Survival-Horror Genre Going Extinct? 166
Destructoid is running an opinion piece looking at the state of the survival-horror genre in games, suggesting that the way it has developed over the past several years has been detrimental to its own future. "During the nineties, horror games were all the rage, with Resident Evil and Silent Hill using the negative aspects of other games to an advantage. While fixed camera angles, dodgy controls and clunky combat were seen as problematic in most games, the traditional survival horror took them as a positive boon. A seemingly less demanding public ate up these games with a big spoon, overlooking glaring faults in favor of videogames that could be genuinely terrifying." The Guardian's Games Blog has posted a response downplaying the decline of the genre, looking forward to Ubisoft's upcoming I Am Alive and wondering if independent game developers will pick up where major publishers have left off.
Gaming article composition Algorithm (Score:5, Insightful)
a.) roll a d6
b.) According to the result, choose one of the following:
1.) PC
2.) Adventure
3.) Single Player
4.) Survival Horror
5.) DRM-free
6.) Windows-only
c.)Insert result in following sentence: Is this the death of $getrandomstring() gaming?
Change is difficult (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know if I 100% agree. I a lot of people complain immediately when they don't get the standard fare. A number of these same people are responsible for the Playstation DualShock controller not changing in any really noticeable way for 10 years. The result: Resident Evil 5 is turning into a Halo style first person shooter.
It's Evolving (Score:4, Insightful)
At some point early on in Resident Evil 4, you encountered a door. Leon promptly kicked it open with his boot and you ran into the next room. It was a statement. The entirety of Resident Evil 4 was a statement. That statement was, "Survival Horror has Evolved". The evolution could be seen early on in games like Resident Evil 3 and Dino Crisis 2. Games like Dead Space are continuing that evolution. The genre is changing, not dying.
If you want a genre that is truly going extinct, just look at RPGs. I'm still waiting for any half decent one to come out in the PS3. It's depressing when you think back to the genre's boom time of 1997-2000.
Survival horror, not action horror (Score:5, Insightful)
While you could interpret survival horror as being about, as the name implies, surviving scary situations, the genre is supposed to achieve this by making you feel vulnerable and desperate. This was achieved, as stated before, by limiting your supplies so much your were forced to sneak around and avoid enemies, or by making you dread the situation, fearful you could be overwhelmed at any moment.
Silent Hill achieved both of these rather well, especially with the radio and flashlight. Keeping the flashlight off prevented enemies from finding you, but you could barely see. The radio would keep you on your toes, looking around frantically for the enemy the that is there, but you can't yet see. The general inhumanity and psychological implications of the monsters, as opposed to the zombies of Resident Evil, also added to the creepy atmosphere.
Going through with the attitude you could kill everything would easily get you killed. Survival horror is about surviving because you do so against all odds, not because of good combat skills. So, as the genre evolves into action horror, it is definitely not the same as survival horror.
Make up your minds (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't get it. Everyone complains that games are the same. They're all the same. There's nothing new.
Then, we get some really cool games coming out. We get GoW which takes 3rd person shooters viable (okay, so it's not that different). Stepping further outside genres, we get GH & Rock Band, a whole new way to enjoy music and video games. Going further, we get Ban & Kaz from Rare, which is an amazing vehicle/puzzle/action game. We get Dance Dance Revolution. We get the Wii and motion-sensing remotes. We get Wii Fit. And then we also get user-input games like LittleBigPlanet. All of these have either created new or revitalized old genres. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch more that have been amazing.
And now everyone's complaining that people aren't playing the old stagnant genres as much? It also ignores how successful games like Left4Dead have been? Or shoot-off genres like Dead Rising?
This is stupid.
Clock Tower! (Score:3, Insightful)
How can Clock Tower be missing here? Particularly the very first one running on SNES, which still gives me the creeps, even when watching youtube recordings of its gameplay (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7N8Q69--Ws [youtube.com]). This game is VERY VERY scary.
Re:Same problem as movies. (Score:5, Insightful)
It also doesn't work if dying means you respawn one or two minutes earlier in the game. Call of Duty single-play mode is like this. I realized this when I realized that I never paused the game when I wanted to answer the door, talk on the phone, or get a drink from the fridge. I just left my guy standing there, and if he died, so what?
When save points are so frequent, dying doesn't even impede your progress through the game unless you do it five times in a row. As a result, to make the game challenging, there have to be individual segments that are INSANELY challenging, which just makes you angry. You only get scared if dying once is a big deal. If dying twelve times in a row is what it takes to get a gamer's attention, he doesn't get scared. He gets angry.
So, you go through the entire game never being scared. You're just bored, moderately engaged, or angry depending on whether the difficulty is too low, about right, or too high.
Games that let you choose your save points, like the original Doom and Doom II, were much scarier, because you would limit your saves out of pride, and you'd also get caught up in the game and forget to save and then GAAAH I'M ABOUT TO DIE AND THIS IS REALLY SERIOUS! You panic about dying because it took half an hour of good play to get where you are, and if you die, you lose it all.
If (like me) you were normally too proud to save in the middle of a level, it meant that there was a great buildup of suspense through the level, because you had more and more to lose the further you got. In checkpoint games, it doesn't matter where in the level you are, so there's no buildup and climax, no arc to the game at all except what they can build up artificially through tacked-on story elements.
Re:That's just what they want you to think (Score:3, Insightful)
And then an other genre comes flying out of an air duct or dark corner!
I would say Left 4 Dead [l4d.com] fits that bill nicely. It has some of the survival horror basics, but in a fun, fast-paced, co-op, action way.
I've got some hopes for this one... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Penumbra Series (Score:1, Insightful)
I just finished playing through Penumbra: Black Plague. It's sort of a combination between resident evil-style survival horror, without guns, and half-life 2 FPS physics puzzles. It's got some really neat angles, including a virus in your brain that develops an alternate personality, and an alien hive-mind. I can really reccomend it for all survival horror fans.
-- Surreal Puppet
Re:Same problem as movies. (Score:5, Insightful)
The kind of fear you're talking about is great, but I rarely get it from games. I treasure the memory of playing an "Aliens" mod for Doom. "Keep it tight, people." "Check those corners... check those corners!" You can't see anything, but you can hear the aliens breathing. Then SHRIEK they're in your face. It got to the point where my heart was going a mile a minute the whole time, and it took me a long time to calm down afterwards so I could sleep.
Unfortunately my success at finding good horror games (and horror movies, for that matter) is so low that it isn't even worth trying anymore -- one good game in ten means paying hundreds of bucks to find a good game, plus the frustration of sitting through so much garbage.
So, yeah, I do like the second kind of horror you're talking about, but I've kind of given up on it.
As for immersion, I agree completely. Few modern games are really immersive. Note to game designers: There's nothing realistic about looking at a bush and not being able to figure out whether you can step over it, or looking at a tree and not knowing whether there's an invisible corridor that will prevent you from ducking behind it. Nobody in World War II died while trying to take cover behind a pile of sandbags that were un-jump-overable for the sole reason that they marked the edge of the battlefield. Level designers need to stop putting visual verisimilitude over everything else and once again start considering the verisimilitude of the whole experience.
One aspect that all immersive games share is that you can almost always predict how objects and terrain will affect your movement. Gosh, just like in real life! That's actually more important to immersion than making the terrain look realistic. If you're examining every rock and bush as a game construct instead of perceiving it as a "real" object, then you're going to see the monster, scary noise, or eerie apparition as just another game construct. You think, "Well, here's a new game object. Looks like a werewolf. Let's figure out how to interact with it. I'll start by walking towards it and seeing what happens. I'll probably get killed, but I might as well be systematic if I want to figure out how it works." That's not an immersive experience :-)
"Hmmm, there's a toddler sitting on the floor of my living room finger-painting with blood."
Immersive game reaction: "What... the... FUCK is a mysterious toddler doing in my house? Whose blood is that!!?"
Non-immersive game experience: "I wonder if I can jump over him?"