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Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror
rtjhbfvsrry Offline
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#1
Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror

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.
01-28-2013, 08:21 PM
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Messages In This Thread
Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror - by rtjhbfvsrry - 01-28-2013, 08:21 PM
RE: Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror - by Acies - 01-28-2013, 08:53 PM
RE: Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror - by Ghieri - 01-29-2013, 01:27 AM
RE: Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror - by Apjjm - 01-31-2013, 02:45 AM
RE: Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror - by Zaffre - 01-31-2013, 07:59 PM
RE: Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror - by Ghieri - 01-31-2013, 11:59 PM
RE: Hypothetical - Multiplayer Horror - by Apjjm - 02-01-2013, 02:04 AM



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