Chris' Survival Horror Quest

[Bingo Zero]

Hey everyone. I've made a wish list of things I want to see in survival horror games. I wasn't too sure where to post this, but the review section seemed fair enough. I'd really like to hear what other people have in their wish lists of what survival horror games should have. Happy Halloween.


Update: The link to this article stopped working so I've just copied the original here.

With Halloween coming up why not talk a bit about horror... more specifically, survival horror video games. I think we all have a dream video game we wish to make, but as those of us who don't work in the video game industry realize, our award winning premises will never be made. So I'm channeling my award winning ideas into this wish list, in the hopes that some video game developers will start taking the survival horror genre seriously again. Here's my wish list of things I want to see in survival horror.

1. Peter Jackson zombies.

We've all known and loved the slow moving, brain eating zombies from the Romero films. They've become a video game classic. And the fast and vicious 28 Days Later zombies have also found a warm spot in our hearts. But where are the Dead-Alive (Brain Dead) zombies?
One of the biggest complaints about the Romero zombies are they aren't a challenge without the tank controls of the earlier games. But that is silly, the simple solution is just to make them harder and more Peter Jackson like. “Oh, you have more precise aiming, do you? Got off a head shot, eh? Good for you. The zombie is still clawing it's way towards you. Better use the chainsaw to eviscerate it. Oh snap. Its intestines are now leaping out and strangling you. You better stop treating these zombies as the others you've played against in other games, it doesn't seem to work. Ooops. You're dead. Too bad.”
There are only two steps to making a Romero zombie into a Peter Jackson zombie. Step one they're immortal. You can't kill them. At all. Best bet, you can incapacitate them or chop them up into jelly. Step two every part is alive and wants you dead. Torso, head, arms, internal organs, everything. How cool would it be if you start cutting off the zombie's arms and legs then the arms leap up and start strangling you and legs start kicking your ass. Maybe after some off screen time has passed the zombies limbs have reattached in unnatural and disturbing ways.
Now all of a sudden percise aiming is stratigic. Should you blow off the limbs creating a small opening past them while creating smaller enemies. Or run back and try and find a way around him. Hmmm. How do you get past this guy?

2. Less is more.

In the last two Resident Evil games you literally kill off two small villages of zombies. Desensitize violence, much? Seriously, you kill 200+ bad guys in each of those games. Should you kill generic zombie number 142 first or generic zombie number 168 first? Who are these turds that I am easily mowing down and who cares.
Now that we have immortal, Peter Jackson zombies we don't need tons of them. I mean you recycle the same character models anyways, you might as well admit it's the same guy. There shouldn't really be a need to have more then twenty bad guys.
We can now get to know the zombies that are facing us. Maybe they have tragic back stories, maybe they were malevolent and wicked to begin with. All of a sudden I care how I deal with them. And that leads me to...

3. The power of friendship.

...Getting to know our assailants. There's no way one person can over come the challenge of these horrors. You're going to need to call on the help of the people trying to kill you. Now, this will require a pretty good AI to pull off, but nothing more than I would imagine a sophisticated dialog tree would be.
So there's a room you can't get past with a zombie in it. Should you try and talk to the zombie and find a rational way out, it seems to still have a lingering bit of it's humanity left? Should you charge in and try and fight it and hope that the solution is on its person? All of a sudden the game has a strong psychological angle. You will need to work with these strangers that appear to be zombies and want to kill you. How do you approach the strange zombie? Do you have your weapon drawn just in case? Or have it stowed away to show you're not here to fight? Will someone who was kind to you earlier betray you? Or someone who attacked you on sight before now offer you their help?
Now you really have to pay attention to the clues that are scattered around to figure out who you can trust. They all probably want to kill you, but if you know what else they want you may be able to work with them for a common goal before they try to kill you.

4. Where's the bathroom?

It's said that the secret to good fiction is one lie. All fiction is allowed one good lie to base their world around. Splice frog DNA with fossilized dinosaur blood and we can clone dinosaurs. A man born under a different star comes to our planet and he has super powers. Everything else falls into place between the big lie and reality. OK, the hell gate opened spilling out the damned souls onto earth and it's up to you to fight them. But why the hell doesn't a wooden door act like it's made of wood?
The Game Overthinker pretty much captures my opinions on this subject. Unless the game is like Silent Hill where you're playing through an evil parallel time-space where the town is made up of reflected shadows of our world, a door should act like a door. Or in Fatal Frame where you play as a little girl with no weapons and there's an unearthly force holding a door shut. That makes sense in the games' logic. But if the story is only monsters and zombies have appeared in our world, then if I want to smash open a door instead of looking for a key it should smash open, and the monsters and zombies should be able to do the same.
Trying to short cut the game like this doesn't have to go unpunished either. If you start going all smash happy, all that noise should draw more enemies towards you. As well as doors and desks or other breakable objects can be booby trapped. Cool, more strategy. And lets take this pinch of reality to the weapons and environment.
Man on the street. Zombie invasion happened now. What do you have on you that you can use as a weapon? I got my keys, I can put them in between my fist and use them as makeshift brass knuckles. But I don't want to touch the zombies. What else do I got... uh... my belt? It's not great but it'll keep my distance and the metal buckle can do some damage. That'll have to do until I can get a pointy stick or something. And the environment, where am I? Sure, I'm in a mansion built as a giant death trap, but where's the bathroom? Function before form. Can people really live there? This pulls me out of a game more then anything else, I want to believe that the location can be real. And keep the locations clear. I hate it when I discover I've been walking in circles because all the corridors look the same. A good test to see if your layout is clear is if you wake up disorientated in the room or hall you can immediately tell where you are from the placement of the doors and windows.

5. Riddle me this.

Know what kind of game you're making. You want a run and gun with monsters everywhere with tons of boo scares. Fine. But it's not survival horror. At it's heart survival horror is a sub-genre of adventure games and at it's barest components adventure games are puzzles with a narrative story. Just like if you broke down RPGs it's arithmetic with a narrative story. And platformers are going from point A to point B with a narrative story.
A run and gun with monsters is basically a scary platformer, the monsters aren't so much obstacles but part of the fun scenery you get to destroy on your way to the destination. The monsters in survival horror are obstacles in the sense of 'how are you going to solve this problem'. Puzzles. Limited ammo, limited health, limited inventory. They're all part of how you can handle the puzzle. Working your way through the level, beating different enemies, getting keys, getting better weapons are like moving pins in the chambers of a lock. Problem solving is how you survive.
Now, there will be hybrids. But you have to choose which aspect is going to take the back seat. That run and gun with the monsters will just be annoying with limited ammo and inventory (Resident Evil 5 I'm looking at you). But making the choice of what path you take to run down the hoard of monsters, maybe a choice of stealth or guns blazing would be nice additions. Just something to keep in mind, survival horror equals puzzles.

6. A rift in time-space.

I know there are game developers out there that like to treat video games as any other serious narrative formate just like books and movies, and they view save points and restarting the game after you die as sort of cheating. Like skipping ahead to the next chapter in a book, or seeing the end of the movie, you know what's going to happen before it happens. You die at the mini boss and the game puts you back at the save point before him, well now you can back track and get more ammo or utilize a strategy you came up with too late. Sure, a big part of video games is trail and error, so should players be punished for dying? Yes, yes they should.
With a sort of combination of auto save and save points. The game keeps auto saving your progress but not for your benefit, just to screw you over. You can only use save points, and that little track of time you spent between saving and dying is still in play. That ammo and health you spent? Gone. Those enemies you defeated earlier? Maybe they got better, maybe they moved onto a different area. Have the whole game run on a in game timer, like in Dead Rising. Now with you dying you may have missed out on important plot points or chances to meet important characters.
That also means that you can die and get a game over without any chance of loading a previous save, you just die. This also makes reloading part of the story in the game. Whatever super science or super natural element that is behind all the evil is also responsible for keeping you alive, perhaps you've even been *gasp* infected with the immortal zombism. Maybe every time you die you bring a bit of something evil back with you and unless you solve the mystery and get the cure (or whatever) you'll get the bad ending where you cause the destruction of the world.

7. 570 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ok, so you're sticking with the run and gun monster shooty game. Cool. Fine with me, but could you please not melt the bodies after I kill them. I spent a lot of time killing those guys, don't make them disappear. Not only is it satisfying to see the mounds of my slain foes but the trail of destruction I left is a very good marker of where I've already been.
Hey, now that the bodies are still lying around we can have more boo scare from having them reanimate and attack. Maybe make them faster, stronger and all around more bad assed, eh? Besides, having the bodies melt away is distractingly unrealistic. Do you know how hot it needs to be to melt a body?

8.Don't be obvious.

I know there's a boss battle coming up and I know when it will happen and I know where it will happen. How do I know this in advance? I looked at the map and saw a huge open area on it with only one corrodor leading to it with a save point infront of the entrance. Broadcasting like that is ok for an early on boss, but so many games do this for every boss. Mix it up.
Have an obvious boss fight towards the beginning then mix it up, have the next boss be small and wiliey in a confided space. Have big areana areas that one would expect a boss fight empty. Now I'm all disorentated, I go into a small room and find a big boss waiting in there, I run away through other rooms and halls and he's destroying the walls chaising me. Because of the distruction of him following me new opening have been created and old ones have been closed off. The layout of the map I've been relying on has been thrown all topsy turvy.

I think that will do for my wish list. I have a few other smaller request like including nudity and eliminating real time inventory screens, but this pretty much captures what I'm looking for in the next game I want to purchase. I'd like to hear what everyone else wants to see in survival horror video games, so leave a comment. Thanks for reading.

[Pheenix]

1. A survival horror game where you are forced to more or less live alongside your enemy, or depend on them.

2. Please, play with our sense of comfort some more. Make your dear friend in the light and comforting building not react at all to the giant mutilated beast forcing you to jump out of the window and into the street.

3. This is more of gaming in general, as I am still anticipating gaming becoming more pure art, but some day, make us end the game by realizing that we were the killer all along. Force us to consciously do something horrible. This is what no other art-form can do.

[pnemosiene]

1. I would first off like to see a game developer use more of the space they have buildt for exploration. Sometimes developers build huge and graphically tantilising rooms, and levels but a great portion of the time you spend very little time in them or can only find a couple of things in them . Too me it's a waste of the rooms/environments. I want to play a game where you are really forced to look at your environments more in depth. Additionaly I would like to see more possible interaction with your environment even if the interaction isn't always necisary to solve the game.

2. I 'd like to see some puzzles that don't just go into minni-game mode puzzles. I'd like to see some puzzles of a grander scale like puzzles that may take several items you must find, involve larger portions of an area or take time through out the game to solve. Mini-puzzles are cool and all but really they have become sort of stereotypical.

3. I would really like more two player horror games, and more horror games that allow you to pick between different characters, those are great. Obscure is currently the only game with two-player mode, and is unfortunatly a B game. I'd like to see an A game series like Resident Evil add a two player mode.

4. Less linear games, even though many games have several possible endings the linear story lines often force most players to repeatedly pick the same routes and objects, many by force, so I'd like to see some more open ended exploration of environments.

5. As a fan of horror mystery not so much chop em up, I'd love to have more adult horror mystery games like Fatal Frame. I like spirits and ghost far better than military based, or black ops based horror games and seriously I love Resident Evil but enough Zombies/Mutants already.

6. A bit more realism with weapons and keys. How many times have you been looking around for a key to a door and just pull your rocket launcher out and shoot the door, even though you know it's not going to do anything? Or seen a window and thought why don't I just bust that out and leave? The game needs to do a better job of giving you reasons to stay, rather than leave. If the glass windows can't be broke then it better be because they are unbreakable due to some kind of paranormal means or something.

[NESfag]

[Chris]

[premaitor]