For some reason, while the Bioshock setting is very well realized in the narrative and atmosphere, I don?t feel at all immersed in it.
Perhaps modern game budgets have spoiled me, but when the game purports to take place in a populated city I am all too aware of the fact that an entire neighborhood is boiled down to about 12 rooms. The architecture is beautiful, but the layout is nonsensical. After fully exploring those 12 small rooms, you retrace your steps to find 2 more splicers wandering around?but where did they come from? There aren?t any passages they could have come through since I have already explored those passages and killed everything there too. It's not like the splicers just slipped past me in the chaos, because the whole area is already dead and devoid of activity, in some cases, even monitored by my turrets and cameras!
The scale of the maps is good in that it provides a very immediate sense of your surroundings. They?re unique and highly detailed because they?re so compact, but it?s also too tight to represent a city. How can residential neighborhoods only have 3 houses in the entire neighborhood? The spaces between buildings are fine for post-disaster traffic, but they?re basically sidewalks on a contemporary scale, no way they?d support the hustle and bustle of Rapture at its peak.
The level to which Rapture?s inhabitants have degenerated is great from an artistic point of view since it emphasizes their fall from grace. But there?s a splicer every 100 feet, and they?re violent and heavily armed. How have they not all killed each other off? How do they feed themselves underwater when there?s no sane people left producing food? The number of sane and potentially productive people left in the city can be counted on two hands, it?s just not enough to keep a city going in that condition. Perhaps a more subtle insanity would have been appropriate? Making them relatively normal men and women would make their violence more sinister since it would then be relatable.
Overall it feels like I?m moving through an abstraction of a setting, not a real place. The abstraction is compelling and interesting, but it never draws me in. It?s like a comic book, the action grips your attention at first, but eventually you wonder how Spiderman is swinging above skyscrapers?what the hell is that web attached to? The setting is like a cardboard cut-out made only to give the impression of a city, rather than the appearance of one. Once you poke that backdrop even a little, it falls apart.
I will say that the audiologs are still terrific, and are really the only things that give me any impression of there having been a society in Rapture at all. Also, I didn?t have this same apprehension with Systemshock?s setting. Again, perhaps it?s because I?ve just been spoiled by modern gaming budgets.
I hate to say it, but I think the main thing I'm missing from Rapture are the generic "closed-doors" that are so common to other games. Developers usually toss in these locked doors because they don't have the time and resources to create a room behind them, but they place the doors there to give the player the impression that there /might/ be a room behind them, and an excuse for the mind to imagine that there is one. Rapture just doesn't have enough of these closed doors to even pretend that there's more to the city that I'm not seeing. The only nods towards a larger city are the brief glimpses of the city's "skyline" in underwater sequences. By excising these closed doors, they do present a much more focused experience by eliminating unnecessary set dressing, I suppose it was a design decision on their part.
(and just to be clear, I'm talking about both Bioshock 1 & 2)
