BioShock Creator Laments It Was Just A 'Corridor,' But Corridors Have Given Us Some Of The Best Games Ever
Player agency is not gaming's only valuable currency, and can often be to its detriment
I'll take a corridor over an open world with a loose main story and 500 repetitive side quests
I want a corridor. It means they actually have to tell a story. Open worlds are too often mostly a large collection of lore for you to slowly read and tease out. But world building and lore doesn't make a game. For many of us, it's about the journey and story. I don't need to make world changing decisions when I'm playing "hero." I want to know heros story with all its cliches and tropes. Give me puzzles to solve, challenges to overcome, and entertaining gameplay instead "choose your own adventure." It's like the industry collectively decided that player agency, open worlds, and having options that changed how the story went somehow is what made a game good.
I don’t need to make world changing decisions when I’m playing “hero.”
This is something so many story tellers in gaming and movies don't get. The story doesn't have to be about saving the world, the universe, the multiverse or the entire nature of reality. In fact, I would prefer it if the stakes are low enough that the protagonist has actual choices instead of being pushed heavily into the "of course I am going to save the world" option of each "choice".
This has been exactly my feeling for the past decade or so. I love open world, when you have a good concept and a solid story. But corridor is the best way to convey that story and keep the player engaged.
For me, Assassin's Creed is the ultimate brilliance to rags example: corridor gameplay that became an open world as you progressed in the early games. Which evolved into the meandering, mindless stories of the more recent games. I genuinely have no idea what Valhalla was supposed to be about lol. I finished it, but it was 120 hours I'd rather have back. A corridor style for the late 2010/20s games would have made all of them far more interesting, as they were phenomenal concepts imo.
All this to say, I don't mind some impactful world decisions that affect story arcs, but bring back the dang corridor and stop hiding behind massive content dumps... Damn it!
I have heard here on Lemmy or Reddit that all the games were meant to be open world games but only limited by the tech of its age.
Screw that thought!
I don't believe the dream of all/most game devs were making empty endless maps.
That's such an awful opinion lol
That's like saying all books should be Choose Your Own Adventure...
I like the idea of open worlds much more than I like the reality. With a full time job, kids, and a completionist mindset I just don't have the time or mental stamina to spend 100+ hours doing side quests and revealing every inch of the map. Not to mention reading all of that dialog and lore.
Give me a corridor with a tight, focused story over a sprawling open world any day of the week. Coincidentally Bioshock was awesome.
Absolutely. Nobody needs an open-world Dead Space. I want 8-12 hours of intense claustrophobia.
Counterpoint, a remastered Dead Space 2 with a lot more exploration capability would go super hard. I WANT to see the nooks and crannies of Titan Sprawl. I WANT to see the full desolation of a Necromorph outbreak. DS1 Remastered got that beautifully right with the new interconnectedness of the Ishimura and the Intensity Director.
Everyone tends to disagree with me but I think Breath of the Wild was the worst thing to happen to Zelda for this reason. I love most other Zelda games but I couldn't bother finishing BotW and didn't even try the newer one.
The corridor was only physical. Bioshock's appeal was not where the player could go, but how the player overcomes the obstacles along the way.
Something a lot of games forget. Customization and personalization is more of a dress up sim anymore, strategy is all 'the meta' and build paths and efficient strategies. I miss OG Deus Ex where I dunno what I'm doing but suddenly I found a vent and now I'm hacking a turret to kill the robot that beats my ass. Didn't know any of that was possible five minutes before.
Games are all predictable, the systems are the same and the same engines/obsession with graphics make a lot of games play the same. The Witcher, Last of Us, Fallen Order/Survivor and Hogwarts Legacy they all feel the same in body language, controls, interactions, it's stale.
Might I suggest playing some modern CRPGs? Rogue trader and Wasteland 3 have a good bit of that, though im pretty sure everyone ends up turning Abelard into an Angron tier melee combatant in Rogue Trader.
Crazy talk!
It offered some navigational choices within each level from the Medical Pavilion on.
Yeah level design was clever, but constrained by the setting itself.
Wasn't that part of the whole fun message at least of the first game?
Would you kindly....
Omg yes. It was not just a corridor. It was a send up of every game corridor game that I had played to that point. Taking a design limitation and making it a compelling plot twist was exactly what made bioshock awesome. One of my top 5 gaming moments of all time.
(subconsciously picks up golf club)
Every game in the Half Life series was a corridor.
Black Myth Wukong is just a corridor and that game is great.
I swear devs come up with the weirdest shit. A good game is a good game. Doesn’t matter if it takes place on a full planet or in a single room.
Is it game devs? Or shitty fans who like to trivialize things for lolz or because they're assholes?
Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal too.
Who cares, it was great
Sometimes I think I should revisit BioShock. When I played it over a decade ago, I did so on the Xbox 360 because my PC would’ve probably played it at around 15 FPS. I recall the game not feeling optimized for the console, felt tired of the game at the end, and that its gameplay was overall tedious. I wish I enjoyed it like everybody else.
To comment on the story, and SPOILERS FOR ANYBODY.
Yeah you're not wrong. The last act after killing Andrew Ryan was pretty unfulfilling. It becomes a full blown first-person shooter.
In spite of that, Bioshock holds a special place on my heart. There's some really really good level design and storytelling (both through the radio AND environmental storytelling) leading up to Andrew Ryan. I ranks up there with Half-Life 2 in terms of telling stories without hitting the player on the head.
Bioshock 2 and Infinite... Not so much.
I'm assuming this is Levine lamenting that Bioshock wasn't a good ImSim, because it was a corridor without player agency. Thief and System Shock (Levine worked on Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2 before making Bioshock) are corridors, but you have freedom in how you navigate them. Bioshock you really don't.
I think this article, and the comments I'm seeing, are interpreting this to mean he wants an open world (which may be the case, idk), but I think he means it lacked freedom of choice. It tied itself to the Shock legacy, but it lacked the freedom of the Shock games.
I suspect this doesn't mean Judas is going to be an open world game filled with fluff. I suspect it means it'll be closer to in ImSim. Prey is the best modern ImSim probably, despite selling poorly, and it's a space station made of corridors. You have a lot of freedom to navigate it under your own control though. There's a lot of ways to get to different areas and to get around hazards. Hopefully Judas will be like this as well.
I'm kind of open-worlded out TBH. I still enjoy a corridor shooter with some nice graphics and good plot line.
Nobody wants an open world BioShock game as a service... We don't, do we?
Bioshock gave us the Souls series ;)
How so
I am mostly joking, but I do remember reading somewhere that the punishing corpse run aspect combined with the lack of checkpoints was a response to how toothless death was in Bioshock and games of that era. Compare a death in Demon's Souls to Bioshock, where you pop instantly out of the nearest vitachamber(?) with no loss, for example.
Ninja Gaiden walked so Pokemon Go could run