Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by fudgestix »

Lostkitsune wrote: My biggest con is another male protagonist.
It's probably not a bad thing. Somehow I can't imagine Kojima bringing that will rounded female horror protagonist we've been hoping for.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by NanayaShiki »

Lostkitsune wrote:My biggest con is another male protagonist.
Mm. It's a well known fact these days that most developers and publishers are terrified to deviate from the norm here, even though there's no real solid evidence that a female protagonist sells less. It's just something that they decided. Didn't Tomm Hulett make a post here saying that it's something that is very hard to do and the closest he could get is letting us create a male or female character in BoM? I swear I remember that.

Still, I won't consider a male protagonist a "con", exactly. I'd rather see something else, but I'm not going to take away points for it.
fudgestix wrote:It's probably not a bad thing. Somehow I can't imagine Kojima bringing that will rounded female horror protagonist we've been hoping for.
Hm, I don't think Kojima is particularly bad at writing females. It's hard to use MGS as a judge of his writing ability since it's intentionally over-the-top and sometimes cliche. Still, I'd say The Boss was pretty damn well written, a complex character with her own ideals and goals. Meryl is pretty interesting and well written too, if you ignore how her character is handled in the plot itself during the latter half of MGS1. Also, while I won't try and pretend she is a well written or complex character at all, I like Rose. I'm like the only person ever who did, but w/e.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Lostkitsune »

fudgestix wrote:
Lostkitsune wrote: My biggest con is another male protagonist.
It's probably not a bad thing. Somehow I can't imagine Kojima bringing that will rounded female horror protagonist we've been hoping for.
Really? I can identify pretty strongly with some of his female characters. The Boss and Dr. Strangelove are very close to my heart in particular.It's a silly thing to consider a con maybe I'm just tired of ANGSTY MALE WITH FAMILY PROBLEMS.
NanayaShiki wrote: Hm, I don't think Kojima is particularly bad at writing females. It's hard to use MGS as a judge of his writing ability since it's intentionally over-the-top and sometimes cliche. Still, I'd say The Boss was pretty damn well written, a complex character with her own ideals and goals. Meryl is pretty interesting and well written too, if you ignore how her character is handled in the plot itself during the latter half of MGS1. Also, while I won't try and pretend she is a well written or complex character at all, I like Rose. I'm like the only person ever who did, but w/e.
I agree with most of this, I like Rose too actually she just didn't get very fleshed out honestly.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Redklok »

I've played it yesterday, on my friends ps4 and I have to say although it was a brilliant way to introduce the new title: I hope the whole game doesn't follow this pattern. I don't know if I could handle it. Seriously knowing that you´re being followed and you shouldn't look back is one of the hardest things for me.
To be honest the cheap Slender game is one of the few games I can't tolerate.

So yeah it works to be nerve wrecking but it´s kind of a cheap tactic. Basically it toys with your primary instincts.

The final puzzle was too confusing. The solutions made no sense. Puzzles in SH never have been head hurtingly difficult (except when you played them on extreme), mostly cryptic things which you could sort of figure out. The solution here was sheer luck, seeing what works. But I understand that was the point of this whole package.

In the end though, this is all nitpicking at the moment I am satisfied that they somehow managed to restore my faith in a new Silent Hill, after the trainwreck the series had become.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Orestes »

Reverend wrote:Silent 2 and 4 don't mention alessa or the cult and I think they're better for it.
Are you sure? 2 was very much standalone, but I'm reasonably sure The Room was packed with references to the Order, though not to Alessa herself.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Redklok »

Orestes wrote:
Reverend wrote:Silent 2 and 4 don't mention alessa or the cult and I think they're better for it.
Are you sure? 2 was very much standalone, but I'm reasonably sure The Room was packed with references to the Order, though not to Alessa herself.
Yes actually it's Dahlia who taught Walter that room 302 was in fact his mother. Still the Order connection in SH4 feels somewhat shoehorned in, not so bad as Homecoming though.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Rinku95 »

The only thing that i don't like of PT is this poor interaction with all and the frustating final puzzle.

But what? PT is totally free. The Silent hill fans had nothing and suddenly, BOOM! A free demo reveals a new game in development by Kojima productions, Hideo kojima, Guillermo del toro and with the colaboration of Norman reedus. That's mindblowing. We can not complain, it's not fair.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Maynard »

dias17se wrote: this game will probably add a lot to the canon story and i quite fear that.
Reverend wrote:I hope not. Personally I don't care at all about silent hill 'canon', Silent 2 and 4 don't mention alessa or the cult and I think they're better for it. I feel like the town is a subjective thing that is different for every person who experiences it. 1 and 3 are great but I think they get bogged down in explaining too much. Some things are creepier left unsaid. And someone should have thought about that before they made those horrible movies.
But isn't this one of the main reasons the new games aren't up to par?
These people didn't bother to understand the story, and just copied (badly) SH2. So let me just ask you, how many great stories you can think of when you reduce the game to "someone did something bad and he goes to SH to be punished?" We're beating a dead horse.

I'm sure they could do a far better job than the previous devs following this formulaic version themselves, after all the teaser itself isn't anything really new anyway but by just being very well done it works. But would it really be that difficult for Kojima to reach Owaku so that he really knows what's what, maybe even get some inside knowledge of old scenarios, and finally move this series forward?

About the teaser, I can't really say they've done anything wrong. It says so at the end that it has no relation to the final game so there's nothing there to judge. I guess as a standalone, I think I disliked those messages that appeared like error/glitch messages. Those didn't fit and took you out of the game. Other than that it succeeded maybe beyond what they expected seeing how many people with no relation to the series are playing it and the coverage it got.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by alone in the town »

Maynard wrote:So let me just ask you, how many great stories you can think of when you reduce the game to "someone did something bad and he goes to SH to be punished?" We're beating a dead horse.
Well, I don't know. I think there are many ways you can take that concept and do something interesting and fresh with it. LostKitsune mentioned that the real problem with this concept isn't the idea, so much as it is that the idea is executed with protagonists who are too similar to one another, having problems that are too similar to one another.

Some fans are insistent about elements like combat with monsters and exploration and puzzles remaining (or reverting to) more or less what they were at the beginning. The tradeoff for keeping these elements static is that there are entire kinds of stories, which might work really well otherwise, but would make some of those elements (especially combat) nonsensical within its context.

It's a matter of, are we willing to sacrifice certain elements in order to open new doors? I am, but I don't feel like my opinion is shared by most fans.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Maynard »

Ryantology wrote:I think there are many ways you can take that concept and do something interesting and fresh with it. LostKitsune mentioned that the real problem with this concept isn't the idea, so much as it is that the idea is executed with protagonists who are too similar to one another, having problems that are too similar to one another.
Can you name one or two then? Maybe I lack any imagination (entirely possible). Because, the way I see it, this scenario is even more limited than 'the protagonist did something bad'. It's 'the protagonist did something bad under certain circumstances'. He wasn't evil. So you can't only not step it down but you can't really step it up either. So for example we've seen rape/abuse from the victims point of view, because who would make the decision to make a game where you're a kid abuser/rapist? Even if they made him a victim himself as a kid (circumstances), would it really be enough for people to be torn about him and not just flat out hate him? I don't think so. No wonder the protagonists are similar with similar problems. They're in a tight box for options.

Now say they choose to expand the story. Let's take the first unoriginal thing I can come up with. What happened in 1-3? They tried to birth a "god" and failed? Well what if they tried again with a different method (no backstory etc) and succeeded? What would that "god" do? What happens then? How would that "paradise" look like? Would it slowly cover the entire world? How are people experiencing it? What would the cult members think now, and how would they react? At least you wouldn't have to be a murderer to still have the monsters around or even end up in SH at all (although you would need to go back there to say kill that god). But you could make that take 2-3 games to "end". Or make it just one game, just so that at the end you can leave it with the rules changed and built from there. I'm sure there's people much more creative than dumb me that could come up with beautiful ideas and breathe new life to the series.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by FrankRD »

The way I see it, they could make it just about someone wandering into the town for something else other than personal baggage. In the first Silent Hill you had a father looking for his missing daughter after a car crash (principally, because I know at the end it all had a purpose for happening), or Henry being involved in that madman's master plan simply for staying in that damned apartment, both are horror tropes through and through but they're at least different than ''main character with emotional baggage'', so you can start from there, and then the answers as to why there are monsters, why the town does what it does (will there even be Otherworld/Fog World?), is where they'll have to get creative.

And it can turn out well... of course that would contradict the reasons we've been given in previous games as to why the town works like it does, mostly the SH2 concept we all (?) know and love that people in the town just face their own nightmares, which would further justify the title Silent Hills, but I'm only proposing the idea to show that it is possible for them to give us a different, non-predictable, main character for the game. And maybe they can introduce all these things without retconning nor depending on previously established stuff. I don't really know.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Leo Ho Tep »

Downpour had the great ideas of putting two persons who shared a history together in SH. But it could be used better in future installments.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Schizzy »

Man, I thought Henry looked pretty haggard in Downpour, but he really looks like he's seen some shit now.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Skele »

My guess is they'll do what the first game did, by throwing an innocent person into SH. I doubt they'll give us another protagonist that's killed someone, and has made their way to SH only for us to figure out the how/why. I'm really eager to see what we'll get, but I think I'm going to purposely keep myself in the dark with this game. The less I know going into it, the better my experience will be.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Reverend »

Maynard wrote:ss

But isn't this one of the main reasons the new games aren't up to par?
These people didn't bother to understand the story, and just copied (badly) SH2. So let me just ask you, how many great stories you can think of when you reduce the game to "someone did something bad and he goes to SH to be punished?" We're beating a dead horse.

I'm sure they could do a far better job than the previous devs following this formulaic version themselves, after all the teaser itself isn't anything really new anyway but by just being very well done it works. But would it really be that difficult for Kojima to reach Owaku so that he really knows what's what, maybe even get some inside knowledge of old scenarios, and finally move this series forward?

About the teaser, I can't really say they've done anything wrong. It says so at the end that it has no relation to the final game so there's nothing there to judge. I guess as a standalone, I think I disliked those messages that appeared like error/glitch messages. Those didn't fit and took you out of the game. Other than that it succeeded maybe beyond what they expected seeing how many people with no relation to the series are playing it and the coverage it got.
All I'm saying is the cult story has been told, and is one of my least favorite silent hill stories. That doesn't mean copy sh2, just that sh2 didn't need an explanation for what "started" the town. If they had included the alessa backstory, the game would have been worse. The new game could be about any kind of protagonist with any kind of history, and the "Silent Hill" world can change to reflect that.

Just like telling us Silent Hill is a real town in West Virginia where a coal mine started on fire and still burns to this day makes it about 100% less interesting, the alessa story is very traditional and sh2 went a more interesting route. We should begin each Silent Hill story once again knowing nothing about the town, or if the town is even a real place (and even finish that way too). Instead of a guy with dirty laundry, make it a Job character, I don't know. The problem with the last few guys was they were all attempts at James clones. With manly combat skills.

Basically, in my humble opinion, ambiguity is what makes these games terrifying. Silent Hill needs no canon. They are standalone psychodramas and Silent Hill is a substrate for them to flourish in. Change whatever you want.

You know... Silent Hills....
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by KingCrimson »

I think the central kernel of the Silent Hill story is not the buildings and streets themselves, but the fact that they sit upon a volatile psychic energy source. Where it came from, what it wants (if anything), why it happens to inhabit Silent Hill, we don't actually know. I wouldn't mind a Silent Hill story that addresses the pre-cult existence of the town's power by taking it out of that context completely. Hey, maybe the "s" at the end of "Silent Hills" means this game will take place somewhere else, not even geographically located near the actual town of Silent Hill. It could be that whatever power inhabits the New England town was driven elsewhere, maybe someplace in the Midwest, where another bunch of locals got wrapped up in it and developed a cult-like organization around it, but with other purposes. I am reminded of the horror writer Thomas Ligotti's expression of supernatural/cosmic horror: "behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world."
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Reverend »

I agree with you in the sense that the common thread in the games is that people's darkness leaves darkness behind; the world is supernaturally/psychologically tainted by something happening in the past. A la the Shining. You could make a game that lifts the story of the Shining and call it Silent Hill ;)

I kind of view sh2 as a more grown up remake of silent hill 1. They have a ton of similarities and I think 2 did it again but better, subtler, more mature.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by demon child 7 »

Somehow I feel more motivated to list my gripes than to list my pros. But there are a few things I really didn't appreciate at all. First off I really am not a fan of first person view. I do not ever want to see a Silent Hill game done that way. I have read some talking about it and maybe a switch that allows you to see the game from your preferred perspective would be fine. At times the first person view is a good way to look at stuff ala Homecoming. But I want third person view for most gameplay.

Secondly I don't want a Silent Hill game without combat. Yes I want challenge yes I want scares yes I want to feel powerless at times to punctuate the dire circumstance. But I want to be able to come back and prevail I want to put the monster down not just run from it. So please always include combat.


Third and most pointed gripe is the puzzles were way, way, way too hard. Did I mention WAY? Because I never got to finish the trailer I only played most of it. The way I understand the final solution you need to speak or understand several languages. Also you need to do some complex code breaking to figure out something. Lastly you need to talk to the game so that it finishes the loop. In one way I am impressed both with the way they hoped to pool the resources of the global community to finish it. That was in a way Epic cool. But that global experience robbed others of figuring it out for themselves. I love a good walkthrough. What I love more is being able to find solutions quickly with the clues given in the game. I don't want to spend more than 15 minutes trying to figure out a puzzle. I don't have the time for that kind of thing. Also this kind of puzzle solving just isn't my thing. Hat's off to all of you who figured it out. You are a group of collective genius masterminds.

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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by Self-Seeker »

The way the story's given to us over the radio...was just cheesy. The idea is for it to sound like a real police report until it starts going agro on us, but it never sounded real to me. So when it went weird it was far less jarring and unsettling than it should have been.

The monster/s were just freaky looking people. I LOVE Silent Hill's abstract, almost human monsters (as opposed to the Groaner, Floatstinger, Split-Head, Double Head, Split Worm, Toadstools, etc.) but s/he was far too normal looking for me. Spooky for sure, but still too normal. But they could be saving their original monsters for the game (especially if they think they're good and don't want to spoil the surprise) so I'm not too worried or annoyed by that.

I suppose I didn't like the killing you observe through the peephole. Didn't feel real the same way the radio didn't.

But really...that's all.
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Re: Cons! What the teaser could have done better! ಠ益ಠ

Post by put_here_2_feel_joy »

It's been a very long time since I've even thought about posting on here. This demo has certainly piqued my interest. I've only been able to see it through YouTube play through videos. So far, I see the good, the bad and a little of the ugly. I would have preferred more visually "ugly" things. The fetus was ugly in the right way. More of this, please.

The level of difficulty (stepping over this side of the line of ridiculous) of the ending puzzle was too much. Everyone seems to understand on here that this was "intentional." Kojima did this on purpose. Well 'eff that. I don't like that a game would make me guess my way through a puzzle with NO clues. A game that, unless I have an vast supply of patience with just the right ammout of curiosity, would want me to ask others for assistance.

This demo has a lot going for it. Atmosphere is top notch. I wish with all my might that the devs would read our posts on these forums. Maybe they could stop making huge mistakes (just one example being hireing Korn to clamber out a new theme song) and actually make a game worth playing. While some of us are trolls, most of these posts are full of constructive criticism.

Take the free advice, Kojima.
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