Behold the true face of fear and horror, a creature of such wickedness and despair… wait, wait a minute. Hold on let me look at my notes….. Sorry everybody, looks like the photo of unspeakable terror got mixed up, my bad. I hope it didn’t get sent to a My Little Pony site. Looks like we’re just going to have to make due, ooh ahh, so scary… ok let’s move on.
In the last part I went on a rant about survival horror design and for this part I want to finish my train of thought. Tone or atmosphere is the other half of what makes a great survival horror experience. The problem is that a lot of designers are having trouble getting the tone right.
The problem with tone can be seen in trying to keep it throughout a series. If you look at the evolution of Resident Evil, it has gone from being about a lone survivor who must get out of a horrible situation. To a one man/woman super zombie killing bad-ass who must save the entire world.
The change in tone is part of the problem with designing horror titles: How do you keep scaring the player in the same universe over multiple games? Going back to the last article, repetition is one of the main deterrents of horror, and having a series of games all dealing with the same type of enemy is very repetitive.
The part where designers write themselves into a corner is with trying to wrap up all the plot points by the end of the game. When there’s no mystery to solve, you lose the mystique of the situation. Silent Hill is one of the few series that has avoided this problem, thanks to the designers not explaining the Meta situation of the world, and switching protagonist each game.
I want to show you something, here are the intro cut-scenes to Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2. After watching that, if you had no idea the titles of either game, would you know that both games are part of a series and feature the same gameplay? The switch in tone between the two was very jarring and if I were to quickly describe the tone of those two videos it would be:
Left 4 Dead 1: 4 Unlikely survivors must team up to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Left 4 Dead 2: Dawn of the Dead directed by Michael Bay.
The other problem with tone is trying to inject horror into settings not made for it. We see this in action titles that try to mix things up half way through. Titles like Uncharted, Gears of War and the original Far Cry, each tried to mix things up with horror segments. The problem is that you can’t just take a game where the player spent the last few hours kicking ass and blowing stuff up, then slow things down and throw a monster in to scare them.
Let’s take that picture of My Little Pony as an example. Imagine if someone remade Dawn of the Dead but done entirely in the same style as My Little Pony. Would it be weird? Yes, unusual? Yes, but scary? Not in the slightest. This is due to the tone of the world does not mesh with horror.
To create a good horror game, the tone must be established from the get-go and the game play to compliment it. You can have strong characters as we saw with Undying, as long as the mood can keep up. We’re coming to the end of our horrific ride, and I have two more stops to go.
As a quick side-note, you don’t know how disturbing it was to search Google images for the right My Little Pony picture to use. In fact, don’t Google image anything mentioned in this series. As the fan art may be more creepy then the original.
Up Next: When Hobos Attack
I have one thing to say about the atmosphere in Left 4 Dead 1. Somewhere in Death Toll there's Graffiti about heading to either the Farm House in Blood Harvest or possibly the starting location in Dead Air. Or possibly both.
ReplyDeleteIn either Dead Air or Blood Harvest, there is Graffiti about heading to the town in Mission 4 of Death Toll. Or there was at some point. I can't tell if that was done on purpose or not but IMO it should have been. I think the game works best with it being vague and not as a deliberate story where you progress from 1 campaign to the next. The end of every campaign is deliberately shrouded in mystery that way. We never really know if Lewis, Francis, Bill, and Zoe are going to make it and we shouldn't. The campaigns loosely follow each other but it's not necessarily so in terms of story. Thematically that neatly ties up with how Night and the original Dawn worked (but not the inferior remake to Dawn). Each campign is them making it "one more night" (so to speak) in hell.
I think that's one reason I love the original survivors more as well. They acknowledge the grimness of the situation (right down to Bill's "we just crossed the street kid" to Lewis in the intro movie). The humor they offer stands out better as a result. None of the second group ever acts the least bit scared or surprised or anything other than sardonic. Not that they don't have their moments (I still get a kick out of singing on the mike at the end of Dark Carnival. And as a campaign Hard Rain is the tits).
Left 4 Dead 2 is the superior game mechanically, and now that we have all of the original campaigns it's heavenly. I have recently started playing again for the first time in awhile and I'm really enjoying just going through campaigns. Of course, my evenings are going to be a little busy starting tomorrow night.
I agree both about the gameplay and the writing between the two groups. There didn't seem to be as much character development with the L4D2 survivors. We know that Nick will say something cocky, and Ellis isn't that smart.
ReplyDeleteTo this day I still think that Valve made the wrong decision about not featuring more movies other then the intro. Even if they were completely optional and can only be viewed from the main menu, it could have done a lot to flesh out either group.
Honestly, I'm surprised there aren't little cinematics that are unlocked for beating campaigns. That costs money to do, but they needn't be long. Like you said, it's a chance to flesh out the group.
ReplyDeleteThe OG actually had some tension running through it (Bill and Francis clash, e.g.) even before you got to The Sacrifice, when Bill and Zoey are outright feuding. I really like that.
With the second group it's just "well, we got screwed at the last extraction point. Maybe this one will be good!".
As an aside I played Cold River (or whatever) for the first time in ages on Monday. It has really changed.
I read a long time ago that the reason Valve didn't make more movies was that play testers didn't like spending the extra time not playing.
ReplyDeleteHow was Cold River? I haven't played it since the holiday achievement for it. But I kept seeing patch notes about it.
Cold River was definitely better. They changed the 2nd mission's event to be a "run for you life" event. The finale was radically overhauled.
ReplyDeleteI should say I think that sometime after the initial CR release, once all the L4D campaigns were imported, apparently they really overhauled some of them. They made some nice changes to events, item spawns, and a couple of defensibility points here and there beyond what was in when they were released.