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The Witness: An 8-year time line puzzle of progress

D

Dangansona

Member
2016

Jonathan%20Blow%20bottle%20of%20piss.jpg
 
mario_O

mario_O

Member
The Steam page says the game has "partial controller support". I thought it was coming to PS4 as well. Why not full support?
 
H

Hyperbole

Banned
Lingitiz said:
It's really cool that so much is going into this game.

I just hope it doesn't result in a bloated game though. The idea of a 50+ hour ~600 puzzle game is more of a deterrent than a feature IMO.
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Great post. I agree. I can't see myself having appetite for that nanny puzzles on a console game. I would have preferred a 10-15 hour game with 30 or 40 really impressive world puzzles.

That said, I'm totally buying this. I'm just concerned I won't finish it.
 
L

LaneDS

Member
I really waffled on getting this day one, but I want to support creative passion projects like this (plus I think it looks great, of course) so I'm in.

I think being a part of the initial batch of people to experience it and start figuring things out should be an experience I'd rather not miss.
 
Grinchy

Grinchy

Banned
I wish there was a pre-load option for this game so I could just start it right when I get home on Tuesday (on PSN).
 
L

liliththepale

Banned
JAVK said:
Hype really came back around for this game.

Reviews will be make or break for me, because I'm still confused about the concept.
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There's a lot that's not being explained because figuring out the game is the game.

Imagine you're dropped on a deserted island and it's filled to the brim with puzzles. You don't know why the puzzles are there, who put them there, or even always what constitutes a puzzle and what is just a secret you found. In a phrase, the game is the joy of discovery.
 
M

mrklaw

MrArseFace
John Kowalski said:
Aww shit tomorrow the quick look is out.............. it's gonna be hard not buying it :/
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Quick look might be the only safe thing to watch - I want to get a feel for the game rather than going in blind, but not be spoiled. QL should be ok if it's just the start of the game.
 
RoadHazard

RoadHazard

Gold Member
liliththepale said:
There's a lot that's not being explained because figuring out the game is the game.

Imagine you're dropped on a deserted island and it's filled to the brim with puzzles. You don't know why the puzzles are there, who put them there, or even always what constitutes a puzzle and what is just a secret you found. In a phrase, the game is the joy of discovery.
Click to expand...

Some people simply cannot comprehend why that would be something they'd want to do, and I suspect many of the "is it just line puzzles?" people are the same people who kept asking "but what do you do?" about No Man's Sky.
 
A

Atrophis

Member
RoadHazard said:
Some people simply cannot comprehend why that would be something they'd want to do, and I suspect many of the "is it just line puzzles?" people are the same people who kept asking "but what do you do?" about No Man's Sky.
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More people really need to go and play Myst and Riven. Then they would understand.
 
S

Safe Bet

Banned
The puzzle genre is definitely not my cup of tea but I like Johnathan's attitude and his involvement within the community.

I wish him, the team, the game, etc all the best.
 
J

John Kowalski

Banned
mrklaw said:
Quick look might be the only safe thing to watch - I want to get a feel for the game rather than going in blind, but not be spoiled. QL should be ok if it's just the start of the game.
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I'll be watching it anyway, i don't care for spoilers. I do care for my money though, which i don't have much of!
 
C

City 17

Member
Regarding the "Music and Sound Effects" in the game:

Jonathan Blow said:
Once in a while I get a question, from someone who really liked the music in Braid, what the soundtrack in The Witness is like. The answer to this question is that there isn’t one. There is (almost) no music in the game. This is not an arbitrary decision, but is in fact very important to the coherence of the thing we are making.

The Witness is a game about being perceptive: noticing subtleties in the puzzles you find, noticing details in the world around you. If we slather on a layer of music that is just arbitrarily playing, and not really coming from the world, then we’re adding a layer of stuff that works against the game. It’d be like a layer of insulation that you have to hear through in order to be more present in the world.

Instead, we put a great deal of care into the sounds of the world around you, in a way that maximizes immersion in the game.

This work is being done by Wabi Sabi Sound, who did the sound for the very atmospheric Dead Space series, and more recently some smaller, artier games like Ori and the Blind Forest.
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I think he is right, considering the scale of the game and the number of puzzles relative to Braid.
 
R

RiverBed

Banned
Great thread, OP.

I didn't know VR was being worked on or the tablet version. Looking forward to a calming and curious game.
 
A

Ansatz

Member
John Kowalski said:
I'll be watching it anyway, i don't care for spoilers. I do care for my money though, which i don't have much of!
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Going in to TW spoiled is like replaying Braid, in other words a trivial experience. Unless you stick around to uncover its hidden layers, replaying Braid is pointless.

This is actually one thing I've been contemplating lately, could TW potentially be considered a true masterpiece with this in mind. A Mario or Zelda is still enjoyable and fun to play on subsequent playthroughs, even though Braid is a perfect video game I have no interest in going back to it.
 
J

jon bones

hot hot hanuman-on-man action
i'll circle back to the QL after i'm a few hours into The Witness, which should circumvent any potential spoilers

hopefully Vinny, Alex & Austin are doing it!
 
A

Alcotholic

Banned
I enjoy puzzle games- this game is pretty cool, but I'm really curious as to why this took 8 years to develop. It's fairly bare bones in terms of content. It's a big island with puzzles scattered everywhere. You don't really interact with much else. Uncharted 4 didn't even take that long. :/
I'm curious, but is it really explained why this took 8 years?
 
A

Abdul Hafeez

Member
Alcotholic said:
I enjoy puzzle games- this game is pretty cool, but I'm really curious as to why this took 8 years to develop. It's fairly bare bones in terms of content. It's a big island with puzzles scattered everywhere. You don't really interact with much else. Uncharted 4 didn't even take that long. :/
I'm curious, but is it really explained why this took 8 years?
Click to expand...

It took more like 7 years. Uncharted 4 was made by 300 people. The Witness had 6 full-time developers. They almost never crunched and Jon Blow described the development process as fairly laid back and relaxed, i.e. the opposite of AAA studios, where crunch can last months at a time. Once you see how deep the game goes, it's surprising that it was made at all, let alone in 7 years.

Edit: Also, not all 6 of those full-time devs actually spent 7 years on the game! Jon Blow spent that much time, but most of the team was around for like 4-5 years I think.

Edit 2: Here's an article by Fabian Giesen (he works at Rad Game Tools) talking about The Witness. It's not spoiler-heavy, but there's a particular section that explains why The Witness is quite an achievement with regards to how game development usually works.

Fabian Giesen said:
Here’s the thing that’s most baffling to me, as a former game developer and current developer of tools for game developers (I guess that makes me a metagame developer?): as a game developer, you know there’s a certain semi-industrial process to making games. Things get made somewhat separately and independently, by different parts of the team, and then at some point they get joined together. And if you’ll allow me an extended metaphor, it’s a bit like injection-molded bits of plastic. You cast these two or more separate shells to form your shape, and they all come out slightly warped because that’s the nature of the process. And then you apply a bit of force and glue it all together along the fault lines, and there’s some rough edges that need to be filed off, and once it’s smooth enough you say “good enough” and ship it. So as a developer, I’m used to that injection-molded plastic process, and I know what works well with that and what doesn’t, and you just try to stay away from that. And you think you know things work because you know everything worth knowing about injection-molded plastic. And some people do these tiny jade figurines that are hand-carved but everyone knows you can’t do anything big like that!

Cue The Witness, apparently carved out of a single massive slab of marble, a lot more solid than what you’re used to, with no visible fault lines, no glue residue, no filed-off corners. And you look at it and it’s there and it makes no frickin’ sense to you whatsoever; this is just not How Things Are Done. How did this happen? How can anyone make something this big without slicing it into parts and gluing it together?

That’s where I am right now. I have never seen another game as cohesive as this. Not even close. Without getting into specifics or spoiler territory, I have never seen a game with such manifest intention behind every single detail, nor one where all the details cohere this well into a whole. This goes for the design and gameplay itself, but also across traditional hard boundaries. Game design and art play off each other, and both of these are tightly coupled with some of the engine tech in the game. It’s amazing. There is no single detail in the game that would be hard to accomplish by itself, but the whole is much more than the sum of its parts, with no signs of the endless compromise that are normally a reality in every project.
Click to expand...
 
B

BlueMagic

Member
Alcotholic said:
I enjoy puzzle games- this game is pretty cool, but I'm really curious as to why this took 8 years to develop. It's fairly bare bones in terms of content. It's a big island with puzzles scattered everywhere. You don't really interact with much else. Uncharted 4 didn't even take that long. :/
I'm curious, but is it really explained why this took 8 years?
Click to expand...

From https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/thoughts-on-the-witness/:

[...]
In one sense, seven years of work seems like a lot of time to spend on developing a game. In another, I don’t see most teams being able to deliver a game this whole, for lack of a better word, in any time frame.
[...]
Click to expand...

EDIT: Beaten so I shortened the quote.
 
G

ghibli99

Member
It's meticulous and almost everything within it is placed with a purpose... nearly to a fault. When you make some of its discoveries, the feeling is unlike anything I've ever experienced in a game. It's definitely a GOTY contender for me.
 
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