Escape from Blogging Bay (Part 2)

A Riddickulous Realization

One hour from midnight and I’m sitting at the kitchen table, the fire needs wood and I should probably turn some lights on but I’m too busy looming over my laptop with a sheen of sweat across my forehead as Riddick stalks his way through a gloomy vent. I’m lost as shit and the in-game map is cruder than bathroom graffiti. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, my journal is still loaded with random side quests but I have a sinking feeling that my current route is leading me further down the main storyline. It’s that infamous one-way street, no U-turns and no more detours. I’m sour as hell and you could rock climb up the furrows in my brow. What would Riddick do? The realization hits me like a Stone Cold Stunner. Riddick would haul ass the hell out of Butcher Bay. He would stop dicking around with side quests and shiv every jumped up inmate who insisted on trying to pressgang him into smuggling drugs or picking up their dry cleaning. All of sudden it made perfect sense to be lost. Butcher Bay is for all intensive purposes - a shithole. Venturing down into the mines, lurking through cramped crawlspace after cramped crawlspace, corridors and rooms set out like a filthy rat warren. Pluck me from the main track and its conveniently unlocked doors and I’d go missing in no time. Butcher Bay is an architectural nightmare and if Riddick can barely scrape out a half assed escape route then how the hell am I supposed to know where I should be? For me Butcher Bay exemplifies two staple ingredients needed in any successful Sci-fi/survival horror goulash –

1. Claustrophobic environments which are all too easy to get lost in and
2. Intuitive level design which will keep players moving even when they barely have the faintest inkling as to whether they’re on the right track.

Ever since I played that steaming pile of disappointment called Rage, the very thought of sidequests in a survival horror/FPS game has left me feeling a bit queasy. Butcher Bay was sure its diversions fit into the main story context and that every move Riddick made on and off the beaten path was for a damn good reason. As long as the game kept flowing under the pretence of a man fighting for his freedom through any means necessary, then my mate immersion and I weren’t going anywhere.

Don't let your homophobic father catch you reading my blog now...

And therein lies the root of the issue. Grinding for experience or being assigned fetch quest after fetch quest is the natural enemy of immersion. Some game genres suit that style and it is an unfortunate staple of many RPG designs but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing. Its robotic, it’s boring and it creates the sort of OCD moments of madness that I mentioned earlier. Butcher Bay didn’t do that, I did. I panicked and briefly misinterpreted a small section of side missions as a harbinger of terrible RPG game elements to come. In hindsight, all it really did was pad the game out and give you an effective taste of Butcher Bay’s prison atmosphere by coercing you through sections of depressingly gritty level design and great voice acting. After I left that strange psychological barrier in my dust, Butcher Bay really came into its own. “Who the fuck designs a prison this poorly-lit, bleak and maze-like?” I don’t know because I’m a bloodthirsty escaped convict, not an engineer. “Whoops! I just missed a pile of shot gun ammo, maybe I should go back and pick it up?” Screw that, I’ve got places to go and people to butcher, and frankly bullets kill too slow. I’ll happily reiterate the fact that Butcher Bay is a great game but I don’t think all the immersion comes courtesy of Starbreeze Studios. I’ve naturally got a lot in common with Richard B. Riddick. Escaped convict and mass murderer? Ahhh not so much. Tall, well-built, handsome and bald? Well I don’t mean to brag, but let’s just say that if I shaved my head, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Diesel and I were separated at birth.