Silent Hill Heaven

this shit really might work very well I got some good feeling this time. Really it works well in other survivore games, shuld be working here as well, if it will be well toned. What about boss fights from the other hand

I doubt it's due to anyone complaining about Homecoming. Not being able to defend yourself would be a new kind of fear in the series though. I'm looking forward to it.

ok, these points come to mind:

no fighting= less exploration. if you HAVE to run from monsters, you cant stop to look around. to me, that is part of silent hill. being able to do a playthrough and stop to look at every detail and take it all in. and if you need to kill a monster to snoop around, that makes it more worth while. but if you are being chased, and you cant kill the monsters, you dont have the time to stop and examine stuff.

and, if you do fight bosses, what are you supposed to kill them with? will there just happen to be a gun laying there by chance? or a wooden plank? i dont see how they can avoid a combat system for 95% of a game. it may have worked for clocktower, but this is silent hill which is more successful than clocktower,which means it has more money at its disposal to improve the game.

This game should be a REMAKE, not a RE-IMAGINING!

not really mate. Monsters will try to fuck you from all sides possible only in Otherworld. So you will have time for exploration in foggy world or w/e calm reality

not really that either Krysta, the foggy world would have dogs,(homecoming had schisms and dogs and others) sh2 had the lying figures etc. there are enemies in every aspect of the game. and if they leave them out of the foggy world, that is just one more thing they would have completely biffed on.

>if you do fight bosses, what are you supposed to kill them with?

They could implement environmental interactions such as luring a monster into a trash compactor and throwing a switch.

As stoked as I am about this game, I really do hope that running from the monsters won't hamper my ability to take in my surroundings too severely.

^ right, i want to see the upgraded graphics and all the little details, i am just afraid that if you are always running that you wont fully be able to explore the whole game.

It is an interesting irony that Climax had the most annoying weapons concept (oh, joy! A katana that breaks after four hits!), and has now just said, "You know what? Screw the weapons."
Let's face it, fighting things in survival horror has been done to death. If you fight something, you know you can beat it. You know that, with time, and effort, eventually you'll overcome it. If you know, however, that your only option is to run away, that certainly adds to the terror.
Just to do it, I'm going to replay all the Silent Hill games now, and entirely avoid combat, except, of course, for boss fights. Should add a whole new layer of difficulty to it.

Actually, it makes the game a lot easier and not very scary. The only enemies you may have trouble running from are monkey men and Sniffers. There's a room full of Closers in Silent Hill 3's church, and running from them is not scary at all, whereas fighting them all head on is. It's really not the same as what Shattered Memories will be like, since enemies are slow and can't pursue you from room to room in the existing games.

I suppose that's true.
Still, any excuse to play the games again!

One of the things that I adore about the Silent Hill series so far (Have only beaten the first two games, working on finding the third) is how human the main characters are. They're not highly trained super-soldiers, martial arts masters, demon slayers, pirates, etc...

Maybe I'm just a cowered here, or maybe I'm too much of a pacifist, but how many of you can honestly say that you would prefer to stand your ground with something like a plank of wood, an axe, or a gun, against the nightmarish creatures that lurk throughout Silent Hill? If it were me, I'd turn around and get my ass out of there.

I like the idea of how your options with the monsters in this game seems to be based around one of those nightmares where you're being chased by some unknown pursuer.

On the other hand, this is the kind of idea that is either going to work wonderfully, or fall flat on its ass. They'll need to give Harry the kind of maneuverability that would be required for a decent chase. They've already mentioned how you'll be able to hop fences and use furniture to block doors, but it'll take a lot more than just that to keep all those chases fresh.

So far I'm looking at this decision with a sort of cautious optimism. I love that they're trying to be original with this one. The last thing I want to see is another Silent Hill game that seems like a blatant fan-made rip-off by using the same old monsters and plot elements.

SilentOne wrote:I was sitting down today, discussing the upcoming Silent Hill reimagining with my friends when one of them brought up a good point: could the exclusion of a combat system be considered a retaliation towards the people who bashed the Silent Hill Homecoming combat system?

While it's pure speculation, I find this thought very intriguing.

So? What do you guys think?

No combat system: an attempt at trying to make the player feel more "insecure" during the game, or are the combat system bashers to blame?

I think it is more a reaction to the direction in which the survival horror genre is moving. The template for a survival horror game has clearly changed. It seems games such as resident evil and silent hill are evolving in different ways, for all there differences the game merchanics of both were very similar in the initial stages (i.e. RE1 and SH1), resident evil have gone for a gears of war type approach and silent hill has moved towards a forbidden siren approach. I think the the lack of combat is to make you feel more vunerable similar to that in forbidden siren (even though there are weapons present in FS they are no very useful).

It's interesting what actually made games scary back in the 90's: It was what is now considered "bad controls" and "bad camera systems." When those aspects are updated, the scare factor is gone. But was it really ever scary to begin with, or an illusion? Silent Hill introduced (for me anyway) the psychological aspect of horror, being able to trick the mind. And what accidentally made silent hill scary: the lack of good draw distance. The fog and darkness was needed to hide the fact that the system wasn't capable of drawing distance to the level. It just happened to work to the game's advantage. The updating of technology and game design is proving to be the achilles heel of this series.

Sake wrote:There's a room full of Closers in Silent Hill 3's church, and running from them is not scary at all, whereas fighting them all head on is.

it is if you're playing on hard/extreme and only have about three first-aid kits in possession.

SGTCOOL wrote:The updating of technology and game design is proving to be the achilles heel of this series.

i disagree, and i feel the whole "bad controls make it scarier" argument is just an attempt to stick up for said bad controls. what makes silent hill frightening is the collective atmosphere, not relatively crappy video game mechanics.

With you on that, man. Bad controls aren't frightening, and don't add to atmosphere, they're annoying. Saying the old games were better with bad controls is like saying Korean POWs are better off because they were tortured after their capture.

Nah I don't think bad controls made silent hill scary. It was definitely the atmosphere. I still don't think silent hill 1 had bad controls, but if it controlled exactly like Homecoming within the exact same framework of the original, it would be a lot less stressful to play. And I believe that that stress as well as the atmosphere contributed to the overall scariness of the game.

SGTCOOL wrote:Nah I don't think bad controls made silent hill scary.

SGTCOOL wrote:The updating of technology and game design is proving to be the achilles heel of this series.

... huh.

SGTCOOL wrote:I still don't think silent hill 1 had bad controls, but if it controlled exactly like Homecoming within the exact same framework of the original, it would be a lot less stressful to play.

this, of course, is a good thing.

SGTCOOL wrote:It's interesting what actually made games scary back in the 90's: It was what is now considered "bad controls" and "bad camera systems." When those aspects are updated, the scare factor is gone. But was it really ever scary to begin with, or an illusion? Silent Hill introduced (for me anyway) the psychological aspect of horror, being able to trick the mind. And what accidentally made silent hill scary: the lack of good draw distance. The fog and darkness was needed to hide the fact that the system wasn't capable of drawing distance to the level. It just happened to work to the game's advantage. The updating of technology and game design is proving to be the achilles heel of this series.

yeah, I totally agree. I think it was also the time in which we played these games. I was about 14 when I got the silent hill demo with MGS and was hooked. I bought the game and did find it genuinly scary. I also thought the second one was too. I didnt like homecoming and I think there focus on reinventing the control system was a bad move as the basic frame work of the games mechanics is vastley outdated in the first place. I welcome this new change. I think in this day and age it is hard to revolutionise a gaming genre like silent hill one did. Influence wise you could compare it to the Exocist. When that film was released people thought it was the scariest thing about, there are reports of people running out of cinemas etc. After it was re-released it didnt scare anybody, due to multiple reasons which could be comparable to SH. It's moment past. However, like silent hill "Exocist" remains a cult classic with a huge following.
I think what climax is doing is comendable. People want another silent hill like the previous, it simply will never happen. Team silent will not make another silent hill and companies that try to mimic what they did will fail (homecoming), if anybody is honest that game is no where near the game silent hill 1,2 or 3 is/was. Its nice to see a company try to revolutionise the title and have the balls try and make a game with the impact SH1 had on its release. I support there ideas and vision. People who moan about them making the game. At least they are. If it wasnt for Climax or Double helix then you wouldnt have a new title to talk about, people would simply talk about the same things people did 6 months ago. The same ideas and theories would simply be repeated every 6 months. Been a silent hill fan no game will recreate what I felt at 14 and 15 playing the first couple of silent hill games. At least at 24 I have new titles to look forward to.

with saying all this I think FS is the best Survival horror game on the PS3 and there approach to horror (in terms of mechanics not story) should have been adopted by Double Helix.

I'm intoxicated and finding it hard to formulate decent arguments, bear with me. So I'll just say that all in all I'm for the removal of combat for I never found it to be much fun in previous entries. Except in homecoming, but it just felt out of place. And I didn't like the atmosphere in that one, so perhaps it would've felt appropriate if I was just "feeling" that game. I just feel like I'll never be satisfied completely with any new silent hill games, and I guess I'm just hoping that this new one will fill the void, so to speak.

I agree with you on the combat aspect of most previous Silent Hill games, SGTCOOL.

The real fun of the game came from trying to avoid enemies, exploring the town, and unraveling the story piece by piece. I've always had mixed feeling on SH's combat. On one hand, I find the awkwardness you encounter when facing an enemy adds to the realism of trying to fight hellish monsters with a character that has no combat experience. On the other hand, once you get the basic pattern down, combat becomes pretty basic and more of a test of patience than that of skill. Also, it simultaneously removes an element of realism, since the average person shouldn't be able to survive Silent Hill with brute strength.