Yes, BioShock Is A ‘Corridor’ Game, That’s What Makes It Great

exist recent interviews Game Industry NetworkKen Levine belittles his most famous and popular game, bioshocklike “a very, very long corridor.” He uses this description pejoratively to distinguish the 2007 first-person suspense game from his current project (a sci-fi FPS). judahHe said the way the game was made was “very, very different.” Therefore, he hopes judah “More…reflective of player agency.” But I want to step in and defend corridors, explaining why the widespread contemporary abandonment of them has taken away from some of the most compelling aspects of the game.

Before we get into that, what does Levine, and everyone else, mean by “corridor”? The concept is that there is only one core route in the game, a predetermined path that all players must follow, we are not given the freedom to choose our own direction. Therefore, looking back at the current era of open-world games dominating the AAA gaming landscape, this could lead to designs that eliminate or limit player agency, leading to deletions as a result.

To be clear, some corridors do just that. While first-person games were born out of level-based mazes (Return to Wolfenstein Castle, doometc.), does emerge as a series of games that feature almost literal corridors so ridiculously restrictive that it feels like you’re being dragged down an inevitable tunnel by your nostrils, shoulders scraping the claustrophobic walls all the way. To name just one, the worst of them all is call of Duty Activity from black ops Forward – If you dare to go left or right instead of straight, these games will kill you and push you back to watch NPCs play the game for you.

But I think almost no one has played bioshock In 2007, he was like, “Damn, that’s just a corridor.” Because this is a game that gives players a huge sense of freedom despite having only one core path. you chose huge The amount is bioshockfrom how you actually play (run-and-gun shooters, device-based trapping and stealth, immersive simulations), to the nature of how you respond to the world around you, especially how you treat your little sisters. People celebrate this game because it offers an amazing amount of freedom within such a tightly scripted narrative, all while ignoring that the game as a prescribed corridor is this whole point.

Sorry to spoil this 18-year-old game, but the fact that you have no choice but to follow the instructions given is the huge reveal in the third act. The fact that the game is set in an inescapable corridor is one of the reasons bioshock That’s great, because if it allowed players to visit any location in the underwater city of Rapture at any time, everything else about it would fall apart.

bioshockThe drama of a game often depends on you getting to exactly where the game designers want you to be, at exactly the moment they want you to be, and this precise narrative choreography is the result of Corridor. By rejecting this type of game design as a failure, we’re losing this experience, and I truly believe it’s something we should be working to save.

Of course, corridors are only part of the game, and should be part of the game. I’m not stupid, I love a good open world game, and of course I’ve been playing role-playing games since the 1980s that offer players a ton of freedom in entering their worlds. I don’t want to argue about anything just yet, just that I want to keep the corridor as one option among many others, so don’t belittle it as if it’s a failure of the past. Because damn, it brought so much success.

I don’t think I’m necessarily a maverick. In fact, if you look at any number of “best games of all time” lists and adjust for recency bias, you’ll find that certain names appear over and over again: half life 2, Deus Ex, Quake 2, faint, shame. They share space in these lists with games that do just the opposite, a long list of fantastic RPGs that often avoid corridors entirely, but those with a straight path undeniably dominate. In fact, they are a shining example of how to hide a corridor in the best possible way.

But rather than delving into how and why disguised corridors are key to their success, let’s focus more on what we’d lose without them.

open world is greatI’m excited to clean up the icons in Ubisoft Maps, or choose my own unique route with Baldur’s Gate 3. But what they also can’t do is manipulate the player to create deliberate narrative moments along a deliberate narrative path. They fail to offer something more akin to a movie scene, in which the impact of event B is more meaningful because it comes directly as a reaction to the action of event A, whose consequences drive the emotional resonance of event C.

I remember, in the early 00s, when I first rejected the hallway game as a design choice, I responded with the same argument that comes to mind now: “Would you refuse to read the pages of a book in order? What if every time Is page 37 the book a failure after page 36? The direct rebuttal is, “games are not books, that’s why we call them other things”, of course, but my point is: games able The goal is to be like the books in some of the best ways. Because, when your game is set in hallways, when scenes are as inevitable as the pages of a book, how we interact with them defines them. It emphasizes our personal interpretation of what is offered, not a sandbox in which we can play God, but rather a story in which we are capable of unique experiences.

(In fact, that’s why I think Finish mass effect 3 It’s not that they don’t recognize the player’s agency.but rather scripted moments that are uniquely understood based on your personal experiences accumulated across all three games.

Agency can be great, but it often comes at a cost—the cost of curating, directing, and thoughtfully narrative experiences. Yes, it wouldn’t be a good thing if all games were like this, but it’s no better to think of it as an unseemly flaw in game design. bioshock Only worked because This is a corridor and indeed a paper in the corridormaking it all the more strange that this game was thrown under the bus of history. There’s value in experiencing a curated, predetermined story, driven by the unique approach to how we turn the pages. I don’t want to lose that in the name of “stronger player agency.”

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