At the recent Eurogamer Expo event in Birmingham, 4 developers from the world of horror games took part in a developer session all about fear and horror in games. This got me thinking, what is the future of the horror genre going to look like?
The possibilities of what a game can do has come leaps and bounds in recent times, the new generation of consoles and graphics cards are letting developers create photo-realistic creatures that move and act so fluidly that it’s easy to forget they’re only computer generated. But it isn’t just the appearance that’s been improved; creatures in video games are now being made to act and think, you can’t rely on memorising set paths anymore.
What does this all mean?
Well, if you take a look back to a game like Bioshock, here the true scares come from the scripted events. The first time you play it through and the dead body on the table leaps at you when you get close, the first time you encounter the creepy little sisters or their Big Daddys, it’s terrifying. Setting this script lets the developers create these perfect moments for the scares to happen, they can orchestrate it so that everything is working as they want it to be.
Surely this must be the best way to scare someone? Removing all the error, the chance that the dead body may not notice you and might end up being no more than a corpse in the corner. Why are they going away from this perfect construct, removing the script and letting the players ad lib their own story? Suspense.
Suspense is where the real fear lies and game developers know this now, whether they knew it already and needed the tools to create this ultimate fear is unknown, but what I do know is that suspense is the future. Ok, so that dead body can end up being useless, but now, with the player knowing that anything could happen at any moment, every moment becomes the time when a creature could appear. As broken as DayZ is in it’s current state, with zombies walking through walls and all, the suspense is incredible. When I think of a game with suspense, what comes to mind is dark, dank, confined spaces; a room cluttered with junk dimly lit with limited ways of escape. But DayZ is set in wide open fields, the map is huge and scarcely populated with urban areas, yet all the time you’re on your guard and that’s what makes a horror game. Never letting you feel safe.
One final mention is to VR, I’m still not sure just how big of an impact it’ll have in gaming, but the one genre that would benefit the most from it, is horror. Putting you into that scenario and making you believe that you are really there is a huge thing, when a monster jumps at you, it won’t stop at the edges of your monitor… oh no, it won’t stop at all. What you see won’t be a figure on a screen, it’ll be there, in front of your entire vision, close enough that you should be able to feel it’s breath hitting you in the face.
So whether it’s still a hit or not after it’s recent set-back, I still can’t wait to see what it brings to the world of fear.
