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Survival game meters are fine as long as the game is fair about it. It shouldn't involve your health draining and killing you in a day or two if you don't eat and you should be able to legitimately build stockpiles of food and water at your camp. I used to play 7 Days to Die with friends on a private server and we'd end up completely self-sufficient after a while. We had one game where we turned a 2-story house in the desert into a fortress with multi-layered defenses, long tunnels with multiple doors to get to the front or back door (because the zombies would need to break down each door before reaching the actual entrance), cooking stations that let us boil water from a nearby river in addition to making food, farms, etc. We had everything set up to continuously produce building materials and ammo. The weekly hordes were the only thing providing any sort of challenge to a very comfortable existence.
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Nov 27, 2019 21:31
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rudecyrus posted:Yeah the ending would've been better if it was, I dunno, more low-key? Yeah, I mean they already had the mechanic in place for different endings depending on how many clues you'd pieced together. Maybe just make it so if you hadn't figured out that the killer was still lurking by the time you bungle into his hideout, you catch an axe to the face. If you have, play out the last sequence in a cutscene. But turning a two hour walking sim into a chase game at the last moment didn't quite work Still a great game, though. And I loved the touch of being able to choose one of your photos to headline the final newspaper article. I plastered it with a big picture of Sofia and her baby. Justice for all 
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Nov 27, 2019 22:09
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Dying Light rules because you can dropkick zombies off roof tops and hop off stuff to stomp dudes and other such very mobile murder.
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Nov 28, 2019 00:23
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The only upgrade you really need in Dying Light is the throw counter. You just kinda grab the zombie's face and throw them off to the side. I could stand on rooftops doing that to zombies all day. The mission where you have to fix the lights on the bridge at night is really scary though.
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Nov 28, 2019 03:34
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Them: "You shouldn't fight the zombies!" Me: https://youtu.be/vgULf_9bnjQ
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Nov 29, 2019 02:01
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Painscreek’s ending is tonally awkward but it’s also the first game to genuinely surprise me in a while.
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Nov 29, 2019 17:01
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Glagha posted:Them: "You shouldn't fight the zombies!" *twinkle*
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Nov 29, 2019 17:06
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weekly font posted:Painscreek’s ending is tonally awkward but it’s also the first game to genuinely surprise me in a while. My favorite thing is selecting a picture to take for the ending. I got the killer and the ghost in the frame so I'm imagining this newspaper headline with a dead woman and literal axe murderer under the headline THE TRUTH REVEALED
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Nov 29, 2019 17:55
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al-azad posted:My favorite thing is selecting a picture to take for the ending. I got the killer and the ghost in the frame so I'm imagining this newspaper headline with a dead woman and literal axe murderer under the headline THE TRUTH REVEALED Yeah my story was almost certainly discredited by my picture that claims to show proof of ghosties. Another question about Painscreek When did you realize the game was tilting spooky? Other than the knock in the mansion when you’re exploring it, I didn’t get any idea until I discovered the abandoned house which, for me, was very late in the game as seemingly I went very backwards. That knock kept me on edge all game and exploring the hospital was terrifying. I imagine the game would have been a little less of an experience I loved if I saw the Ringu rear end ghost model earlier. Lastly is there a game similar to Painscreek out there? I’ve played Dead Secret Circle and enjoyed it (never got back to the sequel after maybe halfway?) and played Kona and wish I could refund it.
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Nov 29, 2019 18:51
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Cardiovorax posted:Team Zombie is blasting off agaaaaaaaaaaain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoLadZotBuE
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Nov 29, 2019 20:03
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Omae wa mou shindeiru. I've already seen that one, it's hilarious. I wish it didn't make Dead Island look so much more fun than it really is, though.
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Nov 29, 2019 20:07
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Cardiovorax posted:Omae wa mou shindeiru. Dead Island was really cool when it's at the resort. It's this interesting setting for a zombie apocalypse, with some really nice views and geography to move through. Then you enter the generic brown city.
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Nov 29, 2019 20:38
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weekly font posted:Yeah my story was almost certainly discredited by my picture that claims to show proof of ghosties. I must've missed the mansion knock. The first time you go to the mansion you can see the ghost women behind the locked bars leading to the well. She's far away enough to be hard to notice but visiting the mansion is like the first thing you do and the place is supposed to be abandoned so seeing a clearly human model was very surprising.
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Nov 29, 2019 20:40
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Dying Light is the only game I can think of where me and my group of friends were bored to death because the combat in the game sucks. The old adage of "any game is better with co-op" doesn't apply.
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Nov 29, 2019 21:53
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al-azad posted:I must've missed the mansion knock. The first time you go to the mansion you can see the ghost women behind the locked bars leading to the well. She's far away enough to be hard to notice but visiting the mansion is like the first thing you do and the place is supposed to be abandoned so seeing a clearly human model was very surprising. Yeah I completely missed that and her chilling on the hospital until my second run.
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Nov 29, 2019 23:20
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weekly font posted:Yeah my story was almost certainly discredited by my picture that claims to show proof of ghosties. My first was the hospital. Everything is fine....and then the power goes out.
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Nov 30, 2019 04:06
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Horror game idea One which preys on paranoia, avoidance, and the fun/security of hiding, in which your goal is to scramble into ruins or wilds to forage as much as you can, before running to your bolt hole during periodic sweeps of (zombies/horrors/robots/etc) armies, who will actively study how you affected the level in order to try to deduce where you've been and gone, constantly forcing you to move around safe houses, secure them better, abandon discovered ones, and keep in a constant dance of movement and stealth, risking time to cover your tracks over grabbing what you need before the next wave, until you reach the end state of someone escaping/destroying the pursuit force.
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Nov 30, 2019 04:13
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So, the special complete edition of State of Decay is dirt cheap now on Humble. Has anyone played the most recent patch of it? It originally seemed too full of yank for me to bother, but has it been polished up in the years since it was released? Edit: It's probably not strictly a horror game, but I thought it would fit the thread.
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Nov 30, 2019 13:26
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Kuule hain nussivan posted:So, the special complete edition of State of Decay is dirt cheap now on Humble. Has anyone played the most recent patch of it? It originally seemed too full of yank for me to bother, but has it been polished up in the years since it was released?
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Nov 30, 2019 13:36
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Yeah it’s kind of a heartbreaker, you can see the perfect open world zombie apocalypse game somewhere at the heart of it, but on an indie budget / management they only got so far. To see the sequel so scaled back in ambition was a bitter pill. If it had started off with Rockstar or Avalanche or even Ubisoft, it could have been an iconic game
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Nov 30, 2019 16:21
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Black August posted:Horror game idea This is about half of The Forest. Enemies begin neutral and unaware of your presence. They regularly patrol the land and if they encounter you they'll keep their distance. Various things increase their aggression like cutting trees, building large structures, and leaving fires all over the place. Once they turn aggressive they have various behaviors, like some will hunt you down specifically while others seek out your camp to smash it.
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Nov 30, 2019 17:32
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Regarding Painscreek, I don't think I caught on to the supernatural stuff until the very end. Although in hindsight the stuff with the gardener should have been a big tipoff, but they make it seem like it's just as probable he was going crazy because his meds were being screwed with, not actually seeing a ghost
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Nov 30, 2019 17:42
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al-azad posted:This is about half of The Forest. Enemies begin neutral and unaware of your presence. They regularly patrol the land and if they encounter you they'll keep their distance. Various things increase their aggression like cutting trees, building large structures, and leaving fires all over the place. Once they turn aggressive they have various behaviors, like some will hunt you down specifically while others seek out your camp to smash it. That's a good start. I'm thinking of something more active, though, with a feeling reminiscent of that one vaporware top-down horror game where you got a black and white satellite feed of a survivor trying to roam around. A game where the horrors are already fully active and searching, and come in waves rather than stay omnipresent in the background. So doing stuff like smashing up a store to get supplies helps, but if you make it too obvious you were there it provokes the hunters into searching around more, destroying other supply areas, and trying to flush you out or box you in. During downtime, you'd KNOW there's no huge enemy search parties around, with the game being how much do you risk for reward between sweeps, and how well you hide your tracks and yourself.
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Nov 30, 2019 17:59
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The Forest kind of highlights the usual quirk with the concept. I've lost track of how many times I've seen people ask what they are doing wrong told "You actually built a big base in the base building game? Why would you do that?." By people who just breeze through the game by making minimalist structures below the contractual videogame AI thresholds. It's the sort of thing that has stopped being scary long ago. Reduced to a punchline where so many "Survival" elements are instead about ensuring every bit of common sense towards "It's easier to survive if I have X!" are just a deliberate trap choice to weigh you down and attract attacks compared to going without. Like, take the spitballing idea at the moment. Would burning time to cover your tracks, or any other time/resource sink, ACTUALLY keep your location safe? Or would it just add a couple extra loops until they find you anyways, leading back to "The right way to play the base building game is to do as little base building as possible" Tension of how safe your home may or may not be is important. But when the real danger becomes stuff like "You should slowly open cans of beans by hand, because the monsters will hear the electric can-opener!" where the measure of how easy it is to lose a base is how convenient it is to have said base, it gets a bit bizarre. Section Z fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Nov 30, 2019 |
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Nov 30, 2019 18:35
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Yardbomb posted:Dying Light rules because you can dropkick zombies off roof tops and hop off stuff to stomp dudes and other such very mobile murder. I first started playing thinking the drop kick was brilliant as it sent them flying. Turned out it was a weekly buff they sometimes give to everyone. I wish that was turned on permanently.
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Nov 30, 2019 18:42
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Yeah, the central conceit of a game should never be to play as little of it as possible if you want to have an easy time. That's just stupid.
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Nov 30, 2019 18:47
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No, my idea of design for such a napkin concept would be that the location would remain safe - your entire task is to ensure your own survival with as little a footprint as you can manage. Being found is a fail state to be avoided, with HIDING as the core gameplay over being CHASED. You could create backup locations just in case, you might have to leave home entirely for a few days to avoid being found when your chosen area suffers an especially heavy wave passing through, you could trash other places further away to draw off attention, you'd have to ambush and properly bury single enemy spies passing through if they begin to clue in, and the end goal would be to find a way to achieve a win state, while ideally *never* being caught. Having a fully built, comfortable, functional base would make that easier over time, or more survivable. The gameplay would focus on the tension of having to always minimize not your base, but your focus on hiding when creating it - how visible is it? How obviously is someone living there from the outside? Can you get inside of it to hide as soon as you know a search wave is passing through? I'd play on the paranoia mentality of "I know they're coming, at some point between now and (X), but I'm not sure of the exact time they'll pass through, and they absolutely CANNOT know I'm here" Section Z posted:Tension of how safe your home may or may not be is important. But when the real danger becomes stuff like "You should slowly open cans of beans by hand, because the monsters will hear the electric can-opener!" where the measure of how easy it is to lose a base is how convenient it is to have said base, it gets a bit bizarre. Oh, I was seeing a little less of that, and a little more of "You can mad-haul this huge box back home to base, but that's going to leave an obvious trail compared to looting a few items here and there, and then getting the gently caress out of the open before someone passes through and begins to see Someone Was Here Recently" Black August fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Nov 30, 2019 |
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Nov 30, 2019 18:48
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I haven’t played a whole lot of The Forest but I’m pretty sure attracting enemies to your base just means you have more fodder for your skull collection and not that you’re actually in danger of losing the game.
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Nov 30, 2019 18:49
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It doesn't make the game a lot harder, but I still think that it's fundamentally a bad and stupid idea to make it so that building a base in the base-building game makes the situation more difficult on you at all. Getting better at surviving is supposed to take part of the pressures of satisfying your immediate needs off of you so you can explore and get into the plot and mysteries of the game, not a needless additional complication to doing so. It's like leveling up in an RPG only to find that all enemies are now stronger than they used to be. Oh wait, games do that too and it sucks every time. quote:Oh, I was seeing a little less of that, and a little more of "You can mad-haul this huge box back home to base, but that's going to leave an obvious trail compared to looting a few items here and there, and then getting the gently caress out of the open before someone passes through and begins to see Someone Was Here Recently"
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Nov 30, 2019 18:52
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Black August posted:No, my idea of design for such a napkin concept would be that the location would remain safe - your entire task is to ensure your own survival with as little a footprint as you can manage. Being found is a fail state to be avoided, with HIDING as the core gameplay over being CHASED. You could create backup locations just in case, you might have to leave home entirely for a few days to avoid being found when your chosen area suffers an especially heavy wave passing through, you could trash other places further away to draw off attention, you'd have to ambush and properly bury single enemy spies passing through if they begin to clue in, and the end goal would be to find a way to achieve a win state, while ideally *never* being caught. Having a fully built, comfortable, functional base would make that easier over time, or more survivable. This is mostly wonderful, though it is still delving into "But if you make your base actually good, you will be punished for it". But that could still work better than the norm if you are are also allowed to spend extra time and materials to build (or later convert it) upgrades to be off the grid. If your investment is actually worth something, then you'll have more reason to care about losing it. Otherwise it's back to "Of course the monsters found your base! You built the electric can opener!" design. Where you don't feel any hardship for going without upgrades, because the upgrades themselves are the danger. With the always important clarification of- Cardiovorax posted:It doesn't make the game a lot harder, but I still think that it's fundamentally a bad and stupid idea to make it so that building a base in the base-building game makes the situation more difficult on you at all. Section Z fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Nov 30, 2019 |
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Nov 30, 2019 19:18
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As I said, the metric of "your base being good" is "did you hide your base well enough" which leads to "well hidden enough means more time to explore which means more time to accumulate resources and keep yourself even more well hidden" - maybe you want a burner style play, where you risk a dozen cubby hole bases scattered around the map to bolt to in succession. Maybe you want one REALLY well designed base, whose challenge is to take risks to constantly improve it until you no longer need to work to stay hidden so thoroughly. Maybe you want your main base to be hidden on the edge of the map in safety, which takes a lot of travel time, with the game style being the use of lesser hidey holes as a slow chain of supply from the main areas back to your hidden. You know how Darkwood had you under attack each night, scared to death of the littlest light peeking through a window? And how some nights, if you were hidden well enough and were lucky, you'd never see a lick of danger? Think of that general feeling, but changed about to be a game where you never know when 'night' is exactly coming, and while out in the forest you have to make sure the night creatures can't piece together your trail to find your home to begin with.
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Nov 30, 2019 19:28
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I don't think I would enjoy it a lot on that basis. By and large, I see stealth in games as something that is supposed to give you a sense of control and safety. Cowering in the dark in the hope that danger will pass me by and never knowing when I will get hosed for reasons I don't understand, that is not the kind of gameplay I think of when I talk about what I think makes for a good stealth experience. I mean, I guess it's scary in a way, but it's a... bad kind of scary? The sort that makes you feel helpless and frustrated rather than tense and exited, I guess is what I mean.
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Nov 30, 2019 19:40
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Cardiovorax posted:I don't think I would enjoy it a lot on that basis. By and large, I see stealth in games as something that is supposed to give you a sense of control and safety. Cowering in the dark in the hope that danger will pass me by and never knowing when I will get hosed for reasons I don't understand, that is not the kind of gameplay I think of when I talk about what I think makes for a good stealth experience. Yeah, what would the win condition be? If the idea is "try to stay alive as long as possible, but eventually you WILL be killed," that's kind of rough. If its, "stay alive for 30 days, and make it to the rescue point to meet the chopper," that's a goal. Do you build your hideout close to the point at higher risk, or stay further out and don't start closing in until it's almost time to leave? You could also have an offensive factor to it. Maybe scavenge things that could be used to build traps. Leave a bomb in a store that you ransacked. Set up shotgun traps in an old base. Leave tracks into an old mine and set dynamite to close off the entrance after something goes in. Maybe have some traps that would have to be set off manually so you have to have an escape planned if it fails or attracts more attention. The goal in this case being either to attract help (maybe find a radio, or a flaregun that attracts a ton of attention so you'd have to be careful what's around you when you use it, or [allied faction] starts looking for you once they know someone is alive and fighting back and you can meet up with a patrol. Or have some kind of enemy base that could be infiltrated once enough of them are out there looking for you where you could find whatever could stop them (master computer if they're robots for example). That one kind of stops being a horror game once you get to a certain point, but would also rely on more active stealth through the whole game combined with the hunting mechanic.
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Nov 30, 2019 20:02
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TVs Ian posted:Yeah, what would the win condition be? If the idea is "try to stay alive as long as possible, but eventually you WILL be killed," that's kind of rough. That's the kind of basic concept that I could stand behind.
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Nov 30, 2019 20:05
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TVs Ian posted:Yeah, what would the win condition be? If the idea is "try to stay alive as long as possible, but eventually you WILL be killed," that's kind of rough. That was my plan. I'd have several win-states - survive long enough for the army to finally leave. Survive long enough to create a way out (boat, tunnel, call in a plane, etc). Survive long enough to build a superweapon that will allow you to beat the army and escape. Or just Endless Survival mode, to go as long as you can.
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Nov 30, 2019 20:18
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Section Z posted:"But if you make your base actually good, you will be punished for it". In The Forest if you make your base actually good, the monsters will be punished for it. Fuckin tripwire molotovs and traps everywhere. If you play The Forest in such a way that you build minimally to avoid the cannibals it's gonna be boring. A few hours in you should be wearing their bones for armor and have massive, flaming effigies made from the bodies of cannibals dumb enough to get near your base or you. In The Forest, YOU should be the scariest thing in the forest.
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Dec 1, 2019 01:19
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I've been replaying Condemned as I do every few years (partially inspired by the Condemned chat however many pages back) and there's a lot more guns than I remembered. It's seems to be sort of common memory that guns are rare and ammo limited in Condemned but these things are everywhere and like a third of the enemies are packing heat.
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Dec 1, 2019 04:10
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Guns only seemed limited because I assume most people went for the achievement to never use one. I certainly did, also partially for the challenge. Of course, the taser didn't count and it trivializes most of the game. Also, I remember that game only shipped with 980 Achievement Points for XBox. Not sure if it is still the only game with less than 1000, but it certainly stood out at the time. Not sure if anyone knows the story if why.
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Dec 1, 2019 10:28
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Zushio posted:Guns only seemed limited because I assume most people went for the achievement to never use one. I certainly did, also partially for the challenge. Of course, the taser didn't count and it trivializes most of the game. One of the lord of the rings game was shipped with like 970. I think they actually said they intended to do updates that would give new achievements or something.
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Dec 1, 2019 13:09
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The first Crackdown shipped with sub 1000 too
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