Horror protagonists have been pretty brash lately. They are running and gunning down hordes of zombies with submachine guns before diving out of the way of an exploding car to duck behind a wall to reload. Their partners actually provide them backup and cover fire as opposed to deciding to “split up and look for clues”.
I remember a time when standing still and unloading a clip into a single zombie in hopes of a head shot was not only the pinnacle of intense, but to then navigate your character through a hallway, actually running from the undead instead of at them, was like steering a battle ship. We have come a long way since the inception of the first survival horror games, but have we gone so far that we have branched into other games? Have we lost our niche?
If you look at the last few horror themed games that have released to the market as of late, or at least the ones that had any traction, you’ll notice that First Person/Over the Shoulder shooters have started to emerge as the dominant engines for these titles. Some of these games gained rather high acclaim like the GEARS OF WAR series, Orange box denizens HALF LIFE 2 and PORTAL, and of course LEFT 4 DEAD. Completely deserting the pause the action inventory systems, the scarcity of ammo and the fear that it would induce, and the helplessness of the main character who can’t figure out how to run and shoot at the same time we now have a group of titles where you play a character sometimes so fierce that monsters should be running from them. Changing equips on the fly, running & gunning, and genuine close combat are all now represented in these titles.
So have we lost our roots? Do these things take away some of the inherent fear and suspense the helplessness of the older titles provided? I would argue no, but it has changed the landscape drastically. We are tensed up for different reasons while playing these games than we used to be.
If you look at the last few horror themed games that have released to the market as of late, or at least the ones that had any traction, you’ll notice that First Person/Over the Shoulder shooters have started to emerge as the dominant engines for these titles. Some of these games gained rather high acclaim like the GEARS OF WAR series, Orange box denizens HALF LIFE 2 and PORTAL, and of course LEFT 4 DEAD. Completely deserting the pause the action inventory systems, the scarcity of ammo and the fear that it would induce, and the helplessness of the main character who can’t figure out how to run and shoot at the same time we now have a group of titles where you play a character sometimes so fierce that monsters should be running from them. Changing equips on the fly, running & gunning, and genuine close combat are all now represented in these titles.
So have we lost our roots? Do these things take away some of the inherent fear and suspense the helplessness of the older titles provided? I would argue no, but it has changed the landscape drastically. We are tensed up for different reasons while playing these games than we used to be.
IN THE OLDEN TIMES…
In a classic survival title like a RESIDENT EVIL or SILENT HILL, a lot of the game was spent avoiding unnecessary combats. You would spend a lot of time running sharply around corners, ducking into safe rooms, and saving progress to avoid being chomped to death. Constant surveying of the landscape in front of you while always watching what may be behind you or around the corner made for an atmosphere conducive to fear. You the player would tense up and part of the scare you would eventually receive would be from the sudden jolt when your anticipation was met and some thing jumped out of a closet at you.
In those days the thought of losing your progress was the most horrifying thing imaginable, when you have been playing for over an hour without saving and were on the verge of death limping and bleeding through a hallway to find a typewriter, wondering if you were going to have enough bullets to actually complete the game and wondering if you needed to buy a separate memory card just to manage all your saves. God forbid you save over an older save and get screwed and have to start over. Some would condemn this as a bad design methodology but to them I couldn’t disagree with more, there is something very revealing in a games design when just the real life fear of progress loss could terrify you. When non-game aspects come together with the title to make for an all encompassing experience it really makes the game something that becomes engrained in your memory.
Classic survival horror titles typically cast you as a Joe Nobody character. Even the super characters like Leon Kennedy and Chris Redfield were effectively just regular Joes with combat training. You knew that no powers or super skills were going to save you from a zombie bite or the slash of a Pyramid Heads sword, you better damn well avoid that crap and blast the hell out of them. Having very little knowledge of what the status of your or the enemies health also added to the feeling of helplessness you had while you unloaded every chunk of ammo you had into some monsters skull.
Since we keep mentioning the scarcity of ammo, perhaps we should remember the weaponry of those days as well. While different games had a different approach to weapons, depending on the setting of the title, the one commonality in all of the weaponry of these games is that they were based in reality. Broken pipe, shotgun, combat knife, and handguns galore, we are all familiar with them and what they can do and we have all grown accustomed to the paradigms of the horror movies that established just what they were capable of. Shotgun blast at close range equals exploding head is a mathematic equation we can all get behind. We can also relate to the downsides of these weapons including clunky reloads, limited ammo, blast radius and more. Weapon selection and ammo management were hallmarks of the older horror titles and were a crucial part of the experience. If you got spooked from a crawling corpse and fired off a round you shouldn’t have from your magnum you would curse the lord’s name for the wasted blast (or likely reset and reload the game if you weren’t too far from your last save.)
YOU KIDS WITH YOUR LAZER RIFLES…
So how much of the genre has changed and how much of it has been for the betterment of the industry? Well games have made leaps and bounds graphically and technologically and no one will ever contest that. The realism (or as real as you can get when fighting monsters that is) has not only made the leap from stick figures made out of polygons towards these fully rendered fake people on screen, it has also kept up with the times and made the transition to Hi-Def, making the onscreen action that much more intense. While the original RESIDENT EVILs and SILENT HILLs could have 7-8 zombies on screen at a time, current titles can support scenes of 1000s. This allows game developers to really challenge a player and create situations that they couldn’t normally approach in the past, like how to avoid a horde of things trying to eat you as opposed to just a handful you can shut a door on.
On the subject of graphics, monsters have never looked better. The advancement of the technology has allowed for games to have a level of realism that really does affect the way the game plays. While in the past you could take out a zombies head or legs, games like FALLOUT 3 and DEAD SPACE have introduced real battle damage. Take out a monsters arms and watch how their tactics change as they try and tail whip you or knock you off a ledge. Take out the legs and they turn into biting machines that walk on their hands. This adds a real layer of strategy to the title as each monster requires a different approach, not just a different weapon or ammo. The downside of this however is that designers seem to have forgotten why ammo management was integral to game play in the first place.
A lot of games seem to have near limitless ammo, some sort of credit system where you can buy ammo at some magic wall emporium that just happens to have bullets for the guns you are using, or you can just slaughter some guy and take his ammo and weapon. The beauty of a lot of old titles is that monsters and zombies didn’t carry guns or money around in their front pocket, so you were on your own to find it. It also makes it unnecessary to have improvised weapons as much. That cinderblock or 2 by 4 doesn’t look as interesting next to the rifle with a chainsaw attached to it that the monster you just nuked dropped.
The move to space has also started to affect games. Be it a marketing ploy or just the nature of gamers in our current day, it seems that horror is moving to outer space. A terrific amount of games now take place on a spaceship, alien planet, or in a dystopian cyber future. This on its own isn’t a bad thing, plenty of horror titles take place abroad as it were, but the consequences of it need to be weighed. Gone are the highly relatable weaponry of modern days and in are the all-in-one death machines of the future. While in a lot of games you started with nothing more than the need to find anything that looked like a weapon before you were eaten, in these new titles your typical starting weapon is equipped with anti-tank rounds. The Lancer from Gears of War is a great example of this weapons escalation, because apparently in the future a bayonet is not enough for the end of your armor piercing, super accurate combat rifle when you can have a chainsaw. DEAD SPACE’s basic weapon was a modified mining tool that shot super heated lines of death at anything that came near you. I don’t think the slow moving zombies of yesteryear would really stand up against that. Combine that with the plentiful nature of ammo in most of these titles and you have what is probably the biggest move away from survival horror into the world of twitch FPS gaming.
Because of the increase in the power level of basic weaponry and armor, enemies have changed as well. Slow moving hordes of zombies and things hidden in fog, meant to occasionally leap at you and deal some damage by attrition are for the most part gone, save sometimes for the early training levels. Replacing them are hulking shapeless masses that regenerate limbs, alien races with more advanced tech than you, and hordes of zombie marathon runners. The slow and often intense build up games used to provide, where as you progress further the infection/corruption spreads more and the enemies grow more plentiful has been replaced by monsters that grow larger and more powerful, completely nullifying and replacing the previous batch. Now to pretend that this didn’t happen in older titles would be silly, obviously most video games have a definite progression in difficulty until the end, but the manner in which it happens has started to shift. This doesn’t make for a bad game mind you, sometimes it even makes for a better one. But the slow unveiling and discovery the old games used to integrate into the story to actually increase the suspense and fear of the setting, where in you needed to say release some deadly specimen to progress past a specific point, has been replaced by you walking through a door and being accosted by a mutant or whacked in the head with a steal girder. This of course brings the game further away from the creeping and sneaking game play of titles past and into the twitchy world of kick in the door and open fire.
The move to full 3D is also a strange one. A lot of people regarded the original survival horror games as some of the seminal titles of cinematic game play. With fixed camera angles containing hidden areas and fully rendered backdrops, a game really had the feel of a horror movie. You didn’t know what was around the corner till you were almost there and an undead arm started slowly coming at you. If you walked into a room and suddenly the camera was affixed to the ceiling and unmovable it made you believe something was about to happen, even if it didn’t. Bringing the game into the modern day brought with it camera control, removing the suspense of not knowing what was around the corner. While it can make for a less frustrating experience, some of that frustration was important to the older games. How much fun is a video game really if you can sit down and breeze through it in a few hours? It’s basically a 60 dollar movie at that point.
ARE THINGS THAT BAD…
With all the changes that have happened it’s hard to look at most modern day horror games and really connect them to the original titles that spawned the genre. The upshot of this however, is that these new games that are hitting the shelves are typically fantastic in their own regards. Most people who play horror games aren’t just in it for the horror, but typically are gamers at heart and play a game to have a good time. They don’t limit themselves to genre and know a good game when they play it. And while titles like LEFT 4 DEAD are really just a FPS backwards and forwards, it is a goddamned great FPS that is fun and rewarding to play. The move towards making multiplayer games is always a great thing, and one of the few things that did necessitate the sea change in the way horror titles are produced, but any gamer knows you’ll get more hours on a game when you can play it with a slew of friends than when it’s a storyline you have beaten and memorized.
Replay value has shot through the roof. Sure I could probably go back and play RESIDENT EVIL 4 again, perhaps dig through the special unlockable challenges and beat them again if only to occupy myself, but much like watching the same movie for the umpteenth time, I wouldn’t be doing it for the challenge, I would be doing it because of the quality of the title. New games aren’t as scripted as older games, with enemy AI dynamically changing and random spawning adding to the challenge of the titles. You may know that in the next room something going to jump you, but truth be told you will not know from where.
Twitch is in. It’s just the nature of the changes. A lot of people love twitch gaming. I would say more like it than don’t. This opens up the genre to more people and increases sales of the various titles, and the more money these titles make the more that will come out for the gaming public. We may lose some people along the way but this happens with all things. An industry with more money to invest in games we like will most likely be a good thing.
So good, bad, or ugly that’s the way it is. While I will miss my beloved classic style, heavily strategic, startling titles of yesteryear, I’m making it my goal to embrace change, to welcome space age firepower, and to put on my running shoes to avoid fast zombies. Perhaps if I see you running from them too I’ll help give you some suppressing fire.
darkstar makes this comment
Wed 21 Jan 2009 07:05:01 CST
Andrew M. makes this comment
Fri 02 Jan 2009 15:39:34 CST
Saccharin makes this comment
Sat 20 Dec 2008 00:37:02 CST