(02-19-2013, 07:04 PM)Rapture Wrote: Btw, did anyone's childhood start with Doom and/or Starcraft? I was playing Doom when I was around 1, and SC1 when it came out, when I was 6 or 7.
My gaming life probably started a bit later than everyone around here when I was around 10. I didn't even get into the Starcraft franchise until early 2011.
Back to the topic at hand though, I also think a good monster encounter should be one which builds atmosphere, and tension without having it forcibly released through a chase sequence. IMO, it is more frightening when you/the player still believes that they have a chance to get around the crisis at hand, but have to be careful about it as well as actively trying to rid themselves of (As opposed to hiding in a closet the whole time waiting for it to pass)
There are several things I disagree with here, but I'll try and keep the response to just one so that you can continue to expose your views with minimal argument
Quote: Well, how about this scenario which I hinted at earlier, you may see it walk into the room but not spot you. It faces away from you, walking around the room allowing you to sneak to other half walls and hide, passing through a few various side passages before getting to the door... etc
I appreciate what you are saying here. A more dynamic approach to any encounter tends to be favourable, but there is an essential trade off happening in Amnesia for the sake of fear. It is critical to the experience Amnesia is trying to give that you feel utterly powerless - this is most obvious in the lack of any ability to fight, which is great. However, being able to stealth your way around 'enemies' is a form of empowerment - it means you have a way to beat them, to be better than them, it means you are smarter than they are, which undermines the principal behind feeling powerless as a means of creating fear.
It also means the players attention will be drawn to figuring out how to 'beat' them in any given encounter - they'll be analysing the tactical space for shadows, areas to hide, places they can sneak past, and they'll be trying to figure out what the path is, where the 'enemy' is stopping/waiting/looking etc.
You want the player to consider the monster to be unknowable, intelligent, unbeatable, infallable. Considering the immense challenge and comparably small payoff for actually implementing a dynamic AI that is capable of such feats (which would be increadible, don't get me wrong), the best way to achieve this in a game like Amnesia that is not set up for multiple play-throughs, and is trying to achieve this particular sense of fear from it's monsters, is scripted events.
First time I was playing Amnesia, I felt like I was being hunted by something intelligent, and that was what made it completely terrifying to the point where I didn't want to continue, because I knew all the horrible things that would inevitably be done to me if I were to continue. If I had a way to 'win', and knew that the game would not throw me into totally unfair situations, I would have been looking for how to win instead of purely immersing myself in it's rich world, and probably would have finished the F-ing game
The interesting thing to note about the design of the gameplay in Thief, and to a lesser extent Deus Ex, is that you feel powerful when you are hidden, and weak when you are exposed. If you are a good player, then you can not be seen, and therefore stay powerful.
In Amnesia, you are not focusing on how to play the game well, because there is no way to play it well - no matter what you do, this 'enemy' *will* find you, it *will* chase you and there is nothing you can do about it, and as a result you never feel powerful, and you instead turn your attention to the details in the audio/visual representations that build such an increadible atmosphere, and in turn draw you that much further into its world.
Like the fear of the unknown thing. I got an example. Is it right or not?
Spoiler below!
"The Player walks through the room. Since it's empty, he leaves it. When the door is shut, he heard footsteps coming from the room he'd left earlier. When he opened it, footsteps appear. It's trail ended on the door. Suddenly, the door is shut and walking can be heard fading out."
(03-16-2013, 04:00 PM)JustAnotherPlayer Wrote: Like the fear of the unknown thing. I got an example. Is it right or not?
Spoiler below!
"The Player walks through the room. Since it's empty, he leaves it. When the door is shut, he heard footsteps coming from the room he'd left earlier. When he opened it, footsteps appear. It's trail ended on the door. Suddenly, the door is shut and walking can be heard fading out."
It's very basic, but it is of a sort, but nothing amazing.
In my story, there's a thing very similar to the shadow, the presence: It's always there, hunting you, appearing in flesh shape (too lazy to make extra models...) and it comes from a world where the worse nightmares are possible (the world of madness). This presence is your main enemy, as, even going to different worlds (up to 4) it still tries to hunt you, and the player doesn't know when or how it will do it. It may invoke a shadowlurker (kind of a ghost) or the already mentioned flesh. In a horror game, you must keep the player tense and peaceful at the same times, giving fear and peace injections regularly, so each one of them has effect.
Another thing is that I like to play with people's minds, as FG did with me: Most of the horror comes from a person, and, more accurately, from the person imagination. People usually tend to dramatize stuff, because when we were in our prehistoric era, our fear sense made us imaginate terrible things in the night when we heard a noise, (it could be a predator). That same and terrible fear saved us. The fear of the unknown, of what we don't know.
What I like most, is to make the player as insecure as possible. Give him something, and then when he needs it, take it away. I loved how the beginning of A Late Night Drink made use of this concept. Give the player an entrance/escape, and then take it away when the player relies on it.
The result is confusion and insecurity
Interesting points in the last part of your OP : ).
I disagree with involving stealth in every monster encounter though, mostly because I don't think there is a "better" type of encounter than another. A well made "IN YOUR FACE" monster spawn after a great tension buildup is in my opinion as good as a stealth phase after seeing the monster lurking in the level for 15 minutes. Both are equally great to me and I don't think FG included chase scenes in their game for no reason. They are really a very tense moment after a lot of buildup and stealth gameplay : I feel like stealth gameplay and nervous chasing parts really complement each other.
The waterlurker chase scene in the flooded archives occurs after 5-10 minutes of cautious walking and jumping, that's why it was such a stressful moment imo.
So yeah, I agree that stealth is a great way of making scary encounters, but I also feel like a game based only on stealth would be boring without a bit of pure, slightly brainless adrenaline.
(no big deal, but shouldn't you rename this thread Robosprog's views on survival horror game design ? Because I don't see anything here that is a general thought on game design ^^. I mean, the part you call "general game design monster encounter" focuses only on monster encounters made to scare you. Which has nothing to do with game design in general : /. Anyway doesn't matter a lot.)
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[SPOILER] Robosprog's Views on Game Design
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