What's scary in survival horror settings in the sense of being alone, or in a group of people left behind by the world, as it plunged into chaos. This won't happen with millions of players running around.

Completely disagree, your reasoning is flawed.  Just look at WOD, been selling games for a long time.  The secret world will be a success too.

First time you really messed up Coyote.

Originally posted by demonic87

What's scary in survival horror settings in the sense of being alone, or in a group of people left behind by the world, as it plunged into chaos. This won't happen with millions of players running around.

How about smaller servers, or more sharding taking place?

Originally posted by nyxxis

greyghost79 you have some great idea's.

I like the base idea, expanding on it, needing to have someone manning the defenses at all times, or getting over ran and actually loseing it and having to fight for it aggain or moving on.

All items in the game would have to be dynamic, to fortify a position, or better hope that door to your back holds up.

No respawns, unless of course you dont burn bodys and they regen eventually. Instanced citys or states or countrys. To me what makes scary is the hope you will survive untill the end and all thhe crap that keeps popping up to stop you from seeing that end.

I think with the perma death idea, there would have to be set "safe" zones to log out in or some sort of defense. As you cant be logged in 24/7 you couldnt just log out anywhere and hope that you arent surrounded by stuff that wants to kill you the second you log in blam perma death have to restart.

Skill based leveling, as everyone would know how to properly use everything as a weapon all the time. Plus if your human you wont get uber strong by lvling to 50 you would just better at using the weapons you have used alot.

Theres alot of idea that could work but being fesible is a different story.

 

Feasible would apply mainly to the AI needed to pull off a game like this. The rest we know can be done as it's being done in other games already. You could mix in a lot that would make it worth sticking around. 

FFXI has had some good ideas with besieged and campaigne (Waves of mobs attack outposts and players are to defend them. Towns could be won and lost with this type of system and zombies tend to make great wave type of enemies). This would be one of the areas that having many players in one place would be a benefit. 

GW2 dynamic event system would be nice in certain areas/missions/quests/w/e with the scalling difficulty and multi branching setup. Zombies attack town A) you succeed in defending. Yay the town stays safe. B) You fail. Boo now you must help the remaining survivors escape. A2) You help the survivors escape. now you must scavenge what you can from the now lost town while evading the hordes of zombies and escort them safely away. B2) Boo they all died. You must now escape because players are the only targets left. 

Something along those lines anyways. 

Originally posted by Ozmodan

Completely disagree, your reasoning is flawed.  Just look at WOD, been selling games for a long time.  The secret world will be a success too.

First time you really messed up Coyote.

WOD was a leading contirbutor to the emo angsty horror genre.

Secret world maybe a success but not because it is scaring the shit out of anyone.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

Completely disagree, your reasoning is flawed.  Just look at WOD, been selling games for a long time.  The secret world will be a success too.

First time you really messed up Coyote.

 

Actually I agree with Coyote. I have no doubt in my mind that a decent horror game probably wont happen. With hollywood skewing the names of innocent vampires and werewolves to make them more teen-romance instead of horror like they were intended, they wouldnt be as scary as they were originally designed to be. And lets be serious. The lvlcappers and dumbasses outweigh the real gamers and would probably do more to destroy horror.

 As for Secret World, it may look good in some of the trailers and what not but lets wait for the release. Im pretty sure Funcom will find one way or another to screw your comment over. This they never fail to do.

In the end horror mmo just wont cut it

lol oh Coyote, your column always makes my day.

the first part really sums up how I feel about the MMO genre as a whole and why I have spent so much time in Skyrim. because other people are a**hats and ruin the game. to the point that i would rather listen to guards saying "I took an arrow to the knee" than "omgbewbs" say chuck norris jokes.

The sad thing about Coyote's column this week is that these exact same detractors apply to every type of MMO. Any spicy cool game setting is going to be sanitized, marginalized, and homogenized by the MMO making process into something about as palatable as distilled water and white bread. And further processed into sh*t by the huge wave of MMO lemmings we now get in every game who care about nothing but the end of the journey.

I disagree about the point about perma-death.  I don't think that's really what's necessary.  In current games, you can expect to win most fights.  If you lose and die, it's because another mob patrolled into you, or you had lag, or something like that.  Perma death would happen to people mostly by accident.  How would you like to lose months of effort on a character because the client crashed in the middle of a fight?

No, what would be much better for horror is simply substantially increased difficulty in combat.  Players should have to flee much more often.  Enemies that you expect to defeat aren't scary, no matter how bad the consequences for failing are, because you don't think those consequences are going to happen.  Enemies that will probably crush you, those are much more frightening to a player.

Good article. I would still try to play a Horror themed MMORPG if it wasn't obviously copied from Vampire Diaries or Twilight.

Too many people could be managed by instancing zones...only 10 people per zone allowed, if there are more than 10 people, another instance spawns and that's where the new players go. Kind of like Champions Online - 1 world, 1 server, but a lot of instanced zones.

Dumb names...well...if the world ended tomorrow, do you think the stupid people in your neighborhood would keep their own names, or would they come up with new, post-apocalyptic names to make themselves 'cooler'. How many people named 'Shadow' or 'Scar' would show up in the local trading post between zombie mobs? That's probably more realistic than we'd all like.

As far as story goes, I think you could handle that the way that Star Wars does but to the nth degree - keep the player isolated in their story line so that they get that sense of isolation and the idea that they are there by themselves.

It would probably still not be actual Horror though, not the way that single player Horror/Survival games are.

Originally posted by Athcear

I disagree about the point about perma-death.  I don't think that's really what's necessary.  In current games, you can expect to win most fights.  If you lose and die, it's because another mob patrolled into you, or you had lag, or something like that.  Perma death would happen to people mostly by accident.  How would you like to lose months of effort on a character because the client crashed in the middle of a fight?

No, what would be much better for horror is simply substantially increased difficulty in combat.  Players should have to flee much more often.  Enemies that you expect to defeat aren't scary, no matter how bad the consequences for failing are, because you don't think those consequences are going to happen.  Enemies that will probably crush you, those are much more frightening to a player.

While I agree with there needs to be enemies that can crush you the problem with out perma death or some significant loss there is not much fear in trying anyways. I mean in MMO's you simply respawn, in many single player games you simply load a previous save. I know personally if there is an enemy that seems impossible to defeat I simply respawn and try again in different ways until I've exhausted all my possibilities solo. 

Many do the same but then proceed to the next step...... zerg it. Throw as many bodies as you can at it until it dies. 

There isn't much fear if there is nothing to lose. Sure it can be terrifying if that creature can kill you in 1 hit, but it simply doesn't mean much if you can just get back up. 

Perma death for me is needed to get them to flee. 

There is Requiem already out there, and I think that's about as close as your going to get for a horror MMO.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

Completely disagree, your reasoning is flawed.  Just look at WOD, been selling games for a long time.  The secret world will be a success too.

First time you really messed up Coyote.

What WoD mmos are there that are selling exactly? or am i missing something since the article is about horror MMOs.

@ Coyote

Bravo, sir. You've stated my feelings exactly.

I grew up with the old, black and white, horror movies. Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi, the Wolf Man, etc...

The first book reports I ever did in school were on classic horror novels.

Seeing what passes for all that today....

I absolutely agree with the article.

This article was superficial and got everything dead wrong (hahhaha pun GET IT?)

first,  notice all those scary movies that include vamps, werewolves, zombies AND ghosts..   yup, THERE'S  NONE.  this is so because different types of horror need to build different types of tension.

second,  this article presupposes (God knows why, as this mistake seems to plague every mmo.com story about horror games)  that the bad guys MUST BE OPEN TO PLAYERS.  this is the wrong approach.  while it would be to the games advantage to include human player vs player, as a form of competition inthe face of rising tensions, the badguys must be inhuman, unfathomable computer generated killing machines.  they must be suicidal in their rush to kill the players.  this can come in varying degrees of subtley (they dont have to run into gun fire) but they must bring a single minded lust for the players death, that wont be replicated by allowing player zombies in a zombie game.

third,  Horror isnt a style you can create with a coat of paint or a type of clothing!!  making a 17th century Dracula movie wont simply be scary because it includes the trappings and superficial setting as other traditional horror stories.  if you dont know how to handle your monster (letting players be evil incarnate, wont be very scary for them, and scary for none if all players can simply log into their werewolf charater and tear #$% up.)

the point im hitting over the head with a hammer is the horror is all about setting tension, using build up, music/sounds, and frenetic activity that challenges the players sense of control.  i wish the writers at mmorpg.com would put some actual thought into this, and stop preventing any chance of an ACTUAL horror game from being produced.  like i said about, they focus on the most superficial concepts, as though zombie movies are scary based on the fact that zombies are wearing authentically ragged clothing. 

Originally posted by ArEf

Easy way to fix all this:-

Only allow the players to be humans. They get killed, they get killed for good.

AI is endless swarms of zombies, massive zombie-horde summoning whatevers and creepy mofos who'll climb up walls and then eat your brains.

Players are bastards who'll kill you and steal your stuff.

Why is this so hard?

this is the perfect idea for a zombie mmo.  it captures all the actual elements that are scary, challenging, and tense of about zombie horror. letting people be zombie just wouldnt be fun, and would be totally missing the point of the genre. 

but no zombie players.

unless someone wants to name all those zombie movies that focused on a single zombie ambling around and chasing people.

I agree with you, but not for the reasons you say. I think horror as a genre, isn't really horror unless it's either scaring someone or blowing people away with gratuitous amounts of gore. This works in single-player games, because they eventually end.

But could a horror MMO be made that keeps me constantly frightened, through months if not years of gameplay? Doubtful. People eventually adapt to the thing they're constantly fed, which is a lot of why people grow bored of just about any game given enough time. It'd stop being a horror MMO within a short amount of time, and then we'd just be left with zombie/vampire/whatever button mashing.

As for people making comparisons to TSW and games like it, I don't know that I'd call those horror MMOs. There's nothing about it that's specifically "horror"; those same monsters designs in various iterations are found in all kinds of RPG. The only thing horrifying about TSW is the company that's making it. Requiem is a little closer to the mark, though. It's not in it for the scares, but it's definitely got huge amounts of gore, so that's probably as close as you'll get. I don't think you can scare people indefinitely, but I do think you can always find new and amusing ways to dismember your enemy. Good luck getting that past the game rating zealots, though.

He says what I'm thinking...

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Originally posted by nuttob
There is Requiem already out there, and I think that's about as close as your going to get for a horror MMO.

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 I'm so not into man on man love, but damn Coyote I love you!