Despite the duo’s stated goal of producing a work that stands apart from its well-known predecessor, “Beyond” stars the returning protagonist of the original game, a small-time engineer named Robert Foster. While “Beneath” dealt with the rampant sentience and breakdown of a “Neuromancer”-esque AI called LINC that haunted an entire city, Cecil and Gibbons say that its follow-up will deal with more pressing questions of social control and privacy under the watchful eye of the supposedly-benevolent, omniscient artificial-intelligence that Foster installed at the conclusion of the first game. In particular, Cecil describes how an AI might view the ideal human society by referring to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a famous triangle-shaped construct in sociology that attempts to explain how the fundamental needs of human beings build off each other. Since an AI would ostensibly follow all those rules as consistently as possible, it would rigidly adhere to that hierarchy at all times, even when it might seem counterproductive.
“You look at something like a social credit system, for example,” says Cecil. “Now, us in the West look at those kinds of systems, and we think of them as particularly Orwellian, very scary stuff. But when you look at some of the data, you’ll find that some of these systems are surprisingly popular. And when you ask them why, they say things like, ‘well, it means that people have an incentive not to litter, to act more orderly in society.’ To an AI that tries to view these things ‘objectively,’ that sort of system makes a lot of sense. The entire game is about how an AI would look at human society and try to make it into a utopia, and what might happen because of that.”
Holy crap!
Hey awesome! I don’t remember the original all that well but I remember I enjoyed it!
Awesome! Enjoyed the original a lot (but exclusives do indeed suck).
All I remember from the original is being underwhelmed. Which is pretty much the same reaction I had to every Revolution Game, except Broken Sword 3 for some reason.
Didn’t the original end in a cliff hanger? I vaguely remember being a bit pissed at how the game ended
Thread title says that it’s an Apple exclusive, but this tweet says otherwise. Is it a timed exclusive?
Apple mobile exclusive. It’s just like when a game is console exclusive, but available on PC.
Ah ok. That makes sense. That way consoles and PC in addition to iPhones is a separate thing. I’m not sure why someone would want to play an adventure game on their phone or tablet anyway. I can never pay attention to story on those platforms.
All I really remember is my character setting someone on fire, watching him burn, and saying “I’m never having kebab again.”
It’s really very silly, I can’t imagine there are more than a handful of people for who are wavering between an iPhone and an Android phone and are swayed by the availability of a game. And if they are, it almost certainly would be an Apple exclusive anyway, either for performance/piracy reasons or because it’s a tablet game and nobody seems to make Android tablet apps.
Ooh, I’d forgotten this was happening. RPS played a preview build.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-06-26-beyond-a-steel-sky-out-today-on-apple-arcade
July on PC apparently.
For some reason your link is broken. This one works for me. Game looks great but the app reviews suggest some launch issues that hopefully will be cleared up quickly. Edit: actually they’re the same and yours works now, haha. Sorry!
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-06-26-beyond-a-steel-sky-out-today-on-apple-arcade
Mixed review of the PC version on Eurogamer:
I have’t got very far on the Apple Arcade version because the touch control scheme is very finicky, plus I’ve been trying to get through my backlog before this week’s releases (still haven’t finished Last of Us 1). Might try it with a controller to see if that helps