XDefiant has a map called "Zoo." Yep, you guessed it, it's a level set at the zoo. That sounds a little mundane compared to the places video games routinely allow us to go. I went to the real-world zoo in May, but I've never been to the Mushroom Kingdom. So what's so special about it?
Fantastical Vs. Realistic Levels
On the one hand, we can agree to disagree, but the zoo rocks. On the other, I love when developers are alive enough to the possibility of the world that they can triangulate the entertainment value in a real-world place you could go to right now.
When I was growing up, most video game levels were fantastical places with only the loosest ties to the real world, especially as a Nintendo kid who didn't have access to games like Half-Life and Max Payne, which were attempting verisimilitude.The first level I really fell in love with was Bob-Omb Battlefield in Super Mario 64, which is as far from the reality of a real-life battlefield as you can get. The combatants aren't human soldiers, they're sentient bombs. They aren't commanded by a general in uniform, but by a huge bomb king waiting to tussle at the top of a mountain.
This is not the real world, in the big details nor in the minutiae. You can pop on a hat with itty bitty wings and fly up to a floating island. There's a huge bowling ball with teeth chained up and guarding a cartoon star. You reach the peak by teleporting through little divots in the rock wall. Big metal orbs randomly roll down the mountain path and into a half-pipe before disappearing. I love Bob-Omb Battlefield, but it's pure fantasy. As I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate games that manage to find the fun in realistic settings.
Mario got as to realism as the series can probably bear with Super Mario Odyssey 's New Donk City, a Saturday morning cartoon take on NYC.
Realism isn't inherently superior, but it presents interesting challenges that more fantastical levels don't. When a level is unconstrained by any need to be credible, designers can let their imaginations go wild. A level where everything is made of incredible looking dessert food? Super Mario Odyssey says sure. How about a level set inside a backyard tree that ends with the characters riding through a cavernous tunnel on a phosphorescent flying fish? It takes two levels for It Takes Two to get to that bizarre scene. How about a level set inside the belly of a giant fish? The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (and the biblical book of Jonah) put the fun in fundus.
Those levels are great because they make you believe that anything can happen next. But when a realistic level feels similarly exhilarating, it's a different kind of accomplishment. The Last of Us tends to be significantly more grounded than its sister series, Uncharted, so its set pieces have a thin tightrope to walk. In Uncharted, a thrilling moment might have Nathan Drake riding a speeding train through a snowy mountain pass or getting topsy-turvy in a capsized cruise ship. With The Last of Us, though, Naughty Dog figured out how to thrill players by simply having Joel's foot get stuck in a loop of rope. That's a different kind of design problem, and I'm impressed when developers nail it.
XDefiant And The Division 2 Take Us To The Zoo
XDefiant's Zoo is actually pulled from the Ubisoft game that does this kind of design best: The Division 2. That Tom Clancy looter-shooter is set in a post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. where humanity is attempting to reform society in the wake of a global plague. I didn't expect much when I started that game up in 2019, but its level design quickly won me over.
Using D.C. as an open-world setting meant that you'd sometimes be getting in a shootout by the Washington Monument, but the most fascinating bits were the interiors. Missions often took place in real-world museums (or lightly fictionalized versions of real world museums). Seeing the architecture of museums — which is designed to guide visitors through its exhibits — repurposed to lead a player through a level was a delight. Plus, the team at Massive Entertainment put the work in to make the levels far more visually interesting than your average shooter corridors.
This is the appeal of the Zoo as it appears in XDefiant, too. It's a nice, welcoming place to be, even if you're peeking around corners to spot hostiles, not howler monkeys. During your sprint to the action, you might pause to take in a placard about the Mariana Trench. You might crouch down, waddling up to combat, and notice some stuffed penguins mid-waddle in a display about the Arctic. In a multiplayer game like XDefiant, you repeat the same, basic actions over and over again. You learn to execute them with greater skill and efficiency, but you're still basically just running and shooting. So it's nice to have a charming slice of life, however mundane, to break up the everyday violence.
