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Why do new Silent Hill entries attract so much negativity?

So many people online seem to already complain about Silent Hill f out of a few details coming out of trailers. I honestly think the game looks sick and I can't wait to play it, expecially considering the writer's good reputation.

I remember the SH2 remake lived in a similar hell-hole before gathering critical acclaim. I have not seen this kind of anxious negativity about new games in a series ever. What do you think?

13 comments

  • For me, it looks like a good game. But doesn't look like Silent Hill. Because of this it comes off as a game that was made and had the SH name slapped on it for street cred. That never works well in any case I've seen. Usually ends up the worst rated in a series.

    • Genuinely curious, why does it not look like SH? Is it because of the japanese setting? Because other than that it looks heavily focused on proper psychological chaos. I think we've got to give developers some form of freedom if we want to see this series advance!

  • The original Silent Hill games were created by an internal group within Konami called Team Silent. This team was formed by underperforming Konami staff to work on a Resident Evil competitor that Konami higher-ups wanted to underperform and give them a chance to fire said underperforming staff. Instead, they struck gold with SH1.

    Team Silent suddenly had a level of fame to themselves, but they were still Konami's red-headed stepchild. 2-4 were similarly successful, with 2 being the high point of the series.

    After SH3, key staff started to depart from Konami. By the time the 5th game, Homecoming, came out, much of the original team had been replaced with those more aligned with Konami bigwigs that wanted to turn the series into a moneymaker instead of the quiet success it was built as.

    An example of this is the Silent Hill HD Collection for PS3 and X360. The 'remaster' of SH2 and 3 was anything but. They had to make these remasters with incomplete codebases, no original staff to question, even some of the original voice acting was missing because Konami straight-up deleted the original source code.

    There are those that say that SH never recovered from the gutting of Team Silent, and they tend to get louder with each entry into the series. Sometimes they have valid points, but not always.

    • To add to this, Team Silent members started leaving after SH3 came out primarily because when SH2 released, it wasn't that well received compared to SH1 (this is mostly to do with the Japanese audience complaining online at the time that SH2 was not a sequel or continuation to SH1). As a result, Konami started forcing Team Silent to make changes to SH3 that Konami executives thought would make it sell and review better in Japan than SH2. In other words, Konami was taking away Team Silent's autonomy within Konami to develop what they wanted.

      Silent Hill 3 was the beginning of the downfall of the series because it was the first game in which the original developer's vision for the game was edited by Konami executives. This would sadly become a recurring theme for every Silent Hill game released thereafter. Silent Hill 3 was never supposed to feature the cult from Silent Hill 1. Heather was not supposed to be Cheryl. The hospital was not supposed to be reused from SH2, and was only done so because the developers were running out of time.

      What's worse, except for Akira Yamaoka, the original series composer, Homecoming did not have any original Team Silent staff working on it because it was outsourced to an external, Western development studio. Not one member of Team Silent was credited in the game except for Akira Yamaoka, they weren't even mentioned in the "Special Thanks" portion of Homecoming's credits.

  • For SH2, I think it was specifically because Bloober Team was working on it. They had a mixed or spotty track record before this release, so people were worried, they'd mess up the remake for a beloved game.

    I think Konami also kinda "left" video game development for a time, focusing more on Pachinko machines, their health clubs, etc. So this, along with some of their previous choices, meant they didn't really have the best reputation (and still haven't), and people didn't know if it was just going to be a lazy cash grab.

    Silent Hill f I don't really know what people are saying, and I haven't looked, but I can only guess that anti-woke mob is going after the game, because you're playing as a girl/woman, which is of course DEI, forced diversity, woke, whatever, I dunno.

  • Haven't seen any complaints about F, but the SH2 remake was made by a studio with a spotty record, they made some unnecessary changes, and it still has traversal stutter.

    • I admit I do not prefer the remake over the original, but that's mostly because I would rather see new original things than to milk pre-existing material which didn't age that badly.

  • Probably because Konami has been pooping the bed when it comes to the franchise ever since Silent Hill 2. The last hint of anything remotely good to come out from them was the Playable Teaser over 10 years ago and of course they fucked that up too.

    • I am salty as fuck about PT.

      As a standalone entry it was absolutely fantastic, I loved every second of playing it. As a demo it got me so incredibly hyped about the full game.

      And then Konami pulled some of the dumbest shit I have ever seen.

  • Woo, time to see how many gooners are actually on lemmy.

    The modern "video game essay" format came out of people on the Something Awful forums who were REALLY into Silent Hill. It was Japanese style horror in a Western setting with a lot of fairly heavy themes and implications so it was the perfect confluence of weebing out and "it is dark so it is deep" level discourse. And what started as people writing thousands of word arguments for what the shovel being at an 80 degree angle in that shed meant became people making 60 minute youtubes on what it meant that Heather ALSO saw the titty nurses and how it represents her repressed lesbian urges. And 3 hour videos about Pyramid Head that would make even Freud roll his eyes.

    And... basically all of the later Silent Hill games REALLY sucked. The Room has its defenders but pretty much everything after that is universally panned and with good reason. Up until last year-ish with the remake of 2.

    Which was a different kind of shitstorm. Because now you had all these essayists who were The Keepers Of Silent Hill lore (one of the most famous ones wrote her master's thesis on SH2 I want to say?) seeing the greatest of the games being remade. And by fucking Bloober team? Pretty much every essayist had keyed in that Bloober have some very questionable themes in some of their games. Uhm... trigger warnings but

    So it was the mix of "This is MY game and MY story and how dare they change it" combined with "Also they picked the bogeymen that I hated on so hard last year that I could buy a car".

    And then... Bloober kind of made a masterpiece? Like, most of their changes are fairly loved/appreciated and everyone but the most hardcore of the SH2 Video Essayists loved it.

    But now we have Silent Hill f that very much DOES feel like a cash in and a way to make a Fatal Frame but with a more marketable IP. But also... Fatal Frame fucked hard?

    Either way? The most important thing ever is to never stop saying that Silent Hill (the town) is really smokey because it was built on top of a coal mine that caught fire and has been smouldering for decades. That is some real Silent Hill fan lore that not many people know but is really cool to share.

13 comments