Honestly the most impressive part to me was being able to convey a story of "human somehow put into a machine" pretty much only through physical acting. That's not something you see every day in video games.
Absolutely this. It fully conveyed real emotion with a sense of panic.. then seeing the different behaviors in the crowd too. The guards. The whole thing tells a story. I hope it's significantly more than just a tech demo. I'm hooked.
And I suppose it's worth pointing out that creating all the tooling to put this together is just as impressive as a lot of the more obvious aspects. It's a giant content creation pipeline coming together. I expect these demos from Epic, not Unity. They're stepping up.
You may want to play SOMA then. The whole game deals with this very subject and its implications. I can highly recommend it for the excellent storytelling, dense atmosphere and brilliant sound design.
That was what mainly put me off, it makes no sense. First the robot starts off breathing like he'd been under water for 3 minutes and came up for oxygen, what? A robot running on oxygen? Then he breathes and moans, what? Vocal cords on a moaning robot? Stumbling because his robot muscles haven't been used in a long time? It made no sense, they took a human's motion, behavior, appearance and sound, and then just exchanged flesh for metal, which makes no sense to me. And then you say that it's only the acting that made him human, come on, everything except his skin made him appear human!
I mean, anyone can come up with some convoluted ideas that explain why the above does make sense... like the robot breaths because there's an organic brain in there that needs oxygen, they moan because it's still a human brain and the machine is sending his brain an overload of sensory data that is hard to deal with, the robot stumbles because his brain is new to interfacing with its machine parts etc. But I personally didn't like it and kinda roll my eyes when they go overboard with the anthropomorphism. Still it was hella cool, hope the full version will explain away my doubts neatly :)
I assumed it was all in his 'mind'. These didn't act like AI robots, seemed clear from some of the exposition that there's a mind in there that thinks it is human. Notice the different choices different robots took - one ripped the covering off it's arm, in the big crowd you can see different robots reacting differently - one pushes another out of the way for instance. I'm pretty sure there's reasons for how they acted.
Put me in a vat, I'm not going to make moaning or breathing sounds in my mind. And it seems like a pretty silly engineer who'd simulate such a thing. That's really my point. If it was a cartoon I couldn't care less, but I like my sci-fi to approach some level of realism. (and I'm really not the type of guy who complaints about sound in space, it's about immersion for me and a breathing and moaning robot kills it for me.)
Amputees still 'feel' the missing limb months and years later, so I find it plausible you would still 'feel' reactions in your body even if you no longer had one. I didn't take the sounds to be literal, just an artistic technique.
To be clear though, I think your opinion on this is every bit as valid as mine, I just really enjoy discussing film.
because they replicated a function of humans that they wanted intact, like speaking, that requires breath, nice demo, as always story is king, it gripped me :)
