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bioshock my monkey! (now also about SPOILARZ)
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 1:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The first time the doctor teleported, I thought he just exploded in a fine mist of gib for no reason. It looks very cool.

This game is looking better by the minute. I just hope they make the more humanoid mutants look different enough one from the other and they centre the weapons a little.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I kind of hate spoilers, so I'll just take you folks word on this. I'm excited enough that I don't need more prodding (that dev walkthrough spoiled way too much for me).
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 10:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah I try to avoid spoilers with any game I'm looking forward to, unless I'm asked to write up a preview. Otherwise games tend to lose their impact!
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 1:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I hate when major spoilers to games I am currently playing are blurted out in my presence by people who are aware I have not yet completed said games.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 9:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Guys, I have never played any System Shock, though this thread has made me curious enough to read about it. It sounds like quite a game and here's an article by Gillen that's pretty good. (warning massive spoilers)

http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/?page_id=1103
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 10:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It is quite a series, though overall, I prefer Thief. The problem with System Shock 2 in particular are the RPG-like stats, which undermines the purpose behind a direct first person perspective. It doesn't destroy the gameplay as offensively as Deus Ex does, but it does leave a sour taste in the mouth.

I'd suggest looking into both the Thief series and the System Shock one if you can. You'll at the very least be pleased by the cleverness and maturity of the stories woven. Thief's stealth mechanics are certainly worthwhile at that.

There's something about Bioshock that bugs me: The little girls are the only ones capable of recycling dormant Adam, the "currency" of the game. Hence the imposing bodyguards. But it's been confirmed that, if we so wish, and if we can defeat their guardians, we can steal their Adam supply, as they'd logically be stocked up on it. But that means child murder. Regardless, does that mean that the more of them we kill, the less they are around recycling Adam, so that by messing up the eco-system, later in the game, we're less likely to find Adam around?
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 10:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why does that bug you? That sounds awesome.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 10:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It bugs me because I don't know if they've incorporated it.

And with all their talk of emergent gameplay and creating a credible ecosystem, they'd gain so much if it is.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 1:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.

ss1 is good but ss2 is better in many ways, especially with the updated texture patches. it's a very credible environment, though i don't know if it would make any sense to someone who didn't play the first.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 5:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

SS2 is a terrible mish mash of ideas that don't gel together. The only thing it did better than Deus Ex was to create a horrifying atmosphere, which DX didn't try to do.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
It bugs me because I don't know if they've incorporated it.

And with all their talk of emergent gameplay and creating a credible ecosystem, they'd gain so much if it is.


I'm pretty sure that, the very first time I read about Bioshock in a GameInformer feature, the dilemmae involved in the various possibilities for approaching the little girls were made to sound like one of the developer's favorite aspects of the game. I do not recall the exact details that were discussed, but I am extremely confident that your choices there will not only be of an ethical sort, but will have economic ramifications as well.

The heart of the game and the designers' vision of it is that you are exploring a decayed civilization and can both make use of and impact its various systems. That's the entire appeal and what makes the game distinctive, so I'm sure they've incorporated what you've thought of there.

I don't want to say for sure, but I should mention I feel strongly that ideas about preying upon the girls causing their numbers (and the availability of ADAM) to diminish were actually in the feature.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 2:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i want to point to a thread at another forum but i am afraid so i will do so stealthily...


Code:
rpgcodex.com

/phpBB/viewtopic.php?

t=17620&start=0


i hope that works.

it's interesting how "first person" automatically disqualifies titles in a lot of eyes, and not just the japanese supremecist types. "FPS" isn't a description so much as a cultural marker that means a tremendous amount to some people above and beyond the mechanics of a game.

oh and don't bother reading past the first page.
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 2:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's not particularly interesting. They sound like the most stereotypical of shut-ins, especially in regards to having *gasp* a female member of staff opening and closing the video. I mean, what an UGLY WHORE!

How they whine and whine about the super abilities and advertise their ignorance.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 3:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i find it highly interesting, if only because i love the shit out of fps viewpoints in games. i can't really imagine playing a horror ish game in any other type of viewpoint - you get single direction vision and stereoscopic hearing and, whammo. it's good for things like that. it's not an isometic viewpoint but uh yeah.

i find it harder to quibble with the cross platform development issues, and i do feel their pain on that - rts games and fps games seem to be the only pc-only (or pc-first) dev games left. console production generally limits the scope of what you can do on a pc, not vice versa, so it's a reasonable complaint.

edit: it is a hard balance between "accessibility" and depth, especially when you're talking about rpg's. but mostly things change, the world changes, and games change, and life changes and hopefully you don't get stabbed to death and die alone.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 3:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Stones, glass houses, etc. The more information is released, the more it looks like Bioshock is going to be to System Shock 2 what Deus Ex 2 was to Deus Ex. Those videos give me the strong impression of somebody just going down a checklist (e.g. gravity gun). Don't let's forget how linear System Shock 2 was.

seryogin wrote:

here's an article by Gillen that's pretty good. (warning massive spoilers)


Suprisingly so. I agree with him about how Shodan's dignity is such an important part of the character, but I'd say that she's more than just a villain. She's amoral as opposed to immoral, in a way that oddly reminds me of A Clockwork Orange's Alex. It's such a shame that the last part of the game was so rushed.

Kieron Gillen wrote:
"In a real way, she was the electricity which Shock."


Oh, god.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 6:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
It's not particularly interesting. They sound like the most stereotypical of shut-ins, especially in regards to having *gasp* a female member of staff opening and closing the video. I mean, what an UGLY WHORE!

How they whine and whine about the super abilities and advertise their ignorance.


Yeah, the guys at rpgcodex are general douchebags. I remember we found a thread making fun of our magazine because we kept throwing around the term "emergent gameplay" and claiming we didn't know what it was (we do, but I personally think it was thrown around a little too much), and then the rest of the thread was them all fighting amongst themselves regarding the definition. It was pretty hilarious.

Also Dracko I had to post my comment about Deus Ex because I have to do that everytime someone compares it to SS2, thanks for understanding.

Oh also found Gillens article pretty unconvinging. Shodan was always a cool character, but always appeared too super villiany to me.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 6:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Soviet Onion wrote:
Stones, glass houses, etc. The more information is released, the more it looks like Bioshock is going to be to System Shock 2 what Deus Ex 2 was to Deus Ex.

How do you mean, exactly?
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 1:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
The Soviet Onion wrote:
Stones, glass houses, etc. The more information is released, the more it looks like Bioshock is going to be to System Shock 2 what Deus Ex 2 was to Deus Ex.

How do you mean, exactly?


I mean it looks as if it's going to be simplified, and not in a good way. It's going to be aimed squarely at a console audience who've never played its precursor, so rather than building on System Shock 2's gameplay mechanics it's probably going to throw large parts of them out. I'd be very suprised to see them keep the research system, or weapons degradation for example.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 1:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

But the mechanics weren't what made the SS games great. It was the tone and the presentation and writing.

I mean, weapons degredation was a nice addition to the survival horror feel, but it wasn't entirely essential.

Not saying we won't end up with xboxification, mind you, just that if those are the only compromises made for a new audience it wouldn't necessarily spell disaster.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 2:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The problem being that System Shock 2's mechanics were pretty poor in the first place. The weapons degradation was utterly superfluous.

Saying that Bioshock is going to be to System Shock 2 what Deus Ex 2 is to Deus Ex, well, those last three games are all heavily, disgustingly flawed either way.

If you want to cool perfecting, simplification and focusing on the things that truly matter "xboxification" bad things, then go ahead. All I've seen so far is ambition which may or may not deliver, but is aiming far higher than the self-imposed limitations and RPG tropes, utterly redundant for an FPS, a couple of stats-obsessed fans believed were the crux of the games they loved.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 11, 2007 5:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

well, they were rpg-fps hybrids.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 11, 2007 3:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
The problem being that System Shock 2's mechanics were pretty poor in the first place. The weapons degradation was utterly superfluous.


It's not superfluous at all. It made the situations in the game seem that much more intense, when you're being chased by a half dozen of those creepy malfunctioning android things and you've backed yourself off into a corner and OH GOD your gun just broke and how are you ever going to get out.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 11, 2007 6:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Man are you fucking kidding, it was a total pain in the ass. The guns broke like after every five shots (slight exaggeration alert) which fought the realism the game was trying to pull off and it just became tedious and frustrating, rather than adding to the tension. IIRC, you couldn't even USE a gun if you didn't have the right stats. What, I need training to know how to pull a fucking trigger? C'mon! Argh!
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 11, 2007 6:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i kinda see that as a bonus, though.

plus it was patchable. a great strength of pc gaming.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 11, 2007 7:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Cycle wrote:
Man are you fucking kidding, it was a total pain in the ass. The guns broke like after every five shots (slight exaggeration alert) which fought the realism the game was trying to pull off and it just became tedious and frustrating, rather than adding to the tension. IIRC, you couldn't even USE a gun if you didn't have the right stats. What, I need training to know how to pull a fucking trigger? C'mon! Argh!


I don't recall it being that bad. Wasn't there some stat you could upgrade that would prolong their lifespan?
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 11, 2007 7:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

And anyway, if you just used the wrench for most situations and only saved the gun for difficult moments it wasn't that bad.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 2:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, they didn't make the melee combat all that enthralling either. And if I sink a whole heap of points into a certain type of weapon, I want to be able to actually use it! Argh! Grarr!
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 7:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

dhex wrote:
well, they were rpg-fps hybrids.

There's the crux of the matter right there.

There is no need, whatsoever, for these games to be hybrids. RPGs are relics of table gaming. Some RPGs do work as games, sure, but if you've got an FPS, you don't need stats. It just comes off as half-hearted, like they're too afraid and couldn't think of anything better to attempt making the game compelling. I'm honestly tired of all the fans claiming it makes the games "deep". Being needlessly complex does not amount to deep gameplay.

Mister Toups wrote:
Dracko wrote:
The problem being that System Shock 2's mechanics were pretty poor in the first place. The weapons degradation was utterly superfluous.


It's not superfluous at all. It made the situations in the game seem that much more intense, when you're being chased by a half dozen of those creepy malfunctioning android things and you've backed yourself off into a corner and OH GOD your gun just broke and how are you ever going to get out.

BULL

SHIT

Seriously, that reply is so wrong, I don't even know where to start. It's a forced system with no depth to it and it was simply annoying and encouraged you to stock up on even more useless items. You'll be telling me the Insanity Effects in Eternal Darkness where awesome and brilliantly implemented next.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 8:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
There is no need, whatsoever, for these games to be hybrids. RPGs are relics of table gaming. Some RPGs do work as games, sure, but if you've got an FPS, you don't need stats. It just comes off as half-hearted, like they're too afraid and couldn't think of anything better to attempt making the game compelling. I'm honestly tired of all the fans claiming it makes the games "deep". Being needlessly complex does not amount to deep gameplay.


i dunno man, like, all of my favorite games seem to be hybrids at some point, especially of this intersection: deus ex, system shocks, ultima underworlds...shit, even shadowcaster (going back to the day) or the entire TES series. i don't know if they made these games deep or shallow - all games are shallow, are they not? - but i do know i enjoyed the hell out of them and look forward to their future incarnations a la bioshock. i enjoy a good plain old rpg now and then (western, natch!) and most certainly love me some fps action (solo only, thanks) but the two tastes together are just plain old delicious. it's a way of putting the brakes on fast shoot me up action, or alternately equipping a +5 ring of kickass to your rpg staid-ness.

but i also thought the insanity effects in eternal darkness were neat, so i could be wrong on this.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 4:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
Mister Toups wrote:
Dracko wrote:
The problem being that System Shock 2's mechanics were pretty poor in the first place. The weapons degradation was utterly superfluous.


It's not superfluous at all. It made the situations in the game seem that much more intense, when you're being chased by a half dozen of those creepy malfunctioning android things and you've backed yourself off into a corner and OH GOD your gun just broke and how are you ever going to get out.

BULL

SHIT

Seriously, that reply is so wrong, I don't even know where to start. It's a forced system with no depth to it and it was simply annoying and encouraged you to stock up on even more useless items. You'll be telling me the Insanity Effects in Eternal Darkness where awesome and brilliantly implemented next.


Actually I do think they were awesome and brilliantly implemented! Eternal Darkness is a great fucking game!

Wow!

I think I've met someone on the internet whose opinion is different from mine!

Fuck!

What should I do!

Maybe I should say something mean!!!
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 5:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh no please don't delete my game gamecube please don't i don't know what i'd do without it!

oh no my tv shut off now oh god this is terrifying!
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 6:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think we can all agree that the insanity effects would have been better if there wasn't a bar telling you when the wacky hi-jinks would occur. Ditching the status effect glowing and really the hud in general would have done wonders for Eternal Darkness.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 6:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That much I agree with. They would also have worked better if they were so concerned with really, really shoddy fourth wall threats.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 10:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

RPG stats are pretty superfluos, Deus Ex could have handled the progression system better. The sequel went in the right direction by ditching them, but the replacement system was also shite, stripped down to just biomods. Also, the rest of the game was poor to average.

Dark Corners of the Earth did the sanity thing better (even if the game is very flawed). I think all of this breaking the fourth wall crap is silly, I mean the stuff in Metal Gear Solid was cute and kinda clever, but that's about it. Same with Enternal Darkness.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 7:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

well, the thing about the FPS viewpoint - and what i think makes it most compelling - is that it attempts to bypass the disconnect between watching your character and seeing as that character.

frankly, i think first person horror is totally tip-top when done right. sure, cthulhu was utterly too hard to even think about, but the viewpoint was excellent. same with fear. it's one thing to go "uh, what's that" from a top down or 3d perspective, and another to have to shine your flashlight into a dark corner, leaving most of your perspective blocked. ravenholm was good at this, and the first fear game was truly excellent in parts (expansion pack, definitely not so much, because it didn't understand that eschewing the jump through the window bits is more frightening and unnerving, though the hospital was done pretty well regardless).

not having real peripheral vision kinda sucks though.

i like stats, but i don't care about the wii or casual gamers so i'm waiting for the comet to take me home anyhow, har har. naw, i mean, i think of a lot of these titles as the last great gasp of pc gaming before invisible war and the age of xboxification; it may be utterly silly to be hoping for the best with bioshock in terms of this legacy but so far i haven't seen anything in the demo movies that doesn't make me go "ok, this has great potential."
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
That much I agree with. They would also have worked better if they were so concerned with really, really shoddy fourth wall threats.

I'll just say that my wife was very fooled by some of this stuff, and the occasional thing that was very in-game "is this a sanity effect or not" stuff did work well. Perhaps toups is just easily fooled by games because he has super-suspension-of-disbelief.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 5:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dhex wrote:
sure, cthulhu was utterly too hard to even think about, but the viewpoint was excellent.


Cthulhu dropped in difficulty quite considerably once you got a gun. It was pretty much easy going after that, apart from some tricky puzzles. And game breaking bugs.

I like stats too, but I think they can really be handled better in these hybrid games. Hey, is anyone still looking forward to Stalker?
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 5:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i am!

it will, i hope, be different.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, I think I will finally attempt to play System Shock 2 again because some loving soul put out a 2K7 patch for Windows XP.

now I just need to track the game down.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 2:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
oh no please don't delete my game gamecube please don't i don't know what i'd do without it!

oh no my tv shut off now oh god this is terrifying!


I thought that stuff was brilliant, yeah!

I really enjoyed it!

I mean yes, the insanity effects are cheap parlor tricks. They're still pretty effective, though, so long as you're willing to suspend your disbelief a bit. I thought it was good campy fun and pretty creepy to boot.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 5:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

cheap as it is, the bath tub scene catches me off guard everytime.
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

yeah, that was well done.

,
the cockroach running across the screen got me too, but that's just because i'd lived in other places where that actually happened...not cool.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 12:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh hey stalker comes out next week.

well, we'll see what we'll see.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 3:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

most of the insanity stuff boiled down to "hey that's neat" for me, but the one I liked the best was the moment that leads you to believe your save game is being deleted. that really, really got me.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 7:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Lurking Deep article on Bioshock, featured in Edge magazine 167:

Edge with Ken Levine, in October 2006 wrote:
Psychopathic holidays. It’s not a perfect definition of videogames, but it’s one of the few that manages to capture the contrast of escapism and obsession that many titles provoke; one of the few that illuminates the space that games often work within.
The man who’s just coined the term is eager to expand on the subject: “In games, you’re quite often doing things that you wouldn’t do in real life,” says Ken Levine, creative director at Irrational Games. “Games often have the effect of putting you in a world where that doesn’t matter because the world has most of its morality sucked out. When you’re playing Doom; it’s hard to even think about morality because there’s no standard of morality in the world.”
A recurring theme in his conversation, Levine’s not talking about all that games could be, but rather what they so often end up as. Irrational’s next title is an unashamed attempt at moving things forward. Eschewing the jungles and factories of many an FPS, Bioshock takes you somewhere undeniably new: to Rapture, a ‘40s utopian city beneath the sea that has fallen into disrepair. The game boasts a memorable Reform Club ambience: brass, parquetry and art deco stylings vying with neon signs for control of the screen. Yet, as the city’s name hints at an unbalanced mix of idealism and mania, Rapture’s experimental society has turned in on itself. Rotting bodies litter the chequerboard floorings, and young girls known as Little Sisters harvest the corpses for precious genetic material, protected by Big Daddies, the hulking Vernian nightmares that amble and thud through the midnight spaces.

Despite the ease with which Bioshock reshapes FPS conventions, Levine is eager to keep the game’s flights of fancy in check: “Whenever you hear a story about a game designer who’s got a notebook of his world which he’s been designing since he was 12 years old, get very nervous. He’s got a story to tell, and he should be writing a fantasy novel or something. At the end of the day, everything’s got to serve the game.” This may seem odd coming from a developer whose primary claim to fame is the strength of its stories, but Levine’s starting point is always the gameplay itself. “That’s what I hang everything else on. Gameplay, and then theme, and then characters and motivation, and then you have the elements of your story.”
It’s a process in which the narrative serves the game rather than overwhelming it, yet Irrational can still claim a recognisable style. “I’m a pretentious jerk,” jokes Levine, “so I write things that pretentious jerks like myself would come up with. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I’ll write a story and nobody cares.”
Bioshock’s plot has come a long way from its original World War II setting, but the mention of those early ideas draws a sigh from Levine: “The WWII thing was, frankly, that I had this press thing coming up and, as a story guy I am really really lazy. I just didn’t have my act together yet. It took some time for everything to really form. We started really thinking: ‘Why would this place exist?’ It all came out of that: the time period, the people who created the place, the look, the feel, the philosophy behind the characters. It all came organically once we had this underwater city.
“It’s very hard for me to construct a story that doesn’t have a theme,” continues Levine. “Otherwise I don’t know what I’m supposed to be writing. The theme of Bioshock from the story perspective is extremes of ideology. And I think that’s true for a lot of our games. When I was working on Thief the story we did was about somebody caught between two extremes of ideology: a pagan god-force versus the powers of modernisation, and they were both these extremes which would not accept any change, and you’re stuck in the middle. I think, deep down, Bioshock is the same thing: it’s about you being caught in between these two characters: Ryan, the founder of Rapture, and Fontaine, his business rival – and their extreme ideologies of how they view the world.”
Bioshock kicks off long after Rapture’s desire for perfection has turned to genetic engineering, with the city’s own populace becoming the only remaining source of the rare genetic material which those in power need to survive – hence the harvesting of corpses by the Little Sisters. But Levine is hasty to point out that he’s not really interested in making reactionary comments about science for the sake of it. “It’s not about the dangers of genetic experimentation or the dangers of building a city underwater, it’s the dangers of having ideas that are fixed. That’s what you see looking around the political situation of the world: what happens when you have ideologies that won’t change. I think a lot of people feel caught up in the middle of these extreme ideologies. It’s a very dangerous place to be, but a very familiar place.”

Bioshock itself seems caught in a war between two ideologies, with tightly-directed, narrative-led games on one side and more open-ended, branching titles on the other. Irrational aims to incorporate elements of both – a compelling story delivered through emergent gameplay filled with choices. Avoiding the ever-raging argument of whether this is even possible, what’s clear is that many developers aren’t interested in trying. “There’s always a reason why people make corridor shooters – it’s better for them and not as good for the player, so I think the theme in Bioshock is: ‘Hey, we’re going to do the work here, we’re going to take the responsibility on’, because that’s going to make it much more interesting.”
Rapture is central to this agenda. “The way we’re approaching this is we’re building a huge city, and it has secrets that you won’t uncover in the first game,” explains Levine. “Most FPSes are one extended corridor, but these are very open-ended naturalistic spaces, much more like a traditional space, much more exploratory. Once you’ve uncovered an area, you can go back to it freely throughout the game, so it’s very free exploring.”
It’s also up to Rapture to carry most of the storytelling duties. “It’s so much easier if your environment can do your work for you. We’re building this are right now which is sort of a museum that talks about the ideology of Rapture, it’s sort of a propaganda area on why this ideology is so great. Meanwhile that action – the characters, the monsters, the plot – so obviously puts the lie to that ideology, what with the devastation you see around you. And it’s not a cutscene, and it’s not a direct narrative. The contrast between ideology and the gameworld – the AI and the monsters shooting at you and the dead bodies and the explosions – they all work to illustrate that contrast. If you can engage the player, not tell him what you’re trying to tell him but let him suss it out through game action, you’re in much better shape. A lesson that somebody imparts upon themselves is much more powerful than a lesson you sit down and tell them.
“Our goal is to create a game where it’s pretty much impossible for us as designers to know how the gamer’s going to play it;” explains Levine. “Generally that’s going to allow the player to skew things and solve dilemmas in perhaps dozen of different really improvisational ways.” The results, while hopefully creating a better game, make testing and balancing a nightmare. “The easiest thing to test is the old-style Sierra game, where the player doesn’t have any expression outside of exactly what the designer knows he’s going to do. He knows he’s going to get the string and attach it to the stick and that he’s going to make the bow: it’s not like there’s any player skill here, he’s just trying to figure out exactly what the designer intended. In a game like Bioshock we have no idea what the player’s powers are going to be – none. We really have to allow a huge range of expression, and it’s always much harder.”

Environments aside, Bioshock explores freeform gameplay in a variety of ways. The first is emergent AI: it’s an area that has already provided Levine with his fair share of surprises, particularly with the disturbing relationship building between the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters: “They care about each other: sometimes they bicker, one that kills the other mourns the other one. Big Daddy protects the Little Sister, Little Sister looks for protection. It’s a very primal relationship. It’s a very sick and distorted relationship because they’re not really father and daughter, it’s this creature protecting this little girl because the city needs the research that she’s gathered, but the visual cues are so strong, and without a lot of words – she doesn’t even speak – it’s a very clear relationship. In a game that is a really deep FPS, to have a relationship that is really meaningful is incredibly satisfying.”
And the AI is there to be directly engaged with/ “Through genetic modification, you can trick Big Daddy into thinking you’re a Little Sister and he’ll protect you, and that’s an interesting feeling, this big guy being misled into protecting you. At one point the Little Sister will think you’re the Big Daddy, and she’ll be looking to you to protect her. I mean, you haven’t really had that experience in an FPS. It’s not like telling you to protect a convoy: this little girl looks at you and you know she needs your protection.”
Emergent AI also helps to bring the game’s puzzles out of the realm of simple item manipulation. “In the world you have digital puzzles and analogue puzzles,” suggest Levine. “Digital puzzles are the old classic ‘put the blue key in the blue door’ puzzles. There’s only one way to do it. Then there are the analogue puzzles, which is what we’re doing with Bioshock: ‘Hey, there’s a lot of monsters in this area’, or you need ammo, or you need to get this resource. That’s a puzzle that emerges out of the game. They’re much tougher to tell a story with, but as much of the world as we can get into the analogue space, where we don’t know how the player’s going to do it, the better.”
And then there are the Plasmids, which will be familiar to anyone who’s juggled cybernetic modules in System Shock 2, or Biomod canisters in Deus Ex: Invisible War. Adam, the genetic material harvested by the Little Sisters, can be used to provide a variety of upgrades to your weapons or abilities. “You have all these powers in your collection, and when you get to these stations you can choose to load-out a sub-section of those. There’s real choices for the player there. As the game goes on you can equip more and more.” And you’re not stuck with your choices: you can reload a different set at the next station. “If you want to make changes, there’s lots of opportunities. It’s really about: ‘How do I want to be for the next sequence?’”
Bioshock exudes confidence, from the brass-plated character design to its cockily off-beat setting. Yet it’s hard not to see lurking beneath it all the tentacles of an ambition that has already dragged other titles down to the depths. One of Half-Life 2’s greatest achievements was the scarlet thread that tugged you ever forwards through the corridors and the digital puzzles. Without that channelling, the risk is that these larger locations will become meaningless spaces where the only sign of an overarching narrative is that you’re held back from progressing until you’ve met some arbitrary criteria. Distant cousin Invisible War may turn out to be an apt comparison. For all its innovation, skill development, and emergent situations, the game felt fudged and fuzzy, a mess of confusing plots, where every choice seemed only to highlight the opportunities you were sacrificing. Ion Storm’s game never quite trusted its players enough to make their own mistakes: those various paths were actually mirages created by a single, linear narrative. However, if Bioshock can focus on creating an experience that manages to incorporate the best elements of divergence without losing overall coherency, all the whole providing the player with meaningful freedom, it could live up to its enormous potential.

Whatever the outcome, Bioshock’s effect on Irrational’s pocket kingdom has been immense. Nearing 80 people, the development team is its largest so far, and while it’s been an administrative headache, it’s created novel experiences for Levine. “I think the challenge with Irrational is in saying, now we have time, let’s take chances here? It’s not profligate spending, it’s people who are used to working on a budget saying: ‘Ok, now we can actually do that.’ We come from a place of real efficient development; it’s always easier to fit into a larger pair of pants when you’re lean and mean, than to try and squeeze into a really tight pair of pants when you’ve been at the buffet too long. We’ve been lean and mean for a very ling tile. We’ve never had enough time before. We’ve never had time to go back and say: is this really what we wanted it to be? Is this really interesting enough and fun enough?” Bioshock has given them the time. “We did a prototype over a year ago, and I took it to New York to show it, and I wasn’t happy with it and I said: ‘I hate the look of this game and we’re going to start over,’ and we did. We’ve thrown out more with Bioshock than actually went into many of the games we’ve made before.”
Despite the extra work involved, Levine is also enthusiastic about the next-generation technologies on offer. “Where it used to be: well we really can’t do that, on this generation I really have not had that experience yet. It’s feasible to do what you want. And what that means is that the wackier, more interesting ideas can actually happen.”
It may be a huge task in every sense, but it has not dimmed Levine’s faith in the power of games to provide new experiences. “When you start a game, you can do anything, and it’s amazing how often we choose to do the same thing over and over again. When I was working in Hollywood, they used to tell me to do the same but different: something people can identify with, but sort of a new take on that. I think the cool thing about Bioshock is that people can look at it and recognise the world. The architecture’s familiar, the clothing is familiar, the advertising is familiar, the clothing is familiar, but it’s not WWII or somewhere they’ve been before. It’s a place people haven’t seen before but won’t be completely alienated by.”
And with that, we’re back where we started – the experiences games could provide that they so rarely do. For Bioshock, it’s still by no means certain that Levine and his team won’t do down with the ship, bit the energy, enthusiasms and rampant ambition ingrained in the development suggests that this truly may be the game that dives deeper than many others could, in order to wrench from the ocean floor that elusive, dripping trophy.

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 12:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

judging from this 25 minute play video i just watched of stalker, it looks like it captured a lot of the qualities it was supposed to. how buggy, of course, is another story.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 12:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The first english review is out, it got 87%. Looking good so far.

Quote:
"Allow me to introduce you to STALKER; the bravest, most futurist survival horror game since System Shock 2."
"It's best described as a first-person shooter/roleplaying game/ survival horror hybrid, in that order....the horror is the thing that underlines the whole game. It's what makes it work. It's what makes it different."

"It's a game full of suprises. For the cynics...the biggest is that it works at all."
"The biggest problem stalker now faces is those early rash promises. To get a game which works, features have been trimmed back. For anyone who's been following the aga, there'll be a moment when they realise something they were hoping for isn't there."

The reviewer then talks about a few side missions that have variable outcomes: Asked to join in defense of a base but dawdled and was chastised when arriving as they'd already fought off the attack. Asked to wipe out a camp but it was empty as they were off attacking a scrapayard.
It makes the game sound exciting and unpredictable.

"And there are other suprises. With all the screens of tentacle-monsters, you'd be expecting to see a lot more of them. In actual fact, monsters are rare. The vast majority of things you open fire on are fellow humans. This leads to a unique atmosphere in a PC science-fiction gam, where the strange is strange."
"This refusal to simply collapse into sci-fi hokum gives the game that rarest of auras: cedibility."

"which isn't to say that Stalker avoids the standard horror tropes of dark places and sudden noises. It excels at them"

"Crash bugs? A few"
"most of its tics are actually fairly commonplace in games. Atmosphere broken when people walk into each other indefinitely, or enemies try to shoot through walls or even floors. The AI as a whole is bizarrely schizophrenic. When it's in a good mood, it's actually impressive..."

"There's a lot of inventory-based worrying"
"The character development is solely based on getting better equipment and selecting for use up to 5 of the artefacts you're carrying."
"Character interaction has problems too...few memorable characters and the plot is badly told."

"Where the game's makers fail in telling the specific story of your character, they excel in telling the bigger story of survival in the zone."

"Few games are as atmospheric as Stalker and none have its specific atmosphere"

It's:Enormous, buggy, atmospheric
It's not:The hype, nearly as buggy as you'd expect, monster-stuffed


It's written by that Giellen or whoever guy, though, so I might wait for some other reviews.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 12:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
It's not:...monster-stuffed

I see this as a good thing.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 12:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Now that I've posted the core of the article, here are the three sideboxes (so I was told they were called), that appear within it:

Moral Minefield wrote:
Levine is adamant that "one of the reasons we're making this game where we're really making a huge effort to build a world that feels real, that has real characters, and is a real place where real things have happened, is so that it puts you in this place that is rather familiar." With the game providing a moral battleground as well as a literal one, Levine is determined to create a more organic modelling of morality than the 'light and dark' meters of Fable or Knights of the Old Republic. "I think the problem is that if you need to tell players about a questionable moral choice through words or a meter, you've sort of missed the point. We've all done things that probably wasn't morally entirely up to snuff, and there's a primal feeling that happens when you do that." A good example of this approach is the Little Sisters, who provide an abundant source of Plasmids - so long as you can bring yourself to partake in child murder to get at them. As a game device it works entirely upon the player's emotional engagement with the world, and seems likely to create some heartbreaking encounters.


The Mod Squad wrote:
Many of Bioshock's choices come from the Plasmids, bolt-on power-ups that offer various new skills such as telekinesis, increased firepower and the ability to hack machines and gun turrets. Stemming directly from System Shock 2's cybernetic modules, the game's 'save anywhere' system coupled with the one-shot terminals which allow you to completely switch around your selected Plasmids should ensure that the player feels free to experiment with different approaches without having to stick with early - and perhaps unwise - selections. The abilities themselves may seem rather familiar, but the combinations and the potential for upgrading each skill by attaching more Plasmids may create memorable opportunities.


Different but Similar wrote:
Irrational's games seem remarkably varied, from the colourful excess of titles such as Freedom Force to the pseudo-sports immediacy of Tribes: Vengeance. It's the firm's first game, however, 1999's System Shock 2, which provides most of the reference points for its latest title. As a spiritual successor, Bioshock has no direct links to either story, setting or characters, but attempts to build on the game's strong sense of isolated dread, as well as exploring the same emergent gameplay and RPG-style upgrades. Given System Shock 2's reputation and fanbase, it's a hard act to follow, but Bioshock seems original and imaginative enough to stand by itself.


The Escapist speaks with Ken Levine.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 8:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i am so getting stalker tomorrow or at least this week sometime.

edit: here's the link to that video i mentioned, i think it's 200MB)

got it from here.

i should be picking this up tomorrow presuming the local gamestop has any copies in.
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