'In the games of madness' discussions and FG in general

[Abion47]

More interacivity.
I agree, oil and battery mechanics is not very well done if it doesn't change the game aspect or it's not connected to the lore.

For example, in Dark souls the Catacombs area, if you don't gain particular item you will have a difficult time.

Spoiler below!

http://darksouls.wikia.com/wiki/Skull_Lantern

But, the item is gained in particular way and you can miss it. It changes the game mechanics substantually.

That right there is precisely what I'm talking about. Dark Souls had an area that used the lantern mechanic. An area. It didn't take up the entire goddamn game. It showed up, did its thing, and then buggered off during the rest of the game. That made it special rather than just a necessary annoyance.

The battery and oil mechanic needs to be used in a way that helps the player only under certain circumstances. That is the difference between the mechanic being a story element and it being the default. Used sparingly, the battery and oil mechanic can be an effective way to raise tension and advance the plot, but when it lasts the entire game, it's just a chore, and instead of adding to the game when it's there, it takes away from the game when it's not.

Sanity is nice touch but time of the screen effect is too long to watch. It could be used in different way in story element. If went insane, char could remember something or see the world in different way.
Player could experience different aspect of the game.

In Amnesia, screen time when enemy spots you, is to long to watch every time but it serves the lore.

Once again, moderation. The sanity mechanic didn't work because it was too prevalent for too often that once the novelty wore off, it was just annoying. It's similar to when, in the Deadpool game, Deadpool shoots off his classic witty one-liners in various certain situations. It's amusing at first, but once you've heard every line 50 times it just gets grating and annoying, and something intended to make the character come to life just ends up having the opposite effect.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, "never let the lore get in the way of a good game". Every decision needs to be made around the context of what will make the game better. Lore-based mechanics are well and good, but the game designer also needs to recognize when a particular mechanic, feature, or aspect of the story has overstayed its welcome. People berate AAA games for having sequences that introduce and heavily feature a mechanic, then leaving that sequence and never using that mechanic again for the rest of the game. The truth of the matter, though? Those mechanics wouldn't have been nearly as memorable if they were just another part of the game as a whole.

I meant 'cheese' as 'outmaneuver'. Player would need to learn and discover the strategy of A.I. to succesfully find out the way how to get rid of it. And every game element tied to that should be eleborate and interesting to the player.
And possibly connected to the game lore, rules and level design.

Of course. That's just one of many examples of problem-solving mechanics in a game. But there are very different ways to deal with an AI-controlled monster, and some ways are better at maintaining immersion than others.

For example, say there's a monster patrolling a hallway. The intended tactic would be to hide in shadows or behind boxes, timing your advance until you successfully advance past him. Another way might be to try and just blow past him, hoping that you are safe inside the next room before he catches up with you and kills you. And a third way would be to get him to chase you in such a way that he clips into a box and cannot move.

Option A is the intended strategy, and it reinforces the fact that you are a scared helpless little avatar in a world that wants to kill you, thus it maintains the immersion. Option B is an all-or-nothing strategy that doesn't quite break immersion, but it does bend it a little in that you may find yourself loading the same save over and over again until it works or you revert to another strategy. (Every save loaded imparts a penalty to the overall sense of immersion.) Option C breaks immersion entirely by revealing that the monster is, in fact, just a program that can be rendered harmless despite all evidence to the contrary.

In most cases, and especially an immersion-centric game like Amnesia or SOMA, you as the designer must strive to encourage the immersion-maintaining strategies at all cost. Once immersion is broken, the game is a lost cause.

Not if the A.I. encounter is thrilling and challanging.
To extent, I would prefer hard challange but rewarding one. This is not the core horror, I know, but it keeps the player motivated along with story elements.
For example, Dark souls was horror experience for me when I first tried it.
I literally didn't have so much dread moments as I had in DS in first playthrough.
But it balances the challange and reward along with this horror feel.
Altough, Amnesia and SOMA are oriented with building the horror feeling, DS is based on surprise and jumpscares.

But again, Dark Souls didn't encourage exploration and fighting monsters at the same time. Before you can explore the area, you had to kill the monsters first. Otherwise, they just keep chasing you until you do or until you escape from the area entirely.

Dealing with monsters and exploring new areas are mutually exclusive experiences. You cannot go collecting lore pieces while the constant threat of a monster is breathing down your neck (unless you just enjoy dying a lot). A monster can be as expertly designed as possible, but when it is staring at you, it demands your full attention. Doing anything less risks getting killed. When was the last time in a game that you were capable of calmly exploring a room while a monster inside that room was actively trying to kill you?

This was the point were it would be good for the player to discover a challenging way how to get rid of the A.I.
Whether that be slowing down the A.I., electrify it, trap it, stun it... using some particular hidden item or learn a way how to build one.

This would be an example of pausing the monster encounter during the moments of exploration. Which would support what I already said - you can't explore and deal with a monster simultaneously. (Keyword: "Simultaneously")

I though the hack is, for example, electrify the puddle of water with A.I. standing in it?

No. That would be puzzle-solving, as in using the objects within the world to clear an obstacle and advance the story. Conversely, a hack is a way to exploit unintended weaknesses of the engine to advance the game in unexpected and unintended ways. Hacks by their very nature destroy immersion, which is why they should never be used outside of speedrunning or the whimsical "just to see if I can" setting.

Further examples:

Puzzle-solving: Using a knife to carve a key out of a block of wood, then using the key to open a door.

Hack: Leaning a box against the door in such a way that if you jump on top of the box, it slides you sideways and clips you through the still-locked-and-closed door.

New game+ doesn't change the story but it could thighten the game rules with harder challanges. Players often like this and can have competitive achievements.

Basically, NG+ serves as an answer to the following question>
How to make another playthrough more interesting and variable for the players who had finished the game and know the story?

I'm not talking about NG+. I'm talking about just straight-up NG vanilla. I don't see what draw there is in playing a game like SOMA more than once, except maybe to explore every nook and cranny to find lore pieces you missed. The intrigue is based on the unknown: not knowing the story, not knowing the setting, not knowing if a monster is hiding around the next corner. Without these, it is literally just playing a walking-and-collecting game that occasionally forces you to deal with an annoying monster.

Now, if we were talking about a more action-oriented game, then there's more merit to NG and NG+, because in those games the intrigue doesn't just come from a lack of knowledge of what's coming, but also from your skill in completing them. In that case, it can be fun to try the same scenario to try and find a faster way, or to turn on modifiers that change the encounter just enough to be an entirely new experience.

In a story-driven atmospheric horror game, though... what are you going to modify? Player speed? Monster speed? There's not much at all you can change to bring the horror back, short of playing entirely new levels. (At which point it's not exactly NG+ anymore, is it?) Any other changes to "increase difficulty"? Well, then it's not really a horror game anymore. You're just changing the game by making up for the lack of horror with self-competition, at which point... you have an action game.