Describe the perfect CoC videogame

[Cherno]

This is basically meant as a form of brainstorming.

This is not a purely "just for fun" thing, there's a solid reason why I'd like to hear other people's opinions on the perfect CoC game (which I won't give away yet, it's far too early for that!)

If you had the ability to create a Call of Cthulhu / Lovecraftian / Mythos /youknowwhatimean videogame, what would it be like?
Some sample food for though:

   

• First person? Isometric? 3rd-Person? Top-Down? 2-D Jump 'n' Run?
• Windows/Linux, Tablet, Android/Smartphone compatible?
• Real-Time action? Turn-based tactics?
• Combat oriented? Focus on Storytelling and/or character interaction, or finding clues and exploration?
• Speaking of exploration, would it be open world with hundreds of locations in Lovecraft Country, or a linear adventure? Would there be multiple "quests"/cases active at the same time, with teh player deciding when to follow each one?
• Multiple party members, or just your own investigator? If more than one, would they be AI companions or be selectable and controllable?
• Character advancement?
• Loot driven gameplay like Diablo, with a "Ravaging Ythian Lightning Gun of the Moon" in each chest?
• Regarding the last two questions, how would long-time motivation be assured?
• Close to Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying System (CoC), or a stat/skill system better suited for combat encounters?
• How would (in)sanity and grave injuries be handled? Will your character be committted to Arkham Asylum for 6 months, or could he just visit a psychatrist/physician, spend some money, and be declared sane/healed?
• Death around every corner with wrong choices punished mercilessly, or forgiving casual gameplay with lots of safespots?
• Can couple of grenades kill even an ancient Shoggoth (a.k.a. "Mythos Lite"), or will your investigator become a screaming manic the first time he or she catches glimpse of a Ghoul?
• Online multiplayer with a Keeper player running an adventure for a group of investigator players, akin to a Virtual TableTop program (or Neverwinter Nights, Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption, and others)?
• User mods for self-created stories, items, enemies, locations?

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If you want to take it one step further, also consider how each choice and design element might influence or limit other ones.

[Malebolgia]

I think the Call of Cthulhu video game actually is quite good! It's somewhat scary (definitely creepy), quite hard and has fantastic elements.

But the most important thing for me it's a 'first person view'. It's hard to experience the horror from an isometric or 3rd person viewpoint. With first person games, it becomes way more creepy.

Realtime please!

A combination of combat and adventure sounds good. Bit similar to the CoC video game.

For locations, doesn't matter a lot, if done properly. A forest in the night is just as freaky as a foggy night in London when done well.

And of course it needs to be a proper pc game. Not Android/Ipad. How scary is it to game on a phone/tablet? A huge widescreen makes it much better and with the pc you have the best power at your disposal. But hey, I'm a pc gamer

No party please. The lonely approach is much freakier IMO.

Character development is not really needed. It's fun, but in the end you're going to die or go insane anyway

No loot! Just clues and stuff to enhance the story and experience.

System doesn't matter a lot to me. I LOVE the Chaosium system but another system is fine by me.

Using healthpacks for general health issues and things like booze and pills for sanity works best. Don't see it working if you need to go to a hospital or sanitarium after each encounter.

Yes, you need to die/go insane quickly and often. A bit similar to the latest Tomb Raider.

If you want to introduce the big monsters, make sure they are nigh unkillable to make them even scarier. And I think the suggestion of monsters is more powerful than fighting off beasties all the time.

Singleplayer for me.

[gmanrocks]

It wasn't officially Cthulhu Mythos, but so highly inspired by it, it might as well of been, but there was a great game way back on the Game Cube called Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem...This to me had everything I'd want, great atmosphere, soundtrack, controls and story, if a little action heavy.

The insanity effects were also very well done. They both interacted with your character, but you too, doing things like displaying memory card formatted errors when saving while your sanity is low.

So for me, I'd use that as a basis and alter to suit.

[Doomsdave]

It must be infinitely complex.

It must be puchaseable only with body parts/souls.

It must cause insanity to any foolish enough to play it.

[Cherno]

Sounds like EVE Online with a Pay 2 Win mechanic

[FramFramson]

Whatever you do, try not to commit the sin that most Mythos/CoC-based games/comics/etc. do: show too much.

Whenever possible, hint rather than showing. Footsteps (or other prints), residue, whispered warnings, "natural" phenomena, fragments of messages both ancient and modern, and all the usual tricks. Even if you must show a few creatures plainly, they ought to be the lower-level creatures if possible: Show the fish-men, for instance, but not the fish god. If it's a good CoC game you shouldn't be expected to directly fight a great elder god anyway, so there's not much reason to show one without cover or a without distorted view or something.

[Connectamabob]

Some of the features listed are a flat NO, due to being nonconducive to horror or roleplay (actual character/story roleplay, not just "pick your stats" like a lot of "roleplay" video games):
Turn based, no
Isometric, no
Loot based, no

You can do horror/roleplay with these, but but you'd be doing so in spite of them instead of being helped by them. Yes, I know there are some really, really successful isometric RP tiles (like the Fallout series), but they come from a time where isometric was the only way to do open world stuff. That isn't true anymore, and IMO these days isometric outside of strategy or sim games is about nostalgia, not immersion or mechanics.

Windows/Linux/Mobile? The more the merrier whenever possible. I'd be inclined to develop for Windows first, then port to Mac and Linux, then see if you can stretch to mobile.

Combat in Cthulhu games is a blatant crutch IMO. It doesn't mesh at all with the source material, and I think the only reason things keep coming back to combat both in tabletop and video games is because its so much easier to design a system around combat than investigation/exploration. If you successfully pulled off the latter, that would be special and worthy of note, but if you did the former, it would only be yet another one of a thousand combat games, just with a superficially Cthulhu themed skin.

And combat in a Cthulhu setting works against your theme. Like I said above, it strongly conflicts with the source material and with what made the source material what it is in the first place. If you want your game to be Cthulhu, combat-based play actively takes you away from that. There's no shortage of video games already that take their visual cues from Lovecraft, but the reason it's always feels like a superficial borrowing of imagery instead of like an actual Cthulhu game is in no small part because of combat always being the core gameplay.

What FamFramson said is also true and IMO strongly related to the combat issue. These two problems are synergistic, and are almost always at the core of both bad Lovecraft games and bad Lovecraft movies.

Most of your other questions come back tho the above IMO:

Speaking of exploration, would it be open world with hundreds of locations in Lovecraft Country, or a linear adventure? Would there be multiple "quests"/cases active at the same time, with teh player deciding when to follow each one?

Ideally a single adventure with multiple paths, maybe open-world-ish in map architecture, but not in terms of having lots of quests/storyline scattered about. An open world with lots of quests implies a massive density of phenomenon that detracts from your chars' specific story. Finding Mi-Go, say, should not be like finding Falmer or Dragons in Skyrim. A Lovecraftian encounter is a very rare thing, as in once every few generations on an entire continent, not 50 times a year in a given 1000 square miles.

Multiple party members, or just your own investigator? If more than one, would they be AI companions or be selectable and controllable?

Either way works IMO. A Mass Effect or Dragon Age type system would be preferable in the case of multiple party members. Avoid XCom or Skyrim style like the plague. If at all in doubt though, keep it solo.
    
Character advancement?

In an organics sense, like the more you use a skill, the better you get at it automatically, yes. A manual leveling and point-picking progression system no. The latter has become synonymous with RPG in the video game world, but it's very artificial and immersion breaking. Fine for a combat game or a long form "career" RPG, but for Cthulhu game you want things to stay very "in the moment", even if the story as a whole is long form. A Cthulhu game should keep the player feeling like they're winging it.
 
Regarding the last two questions, how would long-time motivation be assured?

Focus on replayabilty, or on creating an engine/framework that you can release episodic new adventures for. Do not try to pad out your game with grind or skinner box loot mechanics. That has ALWAYS been a BS filler strategy. Always. Doesn't matter how many game companies do it, or how many gamers have Stockholm syndromed themselves into lapping it up, it's still just BSing your customer with a watered down product.
    
Close to Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying System (CoC), or a stat/skill system better suited for combat encounters?

Neither, but If I had to choose, definitely the former. As I've said before last thing you want in a real Cthulhu game is the latter, and regarding the former IMO video games should be exploiting their media to create their own mechanics rather than trying to emulate mechanics created for a completely different media.
    
How would (in)sanity and grave injuries be handled? Will your character be committted to Arkham Asylum for 6 months, or could he just visit a psychatrist/physician, spend some money, and be declared sane/healed?

Rougelike fashion. Injuries can be mitigated/managed, but not fully healed: get gashed on the leg, and you can patch yourself up to avoid bleeding (if you have the material) but you'll be working with a stat penalty (pain/limping, vulnerability to poison/infection) for the duration.

Similarly with sanity: it can be manged, but not fully cured, and it's ultimately cumulative. If you have a bad experience than knocks your sanity down 20 points (out of 200, say), you can get 10-15 of that back by retreating to relative safety, taking a shot of booze, etc, but you can never restore the full 20. A trip to Arkham is a sanity game over or an ending variation.

Death around every corner with wrong choices punished mercilessly, or forgiving casual gameplay with lots of safespots?

Neither. Actual physical peril of death should be rare, like a boss fight (in terms of pacing, not in terms of being an actual boss fight). Managing san instead of health should be the majority danger. But even in this, IMO peril should be more about choices coming back to bite you down the road than immediate peril. What you let slip while interviewing the drunk effects how accurately the fish-people can head you off in the next town. Maybe if you tell the drunk too much, the evidence will be gone when you get there and the fish-people will be waiting to chase you, but if you tell the drunk nothing, the fish people won't be there to menace you but the evidence you find will take a chunk out of your san.

Think of the ammo/health conservation balance of classic survival horror, but with information/san instead.

Can couple of grenades kill even an ancient Shoggoth (a.k.a. "Mythos Lite"), or will your investigator become a screaming manic the first time he or she catches glimpse of a Ghoul?


Neither. Shoggoth can't be killed, only slowed, and the player shouldn't have grenades to burn anyway (if they have em, they should be a rare item). Sanity should be cumulative, not on/off. Also remember it's not the sight of a ghoul that effects sanity, it's the concept. Seeing a stuffed ghoul in a private museum shouldn't effect san, but finding evidence in the taxidermists workshop that the Ghoul was not a fake, finding out that ghouls snatch people off late night subway platforms, remembering your sister-in-law who's been missing for two years was last seen in the subway, finding that ghouls eat people, finding out that ghouls only eat corpses and the snatchings are for... different purposes... these are what effects san.
    
User mods for self-created stories, items, enemies, locations?

Yes. There is no game where the answer to this is "no".

[d(sqrt(-1))]

So far, I think System Shock 2 is about the best thing I've seen (available from gog.com too for later O/Ss!)

Does have combat (although you can get by without it), and you are always short of ammo, or worrying that weapons will break.

[FramFramson]

A good way to do character advancement is by information acquisition. Area unlocks may also be linked to gear unlocks (so that if you DO have to have "numerical" progression, it's by gaining new items, not levels - similar to many Zelda games).

Say you find a clue that makes your investigator want to go to Innsmouth (unlocks that area for travel). That may also result in the investigator wishing to "Take precautions", unlocking a couple of firearms or a radio, or scientific field kit in the store in the hero's hometown or the hero's house that the character would not have "considered necessary" yet.

[Cherno]

Thanks for the replies people, very helpful. I agree that a game similar to Dark Corners of the Earth, with updated graphics and less bugs would be awesome (exploring the Dunwich countryside, or diving into the deep caverns of the Mountains of Madness, oh my!). Alas, there is currently nothing like this in development that I know of, maybe the future will bring us such a game eventually

I have been thinking of basically doing a videogame version of Strange Aeons, with a small team of investigators fighting against cultists, fishmen, and all kinds of eldritch horrors. Gameplay and interface would be like the best from Jagged Alliance 2 and the X-Com games (both the old one (ha!) and the recent quasi-remake. The game engine could also be adapted to a less combat-focused experience, with the hero being alone or with one or two friends, exploring a mysterious mansion and uncovering it's secrets. This would be more like the boardgame Mansions of Madness by Fantasy Flight Games (which I recently bought), with a focus on exploration, character interaction and puzzle solving. It depends on how the scenario is constructed, with as much or as little combat as the creator wishes.

About combat-centric Lovecraft Mythos games: From a game design standpoint, I theorize that there is a profound differenc between what a player enjoys when playing a face-to-face session of CoC versus playing a Horror RPG on the PC. The former lets you use your imagination and requires social interaction, while the latter's enjoyment depends on more tangible things like graphics, sound and music, and of course gameplay; players like gradual progression of their characters, getting better equipment, and defeating lots of enemies which grow more dangerous as the game and character progress.

All comments regarding the original thread title as well as anything else, including this post, welcome of course