HL2 v Bioshock

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

I really felt that Bioshock lacked some­thing. The cohe­sion of the envir­on­ment had a sore note in it that broke the “spell” that it was try­ing to weave. Namely the vend­ing machines. The tons of gun dis­pens­ing, health giv­ing and weapons man­u­fac­tur­ing machines just seemed wrong. People were sup­posed to live down here, why would they have so much fire­power kick­ing around? Why are all the Plas­mids to do with combat?

Sure many of the mech­an­ics were new: the free roam­ing bad­dies, the big dad­dies and the very spe­cial moments when you res­cue a Little Sis­ter. This I liked, but the manic FPS game­play was pure Doom and offered noth­ing new to me when I have since played Deus Ex, BF2, TFC and, espe­cially, HL1/HL2.

The HL2 storyline is flaw­less. The con­nectiv­ity of the story they are telling with the envir­on­ment you are in is amaz­ing. I never “snapped out of it” with HL2 like I fre­quently did in Bioshock. Many of the moments in HL2 just made me stop and stare in amazement. Remem­ber the facial anim­a­tions, the run­ning from the Com­bine in the flats in the begin­ning, the voice act­ing, the com­edy and espe­cially the ending.

Don’t tell me that Bioshock has a bet­ter storyline when HL2 has this:

http://members.shaw.ca/halflifestory/

I guess that I was hop­ing for Bioshock to be a spir­itual suc­cessor to Deus Ex, but I got a spir­itual suc­cessor to Doom. Even the “twist” was some­thing I saw com­ing, in the sense that I knew I was being fed a false note of some kind all the way through.

HL2 is def­in­itely a grander achieve­ment than Bioshock and while neither of them have the gun con­trols of say Stalker, HL2?s com­bat feels more real to me.

Here is a list of things that HL2 had that Bioshock didn’t:

1. A good end­ing, and by good I mean fantastic.

2. Emo­tional con­nec­tions with the NPC’s. Big time. I per­son­ally didn?t care about the Little Sis­ters in so much as I thought the ?har­vest? option’s anim­a­tion ser­i­ously dis­turbed me and I didn?t want to see it again.

3. Fear. That run­ning in fear that per­vades the entire first part of the game.

4. A mil­lion expan­sions. TFC rocked, TF2, Counter frikkin’ Strike, The bril­liant mod; Nat­ural Selec­tion and many more.

5. NPC’s (IE ones you don?t kill). That you work with. That aren’t fuck­ing you over. BS gave itself away as a Doom 3 clone when I real­ised that you were not going to meet any NPC’s (out­side scrip­ted sequences). From that real­isa­tion came the cer­tain feel­ing that a Scoobie’Doo moment of unveil­ing was on the cards.

6. Vari­ety of loc­a­tion. Put side by side HL2 has a far more var­ied locality.

I could go on, but per­haps this list would be better,

Things that HL2 has that Bioshock also has:

1. Atmo­sphere. In spades.

2. Ini­tial 5 minutes wow factor. Much like meet­ing a per­son for the first time and mak­ing your mind up in that 3 seconds you shake hands, games either grab you or they don’t. Sure they can slow burn a little and you may learn to appre­ci­ate them, but if you don’t imme­di­ately go “wow” you will never fall in love with them. The train sta­tion in HL2 and the fire-on-water start of BS were both amazing.

3. Auto­mated sentries. Usu­ally used in games to make up for lack of chal­lenge (GRAW 2 I am look­ing at you) in these two games the sentries server a higher pur­pose and are both reusable in inter­est­ing ways.

4. Inter­est­ing weapons. The grav­ity gun is an example of a very smart design decision. I felt that in BS that the cross­bow was by far the best weapon; simple and to the point, but it was amongst many.

5. Altern­ate fire modes. Grenade!

6. Both take place in the shattered remains of their respect­ive game worlds with you as the redeemer of human­ity through super­ior firepower.

7. Moments of grandeur. “Time, Mr Free­man”. “Would you kindly?”

8. The illu­sion of open ended play. “Open worlds” is the new buzzword. HL2 and BS show us clearly and we don’t really want true open game­play, just the illu­sion of it. The sense of immer­sion in the choices that nat­ur­ally leads you to the next stage of the exper­i­ence without you noti­cing the gaps and stitches; like locked doors, or invis­ible walls. This is why such games as HL, BS, Deus Ex, Sys­tem Shock 2, Oper­a­tion Flash­point, etc are great. It is a fine bal­ance. Go too far and you have chaos. Go too restrict­ive and you have a con­sole plat­former fodder.

9. Unscrip­ted encoun­ters. Both games con­vin­cingly “fake” unscrip­ted encoun­ters. Giv­ing the AI just enough juice to sur­prise you. Who can for­get the mar­ines in HL1? I won’t for­get my first Big Daddy fight, I had already seen the guy smash in a splicer…

10. Full devel­op­ment time. Finally, both games are good examples why you must never rush to release. HL2 was a full year late and it showed. Com­plete­ness comes from time. Too many PC games are rushed out.

Basho

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