O the horror!

[Fenrir]

What you're basically saying is that the genre has jaded you. Take off the rose-tinted glasses.

[Red9]

tl;dr

AAAGGGHHH! WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!

You could try a rediculously(sp?) lousy game and play it with you feet. Did anyone mention Dead Space yet?

[Bleck]

AAAGGGHHH! WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!

www.google.com

(sp?)

www.google.com

[Native Jovian]

AAAGGGHHH! WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!

too long; didn't read

rediculously(sp?)

ridiculously

[Zipp]

What you're basically saying is that the genre has jaded you. Take off the rose-tinted glasses.

I like your style.

Even so, I think there's more here than just being jaded. I'm presenting some ideas for what I think would make a good game. I'm curious to see people's reactions to those suggestions.

[Native Jovian]

I can't read the article Zipp linked (stupid work firewall...) but I read through the rest of the thread. Mind that I've not played much survival horror, though I've been meaning to give it a shot (Silent Hill 2 is on my Gamefly queue as we speak), so I might be completely off base here, but here's what I'm looking(/hoping) for in a survival horror game:

Normal characters. If you're playing a genetically superior, chemically enhanced, powered armor-wearing cyborg ultra-badass, then the living dead (or whatever) lose a bit of their menace. This is one of the things that I thought Eternal Darkness did wonderfully. The main character is a woman whose only remarkable attribute is the fact that she's stumbled into the story. Even being a normal solider/police officer/bodyguard sort of thing takes away something -- they're people with combat training, expected to face dangerous situations. A random person with a normal background who has no reason to (in a normal situation) be expected to defend themselves makes for a much more entertaining character when they're placed in a survival horror type situation.

Juxtaposition. It's important to have a mix of normal and abnormal, mundane and surreal, expected and unexpected. A dark, damp cave filled with mystic chanting and the moans of undead can be creepy, but it lacks a sense of reality. Most people have absolutely no reason to be in a dark damp cave of any sort, much less one filled with chanting and moaning. Faced with such a situation, most people would probably run away, which wouldn't make for much of a video game. On the other hand, a school or office building, a city park or playground -- these are familiar locations that are part of everyday life for most people. Fill them with dark, monstrous creatures, and it's creepy on a much deeper level. Left 4 Dead, while a far cry from what most people would consider survival horror, was very good at this. They set each level in familiar surroundings -- office and apartment buildings, city streets and highways, a hospital and an airport -- transformed into something else by the infection. This juxaposition can be accomplished in a much more meta fashion as well -- imagine entering an area of the game and being treated to a cutscene of a zombie horde breaking down an obstacle of some sort and shambling toward you from some distance away. When control is returned to the player, then they would almost certainly set themselves up to repulse the zombies -- the cutscene draws their attention to it as the primary threat of the area, and their distance gives you plenty of time to prepare for their arrival. Then, as you're doing that, another, much more dangerous creature smashes through a door/window/wall/whatever and enters the scene just behind you. Not only does it provide the shock-scare of an enemy appearing without warning, but because of the setup involving the zombie horde, it plays with your expectations. That's what juxtaposition is all about -- playing with expectations. The game needs to alter your sense of what's normal and what's not, what's possible and what's not, what's real and what's not. Altering perceptions like that is a huge part of horror.

Good controls and difficulty. Though this applies to any game, it seems to be much more of an issue with survival horror than almost any other genre. Controls need to be fluid, solid, and intuitive; if you feel like the character you're controlling has had his motor skills degraded by a serious stroke, then not only does that artificially increase the game's difficulty, it also destroys immersion (which has already been mentioned as extremely important). Difficulty is a stickier thing; there's a fine line between hard (and thus satisfying when beaten) and frustrating (and thus no fun to play). A player should never be put into a hopeless situation. Running out of ammo or health kits should never be an automatic death sentence. It should make things harder, obviously, but never impossible. I'll give you an example: in the castle in RE4, there's one room where you're confronted by several groups of cultists equipped with large shields and maces. I must have tried 80 different ways to get through that room, and I never managed it; it was annoying and frustrating enough that I actually stopped playing the game. I was later told that the answer to that room is grenades -- something I never thought of because I didn't have any on me at the time. That's lame -- the game shouldn't punish me for failing to be psychic. How was I supposed to know that grenades would be vital later on? There are a few ways to get around this. One is to always make sure that there are some of whatever is required lying around in the place that it's required. If you need grenades to get through the room, then there will be grenades in or just before the room. The problem with that is that the item placement itself becomes a hint -- if you see grenades, you immeadiately start to wonder what they're supposed to throw them at. Another possibility is a (set of?) infinite-use items. A melee weapon -- something as simple as a baseball bat or a length of pipe -- can be used as a last-resort weapon so that combat remains possible (though unattractive) when your ammo is gone. Some kind of never-runs-out first aid kit that raises your heealth to a certain maximum -- and no more (say, 10% of max health or something).

Above and beyond everything else, games are supposed to be fun. If it makes things more horrifying, but less fun, then you shouldn't do it. Having powerful enemies and/or weak weapons, limited ammo and health, monsters with abilities and powers far beyond yours, and dark/cramped/restricted areas that benefit your enemies far more than you are all great, fun ways to inspire horror. Having artificially bad controls or camera, situations that punish you for being unprepared when you had no legitimate reason to bring X peice of equipment, or places that are impossible to get through because of the outcome of an earlier part of the game all add to the horror, but are not fun. They need to be left out.

This is getting into rather specific details, but I think that a button combo sequence for certain enemies/situations could be a great part of horror. Not the "QUICKPRESSTHE'A'BUTTONNOWNOWNOW whoops too late you're dead instantly" quicktime events, but something more like The Force Unleashed's "finishing move" animations. Each button corresponds to a particular action (jump, lightsaber, force push, or force lightning, in The Force Unleashed's case), and each part of the sequence has a "correct" action (that continues the sequence), while an incorrect action ends the combo (sometimes causing you damage in the process). This kind of game mechanic is fast-pased (which increases the player's sense of panic), is sometimes (but not always!) dangerous (which makes it more unpredictable -- all to the good in horror), and allows for a cinematic style of play that can really improve the atmosphere and level of immersion.

Anyway, now I'm just rambling. Nice long post for you people to tl;dr. If it seems disjointed, my bad; I wrote it over the course of two hours or so amid a number of interruptions (y'know... actual work), so it's more a stream-of-conciousness kind of thing than a well thought out post that I usually try to write. Just my thoughts on things; feel free to shoot them down as much as you like.

[Zipp]

thanks for taking the time to reply with such a detailed post. The article goes into a few things you mention here, and removes some of the things that are in the early draft posted in this thread.

I pretty much agree with everything you've said, so I don't have much to add.