There are manygames from the early 2000sthat have changed the face of video games for the better. Whether through plot dynamics, gameplay, graphics, genre elements, or any other facet, it’s easy to trace back some of the games people love today to just a few games of this previous era.
One such game isBioShock. A shooter at heart, but with a healthy mix of stealth, RPG, and horror ideals all wrapped into a game with a stellar plot and some great characters. Whether you were a fan from the beginning, or are just now appreciating the first time in Rapture, it makes one wonder what games were influenced by this interesting mix of a game.
While some games are more subtly influenced, it is pretty easy to see how SOMA was influenced by the first BioShock game. All you have to do is look at the setting.
A place on the sea floor full of scientists freed from the watchful eyes of governments and morals where they do biological experiments on humans. Oh, and it all goes horribly wrong. Sounds like a pretty familiar idea for a setting. True enough, SOMA takes a much stronger horror twist on the idea, and does it with gusto, but the base setting is a pretty fair one-to-one.
A newer game compared to most of the others. Avowed takes on the fantasy genre in a brand-new world full of magic, swordplay, and plenty of enemies to throw both of them at.
While most fantasy games make you choose one weapon, Avowed follows suit with BioShock for the idea of dual-wielding powers during combat. Where BioShock had you wielding plasmid and gun, Avowed lets you mix might with magic. Sword and shield, dagger and spell, gun and gun, and anything in-between are all available to you.
Sometimes it’s easier to see the ways a game has been influenced by a predecessor in more than one of its facets. This is so when you look at BioShock and then the later game Dishonored.
Both two-handed combat oriented, mixing abilities and equipment for fun ways to take on enemies. Both also have a stealth-leaning to their gameplay, which makes sense considering bothRapture and Dunwallare pretty unfriendly to the protagonists in question. Dishonored puts the political assassination idea more in the forefront of the game, but it’s there in both as well. Not to mention the fishy themes.
Every horror game wants to beatmospheric in nature, but few really pull it off the way that BioShock does, and it’s not even a full-fledged horror game. Dead Space ramps up the thrill of the setting in a way that makes you never feel fully safe.
Dead Space follows in its footsteps quite well though, in the way that it throws an unseeming and unprepared protagonist into a cramped setting full of mutated humans. The settings themselves are stifling, suffocating, and all-around unkind to both characters, making you earn every step along the way.
BioShock is a game that wears its ideals on its sleeve. While there are plenty of games out there that take a stance on political ideals, many have since been influenced by BioShock’s overarching story connecting its own concepts.
The Outer Worlds follows suit with an interstellar epic that takes on the ideas of capitalism and what space travel would be like under the control of companies looking to maximize profit. It’s also, coincidentally, a mix of FPS and RPG genres, which it does so quite easily. Throw in some great characters and some epic quests and you have a political game with plenty of heart and humor to back up their ideals.
A game’s plot and setting have to work together. That much is obvious, but some games just treat the setting as nothing more than maps for your character to move around in. Making the setting a character, and an enemy in and of itself, is the secret to a more atmospheric game as a whole.
BioShock does this in spades with Rapture, and System Shock does its damndest with its orbiting space station. Rapture feels like a place long-corrupted, out to get you, and openly hostile in its warped nature. SHODAN in System Shock may not go as far atmospherically, but it does give the space station “life”, turning every room and creature against you.
Some games go so far as to be influenced by their predecessors that they are considered spiritual successors. BioShock changed the landscape of gaming in the early 2000s, so it only makes sense that someone would make a game that closely follows its ideas, accidentally or on purpose.
Atomic Heart takes the BioShock formula of a setting full ofpseudo-governmental scientific discoveries, throws a wrench in the plans, and sets you out to save the day point-for-point. Fans of BioShock will love the upgrade system, interesting weaponry, and mix of peculiar mutant and robot enemies; even if they are put off by the stilted humor and one-liner-prone protagonist.
3Prey
Survival In Space
The remake of Prey was quite a change from the earlier rendition of the series, but it came with plenty of accolades from FPS, horror, sci-fi, and survival fans of all types.
There aren’t many games that can mix so many things as seamlessly as Prey and BioShock both do. So many elements of different game styles mix effortlessly in Prey’s science-fueled future full of shape-changing aliens and twisting narratives. It is a setting that feels so lonely and a world that you may never fully trust that ties it back to Rapture and the world under the sea.
It’s a mix that seems commonplace now, but in the early 2000s, it hadn’t been done all that often, and even then not often done well. The Borderlands series came out of nowhere, and took the next steps in solidifying the mix of popular genres.
A diverse setting, some politically charged concepts of a fictional world, and RPG skills mixed with FPS gunplay are all things that BioShock and Borderlands have in common. The Borderlands series has morphed into a world of its own since then, but its first game was a simple mix that sought to improve the simple FPS idea, just like BioShock once did.
Games that are a mix of FPS and RPG genre elements have come around more and more as the years have gone by, and while BioShock is one reason, Fallout 3 is another. Where BioShock is a small-scale apocalypse, Fallout 3 sets the world on fire.
It’s hard to say just how much BioShock influenced the first game of the rebrand of the Fallout series, but there’s enough overlap to suggest that it’s a possibility. The FPS and RPG mix, the heavy lean on environmental storytelling, and the plot twists make them more alike than different, and both powerhouse of the early 2000s. Not to mention the themes of capitalist-horror, science gone wrong, and political violence.
