The scary aspect of Starbound

No adventure is complete without that adrenaline rush of fear, so I suggest we start suggesting. Yes.

Something like: ''You land on a unexplored planet, and you notice that there are many signs of civilization, but not a soul to be found. As you explore you come across a cabin in middle of the woods, and you decide to stay the night since its getting dark. As you sit on a chair and wonder while watching the torch burn, you hear a sudden crack outside the cabin. You hurry to a window, and see that something had stepped on the branch just in front of the window. Nervous and shaken up you spend a while leaning against the wall away from the windows. After a small while you sit down on the chair again, and almost immediately you hear a crack, this time from the roof. You run outside and quickly point your flashlight above the cabin's roof. The light revealed a dark hairy body, a goat-like humanoid with white pair of eyes, hunched over and looking me at the eyes. Fear I never had experienced took over my body and I rushed inside the cabin. There I was just staring at the window and I saw It staring at me. I tried to go under the table and think happy thoughts, but then it started scratching the window. Something in its low voice seemed to mesmerize me. I finally stood up and shot a number of rounds at the window. The creature had jumped to a distance and it was running away. I screamed and I kept shooting at the direction it had fled. After this I ran to the dark night and headed to my ship. All the way I heard this loud scream that echoed in the distance, and I could feel it becoming louder, closer. Just when I had reached my ship it appeared out of the darkness and jumped on the windshield. It gave up after I had started the motor and began rising.

This is an example how it it would pretty much go If you are completely absorbed in the game. As a mob the creature (named ripper) would rarely spawn on a planet at night as a miniboss, and it would appear out of the darkness behind the players back, and you start to see a pair of gleaming white eyes, then you have to reveal the creature with your flashlight and slowly back off while it stands still and then make your run to the nearest safe spot. Or it could spawn near a house you're in atm and start scrathing the windows/walls.

What are the scary aspects you want to see in the game? (aside from abandoned space station)

 

Powerful stalker enemy. It would creep in shadows waiting to strike + unsettling music when its looking at you. Youd have to hide, crouch etc. to avoid fight. Like that really scary sabor-tooth panther at the end of video

 

Chupacabra's coming to steal your chickens and eat your huevos!

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I really like horror/mystery in games. Would be fantastic to discover some sort of Avian temple and, in the building's murky dungeons, come across torture instruments, sacrificial chambers, and such. Who knows what else would be there? ^_^ One thing I believe helps this genre is finding a diary/log that reports the victim's (or person missing) last message, typically a short undetailed, yet helpful, description about whatever horrors they faced.

 

Maybe we had ruins of apex civilization/laboratories on the asteroids/moon that were lost because of airtank failure or something

 

Well,I don't really like to spam,but...
This is what I mean for scary.A bit.

 

Well yes that was scary, but will starbound have a goblin army?

 

The scariest aspect of starbound is that it's gonna suck up my soul and personal life and just leave me in front of the computer screen forever and ever and ever and ever. On topic though the thing that can make the game scary is having fitting creepy music to accompany eerie planets.

 

I'd certainly enjoy having enemies who you cannot hope to fight, and have to work to avoid as you explore (the SA-X in Metroid Fusion is the prime example of this done, IMO, well). It'd be no fun if everything could just be gunned or cut down without too much issue, or powerful but manageable, in the case of enemies on higher level planets. It would be an interesting way of adding a challenge to gathering certain materials. Have some materials spawn on particular types of worlds, and have powerful stalkers or emergent hunting threats that will follow you about as you spend longer on the planet. The longer you spend there, the more active they become in trying to hunt you down. You'd need some pretty fancy AI though for that, so that they'd be able to lose sight of you and walk off/eventually despawn (possibly through 'cloaking' or just walking off screen), as opposed to knowing you're there on the other side of that wall and walking into said wall for the rest of time.

 

Thats not the kind of Horror i want to see.
Starbound having a way larger scale than that, there is only one thing to shoot for.

Cosmic Horror

Inevitable Terror, forces that do not even recognize you, utterly alien with no comprehension of morality.
I want to see entire planets beeing corrupted by their influence. I want to see tendrils of the void to span entire systems in their dreaded grasp.

I want fucking Cthulhu. Not zombies.

 

I would like to see something like this:

I was just looking out the window, the stars were sparkling and it seemed they were calling my name. After a brief moment I saw one of the stars getting bigger and bigger, it was coming towards me!
I ran to the board computer to get out of the way, but the scanners said it was a normal starwhale. But that's impossible! Starwhales don't give off light! Suddenly, I noticed that I wasn't scanning the light coming towards me, the light wasn't the starwhale!
The starwhale had very different coordinates than the light, but they were coming closer to eachother! I ran to the window, just in time to see a shady figure that looked a bit like an anglerfish, but huge! His light was just as big as a sun, he ate the starwhale in one bite. I tried to make scans of this enormous creature, but the scanner said there was nothing to scan, except some rocks and dust. I stood at the window, looking at the horrible, pitch-black, undetectable creature, and I never saw anything like it again.

It would just be something you can see in the background while in space.

 

Organic dungeon/planet, like a hive of some hideous species that put their victims in cocoons or turning them into monstrosities. And some haunted spaceships/stations/research complexes with dark secret.

 

That's something nice.Events in the background.Easy to mod,probably.

 

Something with an angel-like form, and when it appears, you have to hide quick or it will get you. It can only appear on night, when it does, everything will turn pitch black and a light will appear from some place in the screen with an angelical-demonic voice. It can be a alien race, who inspired the cration of angels in the earth.

 

so you mean like dead space err i cant think of any more ... except system shock(i just thought of that :/)

 

Id say that there are very few games that have ever been able to do horror well. Ironicly the ones who try fall flat on their back, (Im looking at you Slender.) True horror doesnt need jump scares,gore or any of that. Just look at lone survivor,minecraft and several other games wich managed to horror rather well by being original. Im hoping Starbound will aptempt this, The key to true horror is to be original. A event wich suddenly makes the player helpless whould do excellent in a survival game like this. Something hunting the player wich you know you can defeat but at the same time it will be risky as hell is another thing they could do. (Like the wolves from Dont starve.)

 

Fear is difficult to add to a game. Everyone has a different opinion on what "Scary" truly is. I find an endless field of white to be terrifying, others find pitch darkness scary. Some are afraid of clowns, others laugh at them. You can easily make things that "should appear to be scary" but they end up so generic and over done that they not at all. The only real fear that I see in SB is a fear of the unknown, and even that fades as you progress. There is a small detail they can add to try and help in adding fear, add a slightly unnerving sound and never explain what makes it. It can be something subtle and yet out of place, as long as we never find out what makes the sound, there is always the possibility that it is there stalking us.

 

well those games arent exactly saposed to be scary (also plenty of typos in your post but im not a grammer cop)
Also Slender is scary cause it has like a anixaity affect on you. You know he's coming and there is nothing you can do about it.

 

Apologies english is not my main language. In my opinion games that often try to be subtle with horror Lone survivor/Amnesia (The orignal amnesia not those new custom maps.) suceed better than games that are based around paranoia and jumpscares (Slender/Dead space.) Also regarding slender, Its scary the first time you play it. Then you know whats gonna happen. Ive beaten slender a couple of times and i only got scared on my first time playing it.

 

Like the Grue from Don't Starve.
If you stay too much in complete darkness you hear a sound and then something mauls you in 2 hits.
And if you light something it just disappears, so you can never know how it looks like.

 

I'd say fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all, creating the atmosphere in games. Monsters from amnesia or slenderman seem paranormal to us, therefore we don't know what they do. However in those games you anticipate that they WILL find you and your only option is to run for your life. So in starbound we most likely wont get something that will always chase us, instead the fear of the unkown. ''As I opened a new cave, the wind seemed to greet me with a eerie howl as the wind escaped into the long forgotten cave.''