Everyone is making such a big deal about trees not moving… Honestly, when you look at a simple aspect as such, look at it’s entirety first, then make the approach of a suggestion (and be bold about it!); a to realistic gamer is a sad gamer. Besides, the trees are done fine, and they do move!

I’m so excited for this game that I’m just posting on this site again. I am going to buy the game on launch for PS4, and then I will buy a 2nd physical copy for fun and to show my love and appreciation to the developers!

Not to mention the fact that it was just rude to begin with.

Life: Be a civil human being- Don’t be a know it all- Share your information freely without snark-profit.

Was that so hard?

Comments like this are my pet peeve actually.

We are drowning today in crappy computer systems that do not value the user’s attention or peace of mind, and we are expected to then spend the extra time and attention to figure out how to change all this stuff to reasonable settings — and then do it again, and again, every time an OS “upgrade” changes the settings back.

Multiplied by the number of different computers I use every day, the whole situation is absurd and horrible. When you say “was that so hard?” I just get instantly angry.

@Ryan T.

PS4 or PS3: Settings>Notifications> Display Notifications> Off
(This truns off Friends, Messages, Trophies, Alerts, Sign in/out and Download notifications. )

Was that so hard?

Its a great to have an Arabic language, hope the translation is ready at launch.

oddkins! you’re back!

Also I always thought it would be kind of cool if Jon did the final VO in the game. I honestly figured that’s what was coming anyhow. But, you guys will feel out what is best!

I’ve been attempting to forget about the Witness until late January.

It will be nice to get a Game of the Year in January for a change. What that says for the rest of the year, I don’t know.

: )

Also I see that some guys offered help with their native language and I totally understand reasons why you won’t/can’t accept it.

Just want to let you guys know that i’m willing to make a localization of this game in Vietnamese :)

And you know what? I’ll be stumped for hours, find the obfuscated, tricky solution and feel amazing, then find the same puzzle on youtube with the obvious solution and feel like a dummy.

10 bucks says there’s at least one puzzle that has Obvious solution 1 and an obfuscated, tricky solution 2.

Judging from gameplay demos, you are able to retry puzzles, even if you’ve already completed them.

Generally speaking, from what Jon has said before, the game attempts to always use natural barriers when restricting player movement. This does require some conceit that you can’t walk off cliff edges or into the water, but creates a much more predictable world than many other games. For example, many games put doors on buildings that actually are not doors and cannot be opened, or have invisible walls between two trees where one should visibly be able to walk. The Witness attempts to restrict movement in natural ways whenever possible, and predictable ways when not entirely “natural.”

As for jumping and fall damage, there is no jumping or falling in the game, I believe. Usually the idea is that all places you can go are accessible traveling both ways.

Nate, Braid like any well crafted thing has multiple layers and every layer could have a different and sometimes even contradictory interpretation. The definite meaning John was probably referring to was the search for destructive knowledge which is the main focus of Braid communicated through gameplay.

The Witness similarly will be layered and have multiple things inside it to contribute to different subjects and interpretations that try to communicate different things. The most important things will probably be gameplay again and this is the whole game split into two parts (Braid had it’s main part as a platformer and exploration/object collection through puzzles) 1)screen line-maze-puzzles and part 2) observation.

In Braid great moments of epiphany happened by witnessing strange and different behaviors in time. I The Witness great moments of epiphany and discovery (the main focus of the game) will happen by seeing; a reflection on the water, a flash of light in a cloud, a bubble in a stream, a collision between a shadow and the light.

It’s called artistic license.

http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a284605/braid-ending-explained-by-jonathan-blow/

I wonder what you all think – will the Witness follow a similar narrative path?

———— Braid spoilers below ————

By that I mean like how in Braid there seems to be an ‘easy’ interpretation: “Tim is looking for his lost love/the princess and some other stuff happens.”

An ‘symbolic’ interpretation (still essentially an ‘easy’ interpretation in my mind): “Tim is a scientist and the princess is the atomic bomb.”

And a ‘conceptual’ interpretation: “There is no ONE verbalisable thing Braid is about. It is about many things including lofty subjects like creation, destruction, ambition, love, and isolation.”

I’m sure interpretations aren’t strictly limited to my three categories – but it helps me to look at it this way. Point is – I’d be surprised if the Witness doesn’t have a somewhat similar structure.
There’s an ‘easy’ meaning for the people that just want to play it and be done with it and then several other more ‘difficult’ meanings that come from solving more puzzles and also investing more time into understanding the story elements (text, statues, etc.).

i wasn’t saying “hyped” in a negative way, i was saying it meaning “i am excited”
sorry for misunderstandings

“The Witness is a game about being perceptive: noticing subtleties in the puzzles you find, noticing details in the world around you.”

If puzzles depend on noticing sounds around you, are there ways for players who cannot hear or do not have sound turned on to solve these puzzles through captioning of some sort?

Is it me or there’s something slightly wrong with the water reflection in this screenshot?

I’ve been following this blog for quite a while and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on it. It’d be great to get a new wallpaper of the island. I have a feeling mine is out of date.

the vanishing of ethan carter (I believe) did pretty well to simulate vegetation in stormy weather, fit nicely with the aesthetic the game was shooting for– just thought I might make a note of that for you

though also in that case the game wasn’t really aiming for realism

It just depends on which platform you like. It is the same game on PC and PS4 (though we have lower-quality modes for lower-end PCs, but the PS4 always runs at high quality).

I just did Indonesian because it is a pretty big place that not a lot of game people localize to usually. It was more of a “why not?” kind of a thing. I don’t know if this means anyone extra there will buy the game!

I think a distinction needs be made between the setting of a puzzle game
and an accurate depiction of nature as it actually is. The Witness is clearly
an abstracted version of a very particular “natural” environment. An absolutely
truthful representation of nature is not only unnecessary, it might ultimately
detract from the gameplay.

I’ve played a few games in which an attempt at depicting vegetation moving
in the wind was unconvincing at best and weirdly creepy a worst. I don’t
think anyone has done it convincingly.

It’s obvious, I think, that this team has tried to create a game with a unique
aesthetic in terms of both the gameplay and the setting.

they seem to not be moving mostly because the camera is panning– a lot of games exaggerate foliage movement precisely for this reason, but seeing as you’ll likely not be running and shooting much in this game, and also considering that much of the gameplay will require the camera to be still, I think in this case a realistic approach to foliage animation is best

Interesting to see Indonesian on that list! Was there a lot of interest from Indonesia for Braid? Indonesian should make it nicely readable for people in Malaysia to, as the language are quite similar (bahasa mealy and bahasa indonesia). Indonesia is jumping over owning a personal computer for the most part and going straight to smart phone / tablet.

May I ask who is doing the Latin American translation and what country it’s from?
(Warner Brothers usually uses Mexico for translation like in Spike Jonze’s Her, but some times Chile and Argentina are used.)

The translation for Braid was great for the most part because it used neutral/international Spanish, but at times intricate meaning gets lost in translation. Sometimes they didn’t set accurate words to create sentences properly.

Thanks to this I was able to share Braid with my 60 year old father, who absolutely loved the game. So this is very important to me. When Spain is in charge of translation they translate only for Spain and no body else. When a Latin America country like Mexico or Venezuela is in charge, they translate for the whole continent, and we have always been very aware of this!

The leaves move, it’s just slow and subtle…. you know, like real life. Watch the release date trailer again and if you look carefully at 0:18 (puzzle with the magenta-colored background) you can see on the right-hand side of the panel the shadow of the leaves slowly swaying.

And also, I don’t want to be annoying, but are the stiff animations on inanimate objects intentional?

Getting an authoritative answer from Jon wold be great (to know what’s this about, see my comment —and Chris Bell’s— on the “New trailer and interviews!” post by searching for “animations” there). ;-)

Agree about the trees, the leaves not moving feels weird , and it is indeed noticeable from above. (Although this may be too complicated of a technical problem to implement as late in the development cycle, and it’s excusable).

If needed, I can offer my help for the french translation.

Or how plants are pollinated without insects!

Anyway, I guess you need a professionnal work, to be sure to get a good translation, in time, and without risk of the translator spoiling your game,
but, I still offer you my help, it would be an honor to translate your game!

PS: and now I figure out that if I could translate The Witness, It would spoil me the entire game :(
But I can sacrifice myself for the french gamers.

I’m stunned by the care you put into every single aspect of this game! Things like translations are so often botched because no one really cares about it.

A question – I’m going to have to get some new hardware to play the game – is there any reason to prefer PC or PS4?

Yes, but I’m talking about *completely* still here like model trees (well, I mean real-life models), even though the environmental sound gives you the feeling that some strong winds are blowing, that’s against the life experience (especially for beach trees with broad leaves, or tall trees with thin branches and sharp tip, etc.).

(Please pardon me for being completist here, because we all have high expectations on this game :D)

I don’t know much about game audio, but the video sounded a bit strange with headphones to me (complete stereo separation of some things). Obviously for a video you can’t have different sound options without including discreet tracks in the file, but is there going to be a headphone option in the actual game?

Super keen btw :)

Well, I have never really been trying to give real performances in the temp voice. In the beginning I did a little bit, just to see how much work it would take if I were to read those parts in the shipping game, but even that was really more about recording under different ambiences and noise levels as an experiment to see how it would feel in the game.

Once it became clear we would be able to hire actors who would deliver good performances, my readings became much more perfunctory, and really just about getting the bits into the game at all.

So as a result — we won’t be using these as a guide for the actual acting. In fact I doubt the actors will ever hear those temp voice pieces. They are more for my own sake!

Have you ever looked at trees from a comparable height in actual life, when not in gale-force winds?
They don’t, you know, move that much.

Excited to hear this, thanks for being transparent about these aspects of your development. As a developer in training, it really gives a lot of perspective and informs how I’ll take in the game when we finally get to play it. Good stuff.

Oh BTW music doesn’t always jeopardize players’ immersive feelings to one game. I mean look at Lostwinds by Frontier, its properly composed music enriches the depth of the scene and actually makes the game more immersive.

While VR isn’t out yet (realistically it is, but ‘the big three’ at least), the Vive will be out, albeit in limited numbers, when The Witness arrives.

Given the nature and apparent length of the game, revisiting it in VR seems kind of unlikely for the vast majority of players. If the Vive support is there day one, and someone is lucky enough to have a headset, I can imagine it’ll be a great experience, but it seems like something that’s going to benefit very few people if it’s essentially retrospective due to late implementation or hardware availability.

I would really like to see a blog update on the status of the VR development though. How locomotion is being handled, if both major PC headsets will be supported. If Valve’s wands will work, etc.

With a game so focused on observation, what better way to examine the world than within VR? Despite the prolonged development, it’s kind of a shame it’s not another couple of months out and it could have been on all three for launch. Most people are not going to want to hold off on the first experience to be with VR, even if it would be to their benefit, I imagine.

I wonder if the game will contain a logical reason, why a small island like this is capeable of producing a river that size :D

To be fair it’s perfectly natural to want to hype something one’s put much work in. It’s hyping something without the effort and polish that’s disingenuous.

Well of course. VR isn´t really out yet. I also guess that the Ipad version will have a higher priority after the initial launch.

But for now I just want to play the game. It´s so close guys. :-D

Particularly neat to see the running water, as I don’t think we’ve gotten a good look at that yet. It must be exciting, but perhaps daunting, to have to finalize and commit to many things that have remained open items for so long.

At this stage– having written, tested, and performed each speaking role yourself, how much room for variance do you expect the VAs to have (be it in tone, delivery, manner of speaking, etc.)?

I’ve always been rather curious just how much of the performance is defined by a voice actor, I guess.

I’ll be interested to find out why the recordings are there. No doubt there’s a very good reason. But I’ve always found audio diaries to be a lazy way to shoehorn story into games. The recordings have no reason to be there in the first place, and the story they communicate could almost always be done with better environmental storytelling. I hope this is the exception!

As a fan of ambient, surreal scores like Robyn Miller’s score to Riven, I can’t deny I am disappointed at the lack of score. I found your explanation interesting because it’s very similar to the Miller brother’s initial feelings about scoring Myst. But then they tried it, and I cannot imagine the Myst games without their scores.

I recently watched an interesting video about implementing sound for VR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAwFN9sFcso

I guess the sounds in the Witness aren´t combined with objects in the game. So that there is real 3D-Sound like suggested in the video above, or is it?
I really don´t know how you implement sounds in a game. I just love good sound and I am a musician myself.

So how hard is it to make The Witness a really good VR experience assuming that hardware isn´t the problem for the consumer?

To be save I dont want to suggest more work. I get that there is still a ton to do until release. But I´m just curious. And who knows maybe The Witness would really fit VR and sell really well.

I think we’ll go into more detail about that a little later when we can say more in concrete terms of what we *are* doing. But yeah, I did change the direction of the audio as mentioned in that interview, and I am very happy with the final form of it.