https://twitter.com/JNavok/status/1663551904054677506
I guess there was a good reason this title was in the 'Silent Hill Media' section of this forum. Vixx knew!
In response to questions:"Today @GenvidEnt reveals the first trailer for SILENT HILL: Ascension (SHA), an interactive streaming series rendered real-time, and which will go live later this year as a canonical part of the Silent Hill universe.
The SHA story is about intergenerational trauma. It follows all-new characters from around the world as they confront the horrors they have unleashed. You’ll see terrifying new monsters as the characters are drawn into the darkness by both recent murders and suppressed fears.
We are proud of our work with @Konami and the @SilentHill team led by the outstanding Okamoto Motoi, as well as with our partners at @bad_robot, @Behaviour, and producer @ballmatthew. We believe fans will love this new, intense, and unforgettable SILENT HILL story.
SHA is not a choose-your-own-adventure series or a video game. Viewers will be tuning in live to save characters who are reacting to the audience’s input in real-time.
The fates of characters are in your hands. There will be only one canonical ending, which is what you, the audience, decide. You can help, hurt, guide, and complete missions and puzzles that affect the mental state of our characters.
SHA’s creators don’t know how it will end, nor can they control everything that happens in this story. Every day is different. There are countless places the story and our characters could go. Some will survive. Others won’t. Can you, the audience, save them all?
In coming months we’ll unveil more about SHA, including where to watch it, how to engage, and how to be cast into the show too.
We want to thank @TimSweeneyEpic and Epic Games for helping us improve our work with Metahumans. You can see in the trailer the power that UE brings to even small teams like ourselves. Every shot in that trailer is in-engine, and will be streamed LIVE.
We also have top-notch talent at Genvid leading the project, including Chief Creative Officer @stephanbugaj (Pixar/Telltale), Creative Director @MartyMong (Riot/Telltale) and Production Director Shiaw-Ling Lai (Wizards of the Coast/Telltale).
There has never been anything like SILENT HILL: Ascension in entertainment before. Genvid has developed bleeding-edge tech and content at the nexus of games and media, blending the two into a new, high-fidelity experience shaped by millions.
Experience SHA yourself later this year, and participate every day to leave your legacy on the canon of SILENT HILL. And please stay tuned for more top-tier franchises coming to our interactive streaming platform. We’re excited to unveil the rest of Genvid’s slate soon!"
"Is this going to be archived, or do i miss out once it's over?"
Absolutely archived. Every day you'll have recap videos of what you missed, and we'll be uploading all the critical scenes and compiling them into weekly episodes so you can just lean back and watch it like Netflix.
So, as a Silent Hill fan and player, am I going to be allowed to actually play? Or am I going to be watching an interactive series?
It's a streaming show, so you are watching an interactive series, like a Bandersnatch on Netflix. There are things to play inside the show (puzzles, sequences, decisions) but it's not meant to be a video game.
Will it be available in other languages? Like French
We have multiple languages coming.
We will need to watch this Daily? How will we be able to keep up with the story? And there are lots of different time zones, will you be doing US, Europe, Asia versions? I am curious, this seems really interesting but I am also confused as to how it works.
We will have streams that overlap in US, Europe and Asia time zones. Unique content in each stream. You do not need to be there live to participate; decisions will have minimum 24 hour availability in advance so that you can also influence the other time zone choices, and you can watch the results later, at your choosing.
We will have daily recaps and weekly episodes compiled so that you can catch up fast.
Can you explain how choices will be made in this series ? Is it a voting system ? So choices are determined by majority ?
Each day there are multiple decisions available. You'll be able to generate influence through puzzles and other mechanics, and you can use that influence on a decision. So the more you participate, the more influence you have on a decision.
Will there be something in place to prevent people killing off characters / sending the series into bad places just for the sake of trolling?
Also, can we replay toe series later and make different choices to see different outcomes if we want?
Yes, we are going to actively manage trolling. We can see if a small number of users have inordinate influence and can rebalance based on that.
I read all of this and am still confused. Can I just buy this and play it alone? I don’t need some racist meme worthy chat ruining my experience
It is an interactive streaming series. You do not need to view chat.
So it’s not a real game that you can buy and play on PS5 (for example). It’s like a twitch thing? Sorry just trying to understand. Thank you for the insight here
Think like interactive Netflix series, available to watch in multiple places. Not on Twitch.
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So what I'm getting from this is that there are script writers and actors, and things have been mo-capped with branching paths etc. in advance. Then each episode releases weekly, and you have that limited time to participate in it. Live users vote on decision making and puzzle-solving. People who engage with the episode more deeply and often will have their decisions more heavily weighed. The majority of engagement opinions and actions will result in certain outcomes before the next episode.
This format means that there is some kind of already-scripted path for a 'season' in terms of content, and it is just characters deaths/personal outcomes that will be open based on voting/viewer success in solving puzzles/what is interacted with etc.
If this season works, then another season will come in the future. How they monetize this is, is unknown. Most likely there will be options for subscribers who can directly interact, and free viewers who can only watch, but can chat and provide advice to subscribers.
Essentially, it may be the same concept as game streamers. You pay to "play" the experience and you can have chat interacting with you, or choose to just "play" it without interaction if you want. And you get your own outcome.
However, the bulk of this interaction results in a 'canonical' outcome based on the what the majority of subscribers do + the devs own discernment where necessary, and adjustments are made to the next episode where the entire season of material is set up in an open reality-show format.
Afterwards, people are free to play the old episode on their own and check out different branching outcomes of what could've been, but no longer affect episodes going forward.
Actors will be recorded in real-time on UnReal Engine, so it's a lot like an interactive stage-play, but where everything is decided upon at the end of the episode as to what they will do next.
As with all things there are very likely fixed outcomes and likely fiddling of the data and outcome funneling towards pre-set scenarios despite what the developers says so that the experience can remain interesting, but there will be a great degree of freedom for changes and updates that will feel very much like the audience is involved in where things are going within a boundary set of multiple outcomes.
The entire experience I think will most likely be run through their website and potential phone apps. It may be possible that an app will be made for consoles, but nothing is known.
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Update the Polygon interview has more info:
https://www.polygon.com/23742338/silent ... vid-konami
- 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.
