#Scary amnesia custom stories mod
#Scary amnesia custom stories update
#Scary amnesia custom stories mods
#Scary amnesia custom stories series

For instance, there have been really interesting discussions as to whether the game’s (semi-)antagonist, “WAU”, is evil or not. I think the most surprising part of the player response is the depth in which SOMA story and subject matter has been discussed. There are lots of interesting things in the works coming from the community (for instance, a very fitting SCP-inspired custom story) and we’re discussing what we could do to give people more incentive to create and finish more mods.

#Scary amnesia custom stories mods

All of these issues combined probably explains why fewer mods are being released compared to Amnesia.īut we haven’t given up on modding far from it. And finally, you can quickly create gameplay in Amnesia by just placing a few basic items, whereas SOMA requires more set-up and lacks easily reusable elements. Thirdly, both the level creation and scripting is a bit harder in SOMA, making it more of a hassle for people to get things up and running. This gave people a huge incentive for completing their mods. Secondly when we released Amnesia there weren’t many other similar horror games around, and as a result many Amnesia mods got played by popular streamers. The first and most obvious answer is that SOMA is simply not as popular as the mega-hit Amnesia: TDD (test-driven development). It feels worthwhile to discuss why modding hasn’t been as successful as it was with Amnesia. Both of these are very cool modifications, but considering that the game could have been changed into an RTS or a racer, we’d hoped to see more experimental stuff. Because of this, we’d hoped to see people do really crazy things with mods, but apart from Wuss Mode and a location tracking Omnitool there isn’t much out there. Just about everything in the game is controlled via script and modding allows you to replace any file, making it much more powerful than in Amnesia. So far only five custom stories ( two on moddb and three on Steam Workshop) have been released, and while it’s amazing that people spend time making mods for SOMA at all, we expected that there would’ve been a few more. Unfortunately the modding community around SOMA hasn’t really taken-off.

#Scary amnesia custom stories mod

So with SOMA we wanted to make sure we allowed even better mod support, so we would hopefully get as many mods made as we did for Amnesia. This is despite the game’s mod support being far from good. So far almost 450 finished Amnesia mods have been released. User-created custom stories was (and still is) a big part of the (Frictional Games’) Amnesia community. I’ll discuss this in more depth later on. While we think the mix works very well for the game, it seems quite possible that this has put off potential buyers.

What this means is that the game might feel a bit too sci-fi for someone looking for a pure horror experience and vice-versa. One stand-out thing that we’ve identified is that the game falls between two genres: horror and sci-fi. Still, it’s interesting to ponder what kept the game from selling even more. This makes us a lot less worried about making another game of similar scope. Yet SOMA is well on the way to becoming profitable after just six months, despite not being a runaway success.

#Scary amnesia custom stories series

SOMA was a really ambitious project which took five years to develop, used a load of external help and had a big chunk of money spent on a live action series and so forth, making it a very costly affair. It might seem weird, but this is actually very encouraging for us. For instance, Firewatch (which has quite a few elements in common with SOMA) sold over 500K in just a month, so there’s obviously room for SOMA to sell a lot more. While this is a good result for us, it’s by no means earth-shattering. Given that the daily sales are still solid (about 125 units a day) and we have regular boosts from various sale events, this is bound to happen well before this year is over. This is pretty good it’ll only take 20K – 30K more until we’ve earned back our entire investment in the project. The total number of sales, across all platforms, is currently at a bit over 250,000 units.

#Scary amnesia custom stories update

Thomas Grip, Frictional Games: It’s now a bit over six months since SOMA was released, so it feels like it’s time for an update on how everything has gone so far: The studio’s creative director Thomas Grip reflects on the game’s reception and impact on the developer – but let’s take a quick look at the SOMA gameplay trailer before we dive in: Last fall Helsingborg-based Frictional Games released their sci-fi horror game SOMA.