Silent Hill Ascension Could Be A Bad Sign For The Future Of Gaming – CBR – Comic Book Resources

Summary

Silent Hill is a beloved franchise. Many of the games in its early catalog are considered the peak of the psychological horror genre, Silent Hill 2 being a masterpiece of storytelling and atmosphere. Even the weaker entries into the franchise have some who adore and defend them. So the excitement that the fandom felt at the promise of a new entry after eleven years of waiting was palpable. There was a lot of anticipation for Silent Hill: Ascension as the days got closer to its release, only for many of those hopes to end up completely dashed in the wave of its release.

Gaming spaces have had a contentious relationship with many of the larger gaming companies in the last few years. Much of it related to things like poor out-of-the-box quality and the ever-hated microtransactions. Silent Hill: Ascension has come to have the reputation of reproducing the feeling of being in a pachinko parlor without any of the actual excitement that can come with it. The fact that this style of game was even released is ultimately a bad sign for the future of gaming if large studios can assume that they can get away with making "games" like this going forward for beloved and innovative franchises.

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Part of understanding why the reaction to Silent Hill: Ascension has been so vitriolic is understanding that it is only just barely a game. It is a mix of a streamable series and a "choose your own adventure" game at its core. The audience (i.e., the players) is able to vote at certain points to influence the course of the story. The story itself follows six different characters in very different places, all connected by cultish deaths and mysteries. The game references the first three games in the series often and without any real subtlety involved specifically in the psychological elements. The game is set to release its episodes over time to goad audiences back to the app to observe it.

The biggest problem is the voting system. Not all votes are created equal and players can pay for points or a season pass. These points go towards influencing the decisions in the game, so players who are willing to sink money into it have a disproportionate voice in the proceedings. This is where the major cracks settle in. There are free ways to earn points, of course, but in a game that relies on the votes of the community to proceed and change, the fastest way to accumulate these points is by buying them. There are other sequences that don't rely on this system, but they aren't robust enough or as impactful as they should be. This system makes it so that those who pay money are the ones who shape the story with more regularity than any of the players who don't think they need to buy a season pass for something that is basically a cut scene.

Microtransactions have always been a point of contention, especially when they can provide paths to victory or are gatekeeping some content that deserves to be in the vanilla version of the game. The release of Baldur's Gate III had many developers looking rather bad, especially Blizzard with Diablo IV, because no microtransactions exist and BG3 still did extremely well. Diablo IV, by comparison, was universally panned because of its constant redirection to the in-game store and the fact that it was nowhere near what the community actually wanted. For a franchise as classic as Silent Hill to fall to this specific pain point for gamers is something of a slap in the face. Despite the fact that it is barely a game, it fundamentally does not understand what made the franchise so good and beloved. The graphics are cheap-looking, even for a mobile game. The story is very on the nose with very little actual mystery beyond what is conjured up to keep players on the hook. The biggest sin is the fact that it is ultimately a pay-to-play game where money will always win the dayand this is where Silent Hill: Ascension conjures a foreboding sense of what could be to come for the wider gaming space.

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After Netflix canceled free password sharing, the collective streaming world had to see what would happen. The company would either lose customers and viewers as people walked away, or it would gain them and become more profitable. Rather than losing money, it made money and gained more customers. This has led other streaming services to consider getting rid of password sharing themselves and has effectively changed what this space will look like going forward, as more services see the potential to make money off of this idea. Several companies, like Disney+, have already announced their considerations. Silent Hill: Ascension could easily be seen as a testing ground for a similar theory and that theory paints an incredibly bleak future for gaming.

Microtransactions have been a pain point for gamers for quite some time. From Asura's Wrath having its true ending locked behind DLC to Mass Effect 3 having day one downloadable content for content that was pretty pivotal to the plot, the complaints have been there for an incredibly long time. Games that don't have in-game marketplaces have become rarer and rarer from triple-A gaming publishers and people are getting more fed up with the way the system works. Game studios will defend these choices as needing to prop up revenue and make more profits, but with game developers' salaries kept low and executive salaries kept high, the platitude rings hollow. Large gaming companies make a good amount of money on their games, but their promises to their shareholders require them to squeeze as much money out of a game as possible. These policies and decisions have led to games like Dead Space 3 and Diablo IV being scorned by the players who loved the earlier installments in their franchises.

What Silent Hill: Ascension proposes through its very existence is that gamers will take anything as long as they slap a beloved IP on it. People will spend money to have their voices heard, to play something that only barely counts as a game, because it falls into a franchise that they absolutely adore. It is a pretty dystopian thought. That the future of gaming won't try to innovate or create something new when people can be squeezed for every spare dime to play games like these. If this model is shown to be successful and profit-generating, it's only logical that gaming companies would try to continue with this specific trend in design. If the goal is not to create quality, but to act as a free money printer, as some of these games do, then this is the ideal design. Low effort, low cost with high profitability. It cannot be understated that games that are quality on day one with well-paid employees and a lack of predatory in-game markets are becoming more and more in the minority when it comes to triple-A game production. It's one thing for a game to be bad; it's wholly another thing for it to be an ill omen in and of itself.

Silent Hill was a franchise that truly changed the gaming landscape for horror games. Its innovation in storytelling and atmosphere rippled throughout gaming for multiple generations of consoles and gamers alike. At its best, Silent Hill: Ascension is a predatory insult to everything that the franchise was once known and praised for. At its worst, it is a herald of things to come in the unlikely event that its model is completely successful. Gamers deserve better. They deserve to be respected if nothing else, as the gaming industry has only grown in the last thirty years. For so long, developers have been working for small audiences, but most games now do better in their first weeks than most movies. Silent Hill: Ascension is a cash grab that doesn't even bother to dress up its intentions, and its success will only beget more of its kind of game.

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Silent Hill Ascension Could Be A Bad Sign For The Future Of Gaming - CBR - Comic Book Resources