Phasmophobia | v0.10 Update Live

[Dragon Lord]

As far as I know, you are 100% safe during that 5/2 minute grace period. The ghost will not hunt at all during that time regardless of what type of ghost it is or what the player does to try and force a hunt. It's to give new players time to learn how to properly find the room and set-up, then on Intermediate they reduce it to 2 minutes to teach the player to go faster. Then Professional comes along and you know that you have to get in, find it, set-up, figure it out and get the hell out extremely quickly. With all the Phasmo I've watched thus far, I have never seen a ghost start hunting before that 5/2 minutes were up. Keep in mind though that the ghost can still appear during that grace period. A lot of new players think the ghost is going to kill them if it shows up, but it's important to note that when the ghost shows up, but your lights are not blinking off and on, that is only a ghost event, not a hunt. So you don't have to be afraid of the ghost as long as the lights aren't blinking (this is the opportune time to snap a photo of the ghost). Also be sure to approach the ghost if it's walking towards you during this time, as it will then disappear and make a noise in your ear. That counts as a witnessing a ghost event I believe, which can be one of your objectives during a job. Only run for your life if those flashlights are going crazy.

So yeah, if you're struggling learning the bigger maps or how to properly locate the ghost/set-up, it's best to run jobs on Amateur to give yourself time to properly learn, and then move up to Intermediate when you're ready. Even when you're a higher level, you can still find jobs on Amateur, albeit a lot less frequently. Professional jobs start popping up at level 15.

[Mr EliteL]

I watched a streamer I knew of play this for the first time last week, and even though it was only four areas he played with the group he was in (they had a level 30 player showing them the ropes), I enjoyed what I watched. Was funny and slightly frustrating they were using the name of the ghost almost every time they wanted to ask or get the ghost's attention, when knowing that DL says not to do. Then I realised the safe time frame they must've had as there was no hunting.
They played two houses, farmhouse and school with the two latter areas being more creepy to watch. I have to see what the asylum and Professional difficulty looks like, haven't done that yet.

[Moonface]

They played two houses, farmhouse and school with the two latter areas being more creepy to watch. I have to see what the asylum and Professional difficulty looks like, haven't done that yet.

I haven't played the school yet (@ShiraNoMai has though) but the farmhouse is one of the creepier house style maps in the game. I didn't even realise there was an attic in that level until I saw Barb on Twitch play that level when trying the game out and going up there.

[Dragon Lord]

That's because there are two different versions of the Farmhouse, one with an attic and one without. There is also two versions of the Suburban House as well. The farmhouse with the attic is a little more annoying, because the bottom floor has this back area that makes it really awkward to hide/escape from the ghost if it starts hunting while you're back there.

The school and asylum only have one version though, which is understandable considering their size compared to the other maps.

[Moonface]

Oh, I never realised the same map could have variants. I knew there were multiple suburban houses but they look different to each other entirely and I thought that was the extent of the variance.

I think a really cool map would be one that randomly generates so it's never the same when you enter it. That or make the asylum have the ability to shift the walls around so a hallway you came in from suddenly becomes a dead end and you have to find the new route. Might be annoying, but it could be really scary to always be getting turned around and hoping a hunt doesn't start. XD

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, there are variants. Well, technically there's three versions of the Suburban House, but one of them is called the Roadhouse. But you have the one house that has just the single floor with a basement, which has two bedrooms and a bathroom right to your left when you enter the house. Then you have the house that has the stairs straight ahead of you when you enter, with the kitchen right to your left and the living room to your right. Then you have the house that has the stairs right next to you on your right when you enter and a living room on the left.

Farmhouse, as I mentioned before, has the two variants where the one only has four rooms on the second floor, and then the other is considerably bigger with that extra area on the first floor, a bigger second floor and the attic.

For your comments about a shifting map, while it sounds like a neat idea, unfortunately I'm not really sure if it'd be a good fit for this game. Sometimes in the asylum, you come across the ghost's room right when it starts its first hunt, and having it so you turn around and suddenly there's a wall behind you would mean certain death without any chance of escaping for the player, and I feel like that would become very unfair. Granted it might not be a situation you'd always encounter, but it's definitely a possibility. Especially if your ghost happens to be a Revenant or a Jinn, where you wouldn't be able to outrun them.

[ShiraNoMai]

I forget this game is in early access. I was wondering what kind of things they'd release to update the game at all, but I now see that it will be constantly updated to improve some of the jank the game has at times, until full release (which is TBA IIRC?)

[Dragon Lord]

Yes, there are constantly additions being made. A lot of them aren't in the public build right now, but if you switch to playing the beta version, you can experience them all. I'll put some of them in a spoiler if you're interested:

1) I'm not sure if this one has been pushed through to the game yet, but if not, they added singing to the ghosts. It seems to only be the female ghosts (adult and child) that do it, but sometimes when they appear, you'll hear an eerie humming. This only seems to be when they appear as a Ghost Event, and not when they appear during a hunt. In addition, if you have a child ghost, and if you're near them, you'll sometimes hear it giggle in your ear.

2) They added a new ghost. She appears to be in her late teens/early 20s, and she resembles the Grudge girl a lot, at least to me. She's in white pajamas and has long hair that covers her face (she always seems to appear with her head down so you can never see her face). She's also the first adult ghost who crawls on all fours when she's hunting, joining the always creepy crawling child ghost. 

3) They added a new sub-objective, which is to get a ghost to walk through a pile of salt. Not really sure how this applies to Wraiths yet, as they float and thus do not leave tracks through salt. I'm assuming having a wraith pass over a pile of salt would count though, otherwise that would make it an unobchievable objective with that type of ghost. 

4) They added the ability to pick up items in the house when you're dead. This doesn't seem to apply to ghost hunting items, such as a book or a EMF Reader sitting on the ground, but you can have some fun with your friends and try to spook them by randomly throwing objects at them when they don't expect it. Or bring all of the items in the house out the truck and leave a nice little pile of loot for them.

There's been a lot of other additions too, but these are just a few that I can remember off the top of my head right now. I'll post more later as I remember them.

Also, I wanted to let anyone who is interested in playing with me know, I'm down to play the game at any time, pending if my laptop can run it. Even if it's just two of us doing some duo ghost hunting, I'd be down. Just let me know.

[Moonface]

I'm not really sure what adding new ghosts will do in the long term for this game. It might be neat at first but I feel like every new ghost is just going to quickly end up like the rest, with groups just getting in the building and solving what the ghost is as fast as possible. It might make things a little tougher if you have more options to narrow down to, but I think there's going to need to be other things added to give variation to stop the game feeling like the same shit but with a different ghost all the time, because otherwise by the time this game leaves early access I can see the interest in it being very small.

[Dragon Lord]

Well, in this case it's not a new ghost type, just a new ghost model. There hasn't been any new ghost types added in. I'm not sure what would work as a good addition, because it'll be difficult to add in any new ghosts that don't break the game and make things unfair for the player.

Revenants are already impossible to run from if you get caught in a bad spot. If you can't break line of sight with it immediately, it'll catch up to you in about 2 seconds and kill you. A Jinn is the same way if the breaker for the power is on. You can't really add a ghost that stalks one person and follows them around every where, because then obviously it's on your ass immediately when it starts hunting. Though I guess they could make it so that when it starts hunting, you have x amount of time before it actually comes after you, so you have time to hide. Then again, this type of ghost would just be an enhanced version of the Banshee (hunts only one specific person), so that would be pretty pointless.

An interesting ghost idea could be a ghost that possesses one of you, but there's no way to tell who it possesses. Then when it starts to hunt, it takes over that person and uses them to kill. So if you were possessed and it started hunting, if someone was hiding in the same room as you, the ghost would use you to kill your teammate. Not sure how this would be balanced to ensure fairness, but it could be a pretty interesting type of ghost. Especially if they made it so that if the possessed person was in the truck with someone else during a hunt, it could kill that other person in the truck. That would achieve their goal of adding a risk to camping in the truck without making it so that every ghost can hunt in the truck, which I think would be a bit overkill considering you often need someone to stay in the truck to look for ghost orbs or guide you in the Asylum using the map.

[Moonface]

What happens if you hit 100% insanity? Do you just die right away? If so, maybe they could have a ghost that will put insanity up really high if you see them on the monitors in the truck, or perhaps power to the truck could be disabled to force players to leave and fix it if one person is constantly in there. Either that or have possession cause people to see or not see things. Imagine if someone in the truck is influenced to not see something on the camera or they see the paranormal graph read a zero when it's really an 8 or something. It would be obvious someone is possessed if another person is with them to call bullshit and attract the rest of the team to verify the bullshit, so it wouldn't be horribly unbalanced. Or even a ghost type that makes more people hallucinate things so you can't tell who is telling the truth as easily. Stuff that just fucks with the team dynamic and makes people unsure of what is really going on.

[Dragon Lord]

If your Sanity hits 0, the ghost starts to hunt constantly. This is really bad in maps like High School and Aslyum, because if you're deep into the Asylum and someone in there with you has 0 Sanity, the ghost is going to hunt every like 20 seconds. That's why Professional Asylum is such a pain in the ass, because you don't get the safety timer and you're on a very tight time limit before your sanity hits that 30%-40% range where the ghost will start hunting on a consistent basis, and then of course if you hit 0 then you have to deal with non-stop hunts.

There's a streamer I watch who actually wants more stuff to happen when you have low sanity, such as seeing things that aren't actually there. I'm not sure exactly how much this would influence the game though, because you'd know that person is low on sanity and thus would know they will start to see fake things. This is just a type of game that is really difficult to think of new ideas for because of the nature of the game. We already have ghosts that do a variety of different things (Yurei drains sanity at a fast pace, Phantoms tank your sanity if you look at them, Wraiths can go through walls, etc. etc.), so it's going to be very interesting to see how the dev comes up with new ideas while keeping the game fair and balanced.

You could make a ghost that curses someone, and that person is no longer able to leave the building until certain conditions are met. This could be fair, while also becoming a huge threat to the entire team because now you have someone low on sanity that can't leave to take sanity pills. To prevent someone from bringing them pills, you could also make that player unable to use items while cursed. The only issue is I'm not sure what would be a good objective for breaking the curse. Would there be something in the building you'd have to find and destroy? Would you have to cleanse the ghost area to break it? It'd have to be something that would be fair to accomplish on maps like the Asylum, but I think this would be an interesting idea to see in action.

[Moonface]

Perhaps a player with a crucifix has to do something to cleanse the person, and then you have to hope the person who lost their shit isn't the one holding the crucifix that's needed to help them. XD

[Dragon Lord]

That would actually be a good idea. Normally a Crucifix is good for stopping two hunts before it disappears, but make it so that if you want to remove the curse from your teammate, you have to use up the Crucifix entirely. That would add more danger to the game because you're giving up one of your safety nets to get your teammate back into the game, and you're only allowed to bring two Crucifix with you on a job. So now you'd be down to one of them and since the range of it is so small (the ghost has to spawn within 3 meters of it for the hunt to be stopped), it'd greatly increase the danger level.

A ghost type like this would add so much danger to the level, because trapping the player inside means constantly sanity drain without being able to get out, endangering everyone inside with increased hunts. While cursed, your teammate can't do anything, so you're down a party member for setting up/searching for clues. Lastly, forcing you to sacrifice one of your safety items to un-curse your teammate, making the ghost more of a threat.

Let's just hoe the dev for the game has some ideas of his own like this that would add some dynamic to how the flow of the game goes.

[Dragon Lord]

Forgive the bump, but I just wanted to post in here again to say...

Congratulations to Phasmophobia for winning the "Best Debut" award during The Game Awards!

Was really rooting for it to bring that one home, and it did. Was definitely well deserved.