Silent Hill: The Pseudo Rpg

[Visitant]

O.k maybe this belongs in the drunken rambling form but fuck it I already started posting here so damn the man and save the empire.

 

Submitted for your approval, the lonely haunted town of Silent Hill.

 

For years we have been playing these games and one things that game play wise always seems to come up in arguments is control vs characters. Should your character be able to fire a gun accurately, should the control for said gun be dead accurate or clumsy to reflect the nature of the characters inexperience? Let's face it, by the end of the games if you've saved up enough ammo and ran enough you are a god damn badass. In soviet Silent Hill YOU rape pyramid head as it were.

 

Now to what I am proposing: In Shattered Memories we are told that the game alters its self to your game style. Enemies change as do plot points. What I am asking is what if we took that concept to the next level.

 

Lets start with a blank slate, for sake of this argument I will use James Sunderland from 2 (Which i have not beaten due to my xbox eating my saves so if you spoil this I WILL kill you) and the idea that James is just a "normal guy." You can play SH lots of ways, one being a melee style beating things with pipes or shooting the hell out of things or even running from everything. What if THOSE choices affected not only the game but the character himself.

 

Say you're a gun player. James at this point is NOT a person who knows how to use guns but you use them every chance you get. What if the enemies in SH altered themselves to represent this fact, becoming tougher against bullets but at the same time making you more accurate and capable of one hit kills. What if you always ran, and were good at all the puzzles, could you then use your brain to take down bosses instead of hoarding ammo?

 

Hm, it might be drunken rambling but what do you guys think? Could it help up the realism vs control problem? I don't want SH to go down the RE road of becoming an action game but this way the game could adapt to your playstyle and still keep the fear element.

[Jables]

Theoretically it wouldn't be too hard a programming issue, given the level of personalisation applied to a lot of games these days. And it sounds pretty cool too. It's the next logical step for survival horror as a genre to avoid something like Gears of Resident Evil.

[Mr. Sexy Hat]

Sounds good the best way to do this would have different enemy types for your style of play

 

good at guns = make monsters dodge more and move into CQC more often.

 

good at melee = monsters stay away shoot projectiles

 

good at running/puzzles = monsters try to trick you / move quicker ect.

 

is that what we are talking about??

 

Slient Hill would work well with an AI director like in Left 4 Dead.

 

ie. The better your doing the more monsters show up and less ammo and health packs are laying around.

and if you are badly injured/doing badly the game eases up slightly to give you a bit more time.

 

Another way would be to allow guns to jam / weapons to break / lock picks to fail ect. just to make things more intense.

[The NZA]

its a nice concept, but i think you're taking it in the wrong direction. if you're going to give choices to play, i think Shattered Memories got the notion of consequences right - at least, from what you're saying, as im still early into the game myself.

 

now, this shouldn't spoil much for Bindu, as this is kinda stated in SH2's opening, but to build on the notion:

James, unlike Harry, is not well; we know this from the opening of him reading the letter overlooking the pond. ive always liked the idea that: what if the things James was attacking weren't monsters at all? it's just a theory, but there's one line halfway through the game that kinda got me thinking on this.

 

now, look at the genius that was Metal Gear Solid 3. for those that played it:

the fight with The Sorrow was epic for me, cause Snake is wandering the swamp half-dead and here comes the ghost of every solider you've shot getting here, disfigured in the way you killed them. if you played the game stealthily, there's not much to see; treat it like Rambo, and you'll barely make it to the end, nevermind realizing what a fucking monster you are.

 

 

something like that could be made even more twisted in SH, i think, and would play out beautifully given that it was all your choice.

[Iambaytor]

Another way would be to allow guns to jam / weapons to break / lock picks to fail ect. just to make things more intense.

 

NO! FUCK NO! Lock picks can fail and guns can jam but weapons damage is something that needs to be scourged from the face of gaming along with sewer levels and that one character in every RPG that both looks and is useless.

[The NZA]

yeah, breakable weapons didnt help SH Origins.

i like locks failing you. hell, i like the idea of seeing the world peel apart in realtime and trying to run to escape the effect, only to reach a dead-end or the like. really, there's so much stuff from Eternal Darkness id love to see done in SH or other horror titles.

[Mr. Sexy Hat]

Are you talking about an "A world" and "B world" like in Zelda Ages/Seasons (ok ok most Zelda games do this anyway but Ages and Season did it best) and Castlevania HoD

 

eg. A blocked path in "A world" isn't blocked in the "B world" but you need to get the item behind the blocked wall in "A world" so you have to figure out how to get there in "B world" and then try to get back to "A world" blah blah blah you get the point

 

Whats wrong with weapons break there is shit everywhere in Slient Hill to pick up and use as a weapon. Ok how about not break entirely.

eg. like a pick axe handle. It starts to develop cracks in it after some use and then after some more blows it breaks in half still leaving you with a weapon but its range is significantly shorter and does slitghtly less damage leaving the player more vunrable to attack. Forcing you to wing it or find a new weapon.

 

It would be good if you could run at monsters and tackle/shove them but of course they could always grab you/instant kill you. But I think Horror games need desperation moves like that. You should show the player that you might get past the monsters or horribly killed. That kind of risk would make the player either assess the situation or just want to get the hell out of there and hoping they will make it thorugh. Horror needs to be stratigic, the more the player thinks the more scenarios they can think of, then there is more possibily of different things going wrong. Players need to feel for thier little pixel friend wellbeing.

[Visitant]

I think the director AI is part of the direction I was going in as well as a monster visual representation of your particular playstyle.

 

Weapon breaking in Origins was a pain in the ass but I would not expect you to be able to wield a TV more than one or two times. It's a matter of figuring out balancing in the game when it comes to those things. Honestly I just don't want to see a game like SH go down the GoW road when there is so much untapped potential in it. I agree with Sexy Hats point on weapons that don't FULLY break or maybe a gun that is jammed having you have an option to fix said gun.

 

I know I am covering more mechanics that story elements here and that's because I feel the core mechanics are something in survival horror games they have never quite gotten right. If we could just tighten that up without it feel like it's unbalancing the game then we can get back to the core of the SH series which was scaring the shit out of you.

[The NZA]

ah, see, this was the crux of much of the gaming community's fuss when SH: Homecoming was being developed and the new western devs said they were gonna tighten up the fighting. now, i never wanted to imply (as some did) that these mechanics and the genre are mutually exclusive, cause that's an awful idea, and its why SH games dont age as well as id like them to, having old-school RE tank controls.

 

that said, you gotta ask, design-wise: what's your goal? if you wanna try something new, i think the series is ripe as ever for that, Shattered Memories showed that for a number of fans. if you're trying to recapture any of the Team Silent magic of 1-3 (im seriously shocked you've not yet finished 2 though...), the distinction between RE Survival Horror (the "oh shit i dont have enough ammo to clean this hallway can i make it if i dodge GODDAMMIT I HAVENT SAVED IN LIKE AN HOUR" etc) vs the psych horror of the earlier entries of this series, in which like you said, monster design was huge, but gameplay-wise...between simple monster AI and plentiful blunt objects/ammo/health packs, i dont recall dying much at all; maybe in 1 getting the hang of things, and the odd bit of insta-death in 3, but really, my fear wasnt in perishing so much as going mad or something.

 

Sexy Hat's last paragraph on risking tackling enemies & such only works for me if it serves to build comfortability with the player, and then takes it away horribly (i.e., you take down a beast you think you can handle and learn its not what you thought it was far too late, etc - but that feels like a great move for Dead Space as well).