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« Last post by gb_remake on June 03, 2012, 11:03:59 PM »
Yeah, it's more about creating a dense atmosphere and have everything fit the type of experience you want to create.
You can build a fun fair that's not scary at all, but you can make it scary in a variety of ways by changing little things to make it seem slightly off, or slightly wrong. You might remove all the visitors - ghost towns are pretty creepy.
Obvious ways to make things seem off is when something can walk on walls, defy gravity, or when the light changes to an unnatural hue etc. Remember the drawers opening by themselves in The Sixth Sense?
Sounds help. Stalker's soundtrack is somewhat similar to Quake's, but more noisy than musical. Just ambient, metallic soundscapes. Weather also helps - the wind rustling in trees etc.
TBH I play Stalker a lot more than Quake, I just think it's superior in every aspect. You can still shoot the place up, there are still rocket launchers, there is some horde combat, but there is so much more for you to explore. Ironically the basic story is still the same - humans fuck up, monsters invade. But there's more than meets the eye, and you get to see it.
It is also easier to relate to something remotely realistic (I mean guns, buildings, textures, nature) than to something that is just total fantasy. It is fun to have your gun jam in the midst of a heated battle because it adds another factor that you need to deal with. But this, again, is the difference between being a rocket jumping superhero who never needs to reload or being part of the world. The world is not always in your favour. It might be unforgiving.
Randomisation is a step in the right direction. If you play Quake 100 times, you know exactly where everything is and it has no scare factor at all because you will reliably get the jump on the monsters. They are just little piles of HP waiting to be gunned down, not dangerous at all. Randomizing this and making monsters truly dangerous goes a long way. This is why I am in favour of RMQ ogres doing more damage, RMQ scrags being able to blink, and RMQ vores being more lethal. The next step is to modify their actual behaviour to make them more surprising and unpredictable (blinking scrags is a simple example). I was amazed that strafing grunts generated such heated debate... tbh I'd make them circle strafe and hide behind geometry if it was up to me. This is also why I want them to switch to the axe dynamically. I find stupid, one dimensional monsters more aggravating than ones that try to get in my back using invisibility.
Having parts of your game with no monsters or very little monsters also allows the ambience to seep in more than usual.