The smiling, running, nightmare-fuel people in the new nightwave cutscene are scarier then actual infested.

[Snydrex]

I think I've made about two topics in the years I've played Warframe about this, but the infested aren't that scary. If I had to amount a 'theme' to them, it'd probably be 'random sh*t and glowing dots'. Avoiding a huge rant, (And the fact I'm disappointed that the current ancient designs may not be replaced a-la the armor and artwork being rewarded in the current NW selection, they look horribly outdated, shoot hooks... I don't need to elaborate.) I don't see the infested as scary. They lack the 'previous host element' that would make most mutation-esque alien viruses creepier, and the bright and random colors, and the fact every corpus apparently mutated mid-facepalm doesn't help with that either.

But the new Nightwave cut-scene.... Oof. I don't know if the uncanny valley smiles on their crazed faces were supposed to be intentionally scary, but I was more creeped out by the fantasy of coming against those zealots then I was ever about infested. If someone like them ran at me in dark, malfunctioning derelict with no context, I'd probably be a little unnerved. Something about the thought that something that looks human is running at you, but you can tell that there's something incredibly wrong about them makes me pretty disturbed, but in a good way.

Now, I'm not saying we should have The Thing-like body horror, with people splitting in half and growing teeth from their bisected heads, but that would be a far more effective horror theme, in my opinion, for any attempt to design the infested to be actually scary. Or at the very least, better then what we have now, imho.

I also understand that shooting innocent-looking people is somewhat of a stretch, so I don't expect anything to come from this. But I kinda wanna know if the idea appeals to anyone else. My idea of the infested, when I started, was met with disappointment when I saw them for the first time. Even the new Corpus Amalgram enemies are more unsettling to me.

Thoughts?

[Loza03]

I've more or less thought for a while now that the Infested as Zombies can't really be all that scary. I mean, we're basically low-key gods. If DE made some kind of Resident-evil style spinoff, maybe but that's another story.

 

What could work is what they can do to others. Like that struggling Crewman in the Eris tileset. Imagine, if DE ever does an Infested Open World, it taking place in a recently-taken city that due to the 'politics' of the system or some kind of OV-esque terraforming system run from there, people are forced to live in it. You're there both to keep them as close to safe as possible and to recover pieces of research or supplies needed. And at various parts of the City there are hives where the poor sods that get taken go to fully convert. You can stumble in there or need to for certain missions, and the music goes quiet. You can hear sobbing, wails and faint pleas for help - maybe even from children if DE wants to really rub it in.

We might be safe and comfy in our power fantasy, but the civilians aren't. If the Infested ever need to be scary, that's the route that should be taken. Similar deal with these uncanny-valley devoted. We're social animals, and watching people throw themselves to their deaths is unnerving. Second-hand horror can be effective, given the right situation.

[Ahniar]

17 minutes ago, Snydrex said:

-snip- 

That pretty much sums it up... The current infested seem more like a horde of deformed critters than an actual mass of mutated doom they are supposed to be. 

3 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

If DE made some kind of Resident-evil style spinoff, maybe but that's another story.

That would turn them into nightmare fuel (RE5 vibes)... Plix do :3

[Loza03]

8 minutes ago, Ahniar said:

That would turn them into nightmare fuel (RE5 vibes)... Plix do :3

If DE had the budget for it, it would really rock. Imagine if the 'Nemesis'/'Mr.X ' was a squad of Tenno, that aren't necessarily hunting your character down, but if they see them, they will book it straight at you, treating you as a capture target and the only thing you can do is hide.. The twist being, unlike most Resident Evil games where enemies don't really respawn, can't follow you too far and generally don't spread their awareness of your presence, the Infested do all three with impunity, so before too long, it becomes impossible to survive if you're not near the Tenno - since they're both mass slaughtering the Infested and are a bigger target, so the Infested will lose interest in you faster if the Tenno are nearby. Meaning the closer you are, the safer you are from the Infested, but the more at risk you are from being spotted, or even just caught in the crossfire.

You basically have to tread on toes, getting forced closer and closer to the Tenno, maybe even having to interfere with their objectives for supplies, because all the while the Infested density becomes thicker. You start out with lots of safe rooms but they become rarer as the infection spreads. Your goal is to get a transmitter and ship together that can get you off the station and communicate with the Tenno to sell your information willingly, sparing you the fate of... whatever happens to our capture targets. Eventually, during the final moments of the game, you manage to get the transmitter functional (but with no signal) and have just found the signal processor with receiver. Maybe you even get a weapon that can let you fight off the Infested properly - typical Rezzy Evil last level stuff. The home straight, you know if you get to your ship you win the game. You pick up the reciever, turn it on and through comes the Lotus's (or Lotordis or whoever) voice.

"There is a capture target here with vital information that we will need to extract."

 

Basically, Resident Evil meets Metroid Fusion, with Warframe attached.

[Ahniar]

4 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

 

Yes please :3

Enough baby-spankin, we need a challenge. 

[ExcaliburUmbra]

12 minutes ago, Snydrex said:

Now, I'm not saying we should have The Thing-like body horror, with people splitting in half and growing teeth from their bisected heads  -snip-

This would be amazing though. Imagine Grineer butchers running at you but then opening up Nidus-style as they get close.

I certainly agree that design-wise the Infested aren’t that intimidating. Right now the Sentients are spookier then the actual “spooky scary space-zombie” faction. On one hand, you got Crayola-colored mewling lumps of flesh(?) that just hobble and then beat at you with their extremities. On the other, eldritch organic machines that spew alien humming as they adapt to your weaponry and animate in unnatural ways. And that’s ignoring Amalgams, which are probably DE’s most horrific creations to date with all their twitching and shrieking mutations of standard Corpus units.

Heck, even what remains of Hunhow’s corpse (as seen and heard in the rare Uranus extraction room) is more unsettling then the entirety of the Infested faction imo. Though that might be my fear-bias towards hulking remains of leviathan-esque monstrosities talking.

Recent Infested designs (can you really call the Boiler or Brood Mother “recent” though?) have been a bit more interesting but I still maintain that the Infested faction needs another pass visually if not also mechanically. I’d love to see Grineer-themed runners and formerly-Corpus chargers at the very least though faction/tileset dependent infested appearances would be my ideal.

We could also use more Grineer infested units. Infested Ghouls and Noxes could be a real treat if done right.

38 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

What could work is what they can do to others. 

It always did bug me that lore-wise the infestation can spread through a single wound or bite, yet the opposing faction units in infested invasions/crossfires can regularly engage the infested in melee combat without mutating.

I agree that due to our abilities and immunity, the infested won’t ever be scary but there are definitely way of making them creepier then they are at the moment. Their sound design especially, as their whooping and meowing doesn’t quite do it for me, but a bit more body horror is always welcome imo.

[Snydrex]

15 minutes ago, FrostPrime said:

I agree that due to our abilities and immunity, the infested won’t ever be scary but there are definitely way of making them creepier then they are at the moment. Their sound design especially, as their whooping and meowing doesn’t quite do it for me, but a bit more body horror is always welcome imo.

Yeah, sound design is extremely, almost fundamentally important to any scary theme. Especially cosmic horrors.

IMO, more sounds that echoed what the host was (garbled talking, deranged sentences, perhaps noises that we were familiar with in the Warframe Universe, but corrupted) , would probably work, as the chuffs and squeals sound like a space zoo more then horrid abominations swarming you.

Games with related horror themes don't need to have previous host-like noises to be scary on that note, and I like how DE is creative with the process, but the current sound design is just not clicking any horror flags for me.

[Loza03]

Just now, Ahniar said:

Yes please :3

Enough baby-spankin, we need a challenge. 

Strictly speaking, we (the Tenno) wouldn't be the ones being challenged . The player would have to be a Corpus or Grineer or something to justify the situation, hence the whole 'budget' comment. This is a theoretical spin-off. I wanted to really lean into the idea that the Tenno are, to everyone else in the system, this absolutely terrifying, faceless force of nature that cannot be stopped under any means.

8 minutes ago, FrostPrime said:

This would be amazing though. Imagine Grineer butchers running at you but then opening up Nidus-style as they get close.

I certainly agree that design-wise the Infested aren’t that intimidating. Right now the Sentients are spookier then the actual “spooky scary space-zombie” faction. On one hand, you got Crayola-colored mewling lumps of flesh(?) that just hobble and then beat at you with their extremities. On the other, eldritch organic machines that spew alien humming as they adapt to your weaponry and animate in unnatural ways. And that’s ignoring Amalgams, which are probably DE’s most horrific creations to date with all their twitching and shrieking mutations of standard Corpus units.

Heck, even what remains of Hunhow’s corpse (as seen and heard in the rare Uranus extraction room) is more unsettling then the entirety of the Infested faction imo. Though that might be my fear-bias towards hulking remains of leviathan-esque monstrosities talking.

Recent Infested designs (can you really call the Boiler or Brood Mother “recent” though?) have been a bit more interesting but I still maintain that the Infested faction needs another pass visually if not also mechanically. I’d love to see Grineer-themed runners and formerly-Corpus chargers at the very least though faction/tileset dependent infested appearances would be my ideal.

We could also use more Grineer infested units. Infested Ghouls and Noxes could be a real treat if done right.

It always did bug me that lore-wise the infestation can spread through a single wound or bite, yet the opposing faction units in infested invasions/crossfires can regularly engage the infested in melee combat without mutating.

I agree that due to our abilities and immunity, the infested won’t ever be scary but there are definitely way of making them creepier then they are at the moment. Their sound design especially, as their whooping and meowing doesn’t quite do it for me, but a bit more body horror is always welcome imo.

One idea I heard (not mine, just passing it along) is the idea to make certain infested - particularly the ones in invasions who would be more recent - to be only half-baked. Covered in the stuff but not fully transformed. Whilst I like the bright colours overall (it does make them overall more visually distinct), they should probably stick to Oranges or at most highlights with the Greens, Blues and Purples. Leaning more into their body horror elements on their victims would work wonderfully to make them more scary.

[OneYenShort]

Honestly, to me it seems like too much personal bias coming through because of how much types of visual fantasy and horror we have at our virtual fingertips.  Let alone, again the personal bias, that you know it isn't real at all.

Does a black widow spider scare you?  Probably not.
Does a black widow that is crawling on your arm scare you?  Again probably not but you take notice.
How about... being nearly covered head to foot with black widows crawling all over you?  (aka, you just ended up, via an under house crawl space went right into a huge nest without realizing it.)    I don't know about you, but that would sure as heck scare the living crap out of me.

Use these three examples to think through situations with the infested, where does the fear factor kick in for an individual?  Discounting "standard" phobias.

The infested are pretty much like that, ignoring what they represent.  One or two not too terrible, but a swarm and oh boy.  Human me is in deep doodoo.

[Loza03]

20 minutes ago, OneYenShort said:

Does a black widow spider scare you?  Probably not.
Does a black widow that is crawling on your arm scare you?  Again probably not but you take notice.

I'd be terrified even seeing a Black Widow, mostly because in the UK there are only three spiders capable of biting a human, none of which are actually dangerous, which means that I have 0 experience with the Black Widow. All I've got to go is testaments and mystique, so I'd probably freak out.

Though on the other hand, they have the body type of spiders I'm much more OK with (garden spiders) so I might be fine. Who knows?

 

Not me and I don't want to find out.

[evilChair]

The 3rd diorama simply works because it's perverse. It's euphoric, suicidal, collective religious madness. It's rare, but the genre is religious/social horror.

[TARINunit9]

Of course they are. Simply having an infested charger that you can visibly recognize is made of a grineer whose head was twisted around and whose limbs were flayed and covered in cancerous tumors is one thing. That's one kind of scary. But when you have people actively defying their survival instincts and running toward the infested because they want to become it, that adds on a behavioral uncanny valley effect on top of reminding you co the existing body horror. It's two kinds of scary for the price of one. Or to put it another way:

19 minutes ago, evilChair said:

perverse. 

 

[evilChair]

3 minutes ago, TARINunit9 said:

Of course they are. Simply having an infested charger that you can visibly recognize is made of a grineer whose head was twisted around and whose limbs were flayed and covered in cancerous tumors is one thing. That's one kind of scary. But when you have people actively defying their survival instincts and running toward the infested because they want to become it, that adds on a behavioral uncanny valley effect on top of reminding you co the existing body horror. It's two kinds of scary for the price of one. Or to put it another way:

 

the regular infested are only disgusting tbh. except for the mutalist moas, who also happen to be annoying bumholes that taunt you by hopping around. and the ancients, who seem to be an homage to tentacle hentai (which is gross in its own way).

Edited August 9, 2019 by evilChair

[Snydrex]

1 hour ago, OneYenShort said:

 

I get that. Frankly, I'd stay the hell away from a black widow spider near me.

I'm sure that some (irl) people genuinely fear the infested, but this post wasn't quite aimed at those particular individuals. The horde's concept, yes, is disturbing. But In practice? Ehhh... I'm sure anyone who's played a few video games or watched a few movies could easily name something with better fear factor, not only in appearance and concept, but also background and process. Of course, if someone -never- experienced the horror genre in their life and played warframe, of course the infested may be terrifying to them. But that's not what I was getting at, either.

As for your examples, let me get this straight. Standardization conforms to the situation, real or not, in which one finds themselves in. This means that anyone (Or, at least most people) would be scared with real-life infested surrounding them, although this is hypothetically impossible. There's no argument there, if that was your point. In-game, the NPCs and storyline have a good reason to fear the infested.

But here, as Warframe players, where we are not controlling quite normal, squishy humans, the surrounding infested would seem as par for the course for most gamers, I assume.

They may as well be a group of unimposing thugs trying to beat a tank to death, or a group of glowing-rainbow, chirping, malformed demi-gods trying to beat a tofu man to death, depending on which level of infested you fight. Either way, the 'scare' of their number amount is just that: there's lots of them and they all want to kill you. Scary in real life, but less so in Warframe.... Because, well, that's the game, in a sentence.

Without bias, there can be no opinion. This is merely my humble view on the recent additions to Warframe: DE has taken measures, to be sure, to make the infested seem 'scary' in the past. But when a simple diorama they release brings out more unsettling feelings in me then their horror-themed faction? I'd like to know how many people feel the same way I do.

[Unagi604]

I noticed some of them were also Naruto running. Presumably to dodge bullets.

[WoodedSkate89]

ngl the title of this thread made me laugh.

 

Did you see that corpus guy at the end though, he was pure nightmare fuel

[(PSN)robotwars7]

6 hours ago, Snydrex said:

I'm not saying we should have The Thing-like body horror,

if you won't say it, I will. there's a reason why John Carpenter's The Thing from 1970 is still one of the greatest horror films to this day: the practical effects still hold up, and gave rise to the idea of Practical effects being better than CGI (which isn't always true, but in the case of the Thing, the practical is definitely scarier than any CGI Thing, simply knowing that - even if it is just a movie - that Thing does exist, it's physical, not like CGI monsters that are more like Data on a computer.).

the Infested are long overdue for a visual rework, or at the very least a new sub-faction of Infested with different appearances. DE did great work with making the Amalgams quite creepy (Satyrs in particular are a nod to Silent Hill 2 for me), so I reckon with a little bit of inspiration from titles like Dead Space, DOOM and Alien, DE's character artists could totally make some gnarly Infested that freak us out!

 

 

[Gullim92]

The nightwave cutscene did creep me out quite a bit. To be completely honest I'd be all in for having a new infested unit just be normal people or NPCs that run at you and try to kill you, like a pre-mutation infested host that has just lost their mind but still have their bodies intact, would really add to the creepy factor.

[OneYenShort]

On 2019-08-09 at 6:11 PM, (PS4)robotwars7 said:

if you won't say it, I will. there's a reason why John Carpenter's The Thing from 1970 is still one of the greatest horror films to this day:

70s???  Did you mean 80s?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/

It was the last movie that really scared the crap out of me.  I forget when I saw it on TV, but I was still single digits and it was in the 80s. No later than 86 though if I'm remembering the house correctly.