Vladdie93 said:
To start off, your original statements.
See, what I mean is that your statements were "Game can't be X" and "Game can't do Y," which is all fine and good form a personal perspective. However, it doesn't answer the original question you posted, being "what makes a horror game good?" The qualities you represent show what a bad horror game is in your eyes, but we need to focus on a base for all standards to partake so that we know what can truly make a "good" horror game.
Really? What constitutes a good day? Being healthy OR not being sick. Being alive OR not being dead. The airplane lands safely OR the airplane doesn't crash. To say what something CAN'T do is to give it guidelines for what it CAN do. So for me to say a game CAN'T only use jump scares is the same as saying the game must use a variety of ways to scare the player. That is atmosphere, suspense, build up, jump scares, paranoia, ect, ect.
As for your current arguments, I disagree. I think that there are many ways to overwhelm the player (or give them pause) and that don't keep spilling out ridiculous amounts of ammo. in RE4, the lake monster boss has you throwing harpoons you have in the boat.
Infinite harpoons, btw.
At El Gigante, the game gives you ammo in shacks, and before when you're walking around trying to find the lever to get past the arena. It gives you the ample supply to try and overcome the monster, but it doesn't mean it's not scary.
On normal the ammo given is
almost enough, on pro you had better been saving for that fight. This is what I was saying about bosses being there to police resource hoarders and punish those who don't. I had quite a bit of ammo up to that point because I was knifing a lot specifically to save ammo on my pro run. Well you can't initially knife that boss, so guess what? All that ammo I had saved because I was skillful and forward thinking enough to do so was taken from me to even the playing field again. I take issue with that type of lazy difficulty reset.
As for games with overwhelming monsters that you can't beat, note that your inability to beat them is perpendicular to what you are typically given. Pyramid man can kill you in one shot if he does it right. Regenerators are ridiculously strong, and in the original game you would only face one at a time and be forced to avoid it with no way of slowing it down. Even Stasis had little effect on it. The point is that the player needs to feel overwhelmed by enemies.
And you can do that without it feeling cheap. I liken those types of enemies to the boulders in RE4. They are no longer enemies. They are an unstoppable force to drive you from point A to point B until you get to where the devs wanted you to be. Then the enemy decides you are not worth the time or, more insultingly, you are forced to fight it and you can suddenly hurt it. Just like Salizare's right hand in RE4. All you can do if you don't have special unlock weapons is run and then you're trapped in the room and suddenly you are doing damage to him. To make an enemy like that completely negates the player's skill.
As for your #4.... NO. Just a flat out NO.
I understand some of the idea behind open world horror games, but with that open world limits control. If people are given the option to do whatever they want, they'll merely do something that leads them back into their comfort zone, turning a survival horror game into just another sandbox.
For this, I'll use Dead Island.
I have to stop you here. Dead Island was neither open world or survival horror. It was just... a thing. A thing that had a good base idea but shat itself in execution.
Dead Island tried to be an open world horror game, and had many of the elements for it. Breaking weapons were a nice touch, powerful enemies were aplenty, and the forced exploration in a world with monsters ready to kill you was a good idea.
I don't know if you ever played DI, but I need to set you strait on some stuff. The weapon system was unbelievably broken due to the attempted RPG elements. Weapons broke far too quickly in the beginning to compensate for the skills that prolonged weapon life. All power enemies become more dangerous the closer you get to them. Normally this would be a good thing, but in a game mostly about melee weapons it is bad. Some even hurt you when they died if you were too close, like say in melee range. The power enemies were either by themselves, or surrounded by every zombie on the map (those were the ones by quest shit, whoda thunk?)
However, that really limited their ability to try and scare people because of a few reasons.
A) They had time to think about what to do. Instead of forcing them to think on their feet and be distracted by fear, it gives them too much ability to just calm themselves down, turning it into an action game.
I had the opposite experience. Due to the lack of open world elements if a hoard decided it wanted me I very rarely got away. Now, this was in the city where you could go into a total of 10 building I think it was.
B) No ability to plan out the scares. Sometimes you'd run into a few zombies, sometimes it'd be just one big one, or a few small ones, or a few big ones. They couldn't plan it out as well and give something that really scares you because they have no way to figure out where you're headed or what you're going to do. In fact, at one point in the game I just drove around the jungle and found only 2 zombies because the game wanted me to be back near base completing other missions.
That was just poor execution. Halo ODST got the shit right. In the Semi-open world segment the enemies were programed to dynamically patrol the city. If you had killed everything in a sector they would send a strike team to secure that point and double the patrols in the surrounding area. If you engaged a patrol for a bit other patrols would avert their route to assist. It was dynamic and functional but most importantly, it
felt right.
C) If they're like me, they'll just use to Overpowered cars and crash through all the zombies, making any possibility for horror completely impossible.
Because all open world games have cars...?
Overall, survival horror and open world aren't nearly as good (To be fair though, Dying Light looks interesting enough to give it a chance. However, horror is best done when you can plan it out and control all the situations because it doesn't allow the player that chance to think. They need to be forced to do things or not do things that get them out of their comfort zone. Otherwise, they'll just stay in their comfort and avoid all the scares.
I have to disagree on a fundamental level. What stories (beside the glitch stories) do you hear people tell about Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout NV? Because I hear stories like how someone was fighting a dragon and a giant got involved. But it was actually the
dragon that hit the mammoth and agroed the giant, so the pc got a giant ally for that fight. But after the dragon was dead the inevitable betrayal occurred and the pc was forced to slay his once cohort giant. There was a moment of silence after the fight. Shit like that just can't be scripted. I tell you just put dynamic patrol AI in and see what kind of shit will happen. If you don't expect the scare it is even scarier when it does happen. IE cazadores chasing nightstalkers into an ongoing fight between me and Legion elite assassins. I cried as I reloaded my save when they all got involved.
