What Scares You?

[Rossum]

A few ideas:

 

1. An experimental device in the place absorbs all sound in the area so that raiders, feral ghouls, and other enemies are utterly silent. This even aborbs sounds from the radio. It could be that some special enemies are there who absorb sound in their presence and you basically have to listen for things to get quiet.

 

2. Eliminate the compass that lets you magically detect where enemies are.

 

3. Things that move around when you can't see them. Like in Bioshock there is the part with the dentist in his room where steam occasionally fills the room. First time you walk in there is an empty dentist chair, a cloud of steam washes over the room and suddenly there is a corpse there, then later when you pick up an item you turn around and he's standing there without any warning.

 

4. A talking teddy bear. Just say that you are in contact with one other person in the place and they speak to you through a radio transmitter in a teddy bear. Maybe the bear is a tiny toy robot and can move on its own, either walking, floating, or sliding across the ground in a creepy fashion. Whenever enemies appear it just goes limp and waits for them to pass. Maybe you have to manually carry it (by grabbing it, not just stuff it in your pocket).

 

It directs you to bring it somewhere, even while there are monsters and the lights in the place are going dim and gas leaks are happening everywhere. At the very end you have to set it somewhere and then it giggles and says 'stand back now, I'll see you on the other side' and then it detonates like a Mini-Nuke and blows a hole in the wall or something so that the player can escape. They may or may not come across the person talking through the bear.

[l0n3llyw0lf]

Just one thing can make me like screaming in the hell, that is if "i don't know where i must going on or can't quickly make important decision when i confront with problems or in the middle of combat" :mellow: .

[t3hf4ll0ut]

Use the hell out of Fallout 3's ISFX. You can produce some pretty scary imagery with that. :D

Example: You're walking down a cave, you notice a strange man standing there. You walk up to talk to him and when your almost right up to him, trigger a loud scream, a distoorted view with ISFX, and cause the man to vanish (be disabled).

[Hellsing179]

Im not sure if its possible from the geck but if it is i recommend random room changes, like the lights flicker and you go from a hallway to a closed off room. Or maybe a dead deathclaw that gets up when you get close enough to loot it lol. Mostly stuff from other games i played that scared me, like in bioshock when theres a bunch of dead splicers and when you get close enough they get up lol. Also random pop ups. Like say you put a locker with a needed item in it, and as soon as the player loots it, a NPC spawns behind them.

[Grimmjow0006]

Things popping out of nowhere, darkness added with previous. Creepy noises, source from nowhere. The Ring. Random objects coming disappearing and reappearing and then coming to life.

[J13_Knightmare]

Darkness and flickering lights tend to scare the crap out of me. Another thing that works quite well is sounds as other people have mentioned and good use of music. When it comes to music, less is more. One of the scariest experiences for me in a video game was in Half-Life 2: EP1, when you're in those dark tunnels and the music picks up for the first time. That loud, distorted pitch bend at the beginning of the track still makes my skin crawl... Of course music choices are kind of limited in what we can use, but there's bound to be something good out there.

[gizmomelb]

Things popping out of nowhere and constant fighting in the dark is not scary, it's annoying. DOOM 3 did it years ago and that's why there were flashlight mods for weapons etc. It's an annoying gameplay mechanic.

 

Searching in the dark for specific items while in a booby trapped area however would scare me (always on the lookout for triplines etc.). Add in some nice scary sound effects of things being moved, or moving in the room with you and it should freak most players right out.

 

 

The biggest fear for all people is fear of the unknown. What's making that noise? Is someone there? How many are there? Sound effects such as scuttling (for critters and especially - bugs), footsteps, closing doors (heard, not seen), the heartbeat (as mentioned earlier) and shallow breathing to match it.

 

 

Two of the scariest sections of games I've played recently have been STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (just generally walking around, but going into a (potentially NOT) abandoned building wierds me out. Is there anyone in the building? If so, how many are there? Will I be outnumbered? etc. (one thing to remember with STALKER is that there isn't super powered armour or weapons in the basic game and the player can always easily be killed with just a shot or two, so fear of death is always prevalent).

 

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic has giant spiders (about dog size) and ghouls. I'm normally ok with spiders but those puppies mess with my mind as they make a weird scuttling noise when moving and you've got to be careful there's none on the walls or ceilings when you enter a room or cave. The ghouls are scary as you hear their ragged breathing usually well before you see them and they're fast and dangerous enemies (two swipes from a ghoul and usually you're dead). So it's the fear of a tough fight triggered by the sound they make before you see them (anticipation).

 

 

Fear (or respect) for a tough enemy or group of enemies could be achieved in F3 by maybe making the player go through a 'weapon detector' airlock before entering the vault, so they have to leave all their armour and weapons behind. Strips the player's offensive and defensive capability back to a 'normal' person and have them worry about what they're going to fight and how they're going to fight it. But try not to overuse any 'scare tactics' as it just desensitises the player after a while.

[Agnot2006]

What about; The player enters and is immediately knocked unconscious. When they awake all their equipment has gone. I mean everything. The player can hear crazy laughing in the darkness down the tunnel and finds items of their own equipment leading away into the darkness. They must get their stuff back to survive, as they follow the laughing through dark tunnels collecting their own equipment as it is dropped. Enemies have to be taken care off along the way with what the player has managed to find so far. They get stronger and meaner as you progress. Not knowing when you will catch the culprit or what kind of encounter it would be may preclude the player from attempting a confrontation until they feel they have enough stuff back to deal with whatever they find.

[TonyaSolovyov]

You definetly have to disable the radio. Besides that, quality music and sounds are a must. To make something scary, it will take a lot of scripting. Also, make it VERY dark, but use a directional pipboy light mod or something (Nothing is scarier than having to actually search for the thing that is going to scare you =D). Another thing that would be very scary would be to set up certain points were you would here screams or a roar or a chair would fly at you. Things that require a lot of scripting can be very scary. The dissapointing thing is a lot of scripting is a scary thing.

 

Good luck,

Tonya

[Starch]

In order to make the mod I am making (other than my Commonwealth Expanded mod) scarier, I wanted to ask the people here what they find to be scary. To elaborate on the level, it is an abandoned military missile bunker partially taken over by raiders. Its main feature is an undetonated nuclear missile that the player can activate, accidentally or otherwise.

 

So tell me, what do you find absolutely horrifying, terrible, disgusting, depressing, frightening or otherwise terror inducing that I could feasibly fit into this mod using only vanilla dungeon sets? Think of the scariest parts of regular Fallout 3, to give you an idea. Or scary mods from Oblivion. Or stuff from thrillers and horror movies. It doesn't matter, as long as it would work.

 

Centipedes

Dark empty rooms/alleys with low-scary music or no music

Some that jump out at you unsuspectingly