Both of our opinions are based more on preferences than anything else. Don't try to pretend like your preferences are somehow more "logical," because that's BS. You apparently think that ALL games with some sort of combat should automatically have a combo system. That's a pretty narrow minded view.
And more point dodging. Has nothing to do with saying my preferences are my sensible than yours. It's saying that adding combos in an effort to add improvements to the fighting mechanics is not only logical, but stone cold common sense. None of your criticisms have any sound reasoning within them. "Combos are in fighters, hack and slashers, and beat 'em ups. They don't feel like Silent Hill" is an unreasonable excuse. By that logic you may as well consider the concept of being able to gun down the monsters in the game "un Silent Hill like" just because FPS or TPS games focus on gunplay or saying item collecting isn't befitting in Silent Hill just because RPGs have that function.
Have you ever heard the phrase "less is more"? There's a variety of reasons why a simpler approach might be better.
You're talking about gameplay and Silent Hill isn't exactly something like Haunting Ground. It was designed from SH1 with fighting in mind with both melee and firearm weapons. SH3 and SH4 took steps to improve combat by adding the ability to block, equip items via R3, and charge up attacks. I know you're likely going to say "well, they didn't have Virtua Fighter combos either so that doesn't mean they should have them." It doesn't mean they can't either. If the previous developers think it's a good idea to tighten the fighting mechanics, then that should tell anybody it's only logical to do the same in future installments. And that's what you should do. You should strive to make improvements instead of trying to be lazy. Besides, new combat abilities, monster weaknesses, character weaknesses, can have the potential to introduce new challenges and tension.
For example, what if our design goal with the next Silent Hill was *realism*? Fights in real life are not combo heavy...
If you want to get onto the subject of realism, not everybody is going to fight the same way in real life and not everybody is going to swing a knife or pipe in just 1-2 hit combos. You're just overgeneralizing.
sometimes they even end in one blow. If we wanted to make a fighting system that felt more realistic and gritty, then we might not want to have a combo system at all, but rather we might want to focus on a variety of moves that only strike once or twice, and you have to pick and choose the correct move and be more worried about timing and positioning. IMO, this sort of combat system would work much better for a Silent Hill game than a combo system.
Except people by nature have the inherent ability to use quick combo movements with weapons like a knife or rod type of weapon if a situation ever arises. You don't have to be some military trained person in order to so especially with something like a knife. Being in a crazy situation like Silent Hill surrounded by monsters would be reason enough to fight more desperately and ferociously. Only having the ability to strike only once or twice would get old quickly and lessen the amount of strategy needed in dealing with enemies. When you have a limited amount of abilities the chances are greater that they'll grow dull quicker. If you want to true realism, people's movements with weapons are not going to be as limited as you're suggesting they are. All I'm seeing here is that you have a distorted idea of realism when it comes to people fighting with weapons.
Just to reiterate: you don't need a combo system to have a variety of moves. Also, you don't necessarily want to have too many moves, because then the player feels like they need to study their character and memorize the moves, which is not necessarily good for a horror game because the controls should feel intuitive.
Of course you don't need combos to have a variety of moves but why not have no both instead of one or the other? Why limit yourself to just certain ones? And there's nothing unintuitive about combos. They're simple to learn and Silent Hill is never going to have long type combos you see in Tekken. And how is it that studying the character and memorizing their moves can't be good for a horror game? It's horror. Part of the experience is observing everything around you and taking the necessary steps to survive. Having to observe enemy movements and time attacks/dodges would only further strengthen that and you counteract. Having to time attacks and dodges is what counteracts the fear of empowerment because you can't exactly mash on the attack or dodge buttons and expect to get out of danger right away.
You have to remember first and foremost that it's a video game. It's not a good idea to strip down gameplay in the name of immersion when immersion is a subjective matter anyway.
Actually I did, but you ignored it:
You provided a list. You didn't actually provide a solid example of "okay, instead of having combos let us have the play do this blah blah blah" until this post you made. In fact, the list you rounded off is just more or less helping my point. For example, you listed timing and I provided an example of how timing can factor into the gameplay and provide tension that can be effective in a horror game.
Of course there are other ways to induce horror. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try to tighten those concepts as much as possible though. Look at Downpour. Combat was dumbed down in order to convey a feel of helplessness, but it got a lot of complaints of being hard, annoying, etc. and despite the combat there were still complaints that the game wasn't scary with one of the main complaints being monster design. While fighting mechanics are not the number one aspect of the series, they are important none the less and they should not be ignored. Silent Hill isn't just three or four elements like story, atmosphere, puzzles, etc. It's about many different concepts coming together in as fluid and effective of manner as possible.
That's just ridiculously false.
No, actually it's true. The rest of your post just further verifies my point.
Combos in Homecoming can only consist of a string of light attacks, heavy attacks can only be used at the end of combos. Because of this limitation, there is generally only 1 useful combo for every weapon: A, A, A, X. That is the sequence of buttons players will be repeating throughout the entire game. How the hell is that "varied and numerous?"
How the hell is that various? The fact that none of the previous games even had combos like that nor did they even have heavy attacks. You just have the downward swings and the side attacks that could be used in combos. The only "heavy" sort of attacks the series had was when SH4 added the ability to charge attacks. And even then they took out the ability to do those side swing attacks the first three games had.