So many people online seem to already complain about Silent Hill f out of a few details coming out of trailers. I honestly think the game looks sick and I can’t wait to play it, expecially considering the writer’s good reputation.
I remember the SH2 remake lived in a similar hell-hole before gathering critical acclaim. I have not seen this kind of anxious negativity about new games in a series ever. What do you think?
IMO, hit stop in the combat. Also, the camera perspective puts too much emphasis on combat.
At its core, the peak way to play Silent Hill was to engage in combat as little as possible. This makes sense both in lore and for the player of the game:
In the game lore, protagonists in Silent Hill are “Everymen.” Just an average person. Average people do not generally have combat experience or training, and thus an average person put into a Silent Hill scenario, will more likely want to run away than engage in combat with a weapon they are not familiar with. They may be so unaccustomed to combat with a weapon they may injure themselves or waste all the bullets or break the weapon due to lack of training in combat.
For the player, combat felt bad, and generally posed more risk than reward (trade potentially losing a lot of health in a fight just to not have to walk around the enemy) as in Silent Hill, killing enemies doesn’t reward the player with anything other than having one less enemy to avoid. They don’t drop health or items.
Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game. The 3rd game’s original plot apparently did give the protagonist a dark past, but Konami felt it would have been too much and thus changed the plot significantly. Some elements of the original plot still remain, but are reworked into the new, different plot in the game currently.
SH2 remake, and in fact Homecoming and Downpour fall victim to this overemphasis on combat, and it is primarily the fault of the over the shoulder camera. The combat feels good and fun, and thus it makes the player want to do it more. This resulted in more sales because the mainstream audience seems to only like playing one kind of game. Unfortunately, it also resulted in the IP losing its identity.
The story looks fine, but calling it a Silent Hill game when it gives no indication of connecting to the town of Silent Hill is concerning. Every Silent Hill game previously connected to the actual town in some way. If f doesn’t do this, then nothing separates it from being a generic horror game with the Silent Hill name slapped on top.
I’ll try to reply to points highlighted by the both of you, to try and play devil’s advocate for a bit:
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I… I don’t think this counts as a very strong argument if you read the sentence a couple of times. The 3rd entry is, in its actual form, beloved by many fans of the original trilogy.
I don’t know peeps, I understand the sentiment of wanting a good game but we should genuinely just wait and try out the game if we’re interested. They can’t simply make the same game over and over, because that’d be even worse. It’s like with music artists, you know? Bob Dylan was shunned by many for “going electric”, yet those albums are now considered absolute classics. I’m not trying to say Konami has the same artistic foresight of Dylan, but we should at least try to cut them some slack and hold our opinions until after the game has come out and we’ve been able to try it out :)
Respectfully, as a Silent Hill fan, I have been “cutting Konami some slack” for 20 years. And I have been getting burned for 20 years. So please excuse me for being cynical.
I didnt even mention The Short Message or Ascension because I didn’t feel like I even needed to bring either of them up, but just mentioning them now should be enough to illustrate my point in mentioning them at all.
Silent Hill f was the project I was most interested in from Konami when they announced it. I am not disinterested in the game, and I will likely still play it. However, I have a lot of major reservations because of my history with Konami. I didn’t appreciate the changes made to SH2 Remake, so while the mainstream audience at it up, I didn’t even finish the game. I will see how it goes, but the more I keep seeing about the game, I keep seeing some stuff I don’t like.
Everytime a hit lands on an enemy in the trailers, the game stops for a few frames. This better be removed or an effect that is only in the trailers. If that’s in the game and I can’t turn that off then I probably won’t keep playing it. That might seem nitpicky, but I play Silent Hill for a specific experience. I don’t play Silent Hill to get an experience I can get from Resident Evil or some other game. I am totally fine with Konami “making the same game repeatedly,” so long as story elements, levels, items, etc are different, I would be glad to have games in a series have identical gameplay between each entry. Metroid Prime 1 and 2, for example, or Half-Life and Opposing Force. Although the story, weapons, and visual assets are different, the core gameplay is identical. You are still getting the same gameplay experience in the sequel as your did in the original.
To each their own! I’m a long time fan of the original trilogy too, but I’d be very bored if they kept spinning around the same formulas. I do agree with the fact that SH2’s remake added unecessary things - but to be fair, I think the remake was just unnecessary overall, they could’ve simply spent their resources trying to reverse-engineer the original in order to bring it to modern hardware.
Have you tried to take a look at recent horror indie games? Titles such as Tormented Souls might scratch the particular itch, if Konami fails to deliver.