Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs Discussion Topic Part 1

[bluel0bster]

I would personally prefer them to keep the chase sequence music, it freaks me the hell out when I hear it, and the not knowing where the monster is just adds to the fear. It may seem like you'd be less scared without the music, but audio has a special, unparalleled psychological effect on the brain. Also, it'd get pretty annoying if you just die from behind without any sort of indication something is happening.

Imo the biggest problem with TDD was how heavily scripted the gatherer encounters were. A couple places were fine, like the first time you encounter one and have to hide in that cabinet, but the formula of "complete objective -> monster shows up" was very overused and coupled with the poor monster AI added way to much to their predictability, subsequently hurting the fear factor. In fact, there's only a couple points in the entire game where monsters seem to move around randomly (choir).

The devs have teased us for a while now with promises of different AI behaviors, so hopefully this isn't a problem anymore...

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Though come to think of it, I don't recall any sort of fear music in the gameplay trailer with that pig-monster encounter.

One reason taking out the chase music wouldn't work (imo) is that if you count on the player actually visibly seeing the monster, well you'd see the monster. That's always a bad mistake when you show the player/audience too much of the monster. The less you see, the scarier it is. You're imagination will always come up with something way scarier than what it actually turns out to be. This is why the ending of both Insidious and Mama were so disappointing (to me atleast). The demon thing wasn't nearly as scary after you saw it.

Of course, they could take out the music and replace it with audio cues from the monster, which seems to be what they're going with if the trailer is any indication.