Do you think we can resurrect the survival horror genre?

[Rednog]

Meh, I honestly think survival horror had it's time and it really isn't going to come back until we come to the point of virtual reality or some sort of full immersion. Survival horror really is the product of a gaming era where we moved away from the 2D side-scrollers and had clunky controls as a result. This let developers really play on a person's imagination to scare the player, and there was tension because controls not being fluid easily put the player in peril.

Sure there is always going to be a really good survival horror once and a while when a developer just hits all the right points, but it's never going to a situation where a bunch of them spring up. The problem is that once a developer hits certain points the next one kind of has to hit new ones because the same thing just isn't going to have the same impact.

 

[Yopaz]

It never died, it just evolved. Into action games with monsters and jump scares.

The problem with the survival horror games as a whole is that it is a niche genre that not everyone is into. I for one just can't handle them. They wont give me nightmares or keep me up, but it doesn't take a lot to make me too scared to go on. I wont buy an AAA game that costs 90 dollars just to pay the first hour before I can't go on, Amnesia was a budget title so I wasn't too hesitant to get that one. A lot of us want to be engaged by the combat and the gameplay, we want to feel like action heroes. Survival horror games are supposed to give us the feeling of being weak and helpless, make us feel like we're in danger all the time. Big budget titles can't appeal to a chosen few, they have to appeal to a mainstream audience or they will flop.

I also think survival horror games are a lot harder to make because they have to be engaging without giving us the flawless combat, they have to scare us beyond shouting boo and jumping out of a closet.

This is about how I feel too. Resident Evil 4 and onward adopted more of a action-y feel to the gameplay. Whereas 1-3 were much, much more atmospheric. Dead Space would fall into the same category as action survival (as I'm calling them these days) but it still has atmosphere. It's not a ton, but it's enough for me personally.

More atmosphere, controls, game play and setting to create that with less jump-scares would be a start in revitalizing the genre to me.

I agree that Resident Evil was a straight up action game, but at least for a part of it they kept an eerie atmosphere. The cemetery, the forests, the dark clouds, the old castle, the invisible enemies in the underground catacombs and all that. It was an action game and it was more fun than scary, but it didn't lose the atmosphere completely.

 

[Manji187]

There needs to be more mystery (things that make you go "what on earth is going on here"), a slower pace (exploration) and an immersive atmosphere that makes you feel like you are in way over your head.

In other words, tension has to be built up, gradually and subtly. The game has to work to make the player uncomfortable about progressing further, forcing them to be brave.

Jump scares are too easy, it has to be more methodical, using the player's imagination against him/ her.

 

[ninjaRiv]

I think it's making a comeback but it'd best if publishers like EA kept out of it. Their creepy need to have EVERYONE play their games ruins it, taking out the horror and just leaving flat action games.

 

[Lt._nefarious]

Well I thought Silent Hill Downpour was a pretty great survival horror...

*silence*

I'll see myself out...

 

[DrunkenMonkey]

I'm hoping Shinji Mikami's Zwei is the messiah we've been waiting for (not bypassing Amnesia in any way)

 

[crimson sickle2]

There's definitely a market for it by now. It would have to worm its way back up to a decent position before big releases can become possible, but with the endless FPS fad dying off a little at a time, it should eventually be able to return to actual horror.

 

[Something Amyss]

Wasn't what made the genre exist in the first place shitty controls and bad visuals?

Maybe if we can get some people to intentionally handicap their work....

 

[mariosonicfan5]

You know, with how particular most "fans" are these days, if a "true" survival horror game were to come out, they would have something negative to say about and then go back hypeing up how awesome the good old days were, much like sonic fans and resident evil fans do now. I for one am a fan of both but hate to be put into the same category as the people who think that the only good games in those series were the first ones.

 

[2fish]

It is a hard area to get a lot of games in. Like space sims it has a small market, very specific goals, and cannot cost too much to make or it will bleed money. AAA games seem to be working on games in large scale so they will not make these small games. Gotta look to the indie market. The genre is not dead, just hiding. You have to look to find the good ones. Good ones are damn rare though.

Wasn't what made the genre exist in the first place shitty controls and bad visuals?

Maybe if we can get some people to intentionally handicap their work....

We don't need them to do it to their own work, we have EA for that. YAY! Cheapshot on EA this makes me popular on the internet right?


I know the feeling though, I like base building RTS, first person stealth, space sims, and spy games. Damn hard to find these types of games.

 

[Psycomantis777]

A lot of people slated Deadly Premonition for it's "archaic" controls and play style, but I thought that it captured a lot of the good survival horror elements. It wasn't perfect, far from it, but I think that, as long as it's kept away from Triple-A game developers for the most part, Survival Horror has a good chance of making a comeback. It was atmosphere that made them terrifying and big budget games don't really know what that is...

 

[Alhazred]

It's quite a hard genre to do well; it needs a subtle touch that most AAA developers cannot grasp. A good survival horror game should go beyond simply disgusting the player or making them jump, it should tap into their most primal fears and make them afraid to even turn the next corner.

 

[Kroxile]

The survival horror genre doesn't need saving or resurrecting just because Resident Evil in particular does.

What with games like Amnesia, Slender, Cry of Fear, etc I'd say the genre is doing just fine

 

[AnotherAvatar]

For all the people saying "I don't know if Survival-Horror was ever a thriving Genre", you must have never had a PS2 or were too young at the time to play the M-rated games on it. The PS2 was BURSTING with well made Survival-Horror games:
Silent Hill 2+3+4
Rule of Rose
Cold Fear
Fatal Frame
Siren
Clock Tower
Obscure
The Suffering
Haunting Ground
Echo Night
The Thing
Lifeline (one of my favorite obscure games, the mechanics are so weird)
Extermination
Michigan: Report from Hell (Another favorite, Grasshopper was so great that generation)
I could go on and there were TONS more Japanese-Exclusive (because as you probably don't recall they started a new horror resurgence around that time with The Ring). The fact is Survival-horror used to dominate the scene, but then came the Halo kids, who are so full of sugar and twitchy they don't find any joy in being in a quiet empty place that hates you through neglect not enemies, and so all the big names in that genre flipped over to action-horror to indulge them. This is why most of the big names behind the Survival-Horror genre left their respective companies, specifically Team Silent and Mikami will both be missed, without them running Resident Evil and Silent Hill those games have become a joke and a prime example of 'not-scary-action-horror'.

As for it being dead, I'd say it's on it's deathbed, with neither of it's favored children willing to see it, but so long as things like Deadly Premonition keep popping up it won't be fully dead, and there's always a chance of resurgence, which seems like a natural thing to me as today's graphics could do some terrifying things.


So yeah: to all the kids who don't remember the long dark night of gaming during which Survival-Horror was king, maybe you should go grab a PS2 and learn to respect your fears.

 

[Bad Jim]

Wasn't what made the genre exist in the first place shitty controls and bad visuals?

Maybe if we can get some people to intentionally handicap their work....

Actually I think Yahtzee wrote something like that. The reason why AAA developers cannot do good survival horror is that AAA games involve epic quantities of art while good horror requires showing the player as little as possible and letting his imagination do most of the work.

I'm not convinced that shitty controls are important though. What's important is that you can't let the player slaughter his way through the game. This is also a common stumbling block for AAA devs because the result is not necessarily a bad game, it's just not survival horror. In some cases this was achieved with an awkward control scheme, but it can also be achieved with limited ammo, invulnerable/respawning enemies or just not having any way to fight back, like Amnesia.

But I'd say the real problem is that survival horror is a bit niche. The only real survival horror games I've bought are Undying and Amnesia, both at a low prices. In the PS2 era AAA game budgets were in the region of a million or so and a survival horror game could sell enough copies to make that money back. Current AAA budgets are in the tens of millions, and there just aren't enough survival horror fans to make a profit on that.

The answer of course is smaller developers. Amnesia did well because it was made for around $300k. I don't think this necessarily excludes big publishers like EA from making them, but I expect indies to fill the niche.

 

[TrevHead]

Of course, some devs choose to slow the player down artificially with bad controls, and those guys I have no respect for, worst cop-out there is.

I'll assume you mean tank controls? If so I respectfully disagree, tank controls are archaic but that doesn't mean you can't do something good with them. For example Legend of Grimrock, would you say that would be a better game if it had FPS free movement because that's the most realistic and popular way of doing it like Elder Scrolls does?

 

[lithiumvocals]

Well I thought Silent Hill Downpour was a pretty great survival horror...

*silence*

I'll see myself out...

Hey, I enjoyed it.