For example, I didn’t fall in love with Titanfall 2’s environmental art design—it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations.

Ditto BioShock: Infinite. The world felt like it was built around the premise of being an arena shooter, not the other way around.

BioShock 1 & 2 are exactly what I’m talking about though.

Even Borderlands 2 has great world-building: the corporate history that can be inferred from the level design, the weapons & the NPCs makes it one of the richer games I’ve played.

Would love to hear others’ thoughts on your favorite FPS environments!

  • SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    The Deus Ex series is good at this. Instead on having a big vast game world they have a condensed area filled with tons of details used for storytelling. You can go into a lot of places like apartments and it says a lot about who lives there. How well kept everything is, what posters they have, the station the radio was on, the stuff in their nightstand etc.

    SWAT 4 also does a great job with the environments. One memorable level is where you are trying to arrest a suspected serial killer. When you approach the house everything seems…underwhelmingly okay and the mom pleads with you to not take her son because there’s clearly a mistake. As you clear more rooms things get messier with some traps and blocked doors among the clutter making it a claustrophobic and dangerous maze. Eventually you find rooms dug out from the basement with a girl who had been missing for a long time as well as makeshift torture rooms and plans to capture and kill more. It’s just a slow descent into their madness and it’s quite the experience to play.