TheGamer was treated to a peek behind the scenes of the making of The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan, and we weren't disappointed. Medan is the first of eight installments in Supermassive Games' horror anthology. After the (super)massively successful Until Dawn released in 2015 by the same studio, the standards were set rather high in anticipation for Medan, especially by the studio themselves.
Over And Above
In collaboration with facial capture and animation specialists Cubic Motion, Supermassive wanted to push production to its absolute limits with this title. One way was to aim for the most realistic facial animation possible via motion capture techniques that challenge the norm. Animation data was never compressed during the production process, as is usually the case in motion capture for games. This means that the ultra-high definition footage captured by Cubic Motion's technology is precisely what appears in the final product.
Up Close And Personal
Supermassive's ultimate goal in creating Medan – as was the case with Until Dawn – was to convey the actors' performances in the most authentic way possible. "It is the performance of the actors that is 100% the most important factor in communicating our story," says Steve Goss, director of design and technology at Supermassive. According to Goss, it is these actors' performances – with the tension on their faces, the genuine fear in their eyes – that will ultimately lead the player to believe that the characters are feeling the kind of terror they ought to be feeling in each situation.
Reality Recaptured
When it comes to motion capture, the teams at Cubic Motion and Supermassive aren't satisfied with simply capturing the actors' image and movements. Their aim is to replicate reality down to the minutest details. "Man of Medan has Shawn Ashmore, and what we want on the screen is Shawn Ashmore," says Goss. "We don't want a version of Shawn. We want Shawn. We want exactly what he did with the intensity of the performance that he gave, and the way that he did it — with every element of that reproduced."
This aim applies even to those characters that aren't intended to appear as the spitting image of their actors, but where the energy and strength of their performance must still be captured to a tee. Take Ayisha Issa's character Félicité "Fliss" DuBois in Medan, for example. There are certainly some physical similarities, but the two faces are quite distinct. However, Issa's performance in studio (see the images below) was still as accurately transferred to the final game as was technologically possible. The visual comparisons are quite breathtaking.
"The little details make it work, and that's what's so important," Goss says.
So, Did It Work?
Medan's exquisite graphics have frequently been hailed as one of the game's strongest points. But the consensus seems to be that the game has fallen short in other ways. Although stills from the game are absolutely gorgeous, the actual muscle movements - especially around the characters' mouths - at times still seem too robotic. In a similar vein, interpersonal interactions have been criticized as being somewhat out of sync, at times not making a whole lot of sense. Unfortunately, there is a reasonable amount of agreement in the player community that the game does not quite meet the high standards set by Goss and his team.
Other common criticisms allude to the game's brevity, which many players claim gets in the way of immersion with only about three hours of gameplay for a single run-through. However, brevity isn't necessarily a very bad thing in and of itself when it comes to a horror experience. As a general pattern, fear reduces as familiarity increases, and familiarity increases with the passage of time. In this way, a short story might be a better medium for horror anyway. It just needs to be executed in a very skillful way in order to be effective. Medan has also been criticized for its slow-paced story that only adds to the frustration instilled by the game's short playtime.
However, this is only the first of eight standalone chapters in The Dark Pictures Anthology. Although it seems generally to have fallen short of exactly what was expected of it – especially after the critically-acclaimed Until Dawn – it is still to be highly commended in many respects, not least of which are the impressive facial capturing efforts. There are still seven chapters left, so let's not close the book just yet.