Silent Hill: Ascension premiered this week after an 11-year hiatus for the franchise, although according to fans citing various technical issues and poor user experience, it fails to live up to expectations.
After over a decade of dormancy, Konami revealed a slew of new Silent Hill projects in the coming years, from a highly-anticipated remake of Silent Hill 2 to some more experimental titles like the interactive horror titleSilent Hill: Ascension. Streamed online for participating users, Ascension uses the interactivity gained from live streaming to allow audiences to make decisions and influence the game’s story in real time. However, fans of the horror franchise have been less than impressed.
Developed by interactive entertainment company Genvid, the title has seen comparisons to interactive narrative titles like Until Dawn or Telltale’sThe Walking Dead, but without direct player input from a controller and on a much more massive scale since users must make decisions about the story together. Nonetheless, after the first episode released this week, audiences have pointed out a variety of issues with the experience, from a lack of meaningful input on the story thanks to its massive viewership — which saw over one million preregistered users before the release of episode one — to general technical issues and even microtransactions.
Specifically, audience members who tuned in to Ascension‘s first live episode cited issues with connection timeouts, login issues and a plague of spammers and trolls in the stream’s live chat, which Konami reportedly did little to prevent. Additionally, despite its free-to-enter promise for prospective viewers, the title contains premium collectibles that allow users to increase their personal influence on the story. While these are earnable in-game for free, a $20 Founder’s Pack exists, which significantly boosts the frequency of these Influence Points and offers various other rewards for users who purchase it.
This was the subject of outrage for many fans in its own right, with some users taking to social media to criticize Konami’s monetization of the title, which the company originally hailed as the ultimate comeback for the Silent Hill franchise. One user took to Reddit to call the game the “most hated Silent Hill experience” yet — a bold claim about a franchise whose last several titles saw middling to poor critical receptions.
Konami is reportedly working to address some of these issues, with the company stating that it is working with Genvid to implement more robust chat filters and decrease network demands for so many users tuning in to the series. Still, the company gave no comment addressing the series’ monetization features, which will allegedly remain throughout its following episodes.
Silent Hill: Ascension releases new episodes on a monthly basis through the game’s official mobile app and online.
Source: Reddit
