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[IDEA] punishment for look at the monter's face in Amnesia
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RE: [IDEA] punishment for look at the monter's face in Amnesia

The main problem is this: If you add punishment as a gameplay element, the player is in danger of starting to perceive it as exactly that. Sanity drain had more drastic effects on gameplay at first, but Frictional Games toned it down to a mere "atmosphere feature" because having it have a real impact on gameplay put players in a "gamey" mindset and took them out of the immersion. (Am I the only one here who's reading the Dev Blog? Have a look at this my friends, and download the pdf, its very enlightening!)

Another problem is that you cannot let the player die, for the same reason. Once the player dies, he's taken out of the game flow and reminded that he is only playing a game. This is explained in the pdf above as breaking the "feedback loop":
After a while of playing, the player starts to believe (subconciously) that he is really in the game - he doesn't think about the controls anymore and the monsters cause him to feel fear as if they were a real threat - when they appear, his heart starts to race etc. Once they "kill" or even only attack him however the feedback loop is broken, because he is not really feeling any pain. (thank god for that! Wink ) so the act of dying in the game snaps him out of his immersion. Even things like opening the inventory do that, although to a lesser degree. (I guess that's why thechineseroom said something about having no inventory in AMfP in an interview...)

Now, of course the effect may vary from player to player and some might not be less immersed after dying, but personally I could feel that effect when I played Amnesia - every time I died the game lost a bit of its scaryness.

Still I agree that something should be done to make the player fear the monsters more - but I think that in order to do that, he needs to have way less direct contact with them, not be attacked or even killed. The trick is to make the player think something horrible is about to happen, if the monster gets him, not try and make something happen - it will always be less terrifying than what he expected. Instead of punishing the player for getting close to a monster, try to avoid those situations in the first place.
(This post was last modified: 08-29-2012, 08:14 PM by xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.)
08-29-2012, 08:11 PM
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RE: [IDEA] punishment for look at the monter's face in Amnesia - by xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - 08-29-2012, 08:11 PM



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