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Survival-Horror Genre Going Extinct?
Destructoid is running an opinion piece looking at the state of the survival-horror genre in games, suggesting that the way it has developed over the past several years has been detrimental to its own future. "During the nineties, horror games were all the rage, with Resident Evil and Silent Hill using the negative aspects of other games to an advantage. While fixed camera angles, dodgy controls and clunky combat were seen as problematic in most games, the traditional survival horror took them as a positive boon. A seemingly less demanding public ate up these games with a big spoon, overlooking glaring faults in favor of videogames that could be genuinely terrifying." The Guardian's Games Blog has posted a response downplaying the decline of the genre, looking forward to Ubisoft's upcoming I Am Alive and wondering if independent game developers will pick up where major publishers have left off.
True horror/fright can only be produced by ones imagination. While Hitchcock understood this and did a decent job of using it only books ever get it right. Instead today as with movies you mostly get sub-par lighting that hides things from your view.
Remember the mess that Doom3(?) was that you couldn't hold your shotgun and flashlight at the same time? The game imposed a limitation on you that felt forced and limited the submersion.
One game that got it right; Thief. The suspense of trying to sneak, and then panic heart-attack when you step on a squeaky floor!
I have played Alone in the Dark, and many others in the genre but none have ever had me wound-uptight as Thief did.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I don't know anything about Left4Dead, but while I don't agree with the argument, Dead Space is in support of this argument: it's taken, along with Biohazard 4, as being "the future of survival horror", while actually not being survival horror at all; they're both action games in which you are, quite frankly, a pretty substantial badass compared to your opposition and there's little to no shortage of materiel.
You may as well call the Halo series survival horror, because the Flood are portrayed as kinda creepy.
Just because a couple of series that are notorious hallmarks of the genre arguably jumped the shark, it does not mean that the genre is necessarily in trouble. I don't know what specifically occurred in their development, but I do know the names drew a lot of attention. It's hard to avoid people coming in thinking 'it's pretty good, but we need to tweak it'. I have observed it in all sorts of long-standing products in all industries, some people manage to get a share of control that think they know what the customers would want better than the customers or the people who originally captured said customers' attention.
That said, I'm not sure what I would compare to Silent Hill (I didn't think overly much of RE, except to agree that RE4 dispensed with what few aspects of RE I found frightening). Left4Dead is a fun game, but it isn't quite comparable. Without a substantial narrative, it just isn't scary to the degree or type that Silent Hill has historically been.
I think the original Silent Hill team stepped away as they realized they were pretty much out of ideas on where to take things.
Fallout 3 has a lot of the same problems Oblivion did. Also, the writing and voice acting can sometimes be quite bad, and the plot sort of rushes and falls apart embarrassingly once you reach your father.
It's also breakable. I killed Burke before he could kill the sheriff Simms. When Burke died, Simms promptly disappeared in front of me, and all NPC scripts still acted like he had died. That's when I knew I was playing a typical Bethesda game.
I know you've been modded funny, but I think that's actually quite insightful. Left 4 Dead has proven that "die zombies die!" type of survival horror can be immensely popular - even more so than traditional scare-your-pants-off games like Silent Hill.
I know when I pick up a controller after a long day of work I don't want to be scared out of my mind - same reason why I have no great love for horror movies. If they were somewhat interesting in terms of story, sure, but like most horror movies, they are not - just a lot of pseudo-scientific Freudian psycho-babble by game designers who think they know horror. Yes, this applies to Silent Hill - they have perfected the art of scaring you, but not so much the art of writing a compelling storyline that isn't full of juvenile metaphors that's so thick you can cut it with a knife.
So given the choice between run-and-gun fun with my friends mowing down hordes of zombies, vs. playing a game with a dumb plot and too many "LOOK, WHATS THAT SKITTERING IN YOUR PERIPHERAL VISION?!" moments, I choose the former.
It is going dead because there are no quality games being made for this genre.
The Silent Hill series was great, but they stopped making games after SH3. SH4 was a different game with last minute changes to include the Silent Hill universe and had mixed reactions from fans, SH Origins and SH5 were not produced by KCET and had completely different American and European development teams. They both paled in comparison to earlier games in the series and reeked of shoddy effort.
RE4, while a wonderful game and hugely successful, blended survival horror with the action of an FPS. Capcom showed they could certainly make next-gen survival horror games with traditional elements like Resident Evil 0 and RE: Remake, but they seem to have no intention of making more games of that type.
Fatal Frame became more action oriented as time went on and the series is dead. Siren filled a very niche market and the new games appeal to some, but definitely not others.
For survival horror to get back on its feet, Konami needs to make traditional style RE games in parallel with the new model that RE4/RE5 use. God knows I'd buy both types. Konami needs to regroup the people involved with Silent Hill 1-3 and make a new game themselves, without farming off the rights to talentless developers with only a handful of poorly made games under their belt.
Survival horror is a genre that can come back at any time, providing somebody puts the effort into it. Other than Capcom keeping things going with RE5 (and its fun but untraditional stylings), there really isn't much more.
As others have said, Dead Space was not a survival horror game, it was a third person shooter and a pretty poor game at that. It's a pretty sad state when people think games like this are good. Standards certainly have lowered in recent years.
The first thing that annoyed me about it was the fact that your character takes up a full 1/3rd of the screen. People try to make excuses about it making the game more "immersive" but that's a load of crap. If they wanted it to be more immersive they could have just made it first person view. The way it is now it's just obnoxious since you can't actually see anything.
The second thing that annoyed me were the horrid controls. Sluggish mouse movement, sloppy camera control (why does the mouse make the camera rotate around the character instead of just making him turn?) and that you have to use two buttons just to fire your weapon (why wouldn't he always have his gun drawn?).
The next thing that annoyed me was the low quality of the voice actors. Wooden acting, badly written dialogue and paper thin plot are all present. Certainly nothing new in this area.
The last thing that annoyed me was the low quality of the visuals. This game looks like it was cranked out of a Russian development house (if you've ever played one of those low quality Russian made games, you'll know exactly what I mean by this). Everything from the terrible design of the main character's suit to the uninspired enemy models and generic metallic "tech" environments that all look exactly the same was poorly done.
the dance-on-a-pad-with-impact-sensors thing was done first by Bandai in '87 with Dance Aerobics.
Yep - it eventually became a standard Nintendo accessory called the Power Pad and there were a ton of clones.
LittleBigPlanet is a new thing, but it's a different kind of new thing; I'd even argue that it's a toy rather than a game, but it's a toy with an emphasis on making games with it.
It is not new, even slightly. First off, it's a generic side scroller. Nothing new there. It has a physics engine - which isn't really new to the genre, as even the original Super Mario Bros. had some very simple physics-based puzzles. It has a level editor - nothing new either. Games with level editors have existed on the PC for ages. Some SNES games had very simple level editors and I know several PlayStation games (as in PS1) contained level editors.
The only thing new about LittleBigPlanet that I can think of is that Sony seems to think people will pay $2 for costumes for their in-game character. And even crap like that isn't really new.