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Jimbo Jaggins posted:Whats everyone's thoughts on the Fatal Frame games? Should I play them? First one's kinda creaky gameplay-wise, third one feels more like Siren with the weird storyline and the second is considered, at the very least, one of the finest horror games on the PS2. Even now, you usually see it bothering the tops of 'Best Horror Games of All Time' lists. The whole trilogy is gold though, and if you like one, you'll like them all.
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Aug 30, 2014 20:15
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Man, whatever, death of the artist, Freddy's is just a bunch of weird animatronics. No occult bullshit.
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Aug 30, 2014 20:28
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I think I'll play them in order, that way I won't be annoyed by the firsts clunkiness. Also, glad you mentioned Siren because I've not played those either.
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Aug 30, 2014 20:55
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Bogart posted:Man, whatever, death of the artist, Freddy's is just a bunch of weird animatronics. No occult bullshit. I think it works, personally, because it fits in with the running theme of "never take anything the phone guy says at face value". I love how much that guy desperately wants you to keep the job. Plus "weird animatronics" doesn't cover all of the stuff the animatronics do, especially in the later days when they start moving more erratically or stuff flashes onscreen or the empty masks/suits turn towards the camera That's probably an unnecessary spoiler tag but whatever, better safe than sorry.
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Aug 30, 2014 21:26
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What I dislike more is the creator outright confirming it. It's cool as a possible explanation of the events, but I think it loses something when it's the absolutely true story of the events.
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Aug 30, 2014 21:28
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Jsor posted:What I dislike more is the creator outright confirming it. It's cool as a possible explanation of the events, but I think it loses something when it's the absolutely true story of the events. Fair enough. I agree that sometimes things are more fun when left open to interpretation. I think the creator said something about wanting to expand on the premise? Maybe that's why he made the backstory concrete. I might have imagined that, though
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Aug 30, 2014 21:33
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Yeah, its pretty lame. Malfunctioning animatronics that think you're one of them and are trying to make you whole by shoving you in a wire-filled animatronic suit was more creative and fit the tone better than THE GHOSTS OF MURDERED CHILDREN, SO EDGY!
Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 21:34
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Jimbo Jaggins posted:Also, glad you mentioned Siren because I've not played those either.
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Aug 30, 2014 21:41
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Cardiovorax posted:Some people like them a lot, but I never saw the appeal, honestly. The whole sightjacking thing is an interesting gimmick, but aside from that they don't have a lot of gameplay and the constant character switching makes a coherent narrative pretty much impossible. I think they'd work well as a series of novels, but not so much as games. Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 21:43
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I realized that Freddy's was haunted as soon as I learned about Golden Freddy, who is basically a straight up ghost that occasionally appears in the office and will kill you (and crash the game, something the devs said was intentional) unless you immediately look back to the camera.
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Aug 30, 2014 21:49
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Accordion Man posted:Yeah, its pretty lame. Malfunctioning animatronics that think you're one of them and are trying to make you whole by shoving you in a wire-filled animatronic suit was more creative and fit the tone better than THE GHOSTS OF MURDERED CHILDREN, SO EDGY! I don't think anyone under the age of 70 would call that edgy these days.
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Aug 30, 2014 22:54
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Electromax posted:I don't think anyone under the age of 70 would call that edgy these days.
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Aug 30, 2014 23:03
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Lazy then, that's more apt in retrospect.
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Aug 30, 2014 23:08
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Eh, it's just a Macguffin type thing. It doesn't matter one bit why the suits are trying to kill you, but if you want to know, there's both a scientific and a supernatural explanation. Everybody wins, but it still doesn't matter, nerds.
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Aug 30, 2014 23:16
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But it ruins my fan theory that they're secretly muppets and the spirit of Jim Henson has gone insane!
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Aug 30, 2014 23:17
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"Vengeful ghosts" and "haywire malfunctioning robots" are both old as dirt, the neat thing about Freddy's is choosing a novel setting and permutation of those things. I don't really think either one is inherently more creative or interesting than the other.
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Aug 30, 2014 23:20
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Accordion Man posted:The first also had Sierra adventure game levels of obtuse as hell ways to progress. I don't ever think it was that bad, aside from an optional frozen towel puzzle. (Though that isnt Gabriel knight moustache levels of retarded, just not entirely intuitive)
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Aug 31, 2014 05:54
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Accordion Man posted:Yeah, its pretty lame. Malfunctioning animatronics that think you're one of them and are trying to make you whole by shoving you in a wire-filled animatronic suit was more creative and fit the tone better than THE GHOSTS OF MURDERED CHILDREN, SO EDGY! Did they ever confirm that it was an actual person that killed the kids originally or was it just one of the suits? I don't remember.
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Aug 31, 2014 06:14
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Grapplejack posted:Did they ever confirm that it was an actual person that killed the kids originally or was it just one of the suits? I don't remember. It was an actual dude. They even caught the guy.
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Aug 31, 2014 06:25
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Ghosts is so lame, and not even real. Animatronics is very real and very scary.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:04
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Animatronic ghosts (that is to say, ghosts of animatronic characters, not animatronics possessed by ghosts) though, are terrifying. Something I've been thinking about lately regarding horror games - do you guys think it's possible to give players the ability to fight and kill enemies, without making combat horribly clunky and unfun, and still have them want to take a stealthy approach? The thing that got me thinking about it originally is the main difference between the Penumbra series and Amnesia, where they just removed weapons entirely and made it so you could only hide. The combat in Penumbra was pretty awful anyway, but clearly the developers still felt that allowing players that option wasn't the right choice to make the game scary. I've been thinking about it a lot in the larger context of stealth games in general. Most of them are really less about avoiding enemies and just about picking them off one at a time until the area is empty and you can just move through unimpeded. Yeah generally there will be some kind of bonus for not killing dudes, but then they go and hamstring that by giving you "non-lethal" options which are functionally the same as just killing them. To me a horror game should be fundamentally stealth-based (if it's going to have enemies at all, anyway - there's lots of ways to be scary without monsters), otherwise you end up with the RE4/Dead Space kind of thing where it's really more of an exceptionally gruesome action game than horror. I just don't feel like taking away the player's ability to defend themselves at ALL is totally incompatible with stealth - I find stealth games a lot more interesting where you can still potentially recover after being discovered, rather than just getting a straight game over.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:16
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I've been thinking about that, and IMO one solution is to make the enemy adapt to the solutions you take to solve it. So a stealthy player would find the enemy looking over corners more, whereas a combat player would soon be looking for alternate tactics after it suddenly has superarmor after being shot the last few times it saw you. A player who seeks the external help of NPCs would soon see their friends disappearing, while a loner would start to face challenges that are difficult to complete alone. This would take an immense amount of handtuning to get the system right, though. Edit: To be clear, I'm not positing that the game just fucks you over and throws you the middle finger whenever you try to do something. I just mean that it keeps you on your toes.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:22
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Cardiovorax posted:Some people like them a lot, but I never saw the appeal, honestly. The whole sightjacking thing is an interesting gimmick, but aside from that they don't have a lot of gameplay and the constant character switching makes a coherent narrative pretty much impossible. I think they'd work well as a series of novels, but not so much as games. Something Siren did really well was be intense as hell. No other game has given me such a masterful sense of dread before I take any action.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:31
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Animatronic ghosts (that is to say, ghosts of animatronic characters, not animatronics possessed by ghosts) though, are terrifying. I find that the perfect line between combat/no combat is something a little like Shattered Memories, where you can't directly defeat enemies, but you can slow them down with traps and flares. I do agree that combat does reduce the horror when you know you can totally kill the monsters, and absolutely no combat hurts it when you're hosed if you get discovered no matter what, so I'm surprised more games don't have ways to stun enemies for a second by throwing a rock at them, or something.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:33
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The pizza place is just also haunted. The ghosts get ignored because the most pressing matter of the killer animatronics. It's really not a good restaurant.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:35
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Jsor posted:I've been thinking about that, and IMO one solution is to make the enemy adapt to the solutions you take to solve it. So a stealthy player would find the enemy looking over corners more, whereas a combat player would soon be looking for alternate tactics after it suddenly has superarmor after being shot the last few times it saw you. A player who seeks the external help of NPCs would soon see their friends disappearing, while a loner would start to face challenges that are difficult to complete alone. The problem with mixing stealth and combat-capable characters is that being good at one makes the other pointless. You can sneak around stuff easier than you can kill it? Why bother trying, then? You can kill stuff faster than you can sneak around it? So why waste the time? Either way you end up with one choice that is clearly (or at least marginally) better than the other. Nevermind that implementing either of these things well enough to carry a game is difficult and time-consuming as gently caress. You just can't get two complete games mashed together for the price of one. There's a reason why cross-genre games usually end up half-assed and not fun at either genre. And finally, making the player too capable at anything is a great way to remove the most important part of horror, which is the feeling of helplessness. It's kind of hard to be afraid when you know that you have half a dozen different ways to deal with pretty much any situation.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:37
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It's not impossible, but probably out of the realm of most game developers. You could probably get pretty close with some hardcore reinforcement learning work (I mean: publishable research). It's not out of the realm of possiblity, after all Lionhead did some pretty cutting edge, publishable research for the Creature in Black & White, but you'd really have to roll the dice on whether you can actually have a product before your indie company goes bankrupt. Still, designing the game around some sort of "optimal" policy function for each core game mechanic (the tools for this accomplished with tons of shameless AI director cheating), and some sort of point system so the monster can't be optimal in all categories at once could, with years of work, produce something pretty good IMO. It's easier to do this sort of stuff for a first or third person horror game. It probably wouldn't work if it were an RTS or city builder or fighting game, but I'd wager that you could make a really drat good stab for an atmospheric horror game. Of course, nobody will do it. C.F. "years of work", it's easier to cheat, but I think it could be done in principle.
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Aug 31, 2014 07:55
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I seem to remember reading something about how the alien in Alien: Isolation was supposed to be able to "learn" player behaviours the way you're describing. I don't know if that's still in at this point, but from the way they described it, it basically sounded like they already had pre-designed ways for the alien to counter the various options the player had to deal with it (like say, looking inside lockers rather than just walking past), and that it just wouldn't do those things initially but would start if the player was relying on a particular tactic too heavily. In my mind I think a good way to handle the combat/stealth dichotomy would be almost to take the MMO approach - a player can handle a lone enemy in combat, but will get slaughtered by a group. In MMOs players can usually just pull enemies to a safe spot where they can be engaged without risk of wandering mobs getting close enough to aggro and join in, which wouldn't really work in a horror game. I think a solution to that might be to just make open combat loud enough to attract enemies over - but slowly enough that you have time to take out the enemy and potentially flee/hide before they arrive. So combat becomes about deciding whether you need this one enemy dead badly enough to risk luring over 3 of his friends in the near future. A good design would mean that maybe sometimes that IS a worthwhile choice - maybe certain enemy types are worth taking out when you have the opportunity, because they have some nasty property like being better at sniffing you out or destroying hiding places/resources when they can't find you.
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Aug 31, 2014 08:06
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Jsor posted:It's not impossible, but probably out of the realm of most game developers. You could probably get pretty close with some hardcore reinforcement learning work (I mean: publishable research). It's not out of the realm of possiblity, after all Lionhead did some pretty cutting edge, publishable research for the Creature in Black & White, but you'd really have to roll the dice on whether you can actually have a product before your indie company goes bankrupt.
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Aug 31, 2014 08:40
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In Bloodborne, when a group of patrolling enemies is facing away from you then you can throw a pebble at one of them to peel them away from the group. In Dark Souls you can peg them with a wooden arrow and in God Hand you can taunt them. In my opinion though, horror games should be designed with only one way of dealing with enemies in mind because I have never played a stealth/action game where its not been easier to just kill everything. Stealth is different from avoiding combat though, REMake is great because it adds a layer of strategy with the crimson heads where its not a good idea to kill all the zombies and you have to decide which to kill and then which bodies to burn. In horror games run is far more effective than hide because it ramps up the tension and you never feel safe. Amnesia's major failing was that neither combat or stealth were really an option, all you had to do was stand facing the corner of a room until they go away and all enemy encounters became tedious waiting games.
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Aug 31, 2014 08:52
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I was watching some gameplay from The Evil Within and saw a situation where the player had a room with like 5 enemies and was sneaking around them. Near the end of the room he turned and there was another enemy in his chosen route to safety so he used what looked like a one use knife to stab him in the throat. Doing that while avoiding the group of enemies seemed like a good mix between horror and stealth. You use the one use knife on an enemy you absolutely have to kill to avoid using a gun you might not have ammo for that might also draw the attention of more enemies.
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Aug 31, 2014 09:22
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Untrustable posted:I was watching some gameplay from The Evil Within and saw a situation where the player had a room with like 5 enemies and was sneaking around them. Near the end of the room he turned and there was another enemy in his chosen route to safety so he used what looked like a one use knife to stab him in the throat. Doing that while avoiding the group of enemies seemed like a good mix between horror and stealth. You use the one use knife on an enemy you absolutely have to kill to avoid using a gun you might not have ammo for that might also draw the attention of more enemies. That sounds a lot like The Last of Us, more than anything. dichloroisocyanuric posted:Something Siren did really well was be intense as hell. No other game has given me such a masterful sense of dread before I take any action. Surprisingly, Manhunt gave me much the same feeling. The game itself was kinda mediocre, but once you got into it, it was surprisingly gripping. Accordion Man posted:The first also had Sierra adventure game levels of obtuse as hell ways to progress. I had a friend try it out this week. He played it for a couple of hours before giving up, mainly due to the interface. The second is definitely the better/fairer game, I feel. At least I was able to get through a lot of that without obsessively checking a guide to see if there was any unintuitive puzzles in the area.
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Aug 31, 2014 10:43
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I thought Manhunt was an underrated game in general. It fell under "The combat sucks and you will die if you aren't stealthy", but hey, be stealthy you rear end in a top hat. And then it turns into a shooting game, which surprisingly wasn't bad either, just different. It really seemed like a precursor to Arkham Asylum, where your enemies start out badly outnumbering you and are all big and bad that they're going to find you and kill you. Then you start picking them off and they devolve into "Ah hell, where did everybody go?"
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Aug 31, 2014 14:52
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DeathChicken posted:I thought Manhunt was an underrated game in general. It fell under "The combat sucks and you will die if you aren't stealthy", but hey, be stealthy you rear end in a top hat. And then it turns into a shooting game, which surprisingly wasn't bad either, just different. Also like Arkham Asylum, you never really learn any new moves for the basic combat but by the end once you've gotten used to how the game works you become almost unstoppable. There's this feeling of going through grueling hell and coming out the end as this terrifying killing machine. It's all at once badass and also a little scary, since what you're doing in the game is so graphic and awful. But eventually you start getting into it, you start being more bold and actively pursuing your pursuers. It's like it starts as a Running Man-type thriller and then by the end it turns into a slasher movie with you as the killer. There are very few horror games (if any) that do horror like Manhunt does horror. Plenty of other horror games have used gore as cheap shock tactics but they're hardly ever so grounded in reality, and they never really encourage the player to get their hands dirty. Manhunt literally has a pervert breathing into your ear, egging you on to be more violent. It's... unique, to say the least.
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Aug 31, 2014 15:41
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Untrustable posted:I was watching some gameplay from The Evil Within and saw a situation where the player had a room with like 5 enemies and was sneaking around them. Near the end of the room he turned and there was another enemy in his chosen route to safety so he used what looked like a one use knife to stab him in the throat. Doing that while avoiding the group of enemies seemed like a good mix between horror and stealth. You use the one use knife on an enemy you absolutely have to kill to avoid using a gun you might not have ammo for that might also draw the attention of more enemies. That is literally an exact description of the game-play in The Last of Us.
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Aug 31, 2014 20:09
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The drop in quality in every way from Manhunt to Manhunt 2 is incredible. I love Manhunt so much. I still can't believe how bad Manhunt 2 is in all ways.
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Aug 31, 2014 20:12
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Neo Rasa posted:The drop in quality in every way from Manhunt to Manhunt 2 is incredible. I love Manhunt so much. I still can't believe how bad Manhunt 2 is in all ways. The story is also vastly more tame, being a sort of fight club deal. Spoilers for that lovely game, I guess. The scenario for the original manhunt is terrifying. I'm actually surprised a game like that could get made. Forget the violence - the concept alone plumbs the depths of human depravity quite nicely. Rockstar really made a hell of a game with that one. It can also be scary as well, when you get to the final group, the smileyz, who are so crazy they don't follow predictable AI routines. Of course, when you gently caress up the same section repeatedly it takes a lot of the tension out of it.
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Aug 31, 2014 23:15
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So, new stuff for Alone in the Dark: Illumination. Website has more information now. The co-op worries me a little, as a solo player. Also I laugh because Alone in the Dark has co-op now. Story-wise (what they've revealed) I'm a touch sceptical, but I'll roll with it. What worries me most is that, having read all this, and going in with fairly low expectations, I still got excited by the trailer (despite it not showing jack poo poo). I guess Alone in the Dark is to me what Alien is to Xenomrph. Also, Haunted House: Cryptic Graves. Far, far less information. Just a little trailer. Made by the guys hi did Anna, I guess?
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Sep 1, 2014 03:33
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spudsbuckley posted:That is literally an exact description of the game-play in The Last of Us. Kinda? I watched some of the gameplay videos of The Evil Within and it seems more Resident Evil 4 with stealth options than The Last of Us. The concept with that bare-bones description is the same I guess but it looks like it still handles and plays much differently from TLOU. Contra Calculus fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Sep 1, 2014 |
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Sep 1, 2014 04:35
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The Last of Us doesn't really count as that kind of gameplay anyway, really, because the only situation in which stealth really is the best route to take, as opposed to something you utilize a little to facilitate shootsmashing everybody's heads in, is when you are faced with enemies that can instantly kill you and fighting them is simply impossible.
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Sep 1, 2014 04:55
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