Phasmophobia | 2024 Roadmap and Beyond...

[Mr EliteL]

I've watched a bit more and the tracking via voice in hunts is there, but has issues. The time I mentioned before was in the Tanglewood entrance hallway closet Insym was in, so it wasn't a room and the ghost is more likely to be traversing through a hallway. When in the closet he held one side closed while hiding behind that half, ghost opened the other and walked on the spot but couldn't kill. Then later Insym didn't both holding either door, talked so the ghost went there, opened the doors and killed. Another time he tested lockers (Tanglewood garage), holding the door shut guaranteed safety, when taunting the ghost on two hunts it went there, the next two hunts it did not go to the locker despite constantly talking.

Issues I've seen for talking during hunts where the ghost should be after you are hunts randomly stopping much earlier or a little after they begin and the times I've seen the player was hiding in a locker/closet, still very easy to make the ghost lose sight of you/ghost getting stuck on corners even if it was very close behind, and ghost supposedly going to where you are but it goes to the room behind where you're hiding. Example for the latter in the room with a black mat or whatever it is of...Grafton there's still a "safe spot" in the left corner with a curtain and shelving unit, even when the room is the ghost room, the ghost first went to the player but then left to go in the room behind, noticeable from hearing as if approaching from behind. Even got a clip of it: https://clips.twitch.tv/FitSpookyRaccoonPhilosoraptor

EDIT: May already be outdated as there's been even more patches, I should've watched today as it's being tested, only just tuned in and found out. https://game-updates.info/phasmophobia?37

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, ghosts tracking you via voice during hunts is definitely a thing now, and it's a 10/10 move that they finally added it for real.

I also love that ghosts open doors now, instead of just walking through them. It's so much creepier during a hunt when you're hiding and you just here the ghost opening every door down the hall, and you can just hear it getting closer and closer. Then you hear it open the door of the room next to you and you're just like "fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!"

I was watching Sakura Tsubasa play the game the other night and she had a situation like this in the Asylum. One of her teammates ran down the hall that had the room she was hiding in, talking the entire time. So of course the ghost comes a stomping after him, but since the ghost lost track of him, it starts to open the doors and checking the rooms in the hall. She heard it open the door to the room next to her and the "oh shit..." look on her face was priceless. Then she heard it stomp, stomp, stomp right up to the door of the room she was in, and then... by a stroke of luck, the hunt ended right there, probably just a second or two before the ghost would have popped open the door and discovered her, haha. It was absolutely hilarious and creepy at the same time. Though I will say one thing they need to fix is being able to hold a door closed to prevent the ghost from getting into the room and finding you. That shit is so stupid.

On a completely unrelated note as well:

Talking to Moon about what type of ghost I'd be if I died sparked an idea in my brain. You know what kind of a mechanic I'd love to see in this game? A prankster ghost that randomly can show up on a hunt. What I mean by prankster ghost is that it's job is just to throw you off the trail of the actual ghost. It won't hunt/hurt you, but what it will do is give you signs to make you think it's the actual ghost, when it reality it's not and you're just wasting your time/sanity by chasing it. It could do things the actual ghost can do to give you hints, such as turning on lights, opening door, ringing phones, ect..

Maybe it could even leave behind fake evidence that you have to figure out if it's real or not. For example, it could leave a handprint on the door, but you take a picture of it and the book doesn't say "Fingerprints", telling you that you have found the handprint of the prankster ghost instead of the actual ghost. Or if you used the spirit box, it could give you a joke reply instead of an actual reply. Maybe you just spent 5 minutes chasing down the prankster ghost and you ask it a question and it replies with "Gotcha!" or something.

Would need a lot of refinement from the simple examples I gave, obviously, but if it was done right, it could be a really cool mechanic in the game that could really throw players off their game and maybe end up in some more player deaths. Having it just randomly shows up would also make it so players would be thrown off. When you have three games with no prankster, then your fourth does, you wouldn't know when to expect it to happen.

[Moonface]

Ghosts can open doors now? Screw that, if I ever encounter that myself I don't think I'd ever be able to keep calm. My sanity would probably drain faster than that of my character's.

As for the prankster ghost idea, that could be really good. I wonder if it would work as another player option, since you can't harm anyone it wouldn't be overpowered to be human controlled. It would really just need to have ways to not just be obvious what's a prank because the human players would already know there's a prankster ghost before starting. Perhaps having cool downs like in Among Us would help to stop players spamming with it and being annoying.

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, when the ghost is hunting, you'll hear it open doors to the rooms it checks. If you're hiding in a room near it on a map like the Asylum, you'll just hear the sound of it opening doors when it's hunting. It definitely adds a level of un-easiness back into the game when you're hiding and you hear it opening doors closer and closer to where you are.

Though this has caused a big issue, as I mentioned before. Since the ghost has to now open the door, instead of having no doors in the ghost realm, a player can hold the door shut and prevent the ghost from getting in. Some people say it only works with closets and lockers, but I was watching a stream where the ghost attempted to open the door to the room that all four of them were hiding in, but one of them was holding it shut and the ghost was unable to get in. They need to make it so the door opens regardless.

A player controlling a prankster ghost sounds like a fun idea, but I think in this game, it'd be way too obvious to tell when it's the prankster ghost with a player. I think keeping the game players vs AI is best over all. Also another fun prank I just thought of: The prankster ghost could lure you to the actual ghost's room, obviously without you knowing, and then immediately trigger the actual ghost to hunt. It'd be a great way to catch players off-guard and lead to some more deaths.

[Moonface]

Though this has caused a big issue, as I mentioned before. Since the ghost has to now open the door, instead of having no doors in the ghost realm, a player can hold the door shut and prevent the ghost from getting in. Some people say it only works with closets and lockers, but I was watching a stream where the ghost attempted to open the door to the room that all four of them were hiding in, but one of them was holding it shut and the ghost was unable to get in. They need to make it so the door opens regardless.

A player controlling a prankster ghost sounds like a fun idea, but I think in this game, it'd be way too obvious to tell when it's the prankster ghost with a player. I think keeping the game players vs AI is best over all. Also another fun prank I just thought of: The prankster ghost could lure you to the actual ghost's room, obviously without you knowing, and then immediately trigger the actual ghost to hunt. It'd be a great way to catch players off-guard and lead to some more deaths.

If a player blocks the door then the ghost should be allowed to phase through it and instantly kill the person blocking the door. The ghost would probably kill someone if it was able to enter the room anyway, so just punish whoever is annoying it by blocking the door.

It's a shame most maps don't seem to have items you need to pick up in them. If they did I'd say the prank ghost could pick them up when a player has line of sight to the item (so they at least know it's being moved) and then the ghost runs off with it to somewhere else in the house. Perhaps it could also be allowed access to the truck and be able to mess with the cameras when a player is trying to watch one of them.

[Moonface]

A new update came out a few days ago for anyone interested.

The ghost AI improvements are really interesting to me:

• The ghost will now follow your around corners if it has lost sight of you rather than searching a random location.
  
• The ghost will now listen for player voices when hunting and will search those locations. This will not work if you are not the banshee target.
  
• The ghost can now open lockers and closets outside of a hunt.
  
• The ghost will now open doors, closets and lockers during hunts. This can be stopped by holding the door however the ghost can still walk through room doors like usual.
  
• Slightly increased the ghosts chance to wander on all difficulties.
  
• The ghost will now search around the location it last saw a player rather than searching a random location.
  
• The ghost will now target any player that gets close to it whilst it's already chasing another player.

I thought the ghost could already hunt via voice from an earlier update? Other than that one bit confusing me, the rest is neat! I really like that ghosts can walk through doors because I remember making a post earlier in this thread worrying about people blocking doors and just ruining hunts. I also just like that things like corners won't stop the ghost and that it won't ignore people in chases.

It'd be neat if there are ghosts that don't drop the temperature below 5C, so that when the lights are off you won't be able to use the thermometer to tell if the ghost is in the room with you. It'd really make professional mode scary at the start because the power is already off and all rooms will start at 5C, so you would be entering a building with an immediate hunt and no idea if the ghost is in the room with you via temperature.

[Mr EliteL]

Ah, so I assume these will be for the proper game and not just on the beta as before. The daily patches on the beta were good, but I started to give up keeping track as I wasn't playing the game and only watching, then stopped watching for a while. So will be good coming back to watching all the new updates and possibly playing too.

[Dragon Lord]

These were features that have been on the beta build for a long while now. He's just now finally pushing them into the normal version of the game. About time too. He's been extremely lazy with updating this game. I still hate that you can completely counter the ghost by hiding in a locker or closet and just closing the door whenever the ghost opens it during a hunt. There's only one map where you can't rely on a closet/locker, and that's one of the versions of the Farmhouse.

As for your temp wish, there is another change to the game now that the beta features have pushed through to the main game. On Professional difficulty, the power in the building will be off to start the level, and the entire building will be cold until someone goes and turns the power on, and then you need to wait a couple of minute for the building to warm up before you can rely on the thermometer to find the ghost room (exception being if you happen to come across negative temps while using a thermo before the breaker is turned on). This makes it so that using the EMF Reader or the Spirit Box is actually more reliable for finding the ghost early. Or listening for sounds, obviously. Now that ghosts will fuck with doors and shit more often, you can always easily find the ghost by listening for the sound of a door being opened or a knock on a window.

Another thing not mentioned is that it is generally harder to get signs from the ghost now. EMF Level 5 can be incredibly hard to find now, and I've seen streamers struggle for 20+ minutes just to get the EMF to finally go to level 5. A ghost might also keep stringing you along and not write in the book for a very long time.

Oh, another interesting change that wasn't listed there is that now instead of Demons being able to hunt extremely early, it's now the Banshee that can start a hunt at any time. I haven't seen it happen yet, but I've heard people say they've been hunted the moment they enter the building for the first time against a Banshee. I'm a little skeptical of that, but I guess I'll know for sure if I ever see it happen. But regardless, before the Demon could start hunting you at... I think around 70% Sanity, but now it's the Banshee that will hunt you early like that. Another interesting change with the Banshee is that a hunting Banshee will walk through you, leaving you unharmed, if you're not the Banshee's obsession. So if all four of you are in the building and you know who the Banshee's target is, the other three can actually just wander around like normal during a hunt and the Banshee won't fuck with you.

So yeah, the Beta has had a lot of really neat features game-play wise for a while, now everyone is forced to play with them. I'm sure there's a lot of bitching going on amongst the casuals who avoided the Beta build because of the slight increase in difficulty. The ghosts wandering more is a big change that I'm sure people are hating. It can make finding the room pretty annoying, because you'll think you've found it, only for it to turn out the ghost was just wandering there and the room is some where else. I've seen people get annoyed by asking the Ouija board "where are you?", only for it to tell them the wrong room, because that just happens to be the room the ghost is in at the moment of them asking. You have to ask the Ouija board "What's your favorite room?" to get the answer to what room is the correct one.

Oh, one last thing, another change that the beta build had was how a ghost acts after a hunt. Previously, after the hunt ends, the ghost would just *poof* back to its room. Now the ghost actually walks back to its room from wherever it stopped hunting. This means if you go back to the ghost's room after a hunt, and it starts hunting again and it didn't get back to its room, it'll spawn and start hunting from wherever it is. For example, if you're in the Asylum and this happens, you'd be expecting the ghost to spawn in its room, but maybe it decided to wander around after the hunt ended and instead if spawns down the hall behind you, possibly trapping you in a dead end if it decides to go check out its room first. So that does add a little more danger to the game if you get unlucky. Or you decide to start running away from the room when the hunt starts, only to have the ghost pop up right in your face after turned around and started walking down the hall. Especially dangerous with crawling ghosts that you might not see in front of you when you're in a hurry to get away from the room.

[Dragon Lord]

So the dev is looking to make a change to the game that I don't know if I agree with.

He wants to make it so that while the ghost is hunting and it's chasing you/has LoS on you, it'll get faster and faster as the chase goes on until it becomes fast enough to catch up to you and kill you.

Now, obviously Revenants already do this, so making this change takes away what makes a Revenant exciting to face off against, especially on levels with long hallways like the High School. Sure, the other ghosts will take a bit to get that fast and get you, but it makes it so that the Revenant loses the one thing that made it the most dangerous ghost. It'll now just be able to catch you a little sooner than the other ghost types, instead of being the only one that can catch you.

Secondly, they've made it harder and harder to be able to hide from the ghost. The ghost will now prioritize checking locations that the player was in during its previous hunt, and on small levels, this makes it impossible to loop the ghost around to avoid being caught by it. They also want to change it so that when you're hiding in a closet/locker, instead of just opening up the door a little bit, and allowing the player time to close the door on the ghost before being killed, the ghost will just open the door all of the way and instantly kill you.

So they're trying to make hiding from the ghost extremely hard, but also trying to remove the ability to run away from the ghosts as well. I understand they want to add some level of difficulty to the game compared to what it was at launch/what it is now, but there comes a point where you're going to make it so impossibility hard to survive a hunt that people aren't going to want to play the game any more.

They've already made huge nerfs to the Thermometer on Professional (which I agree with, I like that the power is off at the start of the game on Professional now), and changed the Banshee to being able to hunt you at 100% Sanity, so I just feel like it's going to get to the point where it kills the game.

[Moonface]

I'd rather ghosts get faster in each successive hunt if the change has to happen in some capacity. At least then Revenants keep their danger. I'd even say the same could maybe apply to opening doors fully, make it that if you keep using a spot it'll learn and start to be more rapid with opening the door. You could also make it that if you keep using a spot, a ghost is going to check it first if they don't know where you are, so it could even become a risk and reward strategy of do you want to risk being killed by using a spot enough times to trick the ghost later on?

[Dragon Lord]

You could also make it that if you keep using a spot, a ghost is going to check it first if they don't know where you are, so it could even become a risk and reward strategy of do you want to risk being killed by using a spot enough times to trick the ghost later on?

This actually does happen. The ghost is more likely to go check places people were hiding during the previous hunt the next time it hunts. You might get lucky and be able to hide in the same room twice in a row, but there's a good chance that room will be one of the first places the ghost checks during its third hunt.

Though with how closets/lockers work right now, the only map this becomes a problem on is... one of the farmhouses. Can't remember which one, but it's the only map in the game that does not have a closet or a locker to hide in, so you end up having to loop the ghost around instead, because hiding now is more of a death sentence than anything, since the ghosts are now more thorough in checking rooms during hunting. Although they are planning on adding a closet/locker to the map soon, so that's going to change how dangerous that map is. 

I don't remember if I mentioned it in detail, but if anyone doesn't know why a locker/closet takes away all the danger: Right now in the game, if you're hiding a locker/closet, you can hold the door closed and the ghost can't open it to get you. Though even if you don't hold it closed, if the ghost opens it, you have more than enough time to slam it shut again before the ghost can even kill you. Which is why they are wanting to change it so that the ghost just opens the door all of the way, instead of just a little bit, and then they can just go in and kill you right away. 

But yeah, all of this combined just makes me worried that they are going to make surviving a hunt so stupidly hard that groups are just going to decide to start playing the game by having just one person go in and find the ghost, while the rest stay in the van to keep the team sanity over 70%, making it so the only ghost who can hunt in that situation a Banshee.

Oh, I also forgot another feature they want to add. So, when a ghost starts hunting, you have 8 seconds to run before it can actually kill you. During this time you can see where the ghost is, so you know which direction to run in. Well, they want to take that way. They want to make it so that the ghost won't be visible until your 8 second grace period is over. So the ghost could be right on top of you the entire time you're trying to get away and you won't know it until the 8 seconds are over and then you just instantly die. 

So...

-Make it so you can't see where the ghost is during the safe period
-Make it so you can't outrun the ghost for long
-Make it so you can't hide from the ghost

I guess they just want everyone to speedrun every level in two minutes. Unless they find a way to actually balance this mess, but seeing all of the lazy work the dev did with the game, I don't see him putting that much effort into it. It's going to be a shit show.

[Moonface]

Yeah, that just sounds like bad balancing. If they really want a dangerous speedrun style mode I'd rather it be a separate difficulty or something, because for new players a lot of that stuff is going to instantly turn them away because it's going to result in repeated losses until they get lucky or learn the game, but you're not going to be able to learn very well if you keep dying before you can figure out how things work.

[Dragon Lord]

Maybe they'll restrict these changes to Professional difficulty only, but even then it'd only be a matter of time before players got tired of being able to survive being mostly a crap shoot rather than anything.

The main issue with these changes is, if the ghost sees you when it starts hunting, you're going to be 100% dead. You won't be able to continue to outrun the ghost and you won't be able to go hide in a room because the ghost will see which room you go into. So you basically can't be any where near the ghost's room when it starts to hunt, or the odds of dying will basically be 100%. Especially on Asylum where you have longs halls and won't be able to break line of sight long enough to be able to hide without the ghost knowing where you went.

But, maybe in the end they will find a way to balance it out well, but I'm just worried that in his annoyance of how easy his game turned out to be, he's going to turn it into something so gruelingly difficult that it sucks all the fun out of the game. I understand he probably wasn't happy that most people were using this game as more of a fun party game with friends, but dude, thanks to that you made MILLIONS of dollars. Just ride with it.

[Moonface]

But, maybe in the end they will find a way to balance it out well, but I'm just worried that in his annoyance of how easy his game turned out to be, he's going to turn it into something so gruelingly difficult that it sucks all the fun out of the game. I understand he probably wasn't happy that most people were using this game as more of a fun party game with friends, but dude, thanks to that you made MILLIONS of dollars. Just ride with it.

Yeah, he should double down on what people are enjoying the game for; it worked for Fortnite.

If the developer does choose to make changes that hurt the game though, then that just means another developer is going to have a free pass to taking over the market. It'll be the story of the battle royale genre all over again where the OG's of the genre are just footnotes because someone else saw the opportunity to steal the thunder and pulled it off.

[Dragon Lord]

We can definitely already see that potentially happening with that upcoming Forewarned game. While the basis of the game is different, the general structure of it is the same and I know a lot of current Phasmo players are looking forward to that coming out so they can ditch Phas, unless the Dev really turns around and actually starts getting some shit done in the game.

He's made some tweaks to the mechanics of the game, but that's it. The game hasn't received any actual new content since the Prison released back in what, November? Some where around there. I believe the game is still in early access too, and you can't content-starve an early access title and expect it to survive.