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!
Prey (2017) has a great level design. It’s one giant interconnected space station that can also be explored from the outside. Different areas all feel very organic and actually liveable.
Great answer here. And the world building is in all of the details. There were some scattered objects that I assumed they just had a model for and used it to add to come background clutter, but then found some logs and story details that made it all make sense - it’s all very well thought out and interconnected beautifully
My top suggestion:
Halo 3: ODST
The entire game takes place in a single city in a single day during an invasion, with the player having flash-backs / flash-forwards as different characters so you can see what and how the city evolves over time.
There’s also a secret story (called Sadie’s story) hidden in the terminals found around the city that follows a civilian and a [REDACTED] during the moment of invasion. If you’re able to complete Sadie’s story, it tweaks the 3rd act of the game.
My other suggestions:
You seemed fairly set on FPS games, but they’re not the only ones that have the same dark environmental story telling like Bioshock, SOMA, and Alien Isolation.
These are going to seem weird but stick with me here:
- Metroid Fusion
- Frostpunk
Metroid Fusion is a platformer. So what? How can a platformer have that same kind of feeling? Well let me tell you, Metroid Fusion is one of the rare games that was able to do horror and do it without relying the easy immersion that FPS games tend to lean on. I never knew that a platformer could be terrifying and it was a wake up call for me, because I had never even considered that a non-FPS game could elicit those feelings.
It’s a gameboy advance game so super easy to emulate on a computer, you’ll want to play on a keyboard or a gamepad, a touchscreen overlay can’t keep up with the controls you’ll need to pull off to survive. Go into it blind and
despairenjoy.
Frostpunk.
It’s basically a Victorian steampunk version of The Day After Tomorrow. The world is freezing. You’re the leader of a charge of a city fighting for the resources to survive. You are from the last group of survivors. If you make a bad choice, everyone dies. The story is told through random events that pop up during the game where you have to decide which choice you want to go with, while exploring the derelict ruins of the other failed survivors to try and gather more supplies.
Most environmental story games where you can see something has clearly gone wrong tend to be horror, where there is a threat that you can point to and say that is the bad thing that must be dealt with or escaped from. Frostpunk goes the other way. It is not horror, Frostpunk is terror. The climate is the threat. There is no escaping it, there is no way to shoot it with a gun, or a special weapon. It is ever-present, and it gets worse and worse each day that passes. It is a building tension that keeps twisting, getting tighter and tighter, where you will be forced to make hard decisions. The stress level only goes up. Whatever you lose you will not be getting back, and you’re only able to keep a few things. What will you sacrifice to make it to the next few days.
Frostpunk is the game equivalent of being a pilot in the cafeteria of an airport and seeing an emergency alert on every news station that a 1 mile high tidal wave is approaching and will hit in 30 minutes. And each minute that passes, the more desperate people will become, and the worse your situation will get.
Thanks for the really thoughtful comment! You make all three sound extremely intriguing.
I was unaware that any of the Halo games had much of a story at all! I’ve always just imagined them as the present incarnation of Unreal Tournament, i.e. built primarily for competitive multiplayer. I’d have expected the art direction to be, uh, perfunctory. Shame on me.
The thing that I dislike about metroidvanias, which is that I get hopelessly disoriented, could indeed work in favor of a horror game. I’m very interested in this one now, and as a fortysomething gamer I love the idea of a Gameboy title.
I picked up Frostpunk during the Epic giveaway but haven’t dived in yet. Thank you for the specific description—it’ll make it easier to go in with the proper expectation for suspense!
Going to mention F.E.A.R 1 and to some respects F.E.A.R 2, its a first person game that lets you see your feet for one, but seriously they did a really good job with replica AI -even though they are clones they have personality - like making cover from environment, trying to use environment to get away from a bad situation - like crawl under blocked door’s crawl space or shoot and run while getting to cover
Your character has an in-game reason to have slow-mo which is really well done in the I can throw a grenade, go slo-mo, hear the enemy crap its pants and shoot the grenade,see the air around the explosion expand and witness an appropriate blood and gore shower.
They comment on your speed, panick when they run out of ammo when you rush them and try to flank you if they can.
It has some horror elements as well but usually in service to the story as First Encounter Assualt Recon is meant to deal with shady stuff and F.E.A.R 2 had a really cool school level.
Level design for the first 2 also was pretty fluid with reasonable area transistions that made sense how you got where you were at even when it is mostly just a point A to B with some light exploration for secrets or weapons
F.E.A.R 3 is meh, had some fleeting good moments and some answers to questions from the first 2, but overall felt like a lesser game than the two preceding it. It lost a lot of soul and felt more robotic in design
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
All three base games. So many mods.
The zone feels vast, lived in, dangerous.
The ai is dynamic, moving through an area once you mind find a group of friendlies engaged in a firefight with a powerful psychic mutant, and other time find an eerily peaceful vista.
It’s not a power fantasy. On harder difficulties you’re always on edge when you’re exploring even with end game gear. A single bullet from a sniper or a random pack of wild dogs can easily end your run.
Highly recommended of you’ve never experienced it before.
I actually have SoC & CoP in my backlog. I tried SoC once, but admittedly didn’t give it the time it deserved.
Gameplay-wise, would you recommend playing CoP before SoC, since Pripyat is newer, or is it best to play SoC first for the story?
Pripyat is the more polished game mechanically. SoC has the best story. They’re more or less equal in atmosphere.
I bounced off SoC the first time I played it, but after I finished Pripyat the first time I gave SoC another go and I got totally immersed.
It’s hard to recommend one over the other. They’re both great.
SoC is best played first. You could skip the second game if you wanted since its largely a re-tread with some new mechanics, then move onto CoP.
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
If you haven’t already, playing Black-Mesa -> Half-Life 2 -> both Episode 1 & 2 are the perfect examples of what you describe. So many details and stories in all the levels, and you are just a guy passing through
I’ve started Black Mesa but haven’t finished it yet. What I’ve played has been fucking impressive.
Valve is sort of the best at what I’m asking about—all of their games have the greatest touches that make the settings feel like existing locations you’ve walked into. It’s what makes me wish they published more.
The insane detail that goes into aging Aperture throughout the second half of Portal 2, the way it starts in the 40s or 50s at the very bottom and has a distinct “era” for each level as you get closer to the surface, including Cave’s progressing illness . . . it’s such good storytelling, and it’s literally just window dressing for the already-great main plot.
The crazy thing is that Black Mesa isn’t made by Valve, but was essentially a fan recreation of the original Half Life. That it fits with Valve’s style is just so amazing to me.
Valve style is gameplay first and foremost. While the environment tries to feel rooted with reality it fell short on several aspects. For example, ever notice how you never encounter a single washroom besides the one at Sector C? The physics puzzle too, it’s fun and shows off the physics engine but it’s impractical irl. And dear lord, the car battery puzzles…
Btw check out the new HL2 mod Swelter. Takes environmental design up to 11. Personally the best atmosphere of any HL source mod I’ve ever seen.
I honestly don’t notice that kind of thing. I usually play games once, and I’m not that into exploration on that first playthrough.
What strikes me about Valve games is that details are way better than I expect. Maybe not realism as you mentioned, but the narrative feels really compelling even with a silent protagonist and no cutscenes. A lot of first person shooters and puzzle games have weaker narratives despite including cutscenes and whatnot.
I just finished playing Deathloop for the first time and I believe it fits your criteria. Very Bioshock, except 60’s pop art instead of 30’s art deco. I could spend hours just wandering around the island exploring all the detail they’ve crammed in.
I tried to play Deathloop not long after launch and I enjoyed it, the humor was a big selling point, but it was a buggy mess. I tried so many different iterations but no matter what I tried it always crashed near the end of the third area, I can’t think of any other game I’ve tried that has been so comprehensively bricked. In saying that if they’ve managed to patch the gaping holes I’d like to try it again.
Oh sick, I didn’t realize Deathloop was first-person (I assumed it was over the shoulder 3rd-person like Max Payne & Control).
I almost mentioned Control in my post because it did have great environmental design that felt like a cross between Aperture and The X-Files. I’ll stick Deathloop on the wishlist, thanks for the recommendation!
Doom 16 feels way more like an arena shooter than infinite for me. I think my problem was I wasn’t invested in the story and relished each combat encounter.
It is up there in years but system shock 2 is an amazing example.
I’m surprised you don’t mention any bethesda titles (fallout3, oblivion, skyrim…) since they’re just an already existing world you’re put into with their own factions an politics you can integrate and influence
I’ve got about 2k hours in Skyrim so I definitely love a Bethesda game, but what I’m thinking about are simple arcade shooters with less of an RPG structure than TES or Fallout.
Admittedly Borderlands has skill trees and classes, but I feel like it’s safe to call it a shooter first & a roleplayer second. But DOOM, Bioshock, Portal, Metro—if there’s more to your character than their name & their gun, the game barely acknowledges it. :P
Ah, I was gonna recommend the original Deus Ex but it is also an RPG
I see what you mean, you want a "shooter first "game where it doesn’t feel like the world was built around you, all i can say for that is boneworks.
Plugging the metro series
I wish I could tell you Destiny. The original game, with the original maps and through a couple expansions, had great level construction and felt like you were exploring alien worlds. But because it’s always online, they threw away all the good levels and replaced them with weird nonsense.
If you’re open to third person, Sniper Elite (at least 4 and 5) fits the bill. It’s not one of the third persons with your character in the middle of the screen and the perspective isn’t that far off from first person. They’re more stealth than run and gun but you can do the latter if you want. But you have enemies patrolling bases, driving patrols, frequent flyovers, and various notes and things to discover.
I can’t think of a first person game any better than Doom in terms of world building that you can still play.
It doesn’t really classify as FPS, but Witcher 3 was great in that way, and also Mass Effect imho
The Thief trilogy have some of the finest environmental worldbuilding around, highly recommend them if you enjoy stealth games.
GoldenEye/Perfect Dark had great environments in the single player campaigns. Multiplayer arenas were a bit more generic though.
An extremely patient gamer, I see ;)
I was 16 when Goldeneye released. The immersion of those locations was off the charts for the time. I’m not sure I played another game that gave me that uncanny feeling of being somewhere else until HL2.
