Both of those questions take a long time to answer. Really, just understanding what you have and what you want to achieve. And then three months down the line: “What are we thinking?!” That's a lot of the things that you have to go through in order to get a good game. When we sit here in a room talking about how we're gonna make the game, sounds awesome. So it’s just been lots of stuff.īut there's also the typical game development. Because if I were too hands on, people who are taking over certain positions I had would be like, “oh, I’m not going to do anything unless Thomas says so.” I've been trying to control that. You think “you’re only going to handle this and this is going to be hard,” and it turns out things that were hard were easy and a gap that you didn't anticipate and “oh, shit, we have to give them more experience in this.”Īnd also in the beginning, I've had really a hard time being having the right amount of hands on, hands off. Just having team members who've got a new role and having to fill out any holes in their experience and so on. The whole two project setup has been hard. VICE Games: I know after SOMA, you announced “Hey, we're gonna do multiple projects, see if we want to stretch our wings and do something that's not just horror.” Was some of the last couple of years, what's taken longer, just figuring out what the identity of Frictional is? You can keep your sanity better that way, I think. It's really bad if you go by the announcement for SOMA, which was almost seven years back? Wow, bad! So hopefully now that we have two projects going at the same time we will be releasing like every two or three years, which feels more normal. So it's great to be back! We hopefully will do this more often now. Not just an armchair game developer who releases ports.” It felt good answering questions from fans about an actual upcoming game.
It was really nice doing it now because it felt like “Wow, I’m a game developer.
Thomas Grip: Yeah, it feels like I've been out of the loop. Sounds like it's been a long time coming. VICE Games: Congratulations on the announcement. This interview has been edited for clarity. Most of our conversation, however, was about the big changes Frictional has undertaken since Amnesia blew up, what it’s like to give up micromanagement, how he’s handling Amnesia fans becoming Amnesia developers, and what lessons have been learned about some SOMA players being turned off by the game’s scary enemies. I had a chance to spend a few minutes chatting with Frictional co-founder and creative director Thomas Grip earlier this week, and I teased a few details about Rebirth out of him. Set in Algeria, it appears players will be retracing Tasi’s footsteps and figuring out what they were up to. We don’t know much about Rebirth, except that it takes place in the same universe, while focusing on a new character, Tasi Trianon. Now, a decade after The Dark Descent, Frictional is returning to the world of Amnesia with a proper sequel, Amnesia: Rebirth.