

 

It's ridiculously good.

 

Shattered memories is awesome, but compared to SH2, it's a mighty big turd.

[S.C.G]

Why don't they just face up to the fact that they will never make another decent Silent Hill game, re-release Silent Hill 2 in HD either on XBLA or on disc... whatever... and then just move on to making something else instead of continually dragging the name of this once decent series through seven layers of shit.

[Murr]

Why don't they just face up to the fact that they will never make another decent Silent Hill game, re-release Silent Hill 2 in HD either on XBLA or on disc... whatever... and then just move on to making something else instead of continually dragging the name of this once decent series through seven layers of shit.

 

So was Homecoming not that good then? I never picked it up,

 

But agree with you in that re-release Silent Hill 2 on XBLA. That would be awesome.

[Mundi]

Or you can buy SH2 on the original Xbox which is backwards compatible.

 

All this shit flinging on everything that is not SH2 is getting pretty tired.

For something that spend most of its life as a under the radar, low budget horror series, it churned out a good amount of games scaling from decent to excellent.

 

The problem is that the whole series is overshadowed by SH2 greatness and with its growing popularity over the years, the popular opinion seems to think that everything else in the series is just plainly terrible.

 

I at least have a glimmer of hope, just reading that the devs want to add a feeling of helplessness gives me the impression that they are going in the right way.

[D_prOdigy]

Shattered Memories was really, really good, so I don't buy into the whole "it'll always be poor if it's not Team Silent". I'll be keeping an open mind with this one, even with the incredibly odd choice of the developer. Having said that, I'm really not feeling the atmosphere from those scans. It doesn't seem to me that it's nailed down its own style yet.

[Oxigen_Waste]

Or you can buy SH2 on the original Xbox which is backwards compatible.

 

All this shit flinging on everything that is not SH2 is getting pretty tired.

For something that spend most of its life as a under the radar, low budget horror series, it churned out a good amount of games scaling from decent to excellent.

 

The problem is that the whole series is overshadowed by SH2 greatness and with its growing popularity over the years, the popular opinion seems to think that everything else in the series is just plainly terrible.

 

I at least have a glimmer of hope, just reading that the devs want to add a feeling of helplessness gives me the impression that they are going in the right way.

 

 

SH2 is pretty much perfect, so it's no wonder the others are overshadowed. Still, nobody complained when 3 came out. And anyone who complained about Shattered Memories was being anal about the game mechanics, probably. But still, every single game after 3 (except SM, but that was a different team) has gotten progressively worse... so it's pretty much fair that the series is getting so much hate lately. At least, I think it's fair. If they really wanted us to stop comparing new titles to SH2, they'd reinvent the franchise (like they did with Shattered Memories) instead on insisiting on the same old formula that made SH2 such a (relative) hit. You see, it's Konami who seems to be hung up on SH2, much more so than the fans. I mean, the whole community was perfectly fine with Silent Hill 3 because it had an identity of it's own... and 4 was a great idea that was (unfortunately) poorly executed, but it didn't attract that much hate from the community. From then on... they just kept lowering the bar, while returning (or attempting to) to SH2's formula.

 

Shattered Memories was really, really good, so I don't buy into the whole "it'll always be poor if it's not Team Silent". I'll be keeping an open mind with this one, even with the incredibly odd choice of the developer. Having said that, I'm really not feeling the atmosphere from those scans. It doesn't seem to me that it's nailed down its own style yet.

 

I agree 100% with you on 80% of your post's subject. Meaning I thought the exploration parts of Shattered Memories were great. Not SH2 great, but if this is what we'd be getting from now on, then I'd be more than happy. The "ice" parts, however... I thought were absolutely horrid. To be honest, the whole separation of threatening parts and not-threatening parts hurt the formula, as you lost the sense of longing for most of the game, and when it was there, it sucked since you really couldn't loose progress... if you died, you started over, and plus, the freaky bastards were all over the place, it didn't feel scary... at all. And what they're doing with this one is using the few ideas everyone complained about on SM and discarding all the good ones. Which foreshadowes a somewhat bleak picture for the future of this title.

[Mundi]

Yeah I guess when you have a progressive drop in quality SH2 becomes even more of a worshiped game.

 

Not that it matters, I'm just bitching about people who don't frequent here.

[Fierce_LiNk]

 

It's ridiculously good.

 

Shattered memories is awesome, but compared to SH2, it's a mighty big turd.

 

I never owned a PS2, ultimately because I still don't like the controller (even after years of using one for pro evo, fifa, a few other games) and because the system never clicked with me. However, I want to play 2 and possibly the original. I've not heard good things about 3, though, onwards.

 

Why don't they just face up to the fact that they will never make another decent Silent Hill game, re-release Silent Hill 2 in HD either on XBLA or on disc... whatever... and then just move on to making something else instead of continually dragging the name of this once decent series through seven layers of shit.

 

Huh? What was wrong with Shattered Memories? I thought it was very good.

 

The best part of it though was definitely the exploration parts. I enjoyed the nightmare scenes, I found them quite frantic, but in a future game I would prefer if the two worlds "collided" and weren't seperate. So, it would be good if you had a sense of danger throughout the whole game.

[Magnus]

I never owned a PS2, ultimately because I still don't like the controller (even after years of using one for pro evo, fifa, a few other games) and because the system never clicked with me. However, I want to play 2 and possibly the original. I've not heard good things about 3, though, onwards.

You should play 2 and 3 and skip the original instead. It's kind of adorable in its PS1-ness, but the story is so badly told that it's hard to take any of it seriously.

 

3 is actually pretty good (and makes sense of the story in the original), though it's not quite as atmospheric as 2.

[Dante]

Team Silent Disbanded by Konami?

 

According to Kenzie LaMar, an artist for Silent Hill: Homecoming, Team Silent did not just get up and go. Konami apparently pushed them away because they wanted the games to be different. This comment comes from Kenzie on his deviantART page from 2010. We may be late on this, but the comments are pretty interesting.

 

Just remember and never forget that if you don’t like the direction of where Silent Hill went the only people you can blame are Konami themselves. They are the ones who canned team Silent and wanted someone else to make the games. And Konami wanted the games to be different. Thats why team Silent was disbanded. From what I heard they were very happy with the games made by Double Helix and Climax. They were losing faith in the franchise for years. And to further prove what I am saying, they made an arcade style Silent Hill shoot’em’up gun game!! How Silent Hill is that?!

 

The biggest complaint by Silent Hill elitists is that Team Silent should come back. But if these comments by Kenzie are true, then blame can not entirely be put on new teams, but the publisher itself. Silent Hill: Homecoming was not well received by fans due to many influences from the film adaptation. These statements are hard to believe though. Why would Konami push away the team who created the series? Developers move from project to project. It makes much more sense to believe that the team just moved on, and was not forced to step down.

 

Kenzie also states that Silent Hill: Homecoming at one point looked “200% better” than the product that we ended up with. The downsizing came due to “optimizing the engine and texture reduction”. Interesting.

 

While we embrace the new Silent Hill developers, whether they be Silent Hill: Downpour’s Vatra Games or Climax, some fans do not. The biggest issue with getting the Silent Hill series to be well received by long time fans is to eradicate the misconceptions that no one but Team Silent is capable of a great game. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is the perfect example of that.

 

So what do the fanatics in the audience think? Has your anger moved to the higher ups at the publisher, or will you continue to dislike the new teams no matter how good their games are? Silent Hill: Downpour is looking to be a great entry into the series, and a refreshing step in the right direction. So, chill pills are in order.

[nekunando]

You should play 2 and 3 and skip the original instead. It's kind of adorable in its PS1-ness, but the story is so badly told that it's hard to take any of it seriously.

 

3 is actually pretty good (and makes sense of the story in the original), though it's not quite as atmospheric as 2.

 

I played the original Silent Hill on PS1 towards the end of last year and found it to be a great game I'd definitely say it's worth playing for anyone who wants to try out the earlier games in the series! Shattered Memories was also fantastic and I plan on getting stuck into Silent Hill 2 at some point in 2011

 

I also have Silent Hill 3 sitting in my collection, but its turn may not come this year

[Dante]

[Dante]

[Magnus]

Some of those screenshots really remind me of Alan Wake.

 

I recently played Origins and it made me hungry for more Silent Hill. Though I hope they manage to do something a bit different with this game, because Origins was Silent Hill by the numbers, for better or worse.