The thing about Mass Effect 2 that kept my playing is that you're given literally the entire Milky Way galaxy to explore. You play as the commander of a spaceship and you're tasked with leading a team to save humanity. Along the way, you get to visit lots of different locations. One minute, you might be in a sprawling city where you'll uncover a clue that will sends you across the galaxy to an eerie tropical planet filled with tortured inhabitants that behave more like animals than sentient beings. All in a days work.
While I really liked being able to cross the whole galaxy, I couldn't help but feel that the whole thing was a bit superficial. Don't get me wrong, Mass Effect 2 stands out as one of the very best games that I have ever played. The storytelling, gameplay, direction, art style, voice acting in this game are beyond almost any other game that I've ever experienced. It's a truly phenomenal game. But though you can trample across the Milky Way, visiting dozens of star systems which then reveal hundreds of planetary systems, there isn't a whole lot of life to it all.
Most of the cities that you visit are filled with lots of aliens, but they tend to stand in the same spots. No one is simply out conducting their business, bustling around - the non-player characters are where they are for your benefit, your immersion, not their own. One of the earliest missions in the game tasks you with going to a nightclub to gain some information from the boss running the city. When you go back to the same city later in the game, you'll see the same goons waiting to get into the nightclub, despite the fact that nearly 50 hours have gone by. The cities are full of life, but they're lifeless. The same can be said for most of the planets you encounter. Only a few actually let you land and when you do, you're only allowed to explore a very tiny sliver. You'll walk on a very linear path toward whatever goal you're to find, and then it's over.
This phenomena isn't just a problem for Mass Effect 2; it plagues most "open world" games. But I hadn't really noticed what was being sacrificed in open world games like these until just the other day when I booted up Heavy Rain. A lot of people had been talking about how unique this game is and I didn't think much of it until I actually sat down and played it. I'm blown away. It is like nothing I've ever played and however I describe it, I won't be able to do it justice. The game opens with you assuming control of a sleeping male character. You pull him out of bed, walk him to the shower, shave his face, get him dressed, and wait for your wife to get home. Along the way, you explore this man's house (there's no narrative to open it up), interacting in fairly natural ways with the world around you as you wait for something to happen. It plays out much more like a movie opening than a tutorial introducing players to the mechanics of the game. But what has amazed me most about Heavy Rain so far is that, despite the fact that you never leave Ethan's house in this short opening sequence, there's so much depth here. Instead of struggling to fit "the entire galaxy on one disc" as Bioware's Ray Muzyka described the process of developing the original Mass Effect in a conversation I had with him last summer, the developers of Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream built tiny environments and made them as believable as possible. Interaction with objects is highlighted and the player will have to do such mundane things as shake a carton of orange juice before taking a gulp or carefully setting plates on a kitchen table so they don't break.
It may seem silly, but this simple environment seemed more real to me than any I've ever played before. What's perhaps even more promising about this approach to level design is that I as the player remember the experience much more clearly than nearly any individual area in Mass Effect 2. While Mass Effect 2 was certainly a great game and there were a lot of memorable moments, the environmental design felt more like if the developers viewed the environments as a bridge between plot segments rather than integrating the characteristics of the environment into the plot itself. When you're wandering a crowded mall in Heavy Rain, the chaos of homogenized shopping centers loaded with aimless people milling about worked in perfect compliment with the how the story unfolded during that scene. The environments in Heavy Rain are integral, not just diversions to be quickly worked through between two plot points. Quantic Dreams' Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit for those across the pond) was similar in design but failed to have a substantial impact on gaming, perhaps due to being underplayed because of some clunky mechanics and market forces. Fortunately, Heavy Rain is getting a lot more attention than their previous effort and they seem poised to become a big time developer after this showing. Hopefully their emphasis on smaller, more organic environments like what we saw here will help mark a general trend toward designing levels that are more integrated into the narrative instead of serving as simple arenas to house frenzied killing as they are in so many other games. Video games have a long way to go before their storytelling can match Hollywood, but Heavy Rain is a very good example of where this medium is headed in the future.
