Texas Chainsaw Massacre game X Box, PC, PS5

[The Giggling Bean]

It's been announced that the company who made the Friday 13th game is now developing a Texas Chainsaw Massacre game. No other info other than the trailer but I'm ridiculously excited for this.

I heard the F13 game wasn't fantastic, and I've not played it, but TCM is one of my favourite horror films so I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out. This is the game that's persuaded me to upgrade from a PS3.

[H-O-W-L]

The F13 game was complete shit and the devs dropped it halfway, so I advise you to temper your hopes just a smidge-- don't drop them, because F13 had potential, they just failed to realize it.

You can already play Leatherface in Dead by Daylight and he's the most fun killer in that shit game but I advise you don't play that game because it's skinnerbox negative-mindset shite that is actively neurotoxic.

[The Giggling Bean]

I heard really bad things about F13 and believe it was buggy as hell. I'm bearing that in mind but it's hard to temper expectations because I love TCM.

[Mister Six]

You can already play Leatherface in Dead by Daylight and he's the most fun killer in that shit game but I advise you don't play that game because it's skinnerbox negative-mindset shite that is actively neurotoxic.

How so? I've only seen it on Limmy's streams and it does look stressful.

[C_Larence]

Weren't the F13 team forced to drop it because of legal issues surrounding the franchise?

[H-O-W-L]

How so? I've only seen it on Limmy's streams and it does look stressful.

I wrote a big post about it in the past but along with being generally stressful and very biased against individual players (if you don't have at least a 2-stack in Survivor mode you're fucked) the game also has gaslighting matchmaking/MMR features that increasingly punish you for success and make you get locked in/grind/buy more killers to unlock more powers to chase the dopamine hit of victory. It's basically a concentrated form of the negative, conspiratorial feedback-loop stuff that's been ruining comp games for ages. Your actual skill and success doesn't matter, the game will increasingly pit you against impossible compositions until you lose. No matter what or how you do you will eventually be given by the system a team (or killer) that is statistically impossible to counterplay even with an optimum set of circumstances, awareness, and composition on your own part -- like, assuming the match is played entirely by bots that both play to an optimum. Throw human factors into that and you're always going to be given shit matches eventually, and the period for being in the doldrums where you are forced to depip/derank are incredibly nebulous.

Now that they've added a more rigid MMR matchmaking system it's only gotten worse because people can much easier derank to go back to low ranks and fuck with low-ranking people while being incredibly good. It's a kind of game that would benefit from way less competition and encouraging way more fun-having, but the way it's designed is so fucking evil that it encourages nothing less than excoriating your fucking self down to the bones to even succeed at the game, let alone have fun.

Leatherface is the only killer that breaks the cycle of killers having to eat shit when survivors do their woopsy-doodlies, but even then he is fucked repeatedly because his power is so frangible.

Here's my old post:

I think it's neurotoxic shite and I had to pack it in for my own mental health because as you say it is very emotionally manipulative and I realized that continuing to play it was just a net mental negative; there were no true victories, only an endlessly manipulative sense of being able to achieve victory, strung out infinitely, to encourage addictive and compulsive play. A truly cynical and nihilistic game at the design level, and it really upsets me that it's the only game to date with so many horror icons and classical horror concepts under one roof. A good developer could take those licenses and make some real solid gold, enjoyable game but instead it's all shithoused into this proto-MOBA hyper-competitive unbalanced shit designed to make fucking everyone involved in playing it as miserable as possible.

Were it merely a bad game, like, poorly designed, I'd forgive it its sins, but it isn't just badly designed, it is cynical mind-twisting skinnerbox shit legitimately designed to play with your emotions and target your wallet at every turn. Truly one of the most awful games short of gacha.

It is absolutely fucking terrible, what I say genuinely cannot overemphasize how emotionally manipulative this game is on every level -- it WILL get you somehow -- and I cannot warn people off it enough.

My ultimate breaking point at the end of the day, all the shit design choices and the endless manipulative design aside. A game that encourages such open hostility and toxicity and does nothing to control it is absolutely meritless IMO. They've done, and will do, nothing to combat survivors being able to treat killers like shit, for the sole reason of "lol just kill them" when their whole design ethic since launch has been designed to prevent and punish exactly that. Spend five seconds on some cunt who's clearly trying to get a rise and you lose. Not that you'll win anyway.

If the game is making you feel low, or if you at least feel it is, then I implore you to put it down-- there is no light at the end of the tunnel. It only gets worse the lower rank you get, and I really mean worse. In red ranks every single match is worse than the sweatiest match you've currently played. Every single one. There's no completion to be had, no real victory, just this endless, endless sisyphean struggle designed to be compulsive and addictive. It really is mobile game gacha shit given a very complicated-seeming first/third person action layer.

[H-O-W-L]

And to really push it home by the way: Limmy is really, really, really quite fucking good at DBD. Really fucking good. Better than even me or anyone I've played with (not against obv) And then look at how stressful and struggling his matches are. Think about that.

If anyone cares about me actually explaining 'ow the game works in detail (i've glossed because it's legit stressful for me to talk/think about because of how fucking insidious of a cunt you have to be to design something this way) I will though.

[Mister Six]

I don't want to stress you out, so best not - I think I get the gist even though I am an oooollllldddd man who'd rather play a remastered point 'n' click adventure than these Fortnites you modern whippersnappers enjoy nowadays.

[clingfilm portent]

If anyone cares about me actually explaining 'ow the game works in detail (i've glossed because it's legit stressful for me to talk/think about because of how fucking insidious of a cunt you have to be to design something this way) I will though.

I'm certainly interested about it and to be honest its cathartic to hear someone speak about DBD like this.

I got heavily into the game early this year and while it was amusing for a while, something about it always felt off and I could never say what. Solo queueing was always dicey, and while it was possible to have some laughs SWFing with some lovely peeps from Granny's community (and pitted against killers of a similar rank to us), there was this overwhelming sadness that came from a lengthy session - one that stems from something more than simply my own competitive nature and moody gitness. And that's even without mentioning the mental torture of playing as killer against even a moderately good team. It's just a horrible, horrible game and like yourself I always recommend caution to anyone thinking of jumping into it.

[H-O-W-L]

Okay, so I've had a few, so I feel comfortable enough to elaborate. I have issues with numbers so forgive me if my math is shit in here, but this is how it is in me head.


Let's examine actual match behavior.

The game is basically engineered around loops, and "Must Do" actions, right?

Killers Must Do a full loop with Survivors in order to catch them and hurt them. Killers cannot injure survivors past the injury states (healthy, injured, dying) nor instantly kill them, outside of items/powers/addons that enable this, all of which are conditional.

Survivors don't have to do shit with Killers. At all. All they have to do is do gens. All they have to do is sit on a generator and repair it. That is their sole goal. There are 7-9 generators per map, 5 have to be completed for survivors to get to the endgame, and there are 4 Survivor players. The math is innately against you already, but then consider that, even despite all the gen-pressure/disabling powers a killer has, there are *still 9 generators to cover*. In the hands of a competent Survivor team there's very little you can do to stop a 5-gen pop, especially if they're good at stealth or loops.

The presence of generators puts a permanent and ever-decreasing time limit on killers' actions. While, going into DBD based on the concept, you might think that killers are at an innate advantage and survivors are at a disadvantage because of the structure and to create threat, the truth is the opposite.

Every second a killer spends is a currency that is ever-dwindling supply. Nothing a killer does can truly buy them time in a reliable sense, as gen degradation is so conditional (Pop Goes the Weasel etc) that you cannot rely on it as a long-term tactic, only an escalation of threat/confusion/panic state toward Survivor players, and not a hard progress halt. It's a human factor and not a systemic one.

Killers cannot make mistakes as a result of this structure, while survivors can make at least two mistakes that lead to taking damage, per person. That's four mistakes, and theoretically, with the right items/builds, this could be anywhere from sixteen to almost infinite mistakes that survivors can make, depending on the killer.

Every killer except Leatherface, Hillbilly, Oni in rage, and T3 Michael (there may be others, I haven't played since June so the balance might've changed) has to chase people from behind, trailing their footsteps, right? So you're following their exact route. They can drop pallets and block your trailpath temporarily or (theoretically) permanently, if it's a "safe pallet", IE one that is placed in such a way that it is safe for them to play a looping chase around it, and unsafe for you to break without being blinded or losing time.

Every killer except Leatherface, Hillbilly, Oni, and T3 Michael has to hit a survivor three times to down them. Getting them to a hook is a whole different fiasco, so let's focus on the down part. L/H/O/T3M all can instantly down players with a singular hit, which basically means that they ignore loops. They can punish players for mistakes that, otherwise, would only lead to a simple change of hit-state. There are perks that enable this for other killers too but they're so fucking conditional (Devour Hope/NOED) that they're not considerable in a standard chase.

Is this sounding mental to you now? Because I haven't, and won't, bring up perks-- because that's maddening in and of itself. Perks add such a degree of fuzziness, randomness, and incomprehensibility to the game that going into them would take hours.

Just from a killer perspective there are matches where, purely because of statistical factors outside of your control, -- not even raw skill or being matched against better players -- there is nothing you can do. It is a systemically engineered failure. And survivors will treat you like shit, and act like cunts, because the devs have encouraged them to with their sassy bullshit.

The way I explained this to my DBD partner back in the day was that DBD ultimately is poker; the way you end up playing, the hands you end up holding, are, in essence, the only ones that exist. The way you played is the only way you ever could have played. The hand you hold is the only hand you ever would've been given. You can run that same match a million times and the outcome is almost always certain before you've even loaded into it. Every thing that you think is just you being outskilled is merely a result of the macro-level design; you were never going to win otherwise.

Of course there are variables within this system. Sometimes you will win a statistically unwinnable match, but that doesn't mean you were meant to win, or that the system doesn't exist, it's just the nature of the world we live in, the natural chaos and ebb and flow and fail-safe zones of all statistical analysis. There will always be outlying factors.

I've won matches I should've lost, I've lost matches I should've won. But-- but. That is not refutation of my theory here -- it's proof of it. The system is designed very tightly, almost impenetrably so, but even so it is a system made frangible by human error.

In theory, the way BHVR thought they were designing the game, is so that Killers have a physical game-side advantage in that they have offensive mechanisms and survivors have very little defensive... and that's it. From there they built everything else in the idea that every killer is always operating at optimum, and everything else has to be on the down hill slope, if you get what I mean? Everything else has to assume the killer is a fucking Terminator behind the screen, and therefore everything else can only down-ramp from that power, or lower that power.

However the truth is that four thinking humans, even ones that aren't in contact, are statistically better than one thinking human, and are capable of multi-tasking, covering angles unseen/unthought, and generally have the edge. The Killer having a physiological advantage means absolutely nothing if he has no mental advantage. It's like saying that one very powerful computer is more powerful than four mid-range ones linked together in a render farm -- it's not, that's just not how it fucking works. There is a reason the phrase "two heads are better than one".

Playing survivor in itself is miserable and fucking boring because all you do is hold M1 on stuff, and maybe you get to be a cunt to another human being if you don't die. But even if you DO die, your team will probably win anyway.

You can AFK three out of every six matches in DBD, whether survivor or killer -- letting yourself lose, and inevitably end up with a ranking 1:1 with what you'd get if you played every match genuinely. I've tried this. You know why? The game conspires to make you lose 50% of matches.

I can only imagine the true MMR has made it worse.

The fact that a game purportedly made to let people have fun has such an intricate amount of clear bollocks should be a big honking red flag.

[The Giggling Bean]

Wow, that's a lot to take in. I'm not a huge gamer...I'm still using a PS3 and only play the same 5 or 6 games. I'm not really clued in about game mechanisms etc. Although my excitement is high at the moment it's purely because TCM is one of my favourite horror films and has potential to be a fantastic game. Hell the last TCM game I played was this...

I'm not a particularly big fan of F13 so that didn't encourage me to update to a PS4, TCM on the other hand. As I understand it F13 was the first game this company had developed. The F13 franchise has been subject to ongoing lawsuits for years so I'm not surprised the game got caught up in that. Hopefully TCM will be a bit more straightforward and less glitchy.

I'll probably forget about this until there's some gameplay footage next year and adjust my enthusiasm accordingly.

[madhair60]

I kept being asked to play DBD by friends and always thought I was a total fucking freak because I thought it was awful shit that left me feeling actively unhappy. I feel a bit better about it now.

[H-O-W-L]

I kept being asked to play DBD by friends and always thought I was a total fucking freak because I thought it was awful shit that left me feeling actively unhappy. I feel a bit better about it now.

It's kind of like a drug dealer in that it gives you the first hit for free and then expects you to suck cock or swallow condoms for the next bump, so don't feel bad about washing out of it. It took me about a year to wash out but when I did was so much gladder for it. I really don't overstate when I say that my mental state has gotten vastly better since I dropped DBD (and, for the most part, any competitive multiplayer honestly.)

For what it's worth I also love a lot of the visual design, sound, even individual mechanics etc etc-- it's just the whole of the system is basically a baby-smashing machine. There's lovely gilt hammers and bronze handrails, but they're bolted onto a baby-smasher and you can't get around that.

[Rev+]

Weren't the F13 team forced to drop it because of legal issues surrounding the franchise?

If we're being very generous then yes, but they would probably have been fine adding more stuff to the game as promised.  I can understand them being cautious as they're a very small outfit, but the rights case seemed to come as a relief to them as they could immediately down tools on a game that didn't really have legs or much of a player base after the first couple of months.  It had the same problem that Dead by Daylight has, and the TCM game will have if they've not learned:

The killer should not be controlled by a player!  That's the weakness in the structure.  Add it as a bonus option, sure, but Friday the 13th and Dead by Dawn would be so much better if the killer was not player-controlled.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

don't think that trailer shows much promise but god dammmmmn is that camera shutter tuning fork noise so fucking nice

[H-O-W-L]

The killer should not be controlled by a player!  That's the weakness in the structure.  Add it as a bonus option, sure, but Friday the 13th and Dead by Dawn would be so much better if the killer was not player-controlled.

There was one mod for Half-Life and Half-Life 2 that did the asymm slasher format perfectly; it was Hidden and Hidden: Source. It was really, really fucking good, really atmospheric and creepy, and both sides were on an even keel. I loved it when it was still popular. Shame it died out (much like Zombie Master, which was an asymm FPS-RTS that was really great, as was the original Natural Selection.)

[bgmnts]

Hope this ay least provides competitive alternative to Dead by Daylight because it's just crap and there must be something better out there.

Fix generators, that's it.

Reckon you can make more out of a premise like this. Saying that, the Friday the 13th game was a bit rubbish if I recall.

[pk1yen]

I'll still defend DBD, because it's one of the only games I've played that really puts you into the emotional mindset of the character you're playing.

Being a survivor can be terrifying and frustrating because you're up against an invincible foe more powerful than you are individually -- and being a killer is specifically designed to make you rage like a violent killer and make mistakes because the survivors have just enough defences to be infuriating.

But it's definitely not a game for people who don't have a really strong hold on their emotions and general mindset, because losing a game to particularly annoying opponents can absolutely ruin your night. You really do have to stay calm, or you'll probably lose.

I like the fact the game's lore is actually focused around this. The Entity feeds off the negative emotions of the survivors and the killer in the various matches. The real game is staying calm, which I really do think is pretty neat and meta.

The game's huge, massive, fundamental flaw though, is that a team of 4 survivors who are communicating on discord or whatever, will essentially always win against any killer. And this can make the game unplayable for certain games.  There's absolutely no defence against this as a killer because the game's simply not balanced for it, and there's no way to combat it (besides matchmaking changes, where IPs or game party data could maybe be stored and used to identify friends who play together often - but this will never happen because those are the players who spend money on it).

I now always skip games when anyone has "ttv" in their handle for this reason, it's just not fun to play against someone showing off on twitch with their mates, with an unfair advantage.

I do fucking love the rush of winning though. (And it's fairly easy to just go AFK if a team of survivors are wasting your time - just go and make a cup of tea and see how long they waste their own time.)

Anyway, I played F13 for a bit and it was pretty crap. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of my favourite ever films though, so hopefully this is good and pushes the DBD devs to address some of the fundamental complaints with their game too.