Alien: ISOLATION AND HOSTROWN SIMULERS-Genre evolution, part of the third

Here is the last third of Thomas's Essay of Thomas from Frictional, which released Penumbra, Amnesia and now working on SOMA. You can read the first two parts in translation here and here.

In the final part, we will talk about what can be done with the horror genre in order to develop it in a new direction.

Keep the player

I believe that when developing horror, one should strive for simulation. It’s great when a person during the game is given the opportunity to survive episodes, as if taken from a book or horror film. This is what we want from the games, and the return to Horror as a simple shell – as for me, is not the best idea.

But there is one big difficulty: in the current horror symptuces, the list of actions permissible for the player, like a set of global plots, is very limited.

Our Amnesia: The Dark Descent – No exception. In the game itself, you only move from room to room, solve puzzles and go around the monsters tenth road. But read the background – there is opening the tombs in the desert, and the first visit to the Brennenburg castle, and much more. In a good way, the player should win all this, and not read in the diaries.

The problem is not even to transfer these scenes to the game, the problem is the correct impression that they should make. For example, c Alien: ISOLATION Landing on the planet lacks the depth of immersion, which the episodes at the station differ. When you hide from someone else's, you will think of a willy, respectively, what is happening and therefore act absolutely natural. And the journey to the starship ruins could calmly be replaced. You need something more to reach such episodes to the level that the good horror-symractor sets.

Firstly, in my opinion, the use of basic gameplay should be limited. Passage Outlast takes only five hours, but it is already difficult to maintain freshness and proper stress throughout the game there. The game began to seem to be drawn somewhere in the last third.

Amnesia suffered the same. The exact time when such a gameplay begins to bother, is, of course, subjective, but most will agree at least with the fact that the less often meetings with monsters, the brighter they are. Therefore, it will be better to use monsters moderately for horror.

Secondly, in the compilation of the correct model of thinking, one should rely less on the complexity of the game. The device of games like Alien: ISOLATION And Siren, In itself, it effectively does not allow to relax, but exclusively at the cost of narrowing the game framework. As I already explained, it is difficult to add something else to such a game that the player does not start to be weighed.

In addition, it is only worth removing the elements complicating the task (points of conservation, for example), as the intensity decreases sharply. Such games work on a combination of stress from the prospect of losing progress with the surroundings from horror films: the player projects his tension on a frightening video and sound recreation. But the structure, built on this effect, is unreliable-you will have to enter into the game something else specifically in order not to let the player relax, and this excludes many options characteristic of the horror.

New concept of game choice

The solution to this problem, in my opinion, lies in the uncertainty of the outcome as part of the gameplay. So that the player is not afraid that he will not have time to survive, but that his actions will be badly on the game world. Such thinking significantly expands the possibilities.

The best example of this approach in action is probably a series The Walking Dead. It is clearly visible how many diverse tense moments arise only thanks to this uncertainty. I especially like how personal a choice can be: for example, when you decide who to trust.

The most obvious problem of such a gameplay is the need to branch the event line, but it is not as terrible as it seems. In fact, options for the development of events in The Walking Dead Not a lot, and even if you know about them, the choice still makes you feel uncomfortable. The degree of uncertainty is sufficient to maintain the effect of immersion and a serious attitude to decision making.

The Walking Dead , However, it does not work at all like a horror sympturators, in which the player BoVegas Casino should have as much control over what is happening and smaller KAT scenes. Therefore, you can’t just take and turn the game mechanics from there as it is. You should carefully reflect on how to arrange a choice and what the consequences may have.

We conducted the first tests of this concept in Amnesia: Dark Descent And in addition Amnesia: Justine. IN Dark Descent there is no choice as such, but there are some consequences of loss. If the monster kills the player, the world changes a little. The tension, of course, is far from as great as when you are desperately afraid not to have time to survive, but nevertheless it is already a certain level of uncertainty, making the game a little worse.

IN Justine In addition, we tried to introduce puzzles with the consequences: in the case of your failure, someone died. The idea turned out to be worthwhile and made these puzzles-previously former a separate part of the gameplay-also a kind of horror-symptules (in some ways repeating scenes from films like “saw”).

But these are trifles, and the main problem is to make all this smoothly and coherently work on a large scale. The first step is to check whether it is possible to remove the threat of death from the standard stealth gameplay, maintaining proper voltage. If it turns out, it will be a triple victory.

Firstly, there will no longer be annoyed by the tie to preserve and the risk will decrease that the effect of immersion will collapse. Secondly, in the absence of forced repetitions-an inevitable consequence of design, based on complexity, will open up opportunities for researching the surrounding world and for more complex game tasks. Thirdly, we will be able to figure out how to take the Simulation of Horror outside the games in hide and seek with monsters. Then, I hope you can try to make a horror symbol as it should, and recreate all the wealth of the first film about strangers.

With this, we are just now experimenting in Soma, our new game. I do not want to reveal the system ahead of time, so there will be no details, but in general terms I will tell.

The idea is that the choice is a natural part of the game world, and your solutions change how events will develop. The choice may be the simplest – to interact with the game object or not, and less obvious: say, how to behave with a certain creature.

The impact on the plot will not consist in a sharp branching of options, it will be things of a different order: then the game can become worse (for example, lighting will disappear), people you meet can die, your perception of a character or even you yourself may change. We hope that if such a choice becomes an integral part of the game world, the player will include him in his model of thinking. And then the possible consequences of committed acts will worry you in the same way as in Alien: ISOLATION Exciting the search for the following conservation point.

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This is just a small step forward, and before the game is released, we will not know how successful. But I believe that it is important to think about such things now. Due to the fact that the horror served only a wrapper, in the middle of the zero there was a stagnation of the genre, and he is waiting for us again if we do not go beyond the script of “run away from the monster”. Such games are good and justified by themselves, but being content with them somewhat stupid. The potential of Horror is much higher, and the success of the last simulators inspires me with the hope that the games on the shoulder to realize all the wealth of the genre entire.