I really would like to put out a brand new version of 'Resident Evil' for a next-gen console (much like Nintendo did when they re-released it for the Game Cube.) Because I've always had one really good idea for a survival horror game, but it's not about the plot or characters or setting. And I think those kind of need to be good.
But my idea is for the difficulty level. Most games, 'Resident Evil' included, don't go much beyond "Easy", "Normal", and "Hard". (Yes, some of them go on to "Very Hard". Not my point here.) But my idea is to make the difficulty levels customizable in a number of different ways, each one operating independently of each other. So you would have a "Number of Zombies" slider, allowing you to have anything from one zombie in the whole game all the way up to a horde in every room. You'd have a slider for "Amount of Weapons/Ammo", a slider for "Amount of Healing Supplies", a slider for "Zombie Durability", a slider for "Zombie AI" (smarter zombies can open doors and climb stairs, following you from room to room), a slider for "Zombie Speed", a slider for "Zombie Damage" (at the top end, every bite is a kill)...so each game would be its own custom experience tailored to your preferences. You could make a version of RE that's a blood-soaked shoot 'em up, with metric tons of zombies in each room and a shotgun round for every one of them, or you could make it a terror-filled game of relentless pursuit with only one zombie...that never died, that followed you everywhere, and that was only slightly slower than you were. (There'd be a representational slider at the top that rated your overall level of difficulty based on the different selections on the bottom. Not every version would be beatable.)
And there would be one extra-special slider, which would be what would make my version of 'Resident Evil' a truly horrific horror survival game. This slider would set the number of save points, from easy (one every few rooms) to OMG there are no save points. Anywhere. You die, the game ends and all your progress is lost. Trust me, when you are six hours into a ten hour game, and you know that all that goes poof if you run into a zombie at the wrong moment...you are going to be a bag of nerves.
Horror video games. I can't write them, design them, program them or even really play them all that well. But by god, I can come up with good ideas for making them hard.
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You ever played System Shock 1? Not quite that flexible, but it came closer than any other game I can think of. Separate bars for combat, puzzles, cyberspace...
Even let you put the whole game on a timer. Interesting game. Shame nobody picked up on that.
The save thing, though, that was covered much more recently. Dead Space has put that or variants thereof in 2 and 3.
How about also a "randomize" button, so that for each section of the game, YOU DON'T KNOW whether they'll be smart or fast or durable. You have to find out...
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