Will check it out.
Nah, you're wrong.
That's the equivalent of saying "movies without car chases suck". Just like not every movie need car chases, not every horror game needs combat.
The I have no weapons so there must be an escape route argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You could just as easily apply that sort of meta-logic to a game with combat in it.
There's plenty of room for different flavours of horror games.
No. The problem with weaponless horror games is that they want the same emotion throughout the ENTIRE EXPERIENCE. It remains steady. It's a roller coaster without any rolling or coasting. It's a static experience.
The rhetoric here is more like "car chases make movies more exciting!" and then ending the video with "of course there are other ways to do this than car chases, but the people who say 'movies should never have car chases in them' are demonstrably wrong." That's what the video does.
Whether I've done a GOOD JOB of making that clear is up for debate!
Do any survival horror games do gun jamming like in Far Cry 2? That'd be an interesting mechanic to add a lot of tension and panic to combative horror games. I like when horror games give you defense other than hiding, yet make it weak enough so that you are always on edge.
As for the idea in the OP, I think that the first person non-combative survival horror genre is past its prime. At this point that genre is better for storytelling (e.g. SOMA) than actually scaring me. A happy middle between the Amnesia and Resident Evil 4 extremes would probably be where the genre would be at its best.
I know the horror game I plan to make after G1 has weapon jamming. System Shock 2 has some if I remember right. STALKER does as well.
I dislike horror games in general, but I feel like horror is less scaried once you confront your fear, and having weapons means you must confront it.
The unknown is scarier. One way to tolerate a horror game is to make myself die to a monster, and then I know what's going to happen.
The unknown can literally be "if I shoot this monster, will I kill it, or will it kill me?" There's more to the unknown than just "what is the monster?" That's a single question. A well-designed horror game should have LOTS of unknowns that are brought up and dealt with over time. This is why Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is the best horror game there is. It is also why people love Resident Evil 4.
Well, yes, but DS2 is not a scary game. It's a shlocky sci-fi action game with monsters jumping out of dark closets. DS2 has lots of weapons but I argue those actually reduce horror because they give you power over your tormentor. Once you're empowered the only way to horrify the player is through shock. But shocks are temporary and audiences build up a tolerance so you need bigger and bigger shocks and it's not long before you've gone from trying to survive against a single monster to taking on the Army of Darkness.
This is boring and inherently less scary than being in a situation where you have no control over your tormentor, only over your immediate environment. I feel Clock Tower does this really well.
Dead Space 2 is action horror, therefore it deals with horror (the revulsion at seeing the source of terror) and action. It is Aliens. There is literally nothing wrong with that. It is a perfectly valid thing. If you want to be scared, you don't watch Aliens, you watch Alien.
Well if your thesis is actually that horror games are more interesting with more options then we agree. But that seems a bit obvious. On the other hand if your thesis is that X (where X is a horror thing) is more scary with weapons than without, then we disagree.
I did that while simultaneously demolishing the idea that having weapons makes games LESS scary. I argued that variety is good and guns add beneficial variety. Having a gun that makes you feel powerful and then LOSING that gun and being weaponless is five thousand million times scarier than just not having a gun.
Plus it's stupid/unrealistic to think a person in a scary situation wouldn't have a fight response at all.
Gotta satisfy that fight/flight response. Doesn't necessarily require guns or weapons of any kind, but you still have to have some kind of fight/flight balancing for effective horror.
I disagree. Having weapons gives the developer another way to establish and build dread. A weapon subtly makes you feel powerful, so now the creators can make you feel powerless by tweaking that balance. Running out of ammo, enemies that can shrug off your attacks and keep coming like a Terminator, things that move so fast or stealthily that your weapon can't save you.
But you have to find the right balance. Siren games did that well. You have guns and melee weapons, but you never feel safe. Even though you can shoot and stab, it will never save you.
Exactly this.
I think the best representation of weapons would be finally giving you one and pitting you against the horror after you, and the initial confidence of finally having a weapon would be smashed and that weapon is ineffective at the first chance of using it.
On a sidenote, i think if you going to do weapons in horror, you use them to keep things at bay and nothing more. I really liked how Alien Isolation did it. Though having them or not does not make it any less scarier, it the direction the game takes and how it present you the fear and horror itself.
Your idea would seem to be the power loader at the end of Aliens, yeah?
I personally really like the flamethrowers throughout Alien that never really
work, y'know?
This is it for me personally. The idea of a horror setting but theres no stakes other than running and hiding is boring to me. Having to defend youself and having to defend yourself with the right weapons is great tension for me. Classic RE gameplay, that pistol can stop a hunter sure, but it will almost 100% reach you before that pistol takes it down. You have to switch to a bigger weapon, opp no ammo, well shit, better get some good doding in with the tank controls cause its gonna be tense.
Hearing that empty `click` or having to reload while being attacked is great.
This is how I died in the Alien footage in the video. I was clicking pretty hard but no fuel was coming out because hahaha, I was out of ammo.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually played any of the games being discussed, so take any observations with buckets of salt.
Anyway, I was thinking about Five Nights at Freddies a while back and how that became such a success. One of the things I noticed it did that seemed important to it's success was that it created anxiety through player dilemmas. You want to keep the doors shut and/or the lights on, more than anything in the world, but you know you can't. So the player has to sit in the dark and force themselves to endure the creepy. The mechanics create an interesting decision, and the presentation (darkness, spooky music, scary animatrons) translates this tension into fear.
This seems to be a similar effect to what you describe with weapons, and perhaps points to the underlying design concepts at work. You need to give the player a decision to make. Run & hide isn't a real choice because it's the only sensible option in those games. Which means the player is merely executing on it, which feels like busywork, so it becomes boring. From a mechanical standpoint anyway, often the presentation helps to make up for it.
Just some thoughts.
FNAF succeeds in large part because youtubers fake being scared of it for YT video hits and because it's five dollars.
Good points. I wonder, is it important that the ammo be limited in these games for it to create the effect for you? If so, that could be where you are choosing to be vulnerable or not. Use the ammo now, or save it for later when you might need it more?
Edit: Sorry for dp.
Yes. Ammo needs to be limited in a good horror game. It's why Dead Space 3 failed. Unlimited ammo because it was universal, therefore you could build a gatling gun that slowed down enemies and burned away their skin with acid and chopped off their limbs. Once I made that, there was no reason to use any other gun. Dead Space 1 and 2 had more tension because sometimes you'd run out of your preferred ammo on higher difficulties and have to use guns you were unfamiliar with and therefore some tension was derived from Not Knowing How To Effectively Use Guns. It was neat.
