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Nether isn’t exactly the best example for what I’m going to write about, but it is a good example nevertheless (and a personal one, which is more important)!
Basically, Nether was marketed as a game with a lot of potential, and it certainly stood out from its counterpart online survival horror experiences. It stood out because of its incredibly stunning visuals and vertical level design, which is very unique in the genre. Most online survival horror games are very flat, in that they span over large amounts of land, and the buildings are usually never actually tall. I don’t know why it took so long for someone to make a survival horror game in a city, but it doesn’t matter. What’s more important is how this game has simulated the apocalypse in a way it couldn’t even anticipate.
What started off as a very successful marketing campaign, and many followers, is now a dead game, with about 8 empty servers still running. It’s a meta-apocalypse that no designer intentionally accounted for, but playing through it the last few days, has made me think how incredibly effective it actually is. So I used to play this game when I had some free time a few years back, when it was full of players, and full of player killing. It was a very action-packed experience, with many conflicts and many climactic moments in ever playthrough.
Playing it last night was a completely new experience, and I actually loved it. The server was entirely empty. Basically, I was the last person alive, other than a few merchants in the game. And the experience was so much more immersive, I felt so alone and vulnerable. I realized the importance of other people in a horror game like this. There was nobody to clear the safe zones! So all the safe zones were overrun constantly, and I had to just hide out from building to building, snacking on some things I’d find to eat and drinking the occasional bottle of water. Being that the safe zones were overrun, I could never reach the merchants to store items, so everything I did had so much more gravitas.
It’s interesting, and I don’t think it would work in any other scenario. It’s not a single player game, so when it becomes single player, the experience is incredibly unique. I don’t think if the game was designed to be single player, the effect would be the same. In fact, I’m certain it wouldn’t. It was the lack of design for this to be a single player game that made it so incredibly new and fresh.