Why was the PS2 era of survival horror games not more popular? - And survival horror general

I'd like you to share some reasons if you can, but it isn't hard to guess why a game with static (or semi static) camera angles, smaller, more intimate environments and less characters on screen at one time could really amp up the detail.

That's part of why I want to see this style come back, what if you made a game like today, how detailed could the graphics get? I'd imagine you could already get freakily close to photorealism, at least in the environments.

And I'm talking fully 3D rendering, there's also no telling what a game would look like if it was prerendered ala Resident Evil 0 which is a game that still looks impressive almost 20 years later.

I don't know about anyone else, but I would find that really cool to see what could be done today.
You already listed most of the reasons, but it's also worth noting that a slower pace also allowed for lots of hidden loading - RE's famous door animation is a loading screen, for example.

Unfortunately, there's no ground to be gained here anymore. Game realism is now a function of developer time and skill, not hardware power. We've got so much extra juice in modern systems that we invented VR just to do something interesting with it.
 
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You would need a full review of the era in order to answer that question.
Gaming trends usually went where technology could get them. There aren't any styles, like in art movements. I think these retro throwbacks we've been getting since the Indie Revolution show that these older game designs could work on their own.
 
Survival horror was popular enough that they made lots of games in the genre. With the 360/PS3 production costs went up and it probably became to risky to make a game that looked as awesome on 360 as SH2 did on PS2. Silent Hill 2 was very popular even though it, like a lot of survival horror, was stiff as hell.

I'd like you to share some reasons if you can, but it isn't hard to guess why a game with static (or semi static) camera angles, smaller, more intimate environments and less characters on screen at one time could really amp up the detail.

That's part of why I want to see this style come back, what if you made a game like today, how detailed could the graphics get? I'd imagine you could already get freakily close to photorealism, at least in the environments.

And I'm talking fully 3D rendering, there's also no telling what a game would look like if it was prerendered ala Resident Evil 0 which is a game that still looks impressive almost 20 years later.

I don't know about anyone else, but I would find that really cool to see what could be done today.
I've been thinking about that for some time and "pre-rendered" could be done today in a completely awesome style similar to REmake and RE0. Instead of running the game(with fixed camera) at 60fps and render the graphics every frame or using pre-packaged renderings, the scenery could be rendered out during door transitions(or the equivalent). Let's say a door transition takes 2 seconds, that's 120 frames, let the game render out the room during that time using 120 times the power/time of realtime rendering, save the z- and g-buffer for occlusion, lighting, shadows and other effects(similar to REmake and RE0). It would also run natively at any resolution. It also opens up for all kinds of angles if you have a smart camera, not just pre-defined angles/positions.

Add some clever implementation of projection mapping and the camera could move and pan a bit at no real cost to performance.
Here's an example of how that works, this game(released in ~2015) uses pre-rendered backgrounds and runs very well on a potato or old Intel IGP laptops and still looks really good. (timestamp starts at a before and after of how panning looks so give it a couple of seconds)

Example of other scenery.
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Two modern games I forgot to mention that did bring back some of the old style and these were games developed in the west interestingly enough are Supermassive Games' Until Dawn and Man of Medan.

However the only similarity they really have are fixed camera angles and the horror theme, there's no combat (other than QTEs), no inventory management, linear progress through the game environments with no backtracking (though on occasion you do revisit an area) and no puzzles in the traditional sense, they're closer to David Cage games like Heavy Rain than Resident Evil.

But they do still give you some idea of what a classic survival horror game would at least look like today with the fixed, cinematic camera angles, so they're worth mentioning (and pretty good games in their own right)


Survival horror games have 0 to near 0 replayability. Even a racing game is more engaging.
Wrong, multiple endings, multiple unlockable costumes or weapons (Silent Hill 3 had a ton of costumes), sometimes multiple characters to play as and since they were all usually fairly short and simply fun to play they're worth replaying just for the hell of it, you don't always need some specific "reason"

To say they have 0 to near 0 replayability is one of the most flat out wrong statements one could make about the genre.

Interesting though that the whole PS1 horror aesthetic is coming back in the indie scene, though:


Just give it some time, IMO.
Yes, hopefully they'll work their way up to the PS2 era.

You already listed most of the reasons, but it's also worth noting that a slower pace also allowed for lots of hidden loading - RE's famous door animation is a loading screen, for example.

Unfortunately, there's no ground to be gained here anymore. Game realism is now a function of developer time and skill, not hardware power. We've got so much extra juice in modern systems that we invented VR just to do something interesting with it.
It was at least cool for a while to see games that pushed things so much farther than most other games did at the time.

Modern day video game graphics are amazing, but, at least within the AAA realm and not lower budgeted games obviously, everything seems to be roughly on par with one another, there's nothing that really stands out as leaps and bounds ahead of other games or at least not very often.

Just look at how many games use Unreal engine for example and that started with Unreal engine 3, so it was after the PS2, Xbox and GameCube era that most games started to look kind of samey, but at least these days looking "samey" often means looking great, so it's not a huge problem.

Did any of you fuck with Extermination? I loved it back in the day, don't see many people talk about it.

I only played a demo of this, this one struck me as one of the few ones that weren't very good and it's so easily forgotten I forgot to mention it when talking about lesser examples of the genre during the PS2 days.

But it's possible I'll play the whole thing eventually because I would eventually like to have played all survival horror games of the PS2 era.

The answer is simply that normies have shit taste. It's that simple.
It really does come down to that and that's always been the case, I just wonder why exactly normies have shit taste.

PS2 is the golden age of survival horror. That being said, RE7 is good af.
RE7 is good but it's not that good sadly, when I replayed it last year it really stuck out to me just how fucking boring the boat segment is, which is almost the entire third act of the game.

We should have spent a lot more time in the Baker residences, if you look at concept art for the game it shows what looks to be a larger and more intricate version of the main Baker house, I wish they had focused more on that, when the game is "Texas Chainsaw meets Saw" it's awesome, when you're on that completely generic boat at the end it's boring though.
 
I remember Fatal Frame 2 being well regarded, a lot of sites were like "you got to check out this game". Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose I could probably explain away as having low copies produced? I don't know, I wanted to pick up copies but here I am.
 
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I have decided this thread is now for discussing survival horror games in general.


I remember Fatal Frame 2 being well regarded, a lot of sites were like "you got to check out this game". Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose I could probably explain away as having low copies produced? I don't know, I wanted to pick up copies but here I am.
I'm sure it sold decently as there was a third game after all, but that third game reused a lot of areas from the first 2 games as opposed to being all new (even though it's mostly all new to be fair) which speaks to it having a bit of a lower budget.

After that though the series was dead until Nintendo bought the ip and produced a 4th game that never game out stateside (which I'm still pissed about and still don't understand why) as well as a 5th game that did but was digital only and censored.

I do kind of hold out hope that they may re-release the 4th and 5th or at least the 4th game on the Switch stateside though.

While like I said if it wasn't for Nintendo the series probably wouldn't have continued on at all, it would have been cool to see a PS4 entry, but in between the PS2 and PS4 was the PS3 which left a large crater in the Japanese game development world which they never quite managed to fully crawl their way out of to get back to what it once was and survival horror was probably the genre hit the hardest.
 
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A lot of them played like absolute shit, so you had to get over the control schemes to appreciate the gems beneath. SIREN especially suffered from this.

Reality is that part of the charm of the original REs and SHs was the nature of their creation and the creative constraints that were put upon the team. Indie horror is the only place the torch can really continue to be carried now, but the issue is that shit like Layers of Fear gets regarded as somehow "good" horror and that's what the masses want, so that's what they get. Oh, people are suddenly nostalgic for Silent Hill? Here's The Medium, which is complete shit.

There's never going to be another Silent Hill because Silent Hill's originality and novel uniqueness were its charm - but it was also a fusion of a lot of other previous titles, homaging much but aping nothing. Modern silent-hill-a-likes are just fucking lame and fail to draw from anything but pale imitations of the older game itself, infuxed with the obnoxious obsession with the player never having to manage anything or fight back. It would require real gusto and creativity to make a new game like SH, and that's just not going to happen with the current crop of devs - from AAA on down to indie.
 
Here's The Medium, which is complete shit.
The Medium is complete shit? That's too bad as I had hopes for that game since they're clearly trying to ape the old school style just like I want devs to do, but in every screen I've seen the locations are ugly in an art direction sense, which is missing the point entirely, even the Hellish scenes in Silent Hill had a beauty to them.

Giving you beautiful locales to ogle, even if they are creepy, is a huge part of the point of the genre.
 
Here's a man blathering on about it for a while. In essence everything lacks substance that isn't ham-based

don't throw money away on it. "inspired by silent hill" is meant to attract people who will do no research and just buy anything based on the vague association
akira yamaoka composes for fucking everything these days so the fact that he's on the project is a big fat nothing they fluffed up
 
Here's a man blathering on about it for a while. In essence everything lacks substance that isn't ham-based

don't throw money away on it. "inspired by silent hill" is meant to attract people who will do no research and just buy anything based on the vague association
akira yamaoka composes for fucking everything these days so the fact that he's on the project is a big fat nothing they fluffed up
JC Denton: "What a shame"

Hopefully this is just a rocky start to devs eventually succeeding in bringing some of that old magic back.
 
I have decided this thread is now for discussing survival horror games in general.



I'm sure it sold decently as there was a third game after all, but that third game reused a lot of areas from the first 2 games as opposed to being all new (even though it's mostly all new to be fair) which speaks to it having a bit of a lower budget.

After that though the series was dead until Nintendo bought the ip and produced a 4th game that never game out stateside (which I'm still pissed about and still don't understand why) as well as a 5th game that did but was digital only and censored.

I do kind of hold out hope that they may re-release the 4th and 5th or at least the 4th game on the Switch stateside though.

While like I said if it wasn't for Nintendo the series probably wouldn't have continued on at all, it would have been cool to see a PS4 entry, but in between the PS2 and PS4 was the PS3 which left a large crater in the Japanese game development world which they never quite managed to fully crawl their way out of to get back to what it once was and survival horror was probably the genre hit the hardest.
I believe at the time Tecmo was about to go under bankruptcy, which was why they merged with Koei. The reason why there was no US port was because there was a game breaking bug and they decided that it's not in releasable. No explanation on why there's no release of the FF2 remake.
 
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I believe at the time Tecmo was about to go under bankruptcy, which was why they merged with Koei. The reason why there was no US port was because there was a game breaking bug and they decided that it's not in releasable. No explanation on why there's no release of the FF2 remake.
Oh yeah, I forgot the Wii FF2 remake didn't come stateside either, that sucks as well.

When exactly was Tecmo about to go bankrupt?
 
Oh yeah, I forgot the Wii FF2 remake didn't come stateside either, that sucks as well.
It's honestly no big loss, the new dub for it sucks ass (everyone having British accents is jarring as hell) and they included some new bad endings that don't really add anything to the story aside from "here's some bonus angst because the game clearly didn't have enough."

I personally didn't think The Medium was that bad, but for the most part it is essentially a walking simulator with a meh plot and the occasional stealth section. Not very similar to Silent Hill at all. Its best quality is probably the voice acting; people may be getting sick of Troy Baker being everywhere but holy shit did he nail playing the Maw.

Anyone else familiar with Remothered? It tried to be a love letter to Clock Tower but suffered from horrible controls and shitty gameplay, and the sequel that came out this past October was such a broken, bug-filled mess on launch it wasn't even funny.

I appreciate what these indie devs are trying to do, but more often than not the end result is disappointing.
 
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It's honestly no big loss, the new dub for it sucks ass (everyone having British accents is jarring as hell) and they included some new bad endings that don't really add anything to the story aside from "here's some bonus angst because the game clearly didn't have enough."

I personally didn't think The Medium was that bad, but for the most part it is essentially a walking simulator with a meh plot and the occasional stealth section. Not very similar to Silent Hill at all. Its best quality is probably the voice acting; people may be getting sick of Troy Baker being everywhere but did he nail playing the Maw.

Anyone else familiar with Remothered? It tried to be a love letter to Clock Tower but suffered from horrible controls and shitty gameplay, and the sequel that came out this past October was such a broken, bug-filled mess on launch it wasn't even funny.

I appreciate what these indie devs are trying to do, but more often than not the end result is disappointing.
That's weird that they redubbed it, why? Was it because of the new endings?

Siren gave the Japanese characters English accents too and it felt weird.

I'm aware of the Remothered series, I see what they were going for but from what I understand they don't pull it off, hopefully devs will keep trying though.
 
That's weird that they redubbed it, why? Was it because of the new endings?

Siren gave the Japanese characters English accents too and it felt weird.

I'm aware of the Remothered series, I see what they were going for but from what I understand they don't pull it off, hopefully devs will keep trying though.
I have no idea, guess they wanted to start fresh. The original dub may have been awkward but it had that early 2000's charm.

Yeah, they really tried, but it was kind of a hot mess.
 
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