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'In the games of madness' discussions and FG in general
Abion47 Offline
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#11
RE: 'In the games of madness' discussions and FG in general

(08-21-2016, 01:00 PM)brus Wrote: This is already in all inventory based games but it does not have to be heavy distraction for the player. More like of the choice.
In Amnesia and Outlast if you run out of oil or batteries, the game provided it for you along the main story line and it was not actually a big deal to play without it.

And again, I ask the question. If the oil or batteries are freely given to the player, and if the game is perfectly playable without them, then why are they even in the game?

Quote:I would set mechanic as the player's choice. So, if he doesn't like to do something in the game, it would affect his gameplay in another way.
Gameplay should be modular and adjustable by the player to some extent.
I brought up weapon mechanics just to have additional playstyle variety.
There could be some other mechanic what was introduced in System shock 2, or even something completely new we haven't seen yet.

FG addressed this exact thing in their Amnesia post-mortem. They said that the sanity mechanic was a mistake. When the player ran out of oil/tinderboxes or chose to forgo them entirely, the resulting insanity mechanic didn't add anything to the game. It was just an annoyance that the player had to deal with until they found more of the arbitrary collectible game items. All the reasons I've said about why the battery mechanic is a bad one are the same reasons why FG themselves decided to drop the sanity mechanic from SOMA entirely.

The problem here is that having a lantern in Amnesia, or having a night vision camera in Outlast, isn't a benefit to the player. It is the normal way to play. The players are rarely without batteries or oil, so there's little reason not to have them on all the time. The problem is that during those rare instances where the player runs out of them, the game takes away all the benefits the players have grown accustomed to. It's the whole thing with power-ups in action games. If you ran around in L4D with adrenaline always on, then it stops being a bonus and just becomes an annoyance when you don't have it. Or if in Super Mario Bros you always had star power, then your experience would come to a grinding halt when it suddenly went away.

That's the problem with battery-style collectibles. They are power-ups that the player has constant access to, so instead of appreciating them when they have it, they instead get annoyed at the game when they don't. But the trend in horror games right now, as you said, is to give them to the player all the time. With that being the case, the devs have no choice but to design the game with that in mind, lest their game get accused of having a useless mechanic. That makes it anywhere from stupidly annoying to near impossible to play without them.

So yes, the battery mechanic is a great example of what happens when a power-up stops being a bonus and starts being the norm. Of course, the natural continuation of that thought process would be "we should make it so they are only necessary during specific sections of the game", but the problem with that is that it runs into the same issue that if the player doesn't have their batteries, that section becomes arbitrarily difficult. The difficulty of the game should be natural, like trying to figure out how to circumvent some environmental hazard. If the game is hard just because the player doesn't have some item, then the difficulty is artificial because it is something in the game, not in the player's ability to play it, that is hindering their progress.

Now, I say a lot about the battery mechanic being an arbitrary annoyance, but the awesome thing about games is the ability to channel negative emotions of the player into the immersion rather than away from it. If there was a specific section of the game that used the battery mechanic, and the player's annoyance was mirrored through the protagonist's annoyance, then it becomes a story point. The mechanic can then be carefully paced through that area, and discarded once a story-appropriate event has occurred. That ties the mechanic to the story rather than it being some arbitrary design decision, and instead of becoming the norm, it becomes a necessary section of gameplay that adds to the experience.

But I have yet to see a horror game do that.

Quote:Secret strategies can be discovered by the player but they could come with a challenge so that they don't feel like safe point. Player gets a reward for finding out how to cheese the A.I. but with a twist of fortune with aftermath in the storyline, possibly.

Being able to outmaneuver the AI is a sign of good level design. It means that you can lure the AI away from where you need to go, giving you a window of safety in which to explore and figure out what to do next. Being able to cheese the AI is a sign of bad AI design, since it gives you a 100% efficient way to negate the AI entirely. That breaks the immersion, since the atmosphere of horror and dread is completely undermined by the knowledge that the AI is never a real threat.

Quote:But that would leave the game to linear and with no exploration. Personally, exploration gives a sense of atmospheric immersion.

Exploration extremely important for immersion, I agree. But personally, I feel like encouraging exploration in an area where monsters are a constant threat is bad game design. I had this experience in Tau, where I really wanted to explore the area and get more lore information, but I had to constantly run around back to hiding locations because the monster would not get off my back. It detracted from the entire experience, because it went from "holy crap the monster is going to eat my face" to "will this monster just give me five seconds to explore this goddamn room". In that case, the ability to explore actually broke my immersion and made that whole sequence a massive chore.

Quote:Yes, environment hacks and puzzles are welcomed. Basically, everything what can engage the player into thinking how to approach the problem he's facing.
And, so that he does not have only one option for solving his endevours (for the replayability).

Puzzles, yes. Hacks, no. Like I said before with cheesing the AI, the ability to break the game and achieve an unintended result breaks immersion. Amnesia-style horror games aren't technical games that are designed with speed-runners in mind. They're designed for an engrossing atmospheric experience. Without that, it's just a walking simulator.

Also, and this is another point in which I think that we will fundamentally disagree, but I don't see the point in introducing replayability in a horror game, particularly one with only a single ending. The entire point of the game is to keep the player on the edge of their seats with the unknown, and that is not something that is possible if the player already knows what's coming. In a horror game like FNaF, sure, the nature of the game itself introduces the required unknown so that replayability is entirely possible, but in a story-driven horror game like Amnesia or SOMA, that's just not the case. There can be story choices that lead to never-before-seen areas, sure, but minor choices like whether to escape a monster using option A or option B? That's an in-the-moment decision, not a puzzle that necessitates a second playthrough.
08-21-2016, 10:48 PM
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RE: 'In the games of madness' discussions and FG in general - by Abion47 - 08-21-2016, 10:48 PM



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