Some of you might have seen my feature yesterday at Kotaku on the evolution of the survival horror genre. I discussed a lot of different factors in the feature, but among my assertions was my idea that the reason that combat was poor in early third-person games where environmental interaction played a primary role was due to technological limitations. Firstly, I phrased it a bit poorly -- it was and continues to be a design decision issue, but I made the assumption that the tools designers had at the time played a role. I wrote:Though the inability to directly confront monsters in an effective way ended up enhancing the fear factor for these games, it wasn’t likely an entirely deliberate design decision – technology in the nineties didn’t allow for multiple kinds of mechanics in one game the way we see today.
I got a response to my feature from Microsoft Game Studios' John Tynes, producer with Xbox Live Productions there, who disputes my assertion and explains precisely why I was wrong -- and why, as he says, the point of contention is a "minor point that leads to a major point." I thought his comments were really interesting, so I received his permission to reprint his letter here. Enjoy!
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That’s just not true. There was no technical limitation preventing those games from having better combat mechanics. The problem is entirely an issue of design: 3rd-person combat is a hard problem for two reasons.
The first is the camera. If the camera is fixed (as it was in Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil), the player can get into fights where he cannot see the enemy. If the camera is under player control, manipulating the camera at the same time you’re trying to fight can be very challenging. You want a very fast, free camera for when you’re running and turning, but the same controls in combat can have you whipsawing around, losing sight of your target.
The second is targeting. You only need to look at Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels to see this issue: in what is considered a blockbuster action series, the player’s ability to target and attack enemies in melee or ranged combat is heavily compromised. Compared to first-person shooters, which might as well be Photoshop for how easy and precise they make targeting, third-person targeting is a mess. Lock-on is typically how this is solved (the first 3D Zelda game did this) but multiple opponents can make lock-on very frustrating – and again, I’d cite the GTA series here, since they threw multiple enemies at you in close quarters and gave you lock-on, with the result that you’d keep wailing on the same guy while three other guys cut you to pieces. And this was in a series widely praised as a great action game.
The early survival-horror games did a poor job because the entire industry was doing a poor job, because this is a hard problem and it has taken a couple generations of games to find a solution. I would argue that Gears of War is the first third-person game to give the player a smooth and responsive first-person level of control over targeting. We weren’t waiting for better chips to enable third-person action; we just had to keep iterating from game to game until we got somewhere that worked.
Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil could have had melee attack combos, an advancement system with more attack unlocks, etc. They didn’t. I believe this was because they were deliberately designing games that eschewed action in favor of tension and drama. The failure in this decision is that they were still trying to make games that took many hours to play, and they failed to come up with any forms of conflict besides combat and environmental puzzle-solving.
I didn’t enjoy the Silent Hill games that much because that combat was so bad, and yet for all their atmosphere and symbolism you couldn’t avoid the terrible combat. The first undead nurse I had to desperately club to death with a flashlight in a shadowy nightmare realm was scary; the thirtieth undead nurse was just tiresome. Their explanation that it’s a game of mood, and not action, is undercut by the fact that they have so much combat, yet that same insistence has led them to give combat mechanics short shrift.
The fundamental problem here is that videogames have not evolved past combat as their primary form of interaction. The branching-tree dialogues of the BioWare games is the only popular alternative route we’ve found to deliver meaty, game-defining (and game-filling) interaction. The evolution of the survival horror games towards a more action-oriented approach is for that reason: you can solve environmental puzzles, or you can have long, rambling conversations with agenda-defined NPCs, or you can kill things. I would posit that survival horror is not enhanced by long branching conversations with NPCs, so that leaves puzzles and combat. That’s all we’ve got so far in our toolbox for these kinds of games.
That, of course, is embarrassing. There are experiments in other directions, as with Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. But for now, what console games do well is killing things, and when you look at the survival horror genre, it’s clear that its biggest weakness – without stepping outside the problem set they’ve defined – is in crappy combat. They’ve solved that now, and in the process have exposed the real failure: we don’t know how to make moody, atmospheric games that last 10-20 hours without stuffing them full of killing things. We have to step outside of the initial problem set of survival horror and ask how we can give players meaningful, game-filling interaction in a moody, suspenseful environment without resorting to combat. We have a long way to go.
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[The preceding was a contribution by Microsoft Game Studios' John Scott Tynes, Producer, Xbox Live Productions, published with permission.]
28 comments:
"I would argue that Gears of War is the first third-person game to give the player a smooth and responsive first-person level of control over targeting."
In console, that is. As far as I'm concerned, most 3rd person action games I've played had a smooth and responsive control over targeting, unless they were shoddy console ports.
"I would argue that Gears of War is the first third-person game to give the player a smooth and responsive first-person level of control over targeting."
Yeah, that is not a shameless plug for the XBOX360 at all...
Anyways, what about Metal Gear Solid 2. That was a third person game, and you could easily switch to a first person view. Granted, it went into first persom from third person, but the concept is still the same.
You could also argue that GTA: San Andreas had this same concept when you did manual targeting, and the controls were as responsive, if not more, than Gears of War.
Granted, most of the targeting we are referring to is with firearms, and not melee combat. The melee combat in Gears I hated. Maybe I just sucked, but very rarely was I able to land a perfect chainsaw attack because the controls were clunky. I think MGS4 is probably the first game I've played where firearm and melee combat are perfectly blended.
John is exactly right. Resident Evil (and the original Alone in the Dark, of which it is virtually a remake) both made the same design decision: to push atmosphere, through sound, pacing, and -- most importantly -- cinematography. The designers reasoned (quite correctly) that this would be an experience players had never had before: the feeling of PLAYING a horror movie. In the light of that new experience, players (and reviewers) were willing to forgive a lot of problems, especially on a relatively young platform at a time when the 3D gaming experience was still relatively new to people.
And speaking of 3D, although John is quite right that designers are ultimately responsible for the form of the game, let's not completely ignore the notion that technical limitations played a role. To use Resident Evil as an example again, remember that every single environment in the game was a PRERENDERED picture. Oh, and no dual analog sticks. There was no good way to allow for player camera control given those two issues.
Now, again, the prerendered backgrounds were a design/art choice, but when you think about what they allowed, in terms of creating evocative, densely arranged environments, it's hard to imagine the game would have been anything special without them.
One more thing: I agree 100% with John's comment about the limitations of our design toolbox in creating meaningful interactions beyond combat. One answer in the short term might be more short, episodic games -- especially in genres where tight pacing is important. I can't speak to horror, but I know that keeping to the 1 1/2 - 2 hour window REALLY benefited the pacing (and, by extension, the humor) in the recent Sam & Max games that Telltale has done. It's just hard to keep ANYTHING taut and focused over 8-12 hours.
Another possible short term solution is to be more willing to mix up rhythm and pacing of a longer game. Inject moments of humor into your horror game. Obviously, this is somewhat perilous if handled incorrectly, but it's a time honored tradition in film (and Shakespeare, for that matter). A change of pace cleanses the palette and "resets" players' expectations somewhat.
Perhaps third-person action isn't going to work perfectly with good combat and horror put together, but I have to say that Silent Hill has always had combat that fit very well with the game, so whether or not it can be considered "poor" depends on where you look at it from.
A rather good candidate for old survival horror is System Shock 2, which I have recently gotten a chance to play. The game has a great interface and good, albiet not great, combat mechanics, but the atmosphere of the game, even with its very dated graphics, is quite creepy. I personally love the new Alone in the Dark, even if combat is frustrating and the script is something from a movie best watched with a pair of snarky robots and a regular joe "they" didn't like, mainly because of the potential and the scariness of having fast, terrible things bearing down on you.
It's a bit of a process to get to that point when good combat can meet up with the proper atmosphere and difficulty to create a true modern survival horror experience. Perhaps Silent Hill 5 and/or Dead Space can push us another step in the right direction.
"It's a bit of a process to get to that point when good combat can meet up with the proper atmosphere and difficulty to create a true modern survival horror experience."
That is a definate missing link there. It may not be do-able without making the game too action oriented. In survival horror, you only really kill things when you need to, most of the time it is because you don't have much to kill them with.
I think that the newest Alone of the Dark got part of the mechanics right, because in a survival horror "situation"(i.e.: zombie apocalyspe...but not confined to just that situation), people would be using whatever they could find to survive. I think where Alone in the Dark failed was the game focused too much on one aspect: Fire. I thought it looked good, but it lacked improvisation and original thought. Players would get a "If all else fails, burn it" mentality while playing. With all of the technological options available to us, there needs to be more of a branching option for survival. Allow players to MacGuyver themselves out of a situation, without resorting to guns or cheap technical gimmicks.
There is still the question of actual combat control. It is a moot point that because of limited ammo, a lot of the combat would focus on melee. Use a GTAIV-esque lock-on targeting system. Precise manual melee targeting in third person I do not see without getting too complicated. In the "survival horror" situation, you should be trying to avoid combat all together unless you HAVE to.
Combat mechanics have absolutely nothing to do with lack of atmosphere.
It's all about pacing.
RE4 could have had the exact same controls and still have had the BEST atmosphere seen in a videogame to date. Modern day Capcom games have no clue what pacing is. From start to finish they throw hordes and hordes of enemies at you without any buildup whatsoever. Give me a desolate European forested area and I will fuck with your head before you ever see an actual zombie.
Another problem with RE4 is that in this installment, you are no longer escaping from a confined and dangerous area like in previous games. Instead you are now on a Mission to go in to dangerous territory to resue some person the player doesn't know or care about.
Oh and like others have said
"I would argue that Gears of War is the first third-person game to give the player a smooth and responsive first-person level of control over targeting."
Nice try, but it was RE4 with the over the shulder third person mechanics that started it all, I'd even go as far as saying Splinter Cell was the first to give full control in 3rd person.
Hey Leigh, can you let us know when you're review for SH5 will be up? I still haven't seen a single review for it.
That's up to my editor, Wolf_Dog --
I would guess the review runs over the next couple days. I needed a little more time to finish it.
But I will say that I'm making a new policy whereby anyone who doesn't like Homecoming will lose 2/3rds of my respect. :)
When I was reading this I couldn’t help but think of Manhunt as an example of a possible future for survival horror combat. I think that there is a lot of untapped potential inherent in attempting to fuse stealth games and survival horror. Imagine if in Silent Hill the faceless nurses were too powerful to simply engage in face-to-(non)face melee combat. Instead, the player needs to lurk in the shadows and sneak up behind them in order to successfully beat them to death. The fear of the target suddenly turning around and seeing you, or one of their buddies coming around the corner would nicely complement the fear generated by the environment and narrative.
I'm not going to like Silent Hill 5 because, at least I've heard, that it will not have lightsabers in it.
Lightsabers are becoming increasingly needed in the gaming world. In the future, guns and knives will be a forgotten legend, being replaced by the might that is the lightsaber. How else am I expected to fight walking tanks, or defeat hordes upon hordes of zombies without a trusty lightsaber at the ready?
The Silent Hill series has gone downhill because it has not included a Jedi (or Sith) as a protagonist. In my humble (yet correct) opinion, at the beginning of the sdlc of every game, there should a draw from a hat on how many lightsabers a game should have, with 1 being the lowest number.
George Lucas saw early on that the inclusion of lightsabers in a medium will mean instant success. If only the vast majority of game developers would have the same foresight: Lightsabers = fun times.
I'm done with any game that does not include this elegant weapon instantly loses my respect. Any game without a lightsaber as a weapon just doesn't strike me as being very innovating.
The next step in the evolution of games is of course, the double-sided lightsaber, made famous by Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man".
@ chronoduck
Silent Hill 3 actually had a lightsaber! :P
I miss the days when players did not feel so entitled to certain elements of game design.
If a game like Silent Hill proposes that having bad combat is meant to simulate the fact that you're just an average civilian, it gets scoffed at. If a game like the original Alone in the Dark purposefully has a monster appear at a bad fixed camera angle so that the player must run away until they get a good shot, it's considered faulty design. Part of what made those games scary was the extreme lack of advantage you had against the monsters in ways that went beyond just health points.
If you constantly expect everything to play a certain way and never push you into uncomfortable territory, you're just going to end up with a bunch of Resident Evil 4 clones.
Thanks for the comments, folks. I have a few responses:
Chronoduck: "Yeah, that is not a shameless plug for the XBOX360 at all..."
You got me. My eight paragraphs of reasonably cogent game design wonkery were just a covert plug for a game that came out two years ago. Curse you Red Baron!
"Anyways, what about Metal Gear Solid 2. That was a third person game, and you could easily switch to a first person view."
I cite Gears because it is an action game that had really strong controls. I don't think stealth games like MGS and Splinter Cell do action-oriented combats that well.
To be fair, I have to admit that while I managed to play MGS all the way through, I gave up on MGS2 after about half an hour during the shipboard level. The guy on my radio kept yelling "Snake! You have to find a gun!" at the same time that every guy I killed lay there on the floor clutching an assault rifle that I wasn't allowed to pick up. At that point I was done with MGS2 and I haven't gone back.
Wolf_Dog: "I'd even go as far as saying Splinter Cell was the first to give full control in 3rd person."
The first Splinter Cell introduced a really fantastic level of movement control, but it was wretched at action-oriented combat. The climax of the first Splinter Cell game was maddening: after a dozen or so hours of mastering sneaking and silent, one-on-one kills, the climax consisted of a slew of bad guys charging at me while action-movie music played. At that point you had to throw everything you'd learned about the game out the window and treat it like an action shooter, and Splinter Cell was a terrible action shooter. It does great at stealth kills, distance kills, and one-on-one kills. It's very, very bad at multiple-target, close-quarters combat -- the same kind of combat that survival horror games have tended to throw at you.
The real issue, to my mind, is that survival horror games rely way too much on combat. Deadly peril is definitely intense and scary, but only in moderation. If you can reliably defeat the enemies, there is no peril. If you cannot reliably defeat the enemies, there should be another way to survive. My experience with survival horror games has tended towards "too hard to kill the enemies, not nearly enough ways around them," which is a recipe for frustration instead of tension.
l.b. jeffries: "If a game like Silent Hill proposes that having bad combat is meant to simulate the fact that you're just an average civilian, it gets scoffed at."
I think average-civilian combat competence is a great idea. The reason Silent Hill turned me off is that it didn't really let me complete the game without surviving a lot of those combats anyway. So it made me bad at fighting and then forced to me to fight a lot.
I think of Clock Tower as an interesting example. It's been years so I may be remembering it more charitably than it deserves, but as I recall there was really just one thing that could kill you and that was the Scissorman. You couldn't really fight him, so you just had to creep around trying to steer clear and every now and then he'd find you and you'd run in blind panic to try to escape, then go back to creeping around again. It's at least an interesting approach to using combat to create tension without letting the combat get either meaninglessly repetitive or horribly frustrating. Do I remember it fairly?
- Tynes
"You got me. My eight paragraphs of reasonably cogent game design wonkery were just a covert plug for a game that came out two years ago. Curse you Red Baron!"
Just kiddin' really dude. I've got nothing against Microsoft or the Xbox. You guys have put out a lot of really good stuff over the years. The industry would not be as big as it is now without your contributions, and for this, I praise you.
I made my statements regarding MGS2 because they were made in the context of controls for third person games in general, not action games nor survival horror.
John, I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding survival horror relying too much on combat, with that being the only option out other than running. As I stated in a previous post, I'd like to se a more open option system like Alone in the Dark, without relying too much on the gimmicky fire aspect. It is not "combat horror", it should be about survival. Surviving in a horrible situation, like a zombie apocalypse or some other catastrophe. Zombies would only be one aspect of the game.
Such a thing would have to be an open world "sandbox" environment. I can see anything too linear being a lot of fun, nor fully use all the options that would be available. Things like food, transportation, living arrangements, weaponry...and more could be looked upon. But there would have to be a constant fear that something bad could happen at any moment, such as zombies finding where you sleep at night, or your source of food being cut off.
Maybe I'm thinking too big? Or too much of a sim where it stops being fun and starts being work?
Have you played Penumbra?
If you haven't, please go play both Penumbra: Overture and Penumbra: Black plague.
They are true survival horror.
To follow up on your comment:
""Snake! You have to find a gun!" at the same time that every guy I killed lay there on the floor clutching an assault rifle that I wasn't allowed to pick up. At that point I was done with MGS2 and I haven't gone back."
Luckily, MGS4 fixed this issue...thank christ!
Part of the problem with the "fight or flight" dilemma in a Survival Horror game is that the player has free choice, within the limits of the systems given him (or her). So here's what happens: the designers sit and talk about how they want the player experience to go. They agree that they don't want combat to be a focus of the game. The want the protagonist to be weak, and for the player to feel like his survival is always on a razor's edge.
"But," they say, "we HAVE to give the player SOMETHING he can do!"
So they throw players a bone (or a gun, or a wrench) and say, "OK...you can have this, but it's only for emergencies."
Yeah. That "for emergencies" thing lasts about 5 seconds into the first playtest. Having provided ANY means of fighting off the Horrors-Man-Was-Not-Meant-To-Know, it has now become a valid tactic. Oh, and, of course, now that there's combat, the designers go ahead and add a couple of boss encounters. You know, to punctuate the exciting moments of the game. And guess what? The whole thing is a giant pile of "aagggghhhh!" because the combat system isn't designed to accomodate an ACTUAL combat situation.
I would go so far as to argue that "fight or flight" is a false choice in games (at least at this point). Either fight is an option, in which case it effectively becomes the ONLY option for a large percentage of players, or it is not an option, in which case the choice is "flight or flight." QTE, here we come.
Resident Evil 4 recognized this. When they improved their combat to the point where people were actually going to be comfortable using it, they correspondingly loosened up on ammunition restrictions (and actually added a separate economy for gun mods, etc.) The only reason the "fight or flight" choice had existed in previous games was that players tolerated the low ammunition because shooting was so sketchy to begin with.
On somewhat of a tangent, I think it'd be interesting to have a game where combat is mostly melee, you play as an average civilian, and as the game progresses you get better at the combat. Not in an RPG "upgrade your combat skill points" kind of way. Just, you hit faster, more accurately, etc as you get farther in the game. I did like how Condemned and Condemned 2 brought melee combat to the forefront, and firearms were nice rewards for progressing and helped break up the flow of combat.
I'm looking forward to your review of Homecoming. Silent Hill is part of the Yet-Another-Franchise-Sean Hasn't-Played-list, so this could be a good jumping in point.
Actually, there were 3D action games with fluid controls even on the Playstation. Anyone ever play Dino Crisis 2?
Anyway... It seems like this is mostly a semantical argument. Developers couldn't think of a good way to have fluid 3D controls and camera systems precisely because it was new technology they were dealing with -- and let's not forget that the PSx didn't even launch with an analog controller. Though I agree that the simple combat and clumsy controls were a conscious design decision, I'd still argue that they were born out of a kind of necessity, since no elegant solution existed at the time. More to the point, though, this "elegant solution" was really a solution to a problem that survival horror games never had. As has already been pointed out, the combat in Silent Hill games has always fitted the tone and atmosphere of the game. Survival Horror is a genre which, in some ways, is built around that limitation. "Fixing" it only undermines everything else. Resident Evil 4, for instance, is a great action game, but pretty middling as a horror game.
Despite its flaws, I really enjoyed Disaster Report on the PS2 as an alternative to the RE/SH schools of survival horror gaming.
I found refreshing the experience of navigating an earthquake-ravaged landscape, finding and combining items, managing water supply and helping other survivors. It was extremely creepy at times and, like RE, it always kept you on your guard as you never knew when the earth might start shaking again, requiring you to brace yourself or take damage.
I wish more developers would try to innovate along these lines, creating challenging (read: non-casual) games that don't rely on a combat mechanic as their primary form of interactivity.
This is in part a response to this post and your article on Kotaku:
Reading about Survival Horror games, I feel we have to say something about how we define genre and how that relates to theme, gameplay, story, etc. in a game. Several years back I read an essay dealing with how the "film noir" genre of film could not accurately be considered a genre but a style, genre being labels of "action", "detective", "comedy", "romance", etc. Film noir was argued not to be a genre but rather a collection of elements, a film which collected the femme fatale, antihero, shady effeminate male, the shady urban shadows, the MacGuffin... I wish I could find the old essay and delve a bit deeper into that essay's definition of genre and see how it measures up to the computer game's treatment of survival horror, but I'd say that "Survival Horror" is much more of a style than genre, even more so than film noir was to film. This is because genre for a game, as I define it, is ultimately tied to the gameplay mechanics of a game: the 3rd person shooter is played one type of way, the 1st person shooter entails another sort of play, while point-click adventure and puzzle point to different gameplay styles.
However, what defines Survival Horror? Mood, Atmosphere, monstrosities, dark urban claustrophobic settings, and essentially things tied to the narrative of games. These things I would define as stylistic choices, and refer to now as STYLE. Meanwhile, it just happens that what's become labeled as "survival horror" are of the third-person action genre with the STYLE of Survival Horror. I think your discussion of combat in horror games and the letter from John indicates this highly. He states: "I believe this was because they were deliberately designing games that eschewed action in favor of tension and drama. The failure in this decision is that they were still trying to make games that took many hours to play, and they failed to come up with any forms of conflict besides combat and environmental puzzle-solving." This is certainly true for a specific GENRE of game, the 3rd person action game, but other forms of gameplay open up the possibilities much more, such as perhaps a merge of adventure (Monkey Island, Longest Journey, that kind of adventure) and action (Tomb Raider, Gears of War, GTA). Dreamfall was a game that could be thought of genre bending this way, although I would call both its adventure and action elements slightly clumsy.
Another thing to consider though is that style and genre, narrative and gameplay, go hand in hand and influence each other in the best games (Braid, for example). However, in horror it comes together in a very interesting way: if fear and horror is elicited via powerlessness, lack of control, and non-omniscience, then so too must the gameplay contain these elements to a certain degree. However, "good gameplay" is (perhaps arbitrarily) put up to a standard of ease of use, the feeling of control and power, and the ability for the camera to be clear and non-obstructive to the player's view. As you can see, there's a problem here. Either we must change the assumptions and grounds of good gameplay, or the grounds of good horror. Or perhaps there is a third option that we aren't aware of, one that someone may produce down the line.
Ultimately I view genre as a mind-killer of sorts for media; as soon as a developer says "Third-Person Shooter", "1st Person Shooter", "Adventure", or "Puzzle" game they reject possibilities of gameplay that can exist out of the socially defined genre; gameplay doesn't need to follow any actual rules (in fact, it doesn't need to be enjoyable. See Jodi's Untitled Game for example). But genre can also work as a point of possible creativity. The 1998 Battlezone game, for example, merely combined two genres but created a new sort of play. An example in film too is Park Chan Wook's film JSA, which I feel cites and plays with a lot of conventional film genres but ultimately is genre-less, giving the film extra strength in its message. For survival horror, we need to reject combat and environmental puzzles as the only possibilities for gameplay, perhaps arrive at a new gameplay that can take advantage of horror's use of powerlessness, obscurity of the camera, and lack of control.
(holy shit that was long)
John Scott Tynes is smart. He helped write delta green and founded pagan publishing. He works making xbox arcade titles now? Didn't expect to see him on this blog.
Personally I like haunting ground/clock tower style running away from everything. I'm not sure how popular that kind of gameplay is though.
There was a nwn1 world design contest module called Falkner's Folly that had you lead a group of people out of a prison in the underdark. Having a large group of people that were expendable but still had likeable personalities worked well.
John has my deep and unending respect for reasons unrelated to his video game career (Delta Green and Unknown Armies, bravo!), but I think he's overlooking resource conservation/inventory management as elements of challenge useful for survival horror alongside environmental puzzles and combat. Embargo dictates I not talk about Dead Space, so I'll just say that in certain survival horror games I've played, resource management is sufficiently engrossing on its own as to exist equal to combat as opposed to merely supplementing it. Resident Evil 4 is a good example of this -- deciding what to carry where is a big deal. Am I prepared enough? Am I overprepared? Am I carrying so much that I'll have to discard some of it if I find something better, without being able to put what I've discarded into the standard magical locker with multiple colocated entrances? I've found a big haul and am now overprepared; do I risk trekking back through enemy-infested environments to dump what I don't need back into the locker, or do I press onward?
Other than that his points are as always very insightful.
Interesting stuff, and seemingly spot-on.
A new Survival Horror franchise coming out soon (ish) which is keeping the tension and filmlike quality is Remedy's Alan Wake. The main reason I bring this up is chronoduck's suggestion that "In the "survival horror" situation, you should be trying to avoid combat all together unless you HAVE to." In Alan Wake, they are aiming for a large chunk of the tension coming from deciding whether to fight opponents or not, or trying to avoid fighting them. That's the way Survival Horror should be done. Seriously can't wait for that game.
Your blog post really piqued my interest because of the words combat design since that is my current passion so I thought I’d give you my take on the relationship between clunky combat and the survival horror atmosphere. I also found John Tynes’ remarks very interesting but I believe responsive, well-tuned, and even deep combat mechanics can substantially add to the survival horror atmosphere instead of detract from the genre’s primary motivating force and essence.
Take the name of the genre for instance—survival horror. I translate this to “Scary Life.” This implies that my life is in jeopardy at every corner and that I’m in constant alert mode trying to stay alive. At the core, you’re trying to stay alive while something/someone is trying to kill you. The ultimate resolution for you as the protagonist is to put an end to this constant fear via death. Death of my enemy/memory/place is what we want to achieve. Kill or be killed. Destroy or be destroyed. As a player I want to unleash all of my anxiety and fear and channel everything into the very thing that was been tormenting me. In short, combat is mutually inclusive to the survival horror genre.
So let’s assume Silent Hill games in the past had amazing responsive combat where you could freely move around enemies, easily target and aim, clear camera view and evade their attack with ease while their attacks had huge recovery windows and the like. Obviously, you’re not as scared anymore because enemies aren’t a serious threat to your person. But is this really true? The first time I played SH2 I was freaked out the minute I heard the first enemies. Then when I saw them walking (animation) towards me it freaked me out even more. Coupled with the surrounding atmosphere (fog, ambient sounds), my encounter with the first enemy was a scary experience. The enemy’s presentation and lead up to the encounter was the meat of the scary experience. Sure, the actual combat interaction with the enemy was scary but only because of the presentation and location. At this point I’m focused on not losing health while engaging the enemy, making sure my hits connect and then recognizing when it’s dead so I can progress to my next point. If I remember correctly, the player doesn’t have to engage every enemy so it can be argued that clunky combat is not a substantial contributing factor to the scary atmosphere.
Ok, I’m a game developer and I want to make a survival horror game and I have an existing AAA responsiveness and play control feel combat system ready to go from our previous games. What do I do? Do I A) purposely clunkify the combat system or B) build the game around this well-established combat system or C) not use combat at all? B seems like a no-brainer considering developmental budgets, schedules, studio reputation, etc.
So is it valid to say that improving a major system, such as the combat system, actually detracts and distracts from the primary essence of the survival horror genre? It’s difficult to say considering (I’m assuming) most survival horror games start off by designing around the story, mood, atmosphere, methods to evoke the most suspense, fear from a player as opposed to starting with a fluid and deep combat system.
So, again, I’m a developer and I say screw the apparent convention of designing a survival horror game around story, mood, atmosphere, etc. We’re going to build around a combat system similar to DMC, God of War or even Ninja Gaiden. So let’s briefly breakdown what’s possible with one of these combat systems. I’m not going to touch on the depth but instead list the essential play control elements that make combat interactions “fun.” I’ll use the GoW combat system as an example. By the way, I’m just regurgitating most of what Eric Williams (Former Lead Combat Designer/Systems Designer for the God of War franchise) wrote in his blog post:
• Move/Animation Canceling
• Player and Enemy Anticipation/Recovery Windows
You read right. I listed only two play control elements that I feel above all contribute to the ease of control and responsiveness in a combat game…and even then the second bullet point is more of sub element of the first bullet point. So in essence there’s only one core element that needs to be introduced into a combat system to make combat less clunky.
So these two bullet points allow the player the following freedoms:
• “Stick and Move” type strategies
• Branching choices before and after attacking
This is contrary to SH2 controls where once you attack, you are stuck in that animation until you get hit or the animation finished. You have no choice(s) once you press that attack button. So, yeah, you’re going to think twice before attacking and make sure you have your i’s dotted and your t’s crossed.
Now you have a lot of play control freedom in your combat system and now you’re ready to start designing your survival horror game around it. Where do you start? Well, you can start planning for a number of interesting design choices:
• Develop your protagonist so that his combat is clunky in the beginning; tie that into the story somehow without actually making the player feel like he’s simply “leveling” up his combat so it doesn’t make the game about combat character development. Cheesy example: Zombies implanted a chip in your head to control what “level” your skills are at…modern day voodoo doll. Once you reach master zombie, you kill him and now you have the power to increase your combat abilities
• Increase the intensity of the enemies
• Take away his AAA combat mechanics in some clever survival horror method such as the protagonist’s daughter has been kidnapped and they demand you cut off your own leg to get her back. (Yes, these are all silly scenarios.)
• Etc, etc, etc
The point I’m trying to make is the more responsive and fluid and deep and powerful and etc the combat system is the more aggressive and faster you can make your enemies. The more survival horror elements you can inject into a single enemy. The player now has the ability to defend himself (and attack) in ways never thought possible.
So, anyways, I believe combat is synonymous with survival horror and not some exhausted inclusiveness to the survival horror genre. As I mentioned earlier, the ultimate resolution of survival is the death of something/someone whether it be death of debt, death of ignorance, death of disease, death of love, death of person, death of fear, death of pain, death of whatever. Physical, psychological, financial, etc. combat is necessary to confront whatever ills and barriers are keeping a person from living a normal life in a video game.
-JDH
at the anonymous person before me: that's not completely true - the combat being inexclusive to survival horror.
Actually far from it: as soon as you have conquered the horror - you aren't scared anymore untill the next horror comes. If you know how to kill this horror, it's not quite as scary anymore. So then you should keep on getting new horror's which you don't know exactly how to defeat (as Dead Space tried to do) or you should have a more than difficult way of dealing with this horror (the obvious Boss battles)
So for me being only able to run away / have a VERY limited amount of ammo because of which every battle becomes a boss battle / have a near infinite amount of different creatures which you have to kill in a certain way or otherwise it's detrimental to you seems like the best way.
I actually thought the part of Bioshock in which you had to photograph these different creatures as close by as possible created quite the tension. So I guess proximity in combination with inability to do something at that moment also has to do with tension.
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