This post first appeared on
readyplayertwo.co.uk.
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| The right Bioshock Cover |
Playing so much Bioshock Infinite of late has led me to a rather surprising
conclusion. The level to which I connect with a game is in almost direct
correlation to how fantastical or unusual the setting is. Put it like this.
What sounds more appealing? Grey first person shooter set in a gritty rendition
of modern day northern Waziristan or primary coloured first person shooter set
in a sunlight flooded flying city circa 1912. Of course, I'm talking about
Battlefield 4 and Bioshock Infinite, and for me, since games are all about escapism,
my natural choice would be the game set in the early twentieth century flying
city. Let's try another one. A racer featuring real world cars racing on real
world tracks or a supersonic hovership racer running on tight rollercoaster
tracks set in a bright post scarcity future? Forza or WipeOut. I own and enjoy
both, but I only utter the L word about one of those, and it's not the one with
the real world cars.
Games have an ability, unique in pretty much all media, to immerse you in
the impossible. Titles like Fez, WipeOut and Antichamber can even take you to
places beyond what a layman like myself would accept to be the normal laws of
physics, let alone beyond the average imagination. And while a mega budget 3D
movie can show you the impossible, only games can let you experience it.
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This shot sums up the mess that the Spec Ops
soldiers have gotten themselves in to. |
It makes me sad when some games seem
to squander the worlds they're built in. Take Gears of War as an example. It's
set on what's assumed to be another planet, it's antagonists erupt from the
ground and sink entire cities in their wake. Yet despite all this, it's still
for the most part a gritty urban shooter in which you're surrounded by burned
out cars, lumbering tanks, helicopters, crumbling neo gothic architecture and
lots of brown. Take away the locust and it could be a war zone in any European
city. All of the Gears games are great and I've enjoyed every one of them,
particularly the third, but it says a lot about a series' sci fi setting when
it's most memorable moment (at least for me personally) is also practically the
only nakedly sci fi set piece of the entire series; the section in which you
kill a giant city devouring worm from the inside out. It's easy to forget,
during the moments you're not chainsawing Locust, that Gears is set on a
different planet at all. Conversely I find, Spec Ops: The Line's gorgeous sun
drenched rendering of Dubai really compelling. Spec Ops' developers took the
usually mundane idea of a modern day city, drowned it with a sandstorm and then
seemingly made every reflective surface out of gold. It's a look and a location
that is pretty much unique in gaming at the moment. The result takes what
should have been just another brown shooter and polishes the brown to a
blinding sheen, which is what gives Spec Ops' realistic setting such a kick.
What I'm trying to get at here is that a game can be much more interesting
if it's framed in a way that's not often seen. Admittedly, Gears' success did
set the formula for the brown shooter, but I've seen so many brown shooters
since, that when Spec Ops came along wrapped in sand, bathed in blinding
sunlight and drizzled with gold it felt like a breath of fresh air.
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| One of the most iconic shots in Dishonored. |
Thankfully, once you've pulled your
eyes away from Call of Battlefield, you don't have to look too hard to find
game worlds lavished with a wealth of creativity. It goes without saying that
if you want to see the most creative and original games available at the
moment, then you need to look at the Indies. Titles like Fez, Antichamber, Bastion,
Dear Esther, Machinarium, To the Moon, Dust or even Minecraft are unlike almost
anything you'll find in a box on the shelf of your local games shop. But even
if for some strange reason you only limit yourself to boxed games, there is
still a wealth of creativity out there. There's the aforementioned sun drenched
turn of the century vintage futurism of Bioshock Infinite, or the
deep-as-the-ocean green tinted decopunk of Rapture of that game's progenitors. Don’t
want a dystopia in the sky? Then why not tour the bright yet totalitarian city
in Mirror’s Edge. If you want to pass on dystopias altogether, then try a post
apocalypse. If you think every end-of –the-world is the same, then might I
point you in the direction of the criminally under rated, and exceptionally
leafy, Enslaved or Naughty Dog's forthcoming The Last of Us. Alternatively if
like your post apocalypse a little bit grimmer, yet still crave something that
feels fresh, then may I present to you 4A Games' Metro; bleak and dark as the
Moscow underground that shelters the last remnants of humanity in all its
tunnels. Too dark? Perhaps we can lighten the mood in the collapsing
laboratories of Portal 2. Too light, or not escapist enough? How about a visit to
the charmingly English land of Albion in Fable, or the icy blue tundra of
Skyrim. Too much fantasy? Then why not visit the crumbling, and entirely
fictional, yet surprisingly plausible whalerpunk city of Dunwall, the place
that accounts for at least seven tenths of what makes Dishonoured so great. If
you're feeling more adventurous? If you haven't already, look no further than
the Uncharted games, whose fabled lost cities, once they are revealed, dish out
the most lavish and awe inspiring vistas of this generation. What if you want
the fabled cities but less of the shooting and more of the journey? Obviously
you want to visit the golden deserts and the desolately beautiful crumbling
lost civilisation of the genuinely moving Journey. I could go on and on.
And I haven't even mentioned Final Fantasy yet, whose designers, Square, are
the undisputed masters of creating richly imagined worlds. Worlds dense with
culture, history and story, that feel lived in and are a pleasure to inhabit.
Final Fantasy VII wouldn't have been the worshipped game it has become without
that kind of imagination. It takes a special kind of mind to come up with a
concept as out there as the Lifestream, but without it there would be no Mako,
no Shin-Ra, no Soldier, no Materia, no Cloud, Sephiroth, Avalanche. The
Ancients, with whom the Lifestream is intrinsically linked, would not have
sprung from the mind of Yoshinori Kitase and with no Ancients, there would be
no Aeris. Without the Lifestream, Aeris wouldn't have died, because she would
never have existed, and a whole generation of gamers would not have experienced
'that' moment. You all know the one. Square still have that wealth of
creativity. Say what you like about Final Fantasy XIII as a game, you can't
deny that the twin worlds of Pulse and Cocoon make for one of the most
compelling gameworlds of this generation.
Games are always better when game designers can let their imaginations run
wild. That's why so many indie games are so great. With fewer concerns about
shareholders or appealing to the mass market, indie devs can really cut loose.
But there could be more of this sort of thing if the publishers were daring
enough to indulge the experimentation of developers. Would it not be great if
publishers weren't as commercially cautious? I like to think that if they
weren't, we would begin to see fewer gritty modern world war games, less
dystopian cyberpunk and less stone-faced post apocalypse. Of course, every now
and then a game will appear that will turn your expectations on their head.
Spec Ops' Dubai proves there is room for maneuver in the modern day shooter and
the forthcoming Remember Me's Neo-Paris does some really interesting things
with cyberpunk.
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| This is London on wheels, note St Pauls perched at the summit. |
Personally, I'd like to see more of
the punk suffix flying around. Bioshock-the-first may have been first out of
the blocks with decopunk, but there's a lot more that can be done within the
realms of 1920's art deco futurism. In fact there's more that can be done with
retro futurism all round. For instance, who wouldn't love to see something
based around
Retropolis? Or
how about an adaption of
Philip Reeve's
far future world of
Mortal Engines?
Whilst the novels are not strictly steampunk, their vaguely Victorian cast iron
and brass aesthetics, rich back story, airships, unstoppable ancient warrior
cyborgs and predatory mobile cities (yes, you read that right) could make for a
pretty compelling experience. Steampunk has become almost a subculture in
itself, and is pretty ubiquitous at a certain kind of real world convention,
but I'm yet to see a full blown steampunk game. Dishonoured came close, but it
wasn't quite there, which is why I knocked together whalerpunk to describe it
instead.
If all that seems a bit overused already, then there is also dieselpunk and
atompunk to check out too. The best way to describe these would be to tell you
to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and check out the Ratchet and
Clank series' various robots. Or I could just say that it's futurism that
respectively focuses on the aesthetics of the thirties and the fifties. Or you
could check out the Wikipedia page
here. I'm barely scratching
the surface really.
Games tend to focus a lot on sci fi and fantasy, and all this punk stuff is
just my own narrow vision. There are hundreds of talented game designers out
there with incredible imaginations whose ideas are broader than mine will ever
be, who can produce out-there concepts that I couldn't dream of. The games that
come from that kind of imagination are the kind that I always love most. I’m
hoping that the success of Bioshock Infinite can convince the cautious
corporate sorts who have the say in the game industry that a triple A game
doesn't have to be grey, brown or a combination of the two to be successful.
Hopefully they'll begin to allow those designers to set their imaginations
free. The results could really be spectacular if they do.
And I haven't even mentioned Final Fantasy yet, whose designers, Square, are
the undisputed masters of creating richly imagined worlds. Worlds dense with
culture, history and story, that feel lived in and are a pleasure to inhabit.
Final Fantasy VII wouldn't have been the worshipped game it has become without
that kind of imagination. It takes a special kind of mind to come up with a
concept as out there as the Lifestream, but without it there would be no Mako,
no Shin-Ra, no Soldier, no Materia, no Cloud, Sephiroth, Avalanche. The
Ancients, with whom the Lifestream is intrinsically linked, would not have
sprung from the mind of Yoshinori Kitase and with no Ancients, there would be
no Aeris. Without the Lifestream, Aeris wouldn't have died, because she would
never have existed, and a whole generation of gamers would not have experienced
'that' moment. You all know the one. Square still have that wealth of
creativity. Say what you like about Final Fantasy XIII as a game, you can't
deny that the twin worlds of Pulse and Cocoon make for one of the most
compelling gameworlds of this generation.
