Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Bioshock (game worlds)

I'll start this by saying I've not beaten all of the first Bioshock (the lack of Steam cloud saving is a pain. I've played the first half or so of the game more times than I can count because I never back up my saves) but I've still played it. I've also not played any if Bioshock 2 or Infinite, but I do plan to play Infinite at some point (after beating 1).

I'd normally just Tweet this, since it's not a huge post like I normally do, but it's a bit too big for a Tweet. Today we have Bioshock: Infinite DLC announced and one of the packs takes place in Rapture before it all went to shit! I'm really excited for this, but not for the reasons people would probably expect. Bioshock's Rapture is a beautiful city and an interesting idea, but it feels so empty and 2D. It's like an amusement park ride or a cheesy western town. If you move along the route and don't look too hard you'll enjoy it, but the second you look deep you see that's it not a real place where people have ever lived. I never (and again I haven't beaten Bioshock 1 but I've played a decent amount of it) ever felt like people lived in Rapture. The areas flow badly and don't feel like I'm in a place anyone would build let alone live in. I'm sure some of this is because the game doesn't let you explore everywhere and does things to force you along a set route (so you're not moving through the city like a normal person would, you're instead going through broken walls and maintenance doors). When you add in the fact it's underwater you see it doesn't make any sense to have the buildings not designed perfectly before building. It's sad that I've felt like some Call of Duty maps could have actually been filled with people before a war and not in Bioshock (CoD has the advantage of being able to just copy real world areas or movie scenes though). I compare the two games because they're both hallway shooters (Bioshock is better at making you think it's not, but it's pretty damn linear) even if Bioshock likes to throw in RPG type things into the mix (though, once again, it's mostly normal shooter type things with an RPG paint job. In CoD you'd put on a red dot and you're gun would become more accurate where in Bioshock you'd upgrade it or equip plasmids). Borderlands is an example of an FPS/RPG hybrid with a close to a  50/50 split of the two). So the reason I'm excited for this DLC in Rapture is because I'm excited to see if Rapture can feel more like a real place if it's got people living in it rather than just enemies. I've not played Infinite, but from screen shots and in game video it doesn't often look like it'd feel like a real place with people in it. I do feel like Infinite starts out feeling like a real city (the fair parts at the start I've seen feel like a real place) but I won't know for sure until I play it; and the price (along with that damn Steam backlog) keeps that from happening anytime soon. Most games fall very short of making it seem like people could or do live in it, but few games ever really try for this either (by which I mean that they don't set out to simulate a real world, they set out to make a game, then throw in NPCs to make it sort of feel like a real place). Skyrim, Fallout 3 and NV, Borderlands, Final Fantasy, Pokemon; they all fall short of making me feel like I'm in a real place where people live, I'm hopeful that this DLC will finally make it feel like you're in a real place. I could go into detail about what I feel each of those games is lacking to make it feel like a real place with real people, but that would make this post a bit too long (and I'm too lazy to type that much).

The 2 games I can think of that do a decent job of making a city feel real are Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Detroit feels like a hell hole, but it mostly feels like a real hell hole. And China feels like a real slum without being over the top. The fact you can enter a lot of houses and apartments that you don't need to go into really helps this) and Assassin's Creed 2 (lots of people in the world and lots of places to go to. You can't enter house like in DE:HR but it makes sense that you wouldn't in AC2. The advantage here is that the developer can just use real world pictures/paintings/maps to make the city so it's easier to make it feel like a real place just throwing a shit-ton of NPCs into). You could also add GTA4 to this list, since it does a good job making an entire city feel pretty lively. I've not played enough of GTA4 to really have much of an opinion on it though so I won't (and, yes, you could say the same about me and Bioshock: Infinite. The point of this post is more Rapture across the games than it is about a particular game). Hopefully the next Fallout game can make the world seem like there are real civilizations built from the ashes of atomic hellfire, since one of the best parts of post-apocalyptic media are the people who climb back into the ruins of the world.