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!
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.
Aaah, SWAT 4, they did good work with randomness at times, I recall times on that level where the mother is in the bathroom in tub with a shotgun telling you not to take her son or the suspect is roaming around in the lounge.
The suspects that drop their gun only to fast draw their side arm, the stubborn dudes that just won’t surrender and forced to kill to, unintentional or intentional ambushes
I will never forget the feeling of “screw you game” and “well done” where I checked a hallway, clear- breach see suspect and get brained from the back as a suspect came out of a room behind me while being capped by the dude in front ( i don’t know if it was imagination, but felt like my character’s head moved forward when shot in head from the back and then the whiplash of being shot in the head from the front - was armoured suspects with automatic rifles)
Yes the randomness is crazy! I hear Ready or Not is essentially a modern take on Swat style gameplay but I haven’t tried it yet