A little slice of reality
Like 2/3 of PC or XBOX 360 owners, I'm playing BioShock at the moment. I'm not going to review it or anything, other than to say I'm having fantastic fun apart from the occasional and rather severe System Shock 2 flashbacks.
However, one thing I spotted during play made me stop and think about realism in games and how much it enhances by its presence or detracts by its absence. It was only a little thing: I was trying to pick up a round of pistol ammunition I came across and was told I couldn't carry any more of that type. My question was, “Why?”
Does my clothing have spaces specific to certain types of ammunition? Would I receive an electric shock punishment if I tried to put a machine gun clip into that empty linen crevice where I currently have no anti-personnel pistol rounds (again)?
Or is there some invisible Rapture Ammunition Clerk tapping me on the shoulder every time I try to sneak an extra pack of shotgun shells into a spare pocket? “I'm sorry sir, your current ammunition licence only permits you to having a maximum of fourty-eight of those on your person at one time.”
And it all wasn't helped by the fact that minutes later I was perfectly able to pick up and store “somewhere” a flamethrower the size of my arm.
BioShock may do many new/improved things but it has gone for the very “old-school” mechanic of the single man army, able to carry eight different weapons at once. Most first-person shooters in recent memory have gone for the limited, or 'realistic' inventory where you can only have, for example, a sidearm, possibly a knife too, handful of grenades and at most two main weapons. To pick up a new weapon you have to drop one of your current ones. This makes weapon choice not simply what the player feels like using at the time, but an active decision ahead of the battle.
Having said that, even when able to hold every weapon in the game, players will still only use a certain few favourites. I know I do*. The limited inventory just deliberately forces the choosing of the favourites.
In BioShock it just seems a strange juxtaposition of the 'realistic' unlocking of plasmid slots by genetically engineering yourself, the mature story and incredibly well-designed environments versus the thought of having eight weapons (plus a camera) hidden away in every fold of your clothing. Which is then itself juxtaposed against the enforced ammunition 'limits'.
The root cause of this strangeness I think is to do with the removal of an inventory. Specifically System Shock 2's inventory. In SS2 you had a grid divided into squares and each item you picked up filled up a certain number of grid spaces. For example, one grenade took up one square, the shotgun took up three. It was immediately clear to the player that size = space and it was a perfect balance between having the realistic limitation of 'sidearm+two main weapons' or the “classic” way of carrying everything at once. If the player wanted to carry every weapon in the game, they could, but only as long as they found all the strength upgrades (which unlocked more squares) and dropped pretty much all else. A large part of the game was the managing of the inventory so you could carry what you wanted.
As for BioShock, I surmise it was taken out to make the game more accessible to a larger section of the gameplaying public. Perhaps it was deemed too fiddly for newer console gamers to handle (SS2 remember only came out on PC**), or perhaps a distraction away from the main game – “Why am I fiddling around arranging bandages in my jumper when I'm supposed to be finding Ryan?”. Whatever the case, I'd love to find out the actual reason from the developers.
In conclusion, 'unrealism' in terms of what a human being can physically do or (in this case) carry doesn't in itself detract from a fantastic game, but does ruin the internal consistancy of the world if it has been carefully constructed to be realistic. A 'B-Movie' game like Duke Nukem can have the avatar carrying 100+kilos of weaponry without causing me to bat an eyelid, but when a meticulously devised scenario like BioShock uses the same mechanic, it unnerves me slightly.
Anyway, I'm off to find myself a Big Daddy to kill, but I just can't seem to pick up that extra pack of shells as I've already got twenty-four. Room for another tape message though…
*Pistol (anti-personnel) and Crossbow (steel bolt) for headshot fun + the Machine Gun when they get in my face. Loads of them? Flamethrower time 🙂
**Not that I'm saying console gamers are less intelligent, have less patience, blah blah etc. but fiddling around with an inventory screen is admittedly quite geeky and might be a touch too abstract for the larger audience to grasp. Shame, it was almost a fun mini-game in itself in SS2, that directly affected gameplay. Kind of like the pipemania puzzles in BioShock … hmm.
