Tag:

Explain

Directive 8020 devs explain how it’s even more chilling than Until Dawn & The Quarry

by admin June 12, 2025

Directive 8020 marks a stark turn from Supermassive Games’ usual fare of interactive drama experiences, this time set in space with far more player agency in how events unfold.

I got the chance to speak with developers at Supermassive Games about their forthcoming horror title, and even got some hands-on time with an early version at Summer Game Fest.

I’m very familiar with the rest of Supermassive’s lineup — my friends and I love playing the Dark Pictures Anthology together on game nights — so I was confident that I knew what I was in for when I sat down to give Directive 8020 a go.

Article continues after ad

As it turns out, I was wrong. After a brief cutscene, I was dropped head-first into a conflict between two characters and their mimics, alien beings who have altered their appearance to look exactly like the human crew members aboard the colony ship Cassiopeia.

Directive 8020 forces players to fight or flee from aliens

In this section of the game, I fully controlled my character, who was hiding from a mimic that’d let its monstrous true form show. While most conflicts in Supermassive’s games resolve with quick-time events, this time, players are fully inserted into an action-adventure experience, forced to fight, flee, or distract the mimics to get away safely.

Article continues after ad

It places far more responsibility into the hands of the player, which I was clearly not anticipating. I could use a scanner to see where the monster was skulking in the darkness, as well as a cattle prod to shock it if I ended up in an encounter.

“We call this ‘threatening exploration,’ and we’ve been trying to get there for a number of years, but if you try and force it into a game after it’s been designed, it comes with a whole host of problems. So we’ve had to stop ourselves every time.

Article continues after ad

“Now, you’ve got direct control of the character, and when something happens, it can feel much scarier and it’s a chance to do different stuff. You can see the Hunter appear through the floor and, ’cause it can move through the growth and stuff. It’s a big step forward for us. It’s something we wanted to do for a long time.

Article continues after ad

Supermassive GamesDevs at Supermassive told us they describe Directive 8020 as ‘The Thing’ in space.

There were also options to distract the mimic and keep it busy while the player scuttles off to a safer area. I chose the more violent route, although I ended up dying anyway.

Article continues after ad

My character finally made it to the rest of the squad, where I was then tasked with choosing whether or not a certain crewmember — who was, by all rights, acting mad sus — lived or died. Was he a mimic, or was he a human? I chose to get rid of the possibility altogether, and it turned out he was actually a human… but, depending on my choices earlier in the game, his identity could have been completely different.

“We keep saying this is our version of The Thing in space,” McDonald continued.

Article continues after ad

“How twisted that is, the body horror elements. We’ve changed the design of the monster. We gave ourselves an extra couple of years in this game to really take the time to iterate and make it as good as it needs to be.

Article continues after ad

“We’ve changed it over time, and there’s actually different versions of the Hunter you’ll see. And there’s also like half-versions where it’s half-transformed into a human and it’s really nasty. There’s a lot of variation.”

Article continues after ad

Supermassive GamesThe team at Supermassive Games took inspiration from a ton of popular horror films and games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and more.

During our chat, McDonald referenced movies like Event Horizon and the Alien films, making sure to mention that the entire team at Supermassive are big fans of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games.

Directive 8020 has eight, hour-long episodes with many branching paths

As told by Supermassive’s Dan McDonald, players’ choices directly impact events that happen later on in the game, opening up new paths that they can navigate to and from at any time. Directive 8020 boasts a Turning Point menu not unlike that of Detroit: Become Human, allowing players to look back at their choices and drop in the timeline at any point to see what happens if they pick a different option.

Article continues after ad

This, McDonald said, is part of what makes the game so long. He told us that Directive 8020 will have eight episodes, which are about an hour long each. But given all the branching paths, it could take you much, much longer to see the full story.

Article continues after ad

“We’ve got huge amounts of branching, and with the turning points, we expect players to get to that branching a lot more easily. It’s not that they have to go and do a whole ‘nother playthrough to see it all — they can go back to a moment and make a different choice and move on with it.

Article continues after ad

“The way that we’ve structured it, and you might have seen it briefly in the Turning Point screen, there’s eight episodes. Now, we’re more mimicking a high-end TV series, like an HBO, Netflix, or Amazon Prime show. Those are around an hour long each, and there’s eight of them. We’ve done that for a whole host of reasons, but also when you’re playing with your friends, as it’s a bigger game now, maybe you wanna stop before you play tomorrow or next week.”

Supermassive GamesPlayers’ decisions early in the game will affect the storyline later on.

Play with up to five friends on one console or online

This multiplayer experience is very important to Supermassive for Directive 8020, which is why they’ve implemented several difficulty levels and options for players who might be new to gaming or want a simpler experience.

Article continues after ad

“You can change the settings and have a much more classic experience,” McDonald said. “You saw the moment where you had the wedge tool, and you can fight off the monster. If you have it on hard, it’s gonna work once, and then that’s it. But on easy, it will keep recharging really quickly, and you can keep reusing it. Then, if you change the accessibility options, you can make it so it never fails.

“The crew is about 10 people. There’s only five playable characters, plus there’s actually another one in the prologue that’s part of the mission as well. Of course, they die — we always do that, kill off the early ones.

Article continues after ad

“But yes, you have that cast of five characters, so you can have a five-player movie night. But we’ve changed it this time so that now, you can do that online, as well. You can have five people
on one machine, or five people on five different machines, or any combination. We really wanna facilitate how you wanna play with your friends and family.”

Article continues after ad

Supermassive GamesSupermassive Games is making playing with friends easier than ever.

“We’ve always wanted to go to space”

Of course, one of the most pressing questions on our minds was about the decision to take the storyline to space. All of Supermassive’s games are connected in some way, and that hasn’t changed in Directive 8020.

Article continues after ad

In fact, they told us they’d always wanted to go to space, and said that they made sure to connect the game to real-life events like all their other titles.

“All of our games have real-world connections. Even this does. When we started the series, we knew in a good level of detail what the first four games were gonna be. But we also had a high level of detail for the next four. And we were working on some even further beyond that, as well. But we’ve moved some of those around and twisted it, and changed the order a bit. But we always knew we were going to space. We always knew.”

Article continues after ad

“There are a couple of real-world links for this game. [Directive 8020] is a real-world directive. It’s really quite hard to find now. And it might have been NASA just doing a thought experiment, you know? We’ll never know. It’s to do with, if you have contact with an alien presence and creature quarantining and not bringing it back to earth.”

Supermassive GamesDirective 8020 is aiming to be more frightening than any of its predecessors.

McDonald also mentioned the US’s first space missions, citing Apollo 10, which was a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the eventual moon landing, saying the crew of the Cassiopeia was given a similar order.

Article continues after ad

“They had the capability to land on the moon, but they didn’t have the fuel to land on the moon. They were supposed to fly by and then come home. And it purposefully wasn’t fueled up. That’s the same for this mission — they’re not supposed to land.”

From the small snippet that I got to experience at Summer Game Fest, I found Directive 8020 to be a far more terrifying experience than other Supermassive games. Being in full control of your character completely changes things and offers far more ways to get scared. I anticipate that this will be a big hit at game nights — and since it drops on October 2, 2025, you’ll have the entire month of spooky season to enjoy it with your buddies.

Article continues after ad

Source link

June 12, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

A New Law of Nature Attempts to Explain the Complexity of the Universe

by admin June 9, 2025

Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged—this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations.

However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can’t be predicted—and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. “The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,” Kauffman said. “Not only do we not know what will happen, we don’t even know what can happen.” Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, “We need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.”

The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution “generates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.”

“An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms.”

Marcus Heisler, University of Sydney

Mathematically, a “phase space” is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it’s as comparatively simple as an idealized pendulum or as complicated as all the atoms comprising the Earth. Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the “incompleteness theorems” devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that can’t be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms.

Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel’s theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isn’t the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential.

“An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,” said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, “goes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.”

Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix—once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments “in their heads”—the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. “Technological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,” he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind.

Back to the Bench

If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional information—in effect, complexity—does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is “utterly improbable.” After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life?

Mayr’s evolutionary point possibly vanishes in the jump to humanlike complexity and intelligence, whereupon the whole playing field is utterly transformed. Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot.

Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine

But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new “law of increasing functional information” is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesn’t have to rely on some highly improbable chance event.

What’s more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileo’s (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds.

Source link

June 9, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

What Is Matter? We Explain the Smart Home Standard (2025)

by admin May 26, 2025

The ideal smart home seamlessly anticipates your needs and instantly responds to commands. You shouldn’t have to open a specific app for each appliance or remember the precise voice command and voice assistant combination that starts the latest episode of your favorite podcast on the nearest speaker. Competing smart home standards make operating your devices needlessly complicated. It’s just not very … well, smart.

Tech giants try to straddle standards by offering their voice assistants as a controlling layer on top, but Alexa can’t talk to Google Assistant or Siri or control Google or Apple devices, and vice versa. (And so far, no single ecosystem has created all the best devices.) But these interoperability woes may soon be remedied. Formerly called Project CHIP (Connected Home over IP), the open source interoperability standard known as Matter arrived in 2022. With some of the biggest tech names, like Amazon, Apple, and Google, on board, seamless integration may finally be within reach.

Updated May 2025: We’ve added the Matter 1.4 and 1.4.1 specifications for enhanced multi-admin, energy management, and easier setup, and updated general progress for the standard.

Table of Contents

AccordionItemContainerButton

What Is Matter?

Matter enables different devices and ecosystems to play nicely. Device manufacturers must comply with the Matter standard to ensure their devices are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. For folks building a smart home, Matter theoretically lets you buy any device and use the voice assistant or platform you prefer to control it. (Yes, you can use different voice assistants to talk to the same product.)

For example, you can buy a Matter-supported smart bulb and set it up with Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa—without having to worry about compatibility. Right now, some devices already support multiple platforms (like Alexa or Google Assistant), but Matter will expand that platform support and make setting up your new devices faster and easier.

The first protocol runs on Wi-Fi and Thread network layers and uses Bluetooth Low Energy for device setup. While it supports various platforms, you must choose the voice assistants and apps you want to use—there is no central Matter app or assistant. Because Matter works on your local network, you can expect your smart home devices to be more responsive to you, and they should continue to work even when your internet goes down.

What Makes Matter Different?

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (or CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance) maintains the Matter standard. What sets it apart is the breadth of its membership (more than 550 tech companies), the willingness to adopt and merge disparate technologies, and the fact that it is an open source project. Interested companies can use the software development kit (SDK) royalty-free to incorporate their devices into the Matter ecosystem. This is much simpler than certifying devices individually with each smart home platform.

Growing out of the Zigbee Alliance gives Matter a firm foundation. Bringing the main smart home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings) to the same table is an achievement. It is optimistic to imagine a seamless adoption of Matter across the board, but it has enjoyed a rush of enthusiasm with many smart home brands jumping aboard, including August, Schlage, and Yale in smart locks; Belkin, Cync, GE Lighting, Sengled, Signify (Philips Hue), and Nanoleaf in smart lighting; and others like Arlo, Comcast, Eve, TP-Link, and LG.

When Did Matter Arrive?

Matter has been in the works for years. The first release of Project CHIP was due in late 2020, but it was delayed to the following year, rebranded as Matter, and then touted for a summer release. After another delay, the Matter 1.0 specification and certification program opened in 2022. The SDK, tools, and test cases were made available, and eight authorized test labs opened for product certification.

The first wave of Matter-supported smart home gadgets went on sale in the fall of 2022, and we have seen a steady trickle since then. The first update to the specification, Matter 1.1, arrived in May 2023 and consisted largely of bug fixes. Announced in October 2023, Matter 1.2 added support for nine new device types, including refrigerators, robot vacuums, and air purifiers, alongside improvements to existing categories.

The Matter 1.3 specification was published in May 2024, adding energy management, EV charging, and water management alongside support for new devices, including ovens, cooktops, and laundry dryers. It also brought improvements to Matter Casting, so on top of being able to cast from your phone to your TV, other smart devices, like your robot vacuum, can send messages to your TV to warn you if they’re stuck, for example.

Source link

May 26, 2025 0 comments