Quote: Original post by destron
When you think about it, Half-Life 2 is a LOT more realistic than Doom3, especially on the subject of monsters and monster placement.

Haha, It's sorta a paradox when you think of monsters being realistic, considering they aren't real?

Quote: Original post by destron
There's not much in the way of ambient music

According to some interviews, id was actually going for the ambient music.

Quote: Original post by Tom
After a while, imps leaping from behind closed doors ceases to be the least bit scary and simply becomes annoying.

Yes, this is true, but short lived. Once you get passed this part in the game, It gets very exciting. The best part in the entire game is at the end when your in Hell.

Quote: Original post by Tom
The flashlight also annoyed me. There was absolutely nothing scary about having to constantly switch between the flashlight and whatever weapon I wanted to use.

I actually enjoyed beating zombies over the head with the flashlight. I thought it was funny haha. Either way, they did away with the flashlight in the Doom 3 expansion pack Resurrection of Evil. They made a pistol/light combo.

All of this is probably off topic, and the thread is probably nearing the end of its lifetime; but I couldn't resist to respond. Doom 3 is my favorite game lol. The only disappointing part of the game for me was how short it was and the very beginning drags on without action for a while.

Okay, before I tell you what I think will make a game "disturbing" I want you to know, I havn't read any other of the replys, so sorry if I have seemed to have copied someone, I will read through after thou =]

Anyways, what I believe is that most games are "jumpy" not actually creepy. I am not certain but I don't think that there is a horror genre game that doesn't actually make you scared enough that you don't even want to turn on the "in-game" torch or turn on the "in-game" light, you just want to stay in the dark like nothing exists. All horror genre games seems to be are quick shocks that make you stop playing for a maximum of 5 minutes to get your breath back.

What I would say is yes, do have scenes that are made to make people jump out of their skin but also have long periods of time that are made to make people think they are a b o u t to jump out of their skin.

After writing and actually thinking, I beleive you will need "jumpy" bits in the game as when people realise there isn't going to be any jumps, they will run through the game without breaking a sweat and this will just ruin the experience all together.

The best way to make something disturbing to others is think of what disturbs you and then translate it. Odds are you'll hit a relatively universal chord.

For me, the things I find most disturbing are taking familiar objects/people and then altering that image to make it more perverse. A great recent example is in the movie 1408 when the alarm clock (a familiar object) constantly switches a song on and then begins a countdown to the protagonist's death. A familiar object, but with a twist.

But, my favorite example of this has to be the chestburster in Alien. O'Bannon takes a very familiar and intimate thing (birth, human sexuality) and makes it grotesque by having a man be essentially raped by an alien and then give birth to its offspring through his chest.

That's just me personally, though. So some general advice is simply to take universal fears (unknown, heights, claustrophobia, etc.) and work them into the atmosphere, either obviously or subliminally.

The Uncanny Valley reference is good. Another idea comes from Stephen King's "On Writing," I think: his description of three levels of fear.

The first is the gross-out: you're in the dark when a severed eyeball lands on you. Gross!
The second is fear: you're in the dark when a huge fangorious monster leaps out at you. Eek!
The third is terror: you're in the dark when you hear heavy breathing behind you, and you turn around and see nothing, but you sense something big and nasty somewhere nearby, waiting...

The moral is that understatement and lack of information can be good for creating a frightening mood. One drop of blood in an unexpected place, say, or a lifeguard discovering that at the end of the day, there's one abandoned pair of shoes by the pool. Not only do you sense that something bad is going on, you're helpless at the moment because you lack the information to do anything about it. And you know that when you do investigate, you're probably not going to like what you discover.

One other idea would be to challenge people's basic knowledge about how the world works. Suddenly you can't trust the floor beneath your feet, the air, the food, your clothes, your friends, etc..

F.E.A.R and Slient Hill (I only played the first one) are good examples of how to do that.

Silent Hill was scary and disturbing because of:
Audio - You hear the PC's breath, heart beat, echoes, and everything else tends to be fairly quiet until your getting attacked by something

Imagery - The world around you gradually got darker as the game progressed, lighting was very important, there was plenty of blood, sharp objects laying around, and butchered bodies. This stuff was every where. The PC would tremble constantly. You had to watch bad things happen that you could not stop.

Gameplay - You were a clumbsy, shaking, unauthentic, ordinary joe clutching a little crow bar, trying to save his daughter, in a world full of athletic demonic creatures that what to kill you. Even worse, everything you did only made that world more harsh.

F.E.A.R was scary and disturbing because of:
Imagery - The PC would have random "delusions" where your vision becomes blurry and figures in the dark try to attack you or they do bad things that you want to stop. Things would randomly fall from the ceiling when you walk up on them, cinematic events were triggered often and in places you may not expect. You could never stop the bad things from happening, you had to sit through them.

Audio - You hear whispers in the dark and are constantly taunted by voices that you cannot reach.

Gameplay - During "halucinations" your character still had the ability to move but and shoot but you were much slower and shooting didn't always have an effect. Also, it wasn't clear whether the things you saw existed in the real world or not. Then the episodes would end abruptly and leave you where you were before you started making it seem as though you must have been hallucinating.

I think the key to making a game "disturbing" is the ways in which you take control out of the player's hand but still include them in the action. Silent Hill did this by making your character physically weak and shakey (this did annoy some, but I appreciated the change from the Resident Evil way), and F.E.A.R did this with well timed scenes of hallucinations that were beyond the PC's control, and both subjected the player to cinematic scenes of things they would want to stop but could not.

I also think the second biggest element is timing. By timing event's to occur when they are least expected, or at least when they are least desirable, you keep the player on their toes. After that there is pacing; by allowing the player to slow down and think things are ok you prepare them to be surprised again when things are not ok. Of course that is partly related to timing, but it is important to slow things down or the effect of surprise wears off and turns into fatigue and grinding.

So if you effectively leverage the players freedom to engage in the action against their handicaps, employ good timing, and keep up a well varied pace you can create a "scary" atmosphere. You should also use sound effects (I believe this is the more important factor) and imagery to heighten the suspension of disbelief.

About Doom3: It was creepy for a few levels, but having some butt-ugly jump out of a wall every time I step on a power-up got...old. It's not surprising if I am sure it's going to happen. It's not even interesting, backing over another power-up with my flashlight on in a fully lit room. The quality missing is "unusual," or out of the ordinary, and Doom3 made that particular scene the norm.

In the same vein, I have to point out a hazard of the idea behind the last post; that is, to subvert the player's control when he needs it most. If this is done exactly once during the entire 40-hour single-player campaign, then it could be good--If it had a very good reason. It might also be usable if the player were knowingly taking a stim pack with side effects. That way a player would choose to make the tradeoff, and could get practice playing in an altered state. But causing the player to lose their real playing experience as a surprise is not a good thing in general, and is apt to cause frustration rather than being disturbing.

Frustration is a poor substitute for challenging a player, the work of a weak demi-god. Loki, perhaps. Tee-hee, you have to reload a save game. Is that fun for the player? Is that good for game reputation/sales?

If the player loses, it should be his fault. As in: He knew that wouldn't work, but he just had to try it anyway. Or he just went blundering through there without so much as a thought about where the enemy would be. Great times to pay the price for stupidity.

The best way to make material disturbing whether its a book, movie or game is to create a charater that the viewers can relate to one which subconsiousely they could see themselves as, then create a situation that is extremly upsetting and psycologically unsettling. The viewers therefore see themselves as that character and as a result it will produce that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach.

The scariest and most well-handled horror scene ever IMO is the one in Poltergeist, where the kid wakes up and the clown is gone, he checks both sides of the bed and the second time it appears and attacks him. The reason this is scary is because the audience Know it is going to happen, they are waiting for it when he checks the bed but sits back up and they relax; then you exploit that moment of calm and relaxation to hit them with what they were expecting all along. So for example you have the player expecting an attack so badly as they enter a room with flickering lights, then let them down for a minute, don't give them the scare. Then (and timing is imperitave) just as they have calmed down hit them with the attack/apparition/whatever they were expecting before.

Out of all the video games I have played, nothing has seriously startled me or frightened me, with a few exceptions.

To have a perfectly clean room, that appears to be non-threatening. Perhaps a child's bedroom with bright colors and little toys laying around. With a door on one wall that has fluids leaking out of it.

Open the door, flip a light switch, and see gutted bodies hanging down from the roof with cult designs on the wall and blood splattered everywhere. Then see a child crawling on the wall, dislocating limbs as he's crawling.

The door shuts behind you, environment goes dark.

Good horror/suspense is about contrast, and unpredictability. If I am expecting what I see, then no shock is delivered. If I see blood and gore for three hours straight, it becomes old and mundane, no matter how twisted it becomes. A 10 hour game with 1 minute of extreme gore will shock me more than a game thats all gore. This is the contrast thing. That is why on the FEAR game cover box there is a little girl. Little girls = innocent. Which is the exact opposite of what she ends up being truly used for. Exploiting the familiar and particularly comfortable for horror is typical and for good reason. So many horror movies include little girls, dolls, and the like because you aren't expecting them to be evil. Now because of that they aren't quite as horrific as they used to be when they all the sudden transform into something horrible, so it would be good to find less used object but with the same qualities.

Another thing you have to consider is this generation is more desensitized than the last etc because of the horrors we see on tv and movies, etc. What this means is, while you don't have to avoid visual stimuli, you cannot rely on them. As AngleWyrm said, Doom3 only creeps you out at first. You quickly filter out all the gore and the jumping creatures, growling etc. Fear is a much better example of what you need to do. The creepiness has to pervade every area of your game. Lets compare two movies. Silence of the Lambs and Alien. Now I don't know about you, but definitely Silence of the Lambs was a lot more disturbing than alien. But why? Alien created a horrendous beast that massacred humans. While Hannibal was just, well, a cannibal. A great way to disturb people, is to take the normal and mundane, and make it the opposite. Everyone expects a monster to eat people, they do not expect an intelligent doctor to eat people. That he does makes it all the more creepy. And again, which move had more gore? Definitely Alien. But which one was creepier? Again the Silence. This was because in Alien, the gore was used to supplement the action, but in the Silence, it was used to enhance the grotesque nature of Dr. Hannibal. So in short, ideas can be much more creepy than visuals.