Biohazard
Bioshock has two confirmed sequels on the way. Normally, this would be the sort of news that I would be thrilled to hear. A squeal to one of the finest games of 2007? Time to ring the bells and break out the good brandy. However, for a number of reasons, I’m somewhat apprehensive about this particular sequel:
1) It’s not Irrational[1] at the helm.
Development duties for the Bioshock sequels have been passed from Irrational to 2K Marin. On the face of it, this isn’t a cause for too much alarm: franchises bounce around among development teams all the time. Bioshock is something of a unique case, though. Frankly, it wasn’t a great shooter. It was a great game, which happened to have some reasonable FPS elements. The things that made Bioshock great would have made it just as great if it had been an adventure game, or a survival horror, or even a platformer.[2]
Bioshock, unlike the vast majority of mainstream games, had actual themes rather than just a plot: it made points and expressed views that could be applied just as well to the real world. Most games draw their influences from existing science fiction and fantasy, which always creates an experience that, no matter how engaging, is ultimately shallow. Really good science fiction and fantasy draws its influences from a wide range of sources, and that is exactly what Irrational did with Bioshock. It’s plot and it’s world were the result of a range of different philosophical, political and aesthetic schools of thought[3]. Even if you didn’t get all the references, its hard to deny the power and vibrancy of the result.
Can a new dev team really capture this spirit? Short of putting them on a crash course of Sartre and Ayn Rand, it’s hard to see how. But without that spirit, Bioshock 2 will be a hollow experience: it might look right, but it won’t feel right.
2) Rapture is now a known quantity.
The city of Rapture itself was very much a character in Bioshock. There were new horrors and wonders around every corner, the constant juxtaposition of the familiar and the fantastic. A big part of the appeal of the game was exploring this underwater world, taking in its strange and terrible sights, and discovering its secrets.
You can’t recapture that in a sequel. It’s not that we can’t be shown parts of Rapture that we’ve never seen before, indeed, I’m sure that’s exactly what we will see. But we know what to expect from them now. That feeling of discovery, and of creeping horror as another laudable aspect of human endeavour is shown taken beyond the point of obsession, will be gone, and it’s hard to see what can be put in its place.
3) The story seems likely to be cheapened by a sequel.
It’s one of the unfortunate habits of games publishers to view any big budget release that doesn’t set up a franchise that can be milked for at least three more titles as a waste of time. It’s like the studio turning to Orson Welles after he’d just finished Citizen Kane and saying “That’s great, Orson, how long ’till Citizen Kane II? Actually, subtitles are big these days. Let’s call it Citizen Kane: Rosebud This! Awesome. Have it on my desk in six months.”
So much of Bioshock seems designed to stand alone. The whole first half of the game, for example, plays on the fact that you, as a player, unthinkingly follow the objectives set for you by the game, just as the character is unable to resist the commands given to him by Atlas. That trick, so central to the experience, can’t be pulled again. Neither of the ‘villains’ can be bought back without cheapening the story. Ryan, in particular, dies proving a point about his conception of free will: he dies victorious, you, his killer, live on as his slave. If he pops up again in a puff of dues ex machina, that scene, perhaps the most powerful I’ve ever witnessed in a game, is rendered utterly hollow.
Even beyond that, both endings to Bioshock pretty much finish Rapture as a setting for future games. There’s always the option for a prequel, of course, but again, a large part of the appeal of the first game is never quite knowing the whole story of what went on before your arrival.
It would be nice if we could get into the habit of celebrating developers, rather than particular franchises: that way we could applaud them for a great game, then look forward to seeing those talents applied to a new and unique project (although the upside of all this, of course, is that Irrational will be doing just that).
In other sequel news, the new Prince of Persia game is causing quite a stir at the moment. An open world sequel to the Prince of Persia franchise? Didn’t Ubisoft already release that last year? Yes, I’m sure they did. It was called Assassin’s Creed[4].
[1] Actually, they’re called 2K Boston now, but Irrational is a vastly better name, so I’ll keep using that.
[2] In fact, if 2k Marin, in a sudden change of direction, announce that their Bioshock sequels are going to be platform games, all is forgiven. A platform game set in a decaying, under water steampunk city where genetic engineering and free market economics have run amok? Now there’s a game I want to play. I’d like to see any fat Italian plumbers jump their way through that.
[3] It did turn to Sci Fi influences occasionally, but we’re talking more A Clockwork Orange and Metropolis than Star Trek and Aliens.
[4] Or Prince of San Andreas’ Splinter Cell, for those not feeling in a charitable mood. Ah, don’t worry Assassin’s Creed. I only mock because I care.
Visiting Old Friends
For the last couple of months I’ve been working overseas, and will be until the end of the year. With my Xbox 360 firmly sequestered back in Blighty, I’ve been getting reacquainted with an old friend: PC gaming.[1]
Actually, a lot of it has just reminded me why I left PC gaming in the first place. I enjoyed Crysis, but spent my whole time with it wishing I was using a gamepad rather than a mouse and keyboard. Yes, I know the mouse allows for more accurate aiming, but moving without an analogue stick? What is this, the dark ages? Besides, I like a controller I can use while sitting back with my feet up.
Finding myself being metaphorically beaten around the head by copy protection was an unpleasant experience, too. Ok, I get that games companies have to do all they can to counteract piracy, really I do. But when a game takes every available opportunity to point out that you are only being allowed to play it on sufferance (I’m looking at you, Company of Heroes), it’s gone to far. And, gah, having to fiddle with a game’s settings to get it running properly. An hour spent tweaking graphics options to get the best balance between performance and quality? No thanks. Just stick the disk in the drive and start playing, that’s more my style.
On the bright side, the PC has allowed me to go back to enjoying the one genre that has never worked on the consoles: real-time strategy.
There’s something about the classic RTS interface that just doesn’t work without the speed and precision of the mouse. Company of Heroes, the WWII RTS, proved to be an unexpected joy (once I got past the aforementioned hellish copy protection). It managed to capture a real sense of drama, something that the strategy genre has traditionally struggled with, by adding in elements more commonly associated with action games, like a great physics engine and destructible terrain.
Medieval 2: Total War also made an impression, and joined the select ranks of games that have caused me to actually shout at the computer, in this case when the damn treacherous Dutch launched a sneak attack on my French holdings. The bastards.
We do have, though, a couple of exciting, console specific RTS’ coming up in the near future. Or, more specifically, one exciting console RTS, and one that is sounding increasingly like a missed opportunity.
The exciting prospect is EndWar, another game from Ubisoft’s increasingly capacious Tom Clancy stable (although the association between the games and Tom Clancy is becoming ever more tenuous[2]). It’s voiced controlled, which if it works will be absolutely amazing, and takes a troops-eye rather than a top-down camera angle. There is some question about whether it will all come together as intended, but major kudos goes to Ubisoft for trying to develop something with console controls in mind, rather than adapting PC controls to a gamepad.
Halo Wars, the other console RTS on the cards, is something I really should be more excited about than I am. I mean, it’s Halo for crying out loud! Unfortunately, from what I’ve read, it sounds like Ensemble Studios (the developers of Halo Wars) have decided to hammer the square peg of top-down RTS micromanagement into the round hole of console gameplay. Given that I still wake up screaming with thoughts of The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 on the 360, an optimistic prediction is that Halo Wars is going to be ‘adequate’.
