Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror

[rtjhbfvsrry]

Hey everyone, I've been lurking here for a while and I've seen this sort of unpopular topic pop up quite often in the form of "multiplayer for Amnesia!" - I'm not here to talk about that, but I think multiplayer horror is an interesting subject and one that many people are currently thinking about. So it's been established that people think multiplayer is a bad idea for Amnesia or Frictional's mystery project (I agree, Frictional is awesome at making a very immersive single player experience and I would love some more of that) and also that multiplayer horror presents some major problems on a very base level. Here's my question:

If someone were to make a multiplayer horror game, how would they overcome these problems? Instead of rejecting it out of hand as not working, let's treat it as a puzzle. Not for Frictional, not for Amnesia, but just experimentally (as we all know, many approaches in Amnesia were experimental, and I bet some people were going "that won't work" beforehand). So, how would a multiplayer horror game work? Not a tacked on multiplayer mode for a horror game, but a horror game designed from the ground up as multiplayer. What are the problems?

- Less or no immersion and paranoia because you're not alone. Safety in numbers.
- Immersion ruined by friends making jokes or their fear reactions being hilarious.
- Player movements in games are erratic and jerky - an incredible animation system is probably neccesary to smooth these out and make them look convincing enough to be immersive.
- Let's throw more problems in here.

I think horror can work multiplayer, the question is just how and people seem to be thinking about it, judging by how often "Amnesia Multiplayer?" gets posted as well as games such as Survivors or Slender: Source. I know I've had some extremely harrowing moments in Aliens vs. Predator multiplayer despite the presented problems.

A possible solution for the paranoia problem is to insert some kind of distrust function. Something that, perhaps at the start of the game or maybe randomly throughout a human character can become a "villain" character. Combined with some puzzles or objectives requiring close proximity due to more people being needed to solve it this might create some real paranoia fuel.

Player attitude is sadly something that I don't know an easy solution about. A voice system that means you can only hear each other in proximity might be interesting, but easily circumvented by teamspeak or, you know, people in person. However player attitude applies to single player experiences as well - play Amnesia in a brightly lit room with other people there and it's not scary. It's all about how someone approaches the game - of course multiplayer gamers in general are jerks but still.

So yeah, how could someone get multiplayer horror to work?

P.S. I didn't search for previous topics because whether I repost or necropost I'll likely get someone chewing me out anyway, judging by the amount of locks on the Amnesia subforum.

[Acies]

I believe that one of the major aspects of single vs. multiplayer games in general is that single-player games can be structured after a very linear flow with controlled scenes. Multiplayer is often more of a "free-roam"; just have a look at Left for dead or as you mentioned - Alien versus predator.

Amnesia becomes scary because the single-player setup allows the developers to slowly crank up the fear in a very controlled environment. I'm guessing people who wants "Amnesia multiplayer support" imagine a "single-player experience" in a multiplayer environment, whereas the multiplayer conversion actually inflicts restraints on the possibilities to tell a good story and continuity of the gameplay experience.

I'm not saying multiplayer-horror is a bad thing, it's just that multiplayer games has to be set up to allow replayability and "free-roam" possibilities. It's more about "random encounters" or sudden surprises - because multiplayer cannot be controlled in the same way as single-player.

If you disagree with what I'm saying I'm open for discussion :]

[rtjhbfvsrry]

That makes sense, the unpredictability of the other players makes it a lot more difficult to focus on buildup and pacing and tension are huge parts of horror. That's an issue to creating effective horror. How could someone fix that? Maybe harnessing the players somehow.

I'm thinking about something like the movie "The Cube", where you have to work together to solve puzzles to escape a series of increasingly dangerous rooms with timers - tension ratchets up as you work to solve the puzzle and releases when you either die or solve it. The problem is that knowing a puzzle solution will kill replayability. However maybe this concept could be applied to other gameplay mechanics, like chase sequences.

Hell, it might kill two birds with one stone - if the players have to focus hard to survive they might get more immersed and less "LOL fag" type. Add the beforementioned mistrust mechanic to really ratchet up the paranoia fuel.

Multiplayer storytelling, on the other hand, is a completely different problem and extremely difficult to solve, especially if you want to focus on giving your players meaningful choices within a non-combat horror game which is kindof neccesary for replayability which in turn is neccesary for an interesting multiplayer game.

[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

- Immersion ruined by friends making jokes or their fear reactions being hilarious.

Hm... maybe it could work as a game that requires you to do active roleplaying in order to work. Of course that would limit the market to the few players willing to do that - but why try and force immersion unto someone who prefers to make jokes with his friend anyway?

Maybe some of you remember the game Vampire The Masquerade: Redemption - the mostly unknown predecessor to the a bit more famous (but still underrated) Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.
If I remember correctly, that game had a multiplayer modus that was very close to the classic pen & paper game it was based on: The players had to make up their own quests and storylines and roleplay accordingly. (I think one player could even take the role of an invisible Dungeon Master and tell the story, give quests, talk for NPCs, spawn enemies and so on.)
In short, the game world was pretty much just the scenery you played in, everything else had to come from the players themselves.

Not sure if one could use this system for horror at all... I mean there are probably very few people who'd be willing to immerse themselves to such a degree and not everyone likes to roleplay. And if you let one person set up the horror experience for others, he'd probably just be a dick and spam jumpscares But it could be an interesting experiment.

[rtjhbfvsrry]

I did not know there was an earlier V:tM game. I loved Bloodlines and I dig the P&P game, I better give that game a looksie.

That's an interesting idea though. Add replayability by getting the players to create some of the horror voluntarily, or maybe even indirectly choose what kind of scares you get. Again the "players are jerks" problem but that's kind of a risk inherent to online gaming. Or maybe we're just jaded? Who knows, they might end up not being that bad.

Then again, the amount of walking genitalia in Spore and Minecraft kinda shows what the general gamer population is like.

[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I did not know there was an earlier V:tM game. I loved Bloodlines and I dig the P&P game, I better give that game a looksie.

Spoiler because kinda offtopic:

Spoiler below!

Well, it's not bad at all, but unfortunately the single player part has a much greater focus on combat, with almost no alternative ways to solve quests through other skills. It has a more rigid structure in other aspects too, for example you cannot customize your character (apart from stats and disciplines) and the story is the linear life story of this particular character instead of the more personal and immersive approach Bloodlines had. What I really liked though, was that you get to play in both medieval and modern times (so by the end Christophe is ~400 years old) which makes for a quite interesting storyline.

Anyway, another game that I like to look at for inspiration whenever it comes to the problem of immersive multiplayer is Journey. That game is immersive as hell, even though you play with other people and I believe that, since they managed to evoke emotions like joy, desperation, sadness, relief and sometimes even love, they could have also evoked fear if they had chosen to.

What they did, was systematically remove everything that could disturb immersion:
- There's no chat or voicechat available, only form of communication are your characters body language and ingame sounds.
- You cannot choose who you play with, the game connects you to random players, so there's no talking or joking with someone who's in the same room.
- You never see the name of your partner(s) until the very end.
- There are no menus or HUD elements.

I think some of these ideas could be adapted in a way to make them work for a horror game. Think for example of a world like in Limbo (only in 3D of course). You're stuck there in this dark world, as are other players, somewhere, and you have to find your way out. Now you could make this a co-op experience and try to reinforce cooperative behaviour (like Journey did it), but I think a cooler thing to do would be to try and make players distrust each other, like you already mentioned.

For example you could use the fog, darkness and graphics style to make other players almost indistinguishable from enemies. So sometimes you'd see some strange thing scurrying away from you, sometimes you're unknowingly hiding from another player who's just as puzzled as you were before... of course there's the danger that players would try to find a way to signal each other so communication would need to be entirely removed. Also you could leave players in the dark about what their character looks like, so they don't know how they'd even identify another player... still, I guess it would probably be noticeable because players move differently than AI driven characters...

[Ghieri]

For example you could use the fog, darkness and graphics style to make
other players almost indistinguishable from enemies. So sometimes you'd
see some strange thing scurrying away from you, sometimes you're
unknowingly hiding from another player who's just as puzzled as you were
before... of course there's the danger that players would try to find a
way to signal each other so communication would need to be entirely
removed. Also you could leave players in the dark about what their
character looks like, so they don't know how they'd even identify
another player... still, I guess it would probably be noticeable because
players move differently than AI driven characters...

Or you could literally make other players untrustworthy. Like in LoZ four sword, all players have one goal, but at the same time, they can compete for resources(And even damage other players.) and there's a final score showing who the better player is.

[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Or you could literally make other players untrustworthy. Like in LoZ four sword, all players have one goal, but at the same time, they can compete for resources(And even damage other players.) and there's a final score showing who the better player is.

Of course. But I'm afraid that a competitive gameplay often works against fear, be it competition against the computer or against human players. If you're focussed on competition against others, it puts you in a very "gamey" mindset, especially with things like score involved. Therefore your fears are mostly about the underlying mechanics instead of stemming from atmosphere and immersion. You might fear that someone could steal your resources or try to hamper your progress but that's imo a different kind of fear than the fear of the unknown that horror games try to evoke.

[rtjhbfvsrry]

Anyway, another game that I like to look at for inspiration whenever it comes to the problem of immersive multiplayer is Journey. That game is immersive as hell, even though you play with other people and I believe that, since they managed to evoke emotions like joy, desperation, sadness, relief and sometimes even love, they could have also evoked fear if they had chosen to.

What they did, was systematically remove everything that could disturb immersion:
- There's no chat or voicechat available, only form of communication are your characters body language and ingame sounds.
- You cannot choose who you play with, the game connects you to random players, so there's no talking or joking with someone who's in the same room.
- You never see the name of your partner(s) until the very end.

What I wonder is if this doesn't really turn it into a single player experience. At least it will feel like one. It doesn't really allow for "I want to play this game with my friend(s)", which may not be the best solution.

Not saying it's a bad idea, it seems like a pretty good solution to the immersion problem offering co-op in a predominantly single player experience, but when I play multiplayer I generally only play with people I know - I think a game set up to be multiplayer from the start might not do well by offering random matchups only.

[Hunter of Shadows]

Not another one of these threads