Sanity Meters

[Feylynn]

I propose we keep sanity, but agree it needs to do something new and snappy, like not appearing on screen.

If they want to represent a player going more insane they should just tie this invisible bar to the game progress and present you with your complimentary jacket. But if they insist on doing something more interactive then perhaps make these events sensitive to play style.
A stealthy non-confrontation type might see more wispy shadows sneaking about, they will have their heavy scare from the horrors already present, put them in positions to be afraid of those horrors.

The macho hack and slash type that's obviously to good at this game to scare with normal enemies now gets hunted down by a pyramid head mirror image of themselves, twisted by the devastation they cause, the flesh and blood they bathe in to continue their existence.

The player that reads to many books and twists their mind outside of reality and it's proper bounds should be confused, overwhelmed, the scenery could gradually become more convoluted and disorienting, like a blood soaked Escher carnival.

Though, I guess that would be better without the sanity bar, just mixing all of the above in Silent Hill 2-2.

 

[MikailCaboose]

It may not have been that scary...well actually it wasn't very scary at all...
but I will admit that I shat bricks when I though that my save-game had been erased in Eternal Darkness...
Although, the sanity effects did start to get a bit...annoying I will admit.

 

[Kermi]

Lovecraft was a cheap pulp author back in his day, maybe his works just were never scary.

Most of the classics revered today were cheap pulp back in the day. Shakespeare and the Sherlock Holmes stories are a couple of examples that spring to mind. Plus countless penny dreadfuls published at a time when the majority of the common people were just discovering that those squiggly marks you find in books corresponded with the words that might come out of their mouth.

 

[Vzzdak]

Extra Punctuation: Sanity Meters

Lovecraft doesn't translate too well into videogames.

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For those not familiar with it, Infocom published an excellent Lovecraft story titled, "Lurking Horror." It didn't have a sanity meter, though it was innovative in the sense of being a text adventure with sound effects.

I agree that Call of Cthulhu: DCotE had a strong start that declined into being a simple shooter. In the original novel, "Shadow Over Innsmouth," which the game draws upon for inspiration, the story ended when the protagonist miraculously escaped the town. To its credit, the game introduced much more adventure before escaping the town, though it could have concluded at that point and been stronger in terms of story.

 

[Mister Benoit]

I like the Eternal Darkness approach the most of the bunch but I think sanity meters should be invisible. Don't tell us how sane we are, that way when crazy shit happens I'll be like "Holy shit what the fuck" rather than "oh my sanity is low".

Also I think if your sanity gets too low the game should start conjuring things like fake enemies that disappear when you attack them or something like that. Get you to be unsure as to whether or not you want to use your ammo on the monster as it might be fake.

Cover that part of the screen with a piece of paper >.> pretty sad I know.

 

[Vzzdak]

Oh, it's true about the bit in Call of Cthulhu: DCotE, where insanity could cause your character to shoot themselves. Part of the plot involved being trapped in a puzzle room that contained a Cthulhu statue. If you spent too much time solving the puzzle, the constant sense of dread from the statue would cause you to use the handgun on yourself.

To picture how this worked in gameplay, you're trying to push a pedestal around, whilst your vision is becoming steadily blurred and movement sluggish because of the Cthulhu statue. So you might have an idea of how to solve the puzzle, but you're fighting the sanity mechanic all the while.

Aside from that puzzle room, most other hits to your sanity would recover over time.

 

[Fearzone]

Sanity meters didn't "extend" to the pen-and-paper game Call of Cthulhu... they began there. And in a role play environment sanity rolls and sanity levels totally enhanced the fun of the game, and have an appropriate place.

Much as I love Lovecraft and the pen-and-paper game, I've never played a specifically Lovecraft-inspired computer game--the closest I ever got to that was the original Half-life.

For those who want to read Lovecraft, which I applaud, most are short or medium-sized stories and there are a couple anthologies out there that I recommend: "Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre," (as the better one to start with), and "Dreams of Terror and Death" if you want more, which you should. Both are published by Del Rey and mine are 20 years old so I'm not sure are still in print. Just get an anthology with The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, and Shadow Over Innsmouth--at least those.

 

[KEM10]

I like the Eternal Darkness approach the most of the bunch but I think sanity meters should be invisible. Don't tell us how sane we are, that way when crazy shit happens I'll be like "Holy shit what the fuck" rather than "oh my sanity is low".

Also I think if your sanity gets too low the game should start conjuring things like fake enemies that disappear when you attack them or something like that. Get you to be unsure as to whether or not you want to use your ammo on the monster as it might be fake.

Obviously you didn't do the play through where the sanity spells were the last you receive. That did happen. But besides the extremes, your moments became more jerky and the screen was always looking a bit different. I played a level long enough and it wasn't until someone came in and told me that it was tilted 30 degrees. It was slowly morphing and just set the mood for the eerie temple that made it good.

A hidden bar would be good, but if it goes down to 0 you cracked and were deemed unplayable (read dead). To have a hidden meeter that would "kill" you when it hit the bottom would be deemed cheating or just stupid.

 

[Intoxicain]

Really, Shadow Hearts only gets a brief mention, and in a one liner in this thread?

Shadow hearts(1, 2 and 3) had a really interesting take on sanity, IMO. It WAS an rpg, but don't hold that against it for the purposes of the sanity mechanic. It had sanity along with the traditional HP/MP setup, and you lost points each turn, and some attacks (by monsters, usually bosses) and choices made by players during battle would cause that sanity to decline at a greater rate.

The Idea was that even the most hardened heroes would eventually lose their minds and revert to their most base state if they were forced in to battle with Eldritch forces for too long. (in the game, it was sort of a berserk/confuse state)

I think their take on sanity is worth a mention.

 

[GhostLad]

On the flipside, I think Fatal Frame (or Project Zero for us european types) is the only game that has managed to seriously freak me out. Playing the first one, I had to make a rule of never playing it after nightfall. Not only did I jump through the ceiling whenever a spook popped out of a door, but I had nightmares about small orange lights following me around.

And by the end of the first chapter I wondred if the kindest thing I could do to my poor protagonist wouldn't be to stop playing, because you just knew that everything was about to go horribly, horribly wrong for her.

That damned game messed with my sanity in ways a meter could never do.

 

[Brotherofwill]

Also, incidentally, CT3 contains some of the most spastic character animations I've ever seen in a game. In some cutscenes people throw absolute fits while conversing with each other. It's like they stuck all the motion capture balls on an octopus in an electric chair.

Hahaha. Reminds me of this:

 

[electric discordian]

Why don't Bathesda do a sequel to Dark Corners, imagine a sandbox R.P.G set in Lovecraft country!

I would never leave the house! It would be for me like the unholy union of Wow and Fallout3 two things I am addicted too even to this day!

Though I can manage my addiction, or has my invisible sanity bar just dropped and I haven't noticed!

 

[Chakanus]

I have long been fascinated by the Cthulhu mythos, so I guess I'm going to have to disagree with Yahtzee's assessment of the lack of impact of Lovecrafts' work nowadays.

Then, as much as now, there is an underlying idea of a True Benevolent God, a reflection of the perfection we should all strive to acheive, and no logic can ever shake the foundation of the Human Ego. Astrophysics do not correlate in any notion of our daily lives, and, as such, deep down most people still have an inconscient notion of being in the centre of the Universe.

For me, the lack of moral of the Outer Gods and Elder Ones was, and still is, a strike at those morals. Why, yes there are most certainly greater things than what our minds perceive, but our lack of capacity to understand them would make it all seem abhorrent and impossible for us to correlate with (unless you were driven insane). Sure, in Call of Cthulhu it is given the impression that Cthulhu will rise and eat everyone, bringing down insanity and fire and blahdly blah. But most of the stories are not so clear cut in the Evil department. We are just insignificant and THEY are so much greater, so eternal, so multi-dimensional, that our mere gaze at those fascinating creatures has a devastating impact in our psyche.

The main problem with Cthulhu games, lies not with the fact they decide to add an insanity meter (for me it is just a silly way of having a second heatlh meter). The blurry camera does nothing for me, that much is true, but the attempt of Eternal Darkness was a good one.

The main problem with a Mythos game lies in the fact, that in the books, the horrors which lie beyond the veil of our reality are never fully decribed. The picture is painted by explaining how utterly impossible for our feebles minds it would be to try and describe the eternal horror that was rising upon the character. The surrounding environments shift to geometries that are not related to this world, the air vanishes becoming a vile miasma, and even in blindness the astronomical horror can creep inside the mind of the viewer, forever etching a sign that would make sure that the routine world that we all live in is shown for what it truly is - a façade to keep us all sane.

Now unless you were playing one of those text-adventure games, it's hard to not show the monster, hinting at it instead. Even with groundbreaking graphics, it'd be hard to make a shift in the environment that would ammount to anything more than being slightly darker. In a videogame you cannot leave holes and hope that the imagination of the player fills the gaps, which the books and pen&paper can.

The monster will be shown eventually, and as big and ugly it will be, it will actually just be a giant blob with tentacles, something whose fear-inducind abilities have loooooong been destroyed by hentai.

 

[Yelchor]

I have no idea what sanity meters have to do with Lovecraft. As Yathzee said, it risks harming the elements of horror rather than infusing it.

A Lovecraftian horror game with more focus on actual horror and not the gameplay mechanic of... strangeness would add to the potential of the genre greatly I'm sure of.

 

[Gunner 51]

Personally, I didn't mind the Call of Cthulu: DCotE's sanity meter. I've managed to get Mr Walters to kill himself by constantly examining bodies in the morgue of the prologue. (He strangled himself.)

Allow me to come up with an alternative sanity meter.

Your character can only endure X amount of insanity throughout the game.

For example, your character will have 100% sanity. Differing things will take away different amounts of sanity. You can recover some of that sanity by leaving the area - but you can never truly recover it all, ever.

Say you end up rubbing shoulders with Cthulu or something he will take away 1% of your sanity per second upon contact and the longer you stay with him he will end up taking away 2 or 3% of your sanity.

Say he's taken away 10% sanity, you can only hope to recover something like 8% sanity. Seeing him has well and truly scarred your character's mind. The game can tweak the endings slightly judged on how much sanity you have left.

For example...

Good Ending - High Sanity: Hero saves the world, gets the girl and lives happily ever after.
Good Ending - Low Sanity: Hero saves the world but ends up in the local nut-house.
Bad Ending - High Sanity: Hero joins the bad guy as his right hand but keeps the girl.
Bad Ending - Low Sanity: Hero joins the bad guy but serves as a lowly mook.

 

[Traigus]

I swear Alice wasn't a shooter at all. Loved the Atmosphere, but the damn thing was a jumping platformer lol.

Spent more time falling off stuff than busting heads.

 

[Fearzone]

Now unless you were playing one of those text-adventure games, it's hard to not show the monster, hinting at it instead. Even with groundbreaking graphics, it'd be hard to make a shift in the environment that would ammount to anything more than being slightly darker. In a videogame you cannot leave holes and hope that the imagination of the player fills the gaps, which the books and pen&paper can.

The key to horror, IMHO, is never fully showing what is there--just pieces of an incomplete puzzle.

Your FPS horror-game will need to have minions and cultists to eat shotgun shells and generate some mild sense of threat and impediment to foward motion, and then evil lieutenant "bosses" to bring in the occasional difficulty-spike, but there needs to be a sense of something beyond that, some great and terrible mastermind lurking in the shadows, some greater evil going on all around you, that you can sense is there, somewhere, but never quite have the whole picture.

 

[sketchesofpayne]

Insanity in video games should work like dark-side points in star wars games. Basically they affect which story path the character takes. Too many insanity points and you get the 'Bad End.'

 

[TheMann]

Yahtzee took a shot at "Alice"... Oh good lord, is nothing sacred to this guy?

[small](Short answer: No...)[/small]

Well he never said it was a bad game. I loved that game with the brilliant trippy artwork that was insanely good, especially for 2000. Actually I go back and still play it sometimes.

But Yahtzee's right, while from the context of the story it made sense to called it a sanity bar as Alice is never physically hurt; she's just going insane. However, as a gameplay mechanic yeah, it's pretty much just a health bar.

It did look cool though.