Best setting

[grizzle]

The thing about horror is you can still impliment all of the fantasy things (magic, castles etc) with out being limited to the fantasy barriers.

Every PC plays a human but his entire world is surrounded by Zombies, Liches, Vampires, Ghost, Werewolves etc.

Hell aren't all of those things just human anyway?


Vllad

If you look at it, Games that have everything already have the liches, vampires and ghosts implemented. EQ, EQ2, Warhammer.

I love the horror chat that's been building up in this thread, and I'll delve into it in more detail later (heading out for a bit now), but wanted to just quickly address this one.

In EQ, for example, while all the zones were "neat" for one reason or another, there were only two zones that scared me - actually scared me. One was Kith Forest - holy crap, for the first year I played that game, and was low level, I would literally sit at the zone line until daylight, then run my ass off and hope that I didn't get lost (this was back when there were no in-game maps, and EQ Atlas didn't yet exist, so if you didn't know where you were going, you got lost).

For me, Horror isn't just about monsters, it's about the mood, the setting, how you implement the monsters, etc. For example, a zone like Kith Forest, with fog, always dark, and make the path dynamic, changing as you walk, so the forest feels alive and feels like it is trying to get you lost. Spooky sounds, small harmless animals that jump out and scaring you, so that you recover only to then have a real monster come at you, etc. Your flashlight battery dies, etc., etc.

A horror themed game isn't just about mobs - it is a Horror World. And just image if every zone was like this enhanced Kith Forest. The players' heartrate wouldn't be below 140 until they make it back to their Safe Zone (tavern, chirch, whatever).

Imagine if you take your toon to a new zone, you enter a building, and Wham! You black out. You wake up a moment later with a quest having been forced upon you, a quest something out of a Saw movie, where you are trapped and have to find/figure/cut your way out, otherwise your toon dies and you suffer death penalties.

Man, oh man, all the possibilities of a horror MMO!