When creating the brand new sci-fi horror game Dead Space for 2008, Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores Studio knew if its game were to be held in high regard among horror fans, it'd have to be frightening.
But engineering fright is a challenge in video games. One common method for instilling fear in players is limiting a player's mobility in the face of gruesome enemies, exemplified in Capcom's seminal survival horror franchise Resident Evil.
That player "disempowerment" could involve limiting the effectiveness of ammunition, or more drastically, creating an overarching control scheme that puts a cap on a player's abilities -- such as not allowing a player walk or run while shooting a gun.
"I sort of disempowered the player in Dead Space, giving him very limited resources," explained Wright Bagwell in a new Gamasutra feature interview. Bagwell is creative director at Visceral Games (formerly EA Redwood Shores) on Dead Space 2, and was senior gameplay designer on the original.
For him, player disempowerment is effective to a certain extent in survival horror action games, but that method becomes a problem when a player feels helpless.
"There's an interesting story from Dead Space and Dead Space 2, which is that when we started building Dead Space, we basically started with a mechanic set that was really similar to Resident Evil 4," Bagwell said. "The [people on the] team were really huge fans of that game."
"We kind of started -- we had never made a survival horror game -- by saying, 'Well, I think in order to scare the player, you really need to sort of cap how much control the player can have.' So in RE4 and a lot of those survival horror games, they all have these pretty clunky control schemes that don't let you do all the things that you can do in most other shooters, for example."
Therefore, the original Dead Space team decided to ape previous survival horror games by limiting player movement, in order to create a sense of fright in players, even as focus groups complained about the gameplay. "We were kind of like, 'Well, but, you know, that's just kind of what we have to do [to make it scary].'"
But the team then decided to listen to its focus testers. "Eventually we got kind of tired of hearing people complain about it, and we said, 'Hey, we should be trying to scare players by doing things that are actually kind of scary rather than making them just feel helpless.'"
Bagwell continued, "We turned up the speed that [the character] rotates. And we turned up the speed that you could run and things like that. ... What we found is that as long as we focused on making the game really atmospheric and putting you in freaky situations and getting the timing of everything right, you didn't really have to disempower the player that much in order to scare him. ... that's the direction we went with Dead Space 2 as well."
For fascinating insight on Visceral Games' pursuit of fear in interactive entertainment, and how big-budget games like Dead Space 2 relate to other survival horror efforts like Amnesia and Fatal Frame, read the full Gamasutra feature, available now.
Dispite how they did great to create a horror atmosphere, the horror will still be decreased in the later part of the game, as you are getting used to these horror.
It is like the general problems for all the horror game, nowadays.
So maybe this should be the next problem left to solve, how to preserve the horror throughout the game?
That is probabily why for now on these games are, with FPS, the shortest games with rarely more than 10 hours... Because they haven't figured out yet how to bring new or more horror among the experience.
Welle that should be an interesting debate. How to do it, bring more or new kind of horror among the game?
As the gameplay revolves around shooting and killing the scary things, the monsters themselves stop being menacing (though horrid appearances can still tug at your brain), but the literal scare part of their sudden and loud appearances remains, making the quiet parts more scary (for me at least) than the fights themselves.
I guess it's mostly because they don't want to make the player feel helpless in Dead Space; horror games in which you aren't a cool powerful guy and can't kill the monsters are usually creepier imho (such as Amnesia, Call of Cthulhu, the Shalebridge Cradle level of Thief 3); they don't need any artificial disempowerment.
"Therefore, the original Dead Space team decided to ape previous survival horror games by limiting player movement, in order to create a sense of fright in players, even as focus groups complained about the gameplay."
It's nice to see the developers decided to listen - and by the same token, it's a shame it took Capcom over a decade to listen to feedback for Resident Evil!
However, I'm not sure I ever felt resource constrained in DS - I occasionally ran short of ammo for my preferred gun, but I always had alternates available, even with my spending vast quantities of credits on upgrading the suit...
An "horror atmosphere" just creates tension. But games are participatory - if you want to really create a "horror" game, you need to create threat. The player must be in the position their character would be: afraid of what is ahead, and afraid to lose something that they value a lot.
The only game that made me feel like that in recent years was Demon's Souls. "Horror" games like Fear and Dead Space try to be scary like movies are, and the cheap audiovisual tricks that they employ grow thin and wear out in the hours and hours of gameplay (which sometimes involves replaying "scary" parts).
Of course I am not defending the ridiculous "bad controls" approach of the Resident Evil series. It's just a stupid, lazy design hack. What made the first games effective was resource management (even to save your games you needed resources!) and the constant feeling of insecurity, which was ruined in RE4 and 5 while still maintaining frustratingly bad controls.
I agree with your basic point that horror games need to threaten the player to be scary, but disagree about both FEAR and RE4.
When there is no real threat, and just scary atmosphere and scares, the player can quickly tune it out and "callously" run around triggering all the fake threats without letting them get to him. FEAR sidesteps this by putting you under the real threat of being ambushed and near-instantly killed by the clone soldiers (assuming you are playing at a high difficulty relative to your skill). This forces you to proceed carefully, observe and listen, and when the psychological scares hit you in this alert state, they work well. It's not a horror game, of course, but a FPS with a bit of successful horror sprinkled in.
Regarding RE4, I haven't played any other part of the series, and I thought the controls were okay. Having them be a bit inflexible allows the game to be slow without being easy. Only because the combat is so slow, is it feasible for body part targeting to play a significant tactical role. That is done well in RE4 and sums up to a fun and novel experience I haven't found from elsewhere; here too the action carries the game instead of "horror".
RE4's controls were fine. It was everything else that was messed up. And, for a team mainly inspired by RE4, Visceral Games did a pretty good job of fixing its problems. They added shadow back, which was kind of important because it helped handicap the player.
One of RE5's goals was to make the player afraid of sunlight. Why not add a mechanic which made opponents incredibly resistant and resiliant when bathed by sunlight? That way I would be actually fearing going through a large yard in the middle of the day.
Another aspect which was removed and made things less scary was the obligation of facing the enemies. In classic RE's you were not forced to defeat the enemies around the mansion/city/laboratory and that was an important part of it. Whenever you design a game you create a certain expectation in the player. In RE4 and RE5 you just know there is a steady supply of ammo that will drop even from the enemies themselves. And that empowers the feeling of security, you just have to drop the first or the second enemy and a clip will materialize somewhere. Heck, in some parts you were not even able to continue unless you killed the enemies. Games are not impossible, if you close up an area and tell the player:"You're leaving only once you're done with them", the player will know there is a way to fight the enemy, and horror games can't do that. You don't fear what you know can die.
There was no such thing in RE2, for example, one of the design choices that really kept the players on their toes was that it was never stated whether an enemy needed to be taken out or not. You had some ammo, fixed location and didn't know if you were gonna find more, or when you were gonna find it.
So meeting a couple of Lickers was a battle of game skill as much as a battle of strategy. What if I spend these two shots on them? What's beyond here? What if I find something worse which won't let me move forward unless I kill it? I might need this ammo.
Long story short, one of the most powerful aspects in horror games is the duality of being able to run and fight, but never really knowing what's best for your. It's always uncertain, and a great portion of the fear comes from those self-asked questions.
Not to mention you have to convince the player the creatures are deadly, and that if they don't run or fight, something of value for them will be lost. If they stop, they're dead.
Um. From what I recall, RE4 only featured minimal body-part targetting: it was pretty much split between head-shots and body-shots. It also used canned death-animations rather than rag-doll physics: any "horror" aspects quickly vanished after you saw two or three enemies simultaneously performing the same dance on the floor...
(equally - at least on the Wii - head-shots were so easy to carry off that there was little need for tactical play)
Also, there wasn't much in the way of resource-limitations in RE4. I always had plenty of ammo and had enough cash left over to purchase a rocket launcher from the omnipresent (and immersion-breaking) merchants, thereby reducing effort needed to kill the majority of bosses to a single pot-shot.
A far better example of a well-designed horror game is Fatal Frame/Project Zero: the ghosts are generally spooky - your character knew several of them prior to death, which adds to the effect - and your character is clumsy in a realistic way: it's a young, scared girl struggling to line up a large antique camera...
In RE4, you could also hit enemy legs, making them fall, could hit weapons and explosives in their hands, and could defeat thown weapons by shooting them, in a way similar to ray shooters. If it was easy to just dodge around everything, there wouldn't be place for these mechanics.
RE5 was a high resolution copy of RE4. Just about everything you could do in RE4 was present in RE5. Not to say that one as more or less enjoyable than the other, but the squeal did not go out of its way to refine the predecessor.
Though some may have found it easy to shoot enemies in the head decreasing the fear factor of the game in their opinion. I remember there where enemies you could not take out completely with head shots in both games.
Jamie: Luis is correct. In RE4 it was occasionally important to shoot the feet, shoot the weapons, etc. A number of enemies hid behind armor or shields so headshots weren't even possible. Some enemies had specific weak spots, some of which you needed an infrared sight to see.
The laser sight targeting of the original version is nothing like the direct targeting of the Wii version. This probably explains why you found headshots easy. You did play the hardest difficulty, right?
From what I recalled, I played on medium (my default preference), and the experience wasn't satisfying enough to make me want to start again. I do recall the "infra-red" enemies being a pain, but it was mostly because of the need to switch vision modes. In any case, they weren't scary: they just needed to be shot a couple of extra times.
For what it's worth, RE4 isn't the only game to suffer from AI and "headshot" issues. For instance, I recently picked up Dark Sector and Matt Hazard on the Xbox 360 and they both suffered from predictable enemies which could be easily picked off, even with the relatively low accuracy of the control pad.
Since we are here, RE4 is so abysmal because they made crappy controls and made a game around them. The bigger focus on combat also meant that we would see those pathetic scenes where the zombies run at you only to stop right next to you and wait several seconds until they attacked. Because the controls fucking sucked. That's design for you.
if the RE4 way is bad, then how would you make an action game which emphasizes tactically hitting individual body parts and enemies? If the enemies are fast up close, the accuracy required is too much. If the enemies are slow at far distance, then there would be no time pressure at all in larger spaces.
Also: what other games have done this thing better?
"One common method for instilling fear in players is limiting a player's mobility in the face of gruesome enemies, exemplified in Capcom's seminal survival horror franchise Resident Evil."
I think it's a misconceived assumption. Why people think the resident evil movement is the way it is to limit player mobility?
It's the way it is to be a precise way to move your char around with the fixed camera system, which is used to build a feel of realism to every scene, like a real security camera or a movie shooting angle, plus the graphics possibilities of having pre-rendered scenary. The rest of the gameplay is based upon this first base core feature: the fixed-angle cameras.
If you are pressing forward and the camera changes, you're still moving forward, why would a I want a per-camera based movement orientation, which is gonna change all the time making me fix the movement each transition, and have the movement be relative to me, instead of relative to the character?
"I sort of disempowered the player in Dead Space, giving him very limited resources,"
Maybe I might have to try Dead Space on a console to see the point. I just killed everything in my way for the whole game and the only resource I felt in lack was inventory slots.
"Well, I think in order to scare the player, you really need to sort of cap how much control the player can have."
Now that's a wrong assumption. Survivor Horror was never about liminting player control. It's like saying Fallout is a Survivor Horror, since I can shoot an enemy 30 times on the forhead and he wont die cause I don't have enough "level".
"So in RE4 and a lot of those survival horror games, they all have these pretty clunky control schemes that don't let you do all the things that you can do in most other shooters, for example."
Have people noticed that most shooters don't have good weak enemy spot systems that go any further than head shoots? Thus RE4, Dead Space and On-Rail Shooters do. Unreal Tournament movement habilities stand strongly on the way of this kind of interactivity, and pushing it with surreal enemy health point or total lack of ammo will just be forceful to the play style, making the game more of a puzzle.
"Hey, we should be trying to scare players by doing things that are actually kind of scary rather than making them just feel helpless."
I felt fear the most in Silent Hill 1 and 2, and Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, and mildly four. The thing these all have in common? You lacked resources. You didn't know when you were going to find more. Should you conserve the ammo and risk running through the zombies or waste them. RE4 gave to much resources, but the added layer of Enemies approaching from any point made up for it, that is until RE5. A clunky control scheme is not how you instill fear. It's a cheap way and it just plan looks bad. You shouldn't have to sacrifice good design for fear. Alan Wake's controls felt good (from what I remember), but unfortunately that game wasn't scary at all. Tense at times, but not frightening. Fear is best when you are confused and can't see what lurks in the dark.
Maybe the best way to create fear in horror games is to remove the aspect of the gun, make guns a scares commodity, or force the player to find unique ways to survive through killing or fleeing from the enemy. Oh and make a catch-your-breath button.
You may want to check out a game called Haunting Ground, a.k.a Demento. Its one of the few horror games I've played that I would classify as true "survival" horror. You have no real weapons, you have no real self-defense training, you're an ordinary girl and you face arguably constant danger be it from the environment or the people/"things" around you who are always out to kill you. Besides the aid of a loyal companion in your dog, for the most part, you have no means of "combating" or "defending" yourself from the danger you face. All you can really do is evade and hide. Its really truly all about "survival". Its one of my favorite games largely for that very reason.
Helplessness in a horror game can work, but it doesn't mean poor controls. I would say the best recent horror games come from Frictional Games with Penumbra and Amnesia. The method they went with was removing combat from the player. By not being offensive they force the player to have increased anxiety and fear when encountered with potentially violent scenarios. I think it works incredibly well.
The game does not have to be non-combat for that to work. It is the idea that you need to put the player in a situation where they don't feel entirely in control. Once the character is in control of their environment, the fear won't grow. There is no apprehension or anxiety, so they just truck on.
Personally, I never finished Dead Space because it became monotonous. As I recall, the pacing was ok, but not great, and I suffered from horror fatigue. Whereas, I just played through Heavy rain... twice. Both times it evoked more horror and fear than Dead Space ever did. I credit Heavy Rain's impact on its excellent pacing and contrast between scenes. Also, Heavy Rain is the only game I ever played that gave me actual psychosomatic pain. I became so emotionally invested in the characters, that I felt their pain, physically. Whereas in Dead Space, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc. I just start to feel numb to the spooks and gore.
It's good they aren't just copying RE4, but to all the people who think it was a game with clunky controls that was badly designed, why did it sell so many copies? Why do most gamers I know consider it a great game? Because the controls actually make the game scary. They aren't sloppy design or hack thinking, they actually work brilliantly to make the combat full of tension.
The game's success has very little to do with the way it plays. Cold Fear has better controls and it is not as successful. But Cold Fear sure lacks:
Textbook characters design - A hero, a damsel in distress, a femme fatale;
Arcade style - Do what the game says/shows, either shoot or run, no depth or choice in the situations presented to the player;
Good graphics for the time it was released - People still fall for the eye candy trick;
Massive QTE usage & other one-button actions - Simpler controls means less thinking;
Big franchise name - Resident Evil was a well established franchise, people knew the RE name and felt good being finally able to play one of its games.
Accessible design - Point and shoot, almost no problem solving aspect at all;
Over-the-Top action - Because shooting the final boss with a Rocket Launcher never gets old;
Some topics overlap, but what the heck. They're all in there.
Cold Fear had a rather ridiculous presentation, but I actually mean it when I say I think that if you gave the budget and the time of the RE4 team to Darkworks, you'd have a better game in the end.
They are even trying to bring these controls to the newly-unveiled Resident Evil Revelations.
Just reminding people that the Dead Space team isn't ragging on RE4 -- Bagwell says right there that they were huge fans, so much so that they initially tried copying the controls.
Shooter mechanics have evolved since RE4, so for better or worse, players' expectations have changed. That game is six years old, and what worked then in that game in that context probably seems antiquated now to a lot of gamers. I'd argue that RE5 proved that much.
It is like the general problems for all the horror game, nowadays.
So maybe this should be the next problem left to solve, how to preserve the horror throughout the game?
Welle that should be an interesting debate. How to do it, bring more or new kind of horror among the game?
I guess it's mostly because they don't want to make the player feel helpless in Dead Space; horror games in which you aren't a cool powerful guy and can't kill the monsters are usually creepier imho (such as Amnesia, Call of Cthulhu, the Shalebridge Cradle level of Thief 3); they don't need any artificial disempowerment.
It's nice to see the developers decided to listen - and by the same token, it's a shame it took Capcom over a decade to listen to feedback for Resident Evil!
However, I'm not sure I ever felt resource constrained in DS - I occasionally ran short of ammo for my preferred gun, but I always had alternates available, even with my spending vast quantities of credits on upgrading the suit...
The only game that made me feel like that in recent years was Demon's Souls. "Horror" games like Fear and Dead Space try to be scary like movies are, and the cheap audiovisual tricks that they employ grow thin and wear out in the hours and hours of gameplay (which sometimes involves replaying "scary" parts).
Of course I am not defending the ridiculous "bad controls" approach of the Resident Evil series. It's just a stupid, lazy design hack. What made the first games effective was resource management (even to save your games you needed resources!) and the constant feeling of insecurity, which was ruined in RE4 and 5 while still maintaining frustratingly bad controls.
When there is no real threat, and just scary atmosphere and scares, the player can quickly tune it out and "callously" run around triggering all the fake threats without letting them get to him. FEAR sidesteps this by putting you under the real threat of being ambushed and near-instantly killed by the clone soldiers (assuming you are playing at a high difficulty relative to your skill). This forces you to proceed carefully, observe and listen, and when the psychological scares hit you in this alert state, they work well. It's not a horror game, of course, but a FPS with a bit of successful horror sprinkled in.
Regarding RE4, I haven't played any other part of the series, and I thought the controls were okay. Having them be a bit inflexible allows the game to be slow without being easy. Only because the combat is so slow, is it feasible for body part targeting to play a significant tactical role. That is done well in RE4 and sums up to a fun and novel experience I haven't found from elsewhere; here too the action carries the game instead of "horror".
One of RE5's goals was to make the player afraid of sunlight. Why not add a mechanic which made opponents incredibly resistant and resiliant when bathed by sunlight? That way I would be actually fearing going through a large yard in the middle of the day.
Another aspect which was removed and made things less scary was the obligation of facing the enemies. In classic RE's you were not forced to defeat the enemies around the mansion/city/laboratory and that was an important part of it. Whenever you design a game you create a certain expectation in the player. In RE4 and RE5 you just know there is a steady supply of ammo that will drop even from the enemies themselves. And that empowers the feeling of security, you just have to drop the first or the second enemy and a clip will materialize somewhere. Heck, in some parts you were not even able to continue unless you killed the enemies. Games are not impossible, if you close up an area and tell the player:"You're leaving only once you're done with them", the player will know there is a way to fight the enemy, and horror games can't do that. You don't fear what you know can die.
There was no such thing in RE2, for example, one of the design choices that really kept the players on their toes was that it was never stated whether an enemy needed to be taken out or not. You had some ammo, fixed location and didn't know if you were gonna find more, or when you were gonna find it.
So meeting a couple of Lickers was a battle of game skill as much as a battle of strategy. What if I spend these two shots on them? What's beyond here? What if I find something worse which won't let me move forward unless I kill it? I might need this ammo.
Long story short, one of the most powerful aspects in horror games is the duality of being able to run and fight, but never really knowing what's best for your. It's always uncertain, and a great portion of the fear comes from those self-asked questions.
Not to mention you have to convince the player the creatures are deadly, and that if they don't run or fight, something of value for them will be lost. If they stop, they're dead.
(equally - at least on the Wii - head-shots were so easy to carry off that there was little need for tactical play)
Also, there wasn't much in the way of resource-limitations in RE4. I always had plenty of ammo and had enough cash left over to purchase a rocket launcher from the omnipresent (and immersion-breaking) merchants, thereby reducing effort needed to kill the majority of bosses to a single pot-shot.
A far better example of a well-designed horror game is Fatal Frame/Project Zero: the ghosts are generally spooky - your character knew several of them prior to death, which adds to the effect - and your character is clumsy in a realistic way: it's a young, scared girl struggling to line up a large antique camera...
Though some may have found it easy to shoot enemies in the head decreasing the fear factor of the game in their opinion. I remember there where enemies you could not take out completely with head shots in both games.
The laser sight targeting of the original version is nothing like the direct targeting of the Wii version. This probably explains why you found headshots easy. You did play the hardest difficulty, right?
For what it's worth, RE4 isn't the only game to suffer from AI and "headshot" issues. For instance, I recently picked up Dark Sector and Matt Hazard on the Xbox 360 and they both suffered from predictable enemies which could be easily picked off, even with the relatively low accuracy of the control pad.
Since we are here, RE4 is so abysmal because they made crappy controls and made a game around them. The bigger focus on combat also meant that we would see those pathetic scenes where the zombies run at you only to stop right next to you and wait several seconds until they attacked. Because the controls fucking sucked. That's design for you.
if the RE4 way is bad, then how would you make an action game which emphasizes tactically hitting individual body parts and enemies? If the enemies are fast up close, the accuracy required is too much. If the enemies are slow at far distance, then there would be no time pressure at all in larger spaces.
Also: what other games have done this thing better?
I think it's a misconceived assumption. Why people think the resident evil movement is the way it is to limit player mobility?
It's the way it is to be a precise way to move your char around with the fixed camera system, which is used to build a feel of realism to every scene, like a real security camera or a movie shooting angle, plus the graphics possibilities of having pre-rendered scenary. The rest of the gameplay is based upon this first base core feature: the fixed-angle cameras.
If you are pressing forward and the camera changes, you're still moving forward, why would a I want a per-camera based movement orientation, which is gonna change all the time making me fix the movement each transition, and have the movement be relative to me, instead of relative to the character?
"I sort of disempowered the player in Dead Space, giving him very limited resources,"
Maybe I might have to try Dead Space on a console to see the point. I just killed everything in my way for the whole game and the only resource I felt in lack was inventory slots.
"Well, I think in order to scare the player, you really need to sort of cap how much control the player can have."
Now that's a wrong assumption. Survivor Horror was never about liminting player control. It's like saying Fallout is a Survivor Horror, since I can shoot an enemy 30 times on the forhead and he wont die cause I don't have enough "level".
"So in RE4 and a lot of those survival horror games, they all have these pretty clunky control schemes that don't let you do all the things that you can do in most other shooters, for example."
Have people noticed that most shooters don't have good weak enemy spot systems that go any further than head shoots? Thus RE4, Dead Space and On-Rail Shooters do. Unreal Tournament movement habilities stand strongly on the way of this kind of interactivity, and pushing it with surreal enemy health point or total lack of ammo will just be forceful to the play style, making the game more of a puzzle.
"Hey, we should be trying to scare players by doing things that are actually kind of scary rather than making them just feel helpless."
Best thing you did.
The game does not have to be non-combat for that to work. It is the idea that you need to put the player in a situation where they don't feel entirely in control. Once the character is in control of their environment, the fear won't grow. There is no apprehension or anxiety, so they just truck on.
Textbook characters design - A hero, a damsel in distress, a femme fatale;
Arcade style - Do what the game says/shows, either shoot or run, no depth or choice in the situations presented to the player;
Good graphics for the time it was released - People still fall for the eye candy trick;
Massive QTE usage & other one-button actions - Simpler controls means less thinking;
Big franchise name - Resident Evil was a well established franchise, people knew the RE name and felt good being finally able to play one of its games.
Accessible design - Point and shoot, almost no problem solving aspect at all;
Over-the-Top action - Because shooting the final boss with a Rocket Launcher never gets old;
Some topics overlap, but what the heck. They're all in there.
Cold Fear had a rather ridiculous presentation, but I actually mean it when I say I think that if you gave the budget and the time of the RE4 team to Darkworks, you'd have a better game in the end.
They are even trying to bring these controls to the newly-unveiled Resident Evil Revelations.
Shooter mechanics have evolved since RE4, so for better or worse, players' expectations have changed. That game is six years old, and what worked then in that game in that context probably seems antiquated now to a lot of gamers. I'd argue that RE5 proved that much.