As far as production assets, yes much of Bioshock Infinite was new. It is undeniably part of the franchise though.
Link to BioShock
At the end of the game, the player character is transported to the beginning area of BioShock.
I’m not sure Infinite is similar enough to Bioshock to be called part of the franchise (I have barely played either game); it seems more like a new project.
It’s totally and utterly part of the franchise. In fact arguably the most common (and in my opinion most valid) criticism of the game is that its gameplay and key narrative elements (eg storytelling through audiologs) didn’t really evolve much since the original. It feels like it was developed in a vacuum with only the other Bioshock games as design influences.
I’m assuming by “the original” you mean the original System Shock, which used audio logs in pretty much exactly the same way. Twenty years ago.
For all the money spent on it, the in-game UI and menus felt and looked cheap as fuck. Unattractive, basic and functional. The RPG system was stripped back even further than Bioshock 1 and 2. The level design was much worse, with most areas being clearly set up as combat zones before the need to represent somewhere real.
I feel bad about the whole situation, and I think most parties involved did the best they could. I don’t think there’s really a villain here.
Take-Two gave Levine lavish development resources and extensive creative freedom. Maybe they had unrealistic sales projections and poor marketing, but frankly, anyone who tells you these things are easy to predict/control is wrong. Especially when the industry has changed so fundamentally and so drastically since BI’s conception. I’m sure the execs didn’t shut down the studio lightly, and I’m sure lots of the decisions they made throughout BI’s development were constrained by contractual terms.
Levine’s approach for BI was bad. It’s fine to be an obsessive, controlling tinkerer on a small-scale project, or when operating within the bounds of a well-understood gameplay formula. For a project with the size and initial ambition of BI, it was an absolute disaster. The guy is talented, but he squandered the massive resources and human talent at his disposal. That said, if the game did better, his approach would have been vindicated. Again, with hindsight it’s easy to identify the blunders. In the middle of things, it’s not.
Yeah. One constant in every Levine interview is that he says that his storyline contributions are malleable depending on what the game needs, and get revised right up until the end. I guess that’s fine if you’re storytelling with audio logs voice acted by the development staff, as in SS2, and not quite so fine if you’re storytelling with big visual set pieces.
Fair enough. To be clear, I didn’t mean that it’s part of the franchise story or setting-wise, but more that it is built on the same technical engine and core gameplay as Bioshock. The stuff that saves development time. From what Ginger says, that may actually have been the case, and I know both used the Unreal engine, right? So maybe my assumptions were wrong.
The final years of Irrational Games, according to those who were there:
2K Marin was scheduled to create at least the first part of planned downloadable content. But just after BioShock Infinite’s release in March 2013 — as Marin approached alpha on this first piece of DLC — it became clear to senior employees at Irrational that the final product would be unacceptable. Irrational had already taken responsibility for the third piece of DLC, then the second, and now it would need to handle all three pieces.
Thanks for that link. A very nuanced article about the situation.
This stillborn multiplayer game sounds amazing:
The first of the two modes was Border Control, a tower-defense game with an old-fashioned political cartoon art style, replete with racist stereotypes. The mode was itself a game set in the world of BioShock Infinite, meant to indoctrinate the fictional children of its bigoted universe.
That sounds amazing all right-- amazingly hamfisted. Like the sort of game you’d see crop up on NewGrounds as a joke.
It could go either way. Even set in the context of Columbia, I have no idea how that mode would’ve been received with the racial sterotypes.
I think it could have been a really interesting thing to stumble across (in the context of it being an in-game game) during the first part of Bioshock Infinite (while the crazy race stuff is still building up and before you go apple chucking).
2K Marin’s idea of Colombia crashing into the Sea sounds way more interesting than the DLC we got. Oh well.
don’t look at the art
random black ink painting from images.google.com
Sometimes artist work better with smaller limits. They surpass themselves and these limitations, the works are more inspiring than the ones with infinite resources.
I am very fond of ink paintings, drawings with black lines, people cutting wood to use them to print black block of lines, and that stuff.
But I don’t want the author of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite to be that limited, not limited like a indie artist. The type of art that he make, it looks like need a fat budget and have huge wide appeal. He making “small” would not make sense to me, don’t even know what that will get us.
I disagree, Teiman. The creative vision and attention to detail that resulted in the Bioshocks can be just as powerful in smaller games. It’s the quality that impresses, not the scale, primarily. And arguably (because I’m sympathetic to the critics (like Tom) who think that all the shooting stuff in Bioshock Infinite was detrimental to the overall vision) having to make the grand AAA-scale game might have crippled those games in a way that won’t be a problem in a smaller game.
I looked at the art, Teiman.
Fool!
Humm…
… you have a point and half. So I rest my case here. It could be true that this guy could make something really cool in smaller format, maybe.
don’t look again, this time the thing is NSFW
another random image from images.google.com
I got fired, Teiman.