How would (You) manage to make zombies in a videogame feel ACTUALLY scary instead of just generic enemies to gun down? Personally I think what makes zombies scary to some people is not just "ooooh they will kill me and eat me ooooh" but rather the "body horror" aspect of it and what would happen to you if YOU got infected. Slowly losing control of your body, your thoughts getting clouded, your limbs moving on their own accord as a virus/parasite takes control. It's why I consider L4D zombies to be kinda disturbing considering that they're NOT monsters or "walking dead" but just unfortunate people with a form of super rabies wandering around without food, drink or sleep when the virus isn't making them fall into mindless rage. So an actually scary zombie game should focus on how screwed up the infection is and make the player dread it instead of just mindlessly shooting zombies.
tank controls
>>738988373Make their attack an instant death-sentence like Project Zomboid.>If they bite you or scratch you, you're fucked.Basically just freeze tag
>>738988373Personally, I find zombies scarier when they're just mindless and show no emotion. Just an empty husk walking towards you without any higher function, occasionally moaning or groaning. That's how they're usually portrayed in the old George Romero movies, they weren't snarling or angry or growling, but instead calmly and slowly walked towards you with a vacant look in their eyes, and had no reaction to pain. I don't hate fast rage zombies, but I find them overdone nowadays. Project zomboid is a good example of how slower less aggressive zombies can still be threatening. They're easy to evade and fight off at first, but your character loses a little bit of stamina, gets a little bit more worn out and might even get injured here and there, and eventually it piles up and you get surrounded and die. Zombies kill you more with attrition and their constant pressure pushing you to make bad decisions or not have enough time to rest and recover until they eventually swarm you.
>>738988373Personally i've played too many zombie games so i think they'll never be scary anymore but if you want to stress the player out then you can put them in hyper-grim scenarios where hundreds of thousands of zombies are swarming you and you have to escape the tide (killing zombies will give you room and leeway, but your objective can only be escape)
Smart, unkillable zombiesYou'll do your best not to become like them? Not only will they figure out a way to make it happen anyway, they'll tell you how it'll feel when it doesReturn of the Living Dead probably did it best, but there's always the Shibito and Yamibito from Forbidden Siren>So. Nobody can get away.
>>738988373Basically what this anon said. >>738988732No more Room in Hell did zombies best. One zombie is fairly easy to navigate around, but a horde of shambling corpses that are voluminous and hard to kill is scary, especially when one bite means certain death.https://youtu.be/m4TtxHspr5w?si=RacCijs0HF8xzrCP
>>738988373>How would (You) manage to make zombies in a videogame feel ACTUALLY scary instead of just generic enemies to gun down?Zombies in L4D2 actually feel scary when you play solo instead of a team of 4. The game underneath is horror, it's just the survivors cracking jokes 24/7 that makes the game feel non-serious.
>>738988373i think the key to making them scary is to make them unrelenting and inevitable. yeah you could kill a fuck ton of them, you could outrun them, but there will always be more of them and they will never tire in their pursuit.
>>738988373they need to be completely destroyed to stop being a threatshoot one's legs off? it crawls after you. shoot its arms off? it's a bear trap biter on the ground. etcthat's exactly what a potential l4d3 needs I thinkmaybe even the ability to reattach shit. so one which is missing an arm might pick up a leg on the ground and attach it to itself
>>738988373Make them the same as regular zombies but they’re constantly trying to hit you up for cash like a tweeker at a gas station
>>738988373I liked how in Requiem the zombies in the care center still had the ability to speak a bit. Like they were partway aware. That was creepy.
>>738989519L4D/2 sucks dick though, it's always been a AFK camp fest, on higher difficulties you MUST camp.
>>738988373It depends. For gameplay purposes they should be runners because zombies running at full speed are scary. Maybe have a number of them hibernate and lay still to ambush people.The disease's mechanism that animates them is important too, the body would be extremely frail if it was essentially an animated corpse so they have to be living to some degree. Their scariness also depends on whether the player character is immune to the virus or not, if the player is immune then there should be huge hordes of runners.
>>738988373Make them niggers
>>738988373Zombies aren't scary. Think about it, a group of actual living people wanting to kill you are more scary.
>>738988373Most zombie games on hard are scary because of heigh stakes
>>738988373Bump
RE9 zombies
>>738989519>it's just the survivors cracking jokes 24/7 that makes the game feel non-serious.You'd be cracking jokes too in order to lighten the mood and not make stupid panicked decisions.
>>738988373Zombies rape you to infect you.
>>738988373Stop doing fast zombies, they're not creepy or scary they're just exciting and they usually have to be en-masse which makes each one individually less scary and makes them into just enemies to mow down. Slow zombies in tiny cramped spaces (basically resident evil 1) is the peak.
>>738988373this is why valve added special infected to complement the regular zombies
Actually simulate zombie persistence/traveling swarms instead of spawn-closeting them behind my back.
>>738994214They kinda do that in the State of Decay games. They can still spawn out of nowhere sometimes too though.
>>738988373Resident Evil (the good ones) solved this>Zombies are a foot taller than you>Zombies are slow and quiet>Zombies occupy confined space>Zombies will overpower you because they are large>Zombies are visibly diseased and grossThey key to scary zombies is basically making them narrative shorthand for a weird, sick homeless person (probably a nigger) occupying some place you need to be.
>>738994595State of Decay has the swarm as a mechanic, but it's just randomly determined and set up when you're not looking at it. I felt like 2 handled it worse than 1 in that regards. Am hoping the 3rd entry gets a bit more polish. Both of the current games have their fair share of jank and stiff controls.
>>738993789That's just Crossed. I think those were fairly scary 'zombies' to be fair, but they werent really zombies.
>>738988373no more room in hell can be scary, the devs could have improved everything while keeping the base and it would have been a great game, but they decided to make a back 4 blood clone lmao
L4D with modded infected that one shot and only die by headshot
>>738988732One of the most annoying things about the Resident Evil remakes is how the zombies went from shambling husks listing toward you with sad empty groans that uncannily contrasted with how grisly their cannibalism was, to instead now going 'Screee!' or 'Graagh!' every fucking time they aggro. That's not creepy or scary, just annoying.Zombies are most unnerving when they have little to no sense of cognizance of their acts; just formerly human visages puppeteered by an aimless drive to spread horrible death.
>>738988373I think rather than infection, a Frankenstein zombie apocalypse would be cool. Patchwork humans dragging corpses to charnel pits where bodies are cut to pieces and reassembled into more zombies. Eventually as the apocalypse progresses, the flesh factories begin to pump out larger and larger abominations made from more and more corpses until you eventually have undead titans made from entire cities and centipede-men made from a large number of corpses. To make use of extra limbs, it might start spitting out spiders made from arms, feet, and heads and the quality of the human varients would begin to deteriorate. The once familiar human form becomes a mockery of itself as you begin to see zombies with arms for heads, legs for arms, fingers for teeth. To navigate smaller spaces, you might even find crawling hands with eyes dangling behind them and walls of empty faces silently mouthing "KEEP AWAY" to ward off intruders. The mad scientist behind these abominations has long since been processed and all that's left is the ruthless, cold flesh automata carrying out their orders to spread out and make more. You could even make the initial Frankenstein zombies intelligent and have later waves act more like traditional zombies.
