@pyromagnestir said:
Well, maybe that's how you played them, but that's not how everyone played them. Although how they were designed did add to that, as I do remember dying from time to time and then running through stuff the second time and having the knowledge of where the zombies would be and what not making my second time through far more efficient. But not everyone games the systems of games quite so... intentionally as you seem to be describing. I try to play them more... naturally? I guess. If you get what I'm saying.And seeing things twice does end jump scares, but not all tension from the old survival horror games came from jump scares. Feeling ill equipped to handle the situation added a tension that didn't go away, for me. I never found jump scares particularly scary anyways. What I liked was entering a room, seeing an exit, only there is a zombie in the way. How do I get to that exit? That's where the tension was, for me.
The problem with survival horror is that it's niche. It wasn't always, of course, for a brief time when the mechanics of games were different, and the tech was different, and gamers were accustomed to different things it did quite well. Nowadays it seems corporate thinking is that only a Silent Hill type flagship of the genre can even risk making a 40 mil survivor horror game and have it pay off. However, the problem is they go too far back. They are too rooted in tradition. They bring back everything almost exactly as it was almost as if they discovered the game in a time capsule and polished it up a bit. So only the niche fans care, and they complain because the jump scares aren't as scary as they were, or the mechanics are no longer acceptable, or they over corrected too much and now it's too actiony and not tense enough, but still it's just backwards enough that the "mainstream" audience doesn't want it and the game doesn't sell well because there are so few of them around anymore.
I think there's a balance somewhere in there that no one has discovered yet. A mainstream game could strive for this balance if it wanted, but most of them don't seem to have any interest in trying. The Last of Us is a game that looks like it may strive for that balance at times. The demo, however, showed the pendulum swinging pretty far to the action side. Not that it puts me off, or whatever. I'm still interested in the game. And I understand the idea that a small demo is probably not representative of the whole game, which is a concept some people seem to have a hard time grasping. But we are in a time where most games start with a base of, lots of shooting, and add more and more shooting instead of trying to figure out something else interesting to do.
To tie this all back in to Brad's Watch Dogs comment, having a game try to figure out a way to make moment to moment action interesting that isn't just shooting a bunch of dudes would be nice.
I understand there's the right balance to difficulty and resource management so that it doesn't override the narrative, but reinforces it. Those old games took it too far for the most part. The amount of times I finished a sequence in Resident Evil to go "man, I wasted too much herbs and ammo, I'll never be able to finish the game now" and reload a save despite succeeding in the boss fight broke that game. Conversely, Silent Hill 2 is largely regarded as the easiest Silent Hill game, the enemies are slow and clumsy, it's easy to avoid fights, yet it's also the scariest. Because the player can think less about mechanics and inventory management, the seams of the game are blurred out by the narrative and setting.
I also agree that survival horror is niche. People forget that the reason why Resident Evil was popular. Here's two quotes from IGN...
With stunning visuals (that still rank amongst the best in gaming today), a fantastically told story, great puzzles and high-octane gunplay, it's easily one of the best titles of this console generation.
Never has a game combined excellent graphics with heart-stopping action and a great story in such a way as to create an almost cinematic adventure. You really do feel like you're participating in a movie. It's amazing.
One of those is from 1996 talking about Resident Evil, the other is from 2009 talking about Uncharted 2. People forget that Resident Evil was a showpiece in the same way Last of Us is now. And even back then, people hated the inventory management aspects, and were excited to blow up monsters with shotguns and stomp them into red paste. No one had ever seen a game that looked like Resident Evil before, they had never toted around rocket launchers to blast Hunters with. You can say what we need is that nebulous "innovation" but that's easier said than done.
I think it's interesting that I played through Resident Evil the original while legitimately dying twice... I played through Resident Evil 4 dying 62 times (which the game is so pleased to tell you at the end). I found every death or reload in the original to be annoying and reinforcing the mechanics of the game, I found the deaths in RE4 to reinforce the narrative of the game, that high danger and suspenseful action (though yes, a few repeated QTE deaths were annoying).
What I'm actually excited to see is indie devs pick up the survival horror genre (remember, Amnesia and FEAR and Dead Space are not survival horror). The one thing I never do is ask a game company to throw money into a fire for my entertainment, but an inspired indie dev might be able to fulfill that niche while doing something they love. One of Ryan Payton's stated influences for Republique was old survival horror mechanics. We'll see how that does critically and in terms of commercial success. If there's really these markets there for survival horror, isometric RPGs, turn based strategy, we should see those games be successful and grow into something sustainable for developer and consumers.
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