Wednesday, September 24, 2014

P.T. Concept video

By now, most people know what P.T. is! A special panel was held at the Tokyo Games Show that also revealed a look at an early demo done in FOX Engine on PS4 as an internal video to pitch the concept of P.T. as a playable teaser masking the announcement of Silent Hills. Check it out below!


And here's some more info: P.T. started off as a concept movie for internal presentations for when they decided to revive Silent Hill. The team was only comprised of 4 people; 3 CG artists & 1 scenario writer. They had no programmers because they were all too busy working on MGSV:TPP, so that's why they had to make a CG movie at first. They reused Chico's character model from MGSV:GZ for this concept movie because there was no one available to make another model; so it was a result of being understaffed and wasn't to cut costs. After the concept movie, Kojima decided to make a playable teaser. Silent Hills' writer mentioned what the technology of the PS4 and Xbox One lets them do, which perhaps indicates that Silent Hills will not be PS4 exclusive.

Kojima wanted to do more of an old school horror, a beautiful kind of horror. Kojima said horror today tends to focus on jump scares and gore, but seeing an empty hallway is far scarier because your imagination kicks in; you think of what's scary to you and what has scared you before. The empty hallway resembles the unknown. There's the potential for *anything* to happen and it keeps the heart racing. He talked about being stuck on an elevator. It's the lack of information that's scary. They want to make a game that is true to Silent Hill's roots.

Hiding the real nature of the game allowed them to avoid players having preconceptions. Kojima wanted to use Norman Reedus because he likes his work. Del Toro gave him his first acting job in Mimic, but Kojima met Reedus in person and offered him the role.

They set up an isolation test booth in studio and told people to play on their free time at their convenience, but Kojima had to force people because no one volunteered as they were too scared. Some staff would only play the game on the condition that Lisa appeared as a wireframe model. Some staff acted like they weren't scared, but P.T. team felt that because it was scary to them (the team) that meant they were on the right track.

But when the team had its doubts, its writer said Kojima told them to go with their feelings and not their heads a la Bruce Lee. P.T.'s last bit was originally harder. Kojima said, "People solved the Moby Dick Studios teaser before the trailer ended, so we wanted to make this one harder." But staff said, "For the love of God, you have to change this. No one will be able to solve it." The writer said Kojima wavered on the difficulty - "People will get it right away... No, it's too easy... No, too hard." In the end, they made it easier and took out some of the random elements.