Grey Day for Elcia said:
Char-Nobyl said:
Most SH protagonists have a very understandable reason for remaining in the town, whether it's lost family or simple despair, though nothing physical is stopping them from leaving.
I dunno about you, but I aint hanging around in Silent Hill by choice. Fuck my dead wife >_>
Also: the fact the roads are all massive craters now kinda traps you in. And the fog walls.
But those are barriers to keep the
players in. From a narrative standpoint, James didn't need any of that. Physical walls exist to be climbed. But walls built with your own mind? Those are 'built' to be avoided.
Therumancer said:
I agree with you on everything pretty much, except for this bit. See, I'm one of the few horror gamers that thinks that for all it's potental, Amnesia was a poorly designed turd that failed for largely this reason. To be honest the point I'm making is about how combat needs to be a viable option but needs to be balanced by the atmosphere and the options present for this to work. Amnesia is as big a failure as horror games that routinely force combat because its not an option and makes the need to flee or hide exclusively something that breaks immersion, it pretty much turns the game into a giant forced stealth section every time a monster shows up, and that's just as bad.
Erm...I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. Is it that Amnesia's biggest failure was the complete lack of a combat option, rather than having one that was realistic given the setting?
If that's the case, sure, the latter would be nice, but what would you do with it? Can the monster be damaged? Does it have a massive yet nonetheless finite healthbar? If it gets stuck on a crate or something, and the player takes the hour or so of cherry-tapping to kill it, what then? Do they just walk through the rest of the game undaunted? It's a problem especially when there's
one monster to worry about, because the odds of a glitch/exploit/whatever that lets your feeble attack eventually kill it go up exponentially.
Therumancer said:
See, the thing to understand is that humans are the most efficient predators on our planet. We dominate the world because we're aggressive, highly intelligent(a dumb human is smarter than pretty much any animal out there), and we have opposable thumbs to make and use tools. We aren't the strongest or the fastest but those advantages make us nearly unstoppable.
I'm gonna stop you there and add a few things to the list of 'human survival assets.' Yes, opposable thumbs are a big one. And intelligence is another. In fact, that's the reason why human babies take comparatively so long to mature when put alongside other animals (the brain/head needs time to grow, and if it did so in the womb, it would require that the birth canal be cripplingly large). We've also got remarkably efficient bodies given the potential strength output and required energy consuption.
But we're also really good at acting in groups. Civilization is pretty much just large groups of humans clustered together for the sake of survival, and it's why we all (with few exceptions) always like being in populated areas. And similarly, the ability to socialize actually lets us override basic survival instincts for...well, for no good reason, quite a bit of the time. But that's the glory of it: we're so intelligent that we can do unbelievably stupid things that most animals would never even consider.
So as a result...we have some good stuff going for us, but our main asset is
other humans.
Therumancer said:
For all the situations people die in, people also tend to surprise in incredibly hostile situations despite the odds civilization teaches us to believe in because people generally don't realize what horrendously nasty creatures we are when you get down to it. Heck, you even have little kids surviving in the wilderness for years purely on instinct.
I'm not so sure about that last one. That's stretching it a bit.
Therumancer said:
The point here is that we do run away, the fight or flight reflex includes "flight" for a reason, but we also don't tend to leave things that are dangeorus to us alone, being smart tool users when we run into something we can't beat, we set traps for it, or create things to give us an edge. This is how humans have been taking down vastly more powerful creatures on a physical level since the dawn of time.
...not really, no. You're thinking of the conclusion of
Predator. Our ability to survive is more akin to a group of early homo-sapiens surrounding a mammoth and killing it with crude spears.
Therumancer said:
The problem with Amnesia is that running away makes sense in some cases, but even if I can't outmuscle the monster, in certain situations there is a lot I am going to be able to do, and in that game (as far as I played it) and a few others it occured to me that the situation was getting stupid because there were plenty of things I should have been able to do with the enviroment or what I had on hand that would have made life alot easier.
I can almost guarantee that what you're about to propose would've gotten you killed. Just a hunch, though.
Therumancer said:
It's one thing when there are no oppertunities present, but quite another when I'm say sitting on lamp oil and matches and am left with perfect oppertunities to light some annoying creature up like a torch,
And how do you propose you'd do that? Lamp oil is a precious commodity, for one thing, so you'd essentially be committing suicide if you used so much of it on a gamble that the horrible flesh-thing that's stalking you is vulnerable to fire, because then you have no real portable light.
Not only that, but
how would you set it alight? You make it sound like "Lamp and matches equals firebomb," but it really doesn't. How would you soak the monster in lamp oil? And even if you manage to get enough on it, do you trust yourself to fumble with a book of matches and get one lit before it disembowels you?
Therumancer said:
or heck... just to drop really heavy things on them.
This was a monster that routinely smashed through doors that were several inches of iron-reinforced wood. It didn't force the lock, or even rip the door off the hinges: it shattered the door into splinters.
Mate, unless you've got a truck-mounted cement mixer and the ability to dump the entire load onto it, you aren't going to stop it with anything lying around a distended castle.
Therumancer said:
This is why I think the type of monster is important, and why in some cases it doesn't work. In Amnesia your enemy for most of it basically amounts to some big, ugly, mook, that is apparently as dumb as a rock and doesn't exactly have any superhuman senses or anything. Okay greanted, your not going to win a dust up with a club, a makeshift spear, or whatever else, but if I push say a 400 pound crate off an edge using a lever onto it's head,
Again: turning several inches of iron-backed wood into splinters.
Therumancer said:
or cover it, or say close a barred door and lock it so it cant get through,
Aga...or just see above.
Therumancer said:
say "over here" douse it with lamp oil trough the bars and toss a match on it and laugh...
A few questions:
1) How would you douse it in lamp oil? Do you have a bucket filled with the stuff that you can just throw at it, or what? And, on a similar note...
2) Where did you get all this lamp oil? It was a pretty rare commodity in the game, and a bucket of the stuff is going to take quite a bit of scrounging to find, made only longer and more dangerous by the fact that you don't have a lamp to help you.
3) Do you know much about the creature itself? Because as it stands, fire is a pretty shitty way to kill someone/something. Burn victims look as horrible as they do because it's rarely the fire that kills you: it's the lack of oxygen. You suffocate long before you'd die from the burning itself, hence why people can survive with a body covered with third-degree burns.
4) Have you ever thrown a match before? Because they don't have much weight behind them. So they're rather hard to reliably toss at anything that's more than a couple feet away (and therefore within grabbing distance).
5) Do you know how much lamp oil it would take to reliably kill a regular person by immolation, much less a highly-durable monster of unknown nature? A lot. Probably even more than that bucket I mentioned earlier.
But either way, the plan is pretty well shot once you realize that it would take a veritable bank-vault door with a convenient hole in it to keep the monster back while still letting you throw stuff at it, and too much lamp oil for you to lug around and reliably dump on it.
Therumancer said:
yeah that would work, and makes a lot more sense than simply hiding constantly once you know for sure it's out there. Since there only seems to be one real monster for a good part of the game, think about how much easier and much logical things would be if you just took it out. Now granted, there might be some very good reasons why this wouldn't work, depending on it's exact capabilities, but there is no knowlege I have for most of the game that explains why I wouldn't try.
Sure there is. Fleeing gives you a strong chance of survival. Confronting the creature (whose nature you don't understand, and whose physical capabilities are far beyond your own) will likely result in your death, and any dawdling to rig crude traps and whatnot will rapidly increase your chances of getting caught and killed.
Therumancer said:
Even in horror where your a relatively ordinary guy, I tend to frame it in the sense of what I would do in real life, and by "real life" I'm talking about what I can actually do (where I'm sub-average now actually) as opposed to some nerd fantasy. See, I will run away from something that scares the crap out of me, and might not go looking for something obviously more dangerous than I am with an improvised weapon, but will I take an oppertunity to turn the tables on it? Would I set a trap for something stalking me? Hell yes. Even as I'm running or hiding I'm going to be thinking about ways to get rid of that thing, and given an oppertunity that seems viable I'm going to take it.
Then consider it from this point of view: whenever one of these 'opportunities' presents itself, you have two options: continue to flee, or take the chance. You have no reason to believe that taking the chance will stop the creature, or even slow it down, and every second you waste on it is another second that you didn't spend putting more distance between you and it.
You think that you're considering this objectively, and not (as you put it) as some sort of "nerd fantasy"? Then stop thinking that you're MacGyver. Your plan required a few jerrycans of oil you don't have, a flamethrower you'll never find, and a door that will undoubtedly leave you trapped and waiting to die if you screw up. Oh, and that's another thing: locking yourself in a room with a horrible monster outside and no real ventilation system? Not a great time to set stuff on fire. I can guarantee that it's got a hardier constitution than you, and you'll probably die of smoke inhalation long before it does.
Therumancer said:
Immersion can be broken by making the character too ineffective and incapable of action to be believed, and that can ruin taking horror seriously, just as bad as simply walking around and pwning everything that gets in your way with improbable levels of superhuman fighting abillity.
A well-designed horror game should be able to be beaten on a single playthrough by a skilled player without any deaths. If I were designing a game based on the desires you set above, I would include every single one of those options as things you can do in-game.
But there would be one catch: if you die, you're done. Game over. No checkpoint, no regression to the start of the chapter, no nothing. You die, you go back to the 'start' screen. Because I welcome the sort of free-thinking that you're proposing. I think plenty of situations
could be defused in ways similar to what you proposed. But I want players to go into the game with as great an investment in their survival as possible.
Mind you, this is in a hypothetical ideal where control error isn't an issue, environments provide as much versatility of action, etc. But the point is that if you think you can light the unknown horror on fire and kill it, by all means, try. But you'd better be willing to deal with the consequences, or at least have an escape planned.
Abandon4093 said:
I'm pretty much like you. I didn't find the game scary because there was no real risk. When you died you just respawned somewhere else with all the items you possessed when you kicked it. So after the initial 'bwah wtf is that?' the creatures became a bit monotonous. You had noooo way of defending yourself, and while that should have made it scarier, it ended up being a very repetitive game.
'Oh, big scary thing. Better run into this room and hide behind that box... again.'
It takes a lot to scare me anyway, but the lack of risk really killed that game for me. Especially when you found out that the insanity mechanic was pretty much just aesthetic. I did about 90% of that game without using the lamp.
It's almost as if the game was telling you that you should be scared instead of actually scaring you.
I literally just had a night at a mates house where 4 of us took turns playing through the game on the big screen with the lights off etc. And eventually they told me to stop playing because I wasn't jumping and screaming when a creature popped out of nowhere. And I didn't use the lamp etc.
Once you've figured out that there's no real reason not to just run past the thing and make a break for the door. It becomes a little boring. For both player and audience apparently.
Hm. Sounds like the latter part of my other response can work for you, as well. Getting players invested in survival and whatnot.
