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Comments
I think the worst thing is that he's blind to the alteration of the Silent Hill franchise and how this latest game is both an indicator of how far it's falling and how RPG mechanics are a force unto themselves, facing little criticism.
Silent Hill has moved further away from its ingenious horror roots to a more action-oriented experience based mostly on fanservice. And I don't mean in the libidinous sense; I mean in the traditional sense of the term. Enemies from previous games show up, despite the fact that every monster type is supposed to be a reflection of the playable character's psyche. It's one of the worst cases of dumbing down in any form of media, and the fanbase more or less just laps it up and even celebrates it.
And finally, whatever money this game makes will prove to publishers and developers that this kind of venture is profitable. I'm not against having a game series where different entries are different genres, but you can't move Silent Hill into an RPG without some pretty major tonal issues -- especially if that RPG is of the standard mold.
I mean, Silent Hill as an RPG almost sounds like a publisher's cash grab rather than the idea of a developer, right? It's that old "combine two unrelated but popular things and make lots of cash" thing, sense be damned. I remember that one developer, in interview, said that one publisher asked if he could make a "first-person shooter with vampire romance" -- this new Silent Hill game looks to work on exactly the same kind of twisted, thematically bankrupt logic that is almost solely the produce of publishers.
That's one of those occasions when a business makes a decision and I have to wonder if they've just given up. Like how Books A Million sells the Barnes and Noble eBook reader.
Yeah. Though I have to wonder if it started life as a Silent Hill RPG, or just an RPG that was later forced into the Silent Hill IP to make it more marketable.
>I kinda wasn't sure whether to agree or disagree with him. I mean, on the one hand, a game that's allegedly part of a series but really unrelated to it can be good in its own right, so it shouldn't be automatically dismissed
This much is true, but the whole thing if it's a good, unrelated game why the hell call it Silent Hill? I mean looking at the game it might be a good pseudo-Lovecraftian dungeon crawler but that sort of game is a betrayal of the very idea of the themes of Silent Hill. Brands aren't just names, they have a level of promises to them, statements of what a game is going to go on.
A Sonic the Hedgehog game without a blue guy running very fast might be a good game, but the title is lying to us.
I also like that he accuses DMC fans of taking Dante too seriously when in fact the complaint that fans are having is that it's going in a grim-and-gritty direction that saps out the contextual aspect of goofy-fun that made the original series so much fun.
I'm with Yahtzee that I think we should lay the Silent Hill series to rest. For a little while anyways. I think the town has more minds to fuck and stories to tell, but until the new developers figure out what that is it needs a hiatus.
Also, is anybody noticing that there seems to be a surge in SH popularity lately It was barely on the radar back when the good ones were coming out and now it seems to be a standard game for every other year or so. There was even that HD version that added in new voices for Silent Hill 2 that weren't as creepy.
Random question to which I don't have a correct answer in mind: If you spent a large amount of time and effort making a game, but publishers would only release it if you crammed in Silent Hill iconography to guarantee sales, would you do it? Because I feel like a lot of developers have been in positions like that.
I heard it also removed the fog. Is that true?
If I was going to turn Silent Hill into an RPG, I'd make it meta anyway. It'd be about an RPG nerd with an already tenuous grasp of reality, wherein the mechanics themselves shift and change, with character levels having more to do with the context and psychology of the situation than any experience gain. I guess his obsession would have fed itself into moral relativism via getting too close to the characters he was playing and the world he had inhabited, slowly replacing reality with his various fantasies until he finds a reason to go to Silent Hill and it all comes crashing down at once.
You know, Silent Hill would actually fit my "RPG where levels make you weaker" concept from earlier pretty nicely >.>
That would fit the theme nicely, wouldn't it? Higher RPG levels make your grasp on reality weaker, empowering the monsters even moreso than yourself. And the only way to get the best ending is to finish the game under a certain level.
Hmmm...it might even be interesting to have one stat for your character's confidence (increased by defeating monsters and maybe other stuff) and another for his sanity (decreased while in the presence of monsters and maybe other stuff). The two could both have independent gameplay and story effects.
I think measuring sanity and confidence would break the illusion; the former should be implicit within the game, and the second should simply be up to the player's own psychology. Having "trick" levels seems both simpler and more in line with the way Silent Hill works to me.
True. I'm pretty much just throwing ideas around.
>Random question to which I don't have a correct answer in mind: If you spent a large amount of time and effort making a game, but publishers would only release it if you crammed in Silent Hill iconography to guarantee sales, would you do it?
Like you said there's no right answer to this. Me, I probably would take the opportunity to get my stuff published, but I like to think I would understand why they'd feel betrayed.
Derp. I forgot we had the appropriate thread.
Playing New Vegas, and it decided to pull this stunt on me. Damn thing ate all my 9mm ammo.
Apparently they have a Monster Hunter exhibit at Universal Studios Japan, complete with a full-size anamatronic.
Playing Assassin's Creed: Revelations. On the scene at the start where you're being dragged behind a cart. Am I going to have to do this sort of bullshit a lot during the game? Because if so, I may just have to drop the series after all.
No. The cart sequence at the start was pure bullshit and there isn't anything as bad for the rest of the game. There is a similar chase scene at the end, but it is nowhere near as annoying as the cart chase.
And what happens after that? Another pointless entirely-new-mechanic setpiece, only this time, the win condition isn't what they tell you it is.
Um...does Ubisoft have even the slightest idea why people play Assassin's Creed?
Ninja'd: ah, okay, good to know.
Also played some Fortune Summoners, and it's good so far. The enemy AI is some of the smartest I've seen in a platformer.
Just picked up Sonic Generations again.
Someone should call Mario and tell him THIS is how you do the lives system.
But lives systems in general are terrible and annoying.
No, you're actually wrong.
You either end up with too many lives to the point where they become meaningless, or the game is annoyingly sparse with them requiring very cautious play or lives hunting/lives farming. I much prefer a system like Rayman Origins, where if you screw up the game sets you so far back in the stage. It can be as hard as it wants(and that game can be screen punchingly difficult) but it isn't an absolute hell if you fail and have to worry about your lives count.
Um, what?
Exactly Mario's problem.
This was kind of the point of the lives system in general. It was a system that penalized you for failure with -gasp- actual consequences, but wasn't extremely severe about them so you could learn from your mistakes.
Really, my problem is that you're only mentioning the extremes of the lives system. There are games that have their lives systems in between these two, and that works fine.
No, it was a holdover from arcade games to get players to put up for money to keep playing the game after they failed so many times. Since machines aren't coin op anymore(well one could start arguing about microtransactions for app games actually...) it's more annoying and pointless.
Look kicking a player back because they failed the stage and making them do it again is enough of a punishment. Forcing them to horde lives so they don't loose a lot of progress is just annoying.
Blegh. Along with the final boss the crappy lives system something I didn't like about Sonic Generations. Especially considering Sonic Colors didn't take a life away if you wanted to retry a stage, but Generations does.
Did you know how many Game-Overs I had to sit through before I could S-Rank a stage?
If anything I've concluded that S-ranks(or whatever the equivalent is) and 100% completion rewards are a video games way of punishing obsessive players and giving them an incentive to put the game down for a while.
Which version are you playing?
S-rank is supposed to be difficult to obtain. Remember how boring Sonic Colors DS' bosses were because you could S-rank them on the first try?
Punishing I get, but isn't it to encourage them to be even more obsessive?
Works fine to do what? Because the only difference in a game where you can save is the mild annoyance of having to go back to the main menu if that was your last life.
Lives did still have a purpose in early console games where you couldn't save and difficulty was the only way to add any length to the game, but if a game has saves, it should not have lives.
Obsessive gamers pretty much account for 50% of sales for most games.
Never mentioned saves.