This is the second post in Heart of Style's Resistance:FoM-themed series on user immersion in digital entertainment productions. It is also devoted to the newly founded Eva Mendes Day.
Even though I'm not a huge fan of FPS's, I've played enough of the genre to tell what distinguishes this series from other titles. And far and away, the style of Resistance comes in at the top of its achievements no matter how you slice it.
What have we seen before? WWII shooters. What else have we seen before? Alien shooters. What have we not seen before? WWII alien shooters.
I guess the hook of the Resistance universe stemmed from this original creative concept. And unlike most games, Resistance doesn't use the plot/setting as an excuse to dump you into a load of alien scum with nothing but a rifle, handful of grenades, and two guided missiles to defend yourself. Everywhere you look in this game you see Insomniacs working insanely to make
their world as absolutely massive and believable as ours.
The most obvious way they attempted to do this was through the copious amounts of "intel" documents stashed throughout the game. Some of these serve functional purposes such as informing the player about weaponry or tactics (like a standard game tutorial), but some are strictly fluff meant to draw you deeper into the mysterious world of the game.
I encountered just such a brief outside of Manchester Cathedral in the game's most controversial level. It was an excerpt from a fallen soldier's journal chronicling the battle he and his platoon waged to hold the cathedral from Chimeran forces. No tactical advantages whatsoever. Well; I guess you could claim that it's warning you "Hey, there's bad guys in the next zone," but if you're playing an FPS and you haven't already realized this, then you owe me a substantial donation for using up our shared limited air supply in order to sustain your idiocy. The point is, Insomniac spent time, manpower, and money to write a “useless” piece of fluff that added more immersion to the game.
The artwork was another huge point of immersion. Not only did Insomniac use recognizable public locations to convey a sense of reality to the player, but also the way they decorated these locations stressed an extreme intent to convince. In one level I found myself running down the wartorn streets of Nottingham (or was it Manchester again? Sorry to my British readers), and I came around a corner to see a bombed-out brick building with a 20-foot mosaic painted on the exterior. It was of a motivational war poster heralding "Victory, With Our Help" in reference to the American-British alliance against the Chimera. The poster was intricate, a specifically designed piece of unique artwork to establish the game's setting and give it a larger scale. Similarly, I came across several posters for "The Beadles" in an abandoned home on the same level.
These are just a fraction of Resistance's expansive universe pie. Levels are loaded with unnecessary artifacts that are there solely for realism, from refigerators to books to cardboard boxes (that you sadly, cannot hide in). Soldiers you encounter in the game will spout out conversational tidbits that have nothing to do with your objective. The entire game is layered with an immense amount of detail.
The question is, was all that effort worth it? We'll discuss that in my next post. Stay tuned!
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