During Rapture's golden years this area showcased the best exhibits the museum had to offer, but when the museum became a training ground for the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, it was used to collect ADAM from the young gatherers and splice up their monstrous guardians. If developer Cloud Chamber can channel the science fiction and philosophical questions presented by the series at large, while finding ways to embed the environmental storytelling into how players interact with the game, we could be looking at a truly incredible sequel.The level was once the Special Exhibit wing of the Memorial Museum. It’s been repaired and improved by 15 years of environmental storytelling innovation that the game's designers will need to acknowledge and draw upon. While that road was paved by the 2007 original. The original BioShock is also driven forward by a two-way radio conversation and an oppressive atmosphere, but the next game could follow Firewatch, and build its areas/levels to suit how the mood it wants to convey.īioShock 4 has a difficult road ahead of it. Firewatch uses the environment to excellent effect, both to underpin the story via ongoing two-way radio conversations and to highlight an oppressive atmosphere. Perhaps there’s a hopeful vista pierced by the sunrise or an enclosing darkness that’s only pushed back by the beam of a torch. Without giving too much away, it's excellent at using major and minor environmental changes to reinforce its narrative. The series’ famous wall-scrawling, audio logs, and atmosphere can be combined with a wider freedom of movement, to act as stepping stones for emergent moments, like the ones found in Outer Wilds.įinally, there’s Firewatch. So the next game in the BioShock series, if built upon a metropolis that constantly poses questions to the player, can harness the player’s curiosity, and tie it up with mechanics uncovered by discovery. ![]() The cities of the BioShock universe, like the solar system of Outer Wilds, are inherently interesting places. ![]() is meant to be interesting, but it's not going to be as interesting as getting sucked into a cyclone." As narrative designer Kelsey Beachum explained at GDC 2021: "Some of the story is told through found text, but those moments don't deliver the biggest initial hooks. The solar system exploration game centers on one major mystery that underpins a series of smaller, but still entertaining, stories, all of which are told through the environment. Outer Wilds, on the other hand, can inspire BioShock with its focus on your curiosity that’s often rewarded with not simply an audio log or diary, but with environmental surprise. Having the player’s decisions, both big and small, contribute to some behind-the-scenes mechanic that influences the state of the world around them would mean that the franchise's next urban environment could do more than tell stories from the past it could have the player write them as they happen. If you spared more NPCs, you’d accrue less chaos and find fewer guards on patrol, fewer rats, and you’d get more help from citizens.īioShock, with its complex urban environments that blend politics with science fiction, could absolutely use this system. If you killed lots of guards and innocent people, you’d find the world less hospitable: more guards would patrol the streets, rats would be everywhere, and people would turn you away. Arkane’s Dishonored does this in spades, as the studio introduced a way for the world to actively react to the player, called the chaos system. ![]() While BioShock has multiple ending cutscenes, there’s very little the player can do to make the world change around them. So what can the designers of the next BioShock learn from these games when conceiving the series’ next doomed utopia? I’m going to draw on three examples in particular: Dishonored, Outer Wilds, and Firewatch, to explore what BioShock can do next. These methods of environmental storytelling still work, but it's been over a decade since BioShock was first released, and since then a number of games have pushed the envelope.
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