The very easy joke here is “Great, now you can be indie too”, but no going to do that crapshot, because the topic here is some people lost his jobs, and thats suck a lot for the people affected.
This is a story with only beginnings. Everything is beginning all the times. Theres not finals, what looks like a final is just another beginning in other form.
The above is how I feel just now, but I want to attribute it to Mark Twain, because MT is a awesome writter.
somebody experiment at creating artificial life with blender
Are you saying you worked on this company, and yours was one of the jobs that got lost? If thats the case, I desire you good luck. You hare a great guy here on QT3.
I am a fan of the people that did Bioshock and Bioshock infinite. I have seen game devs lose his jobs and is terrible.
edit: ok, I do hate to explain a joke, but recognizing you aren’t a native English speaker and may not have the same cultural frame of reference - you posted a picture and said don’t look at the art. Which immediately made me think of this, hence my reply. Then I just ran with what you wrote from there.
Interesting article about the making of Bioshock from Eurogamer. Some of it seemed relevant to this thread.
At one point the team needed to create a demo for the American video game magazine Game Informer. The magazine was set to run a BioShock cover story. “The pressure was on to create something that would impress, and our deadline was looming,” says LeBreton. “In a level review, there was some discussion of how an AI should be presented in the short demo. Someone mentioned System Shock 2’s evasive cyborg ninjas as a reference point. Ken threw his glasses down and yelled: ‘I don’t want to hear anything about any f***ing cyborg ninjas!’”
When Paul Hellquist, lead level designer on the project tried to interject, Levine screamed: “Shut up!” “This stunned everyone into silence,” recalls LeBreton. “This was still early in my time at Irrational, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Other folks were upset, but in a way that indicated this was something that had happened before.”
That article was all about Bioshock1, which was less ambitious than Infinite but had a much tighter focus on actual gameplay. The minute to minute experience of playing Bioshock1, the shooting, was just so incredibly tight. They set out to evolve the shooter genre, and they executed on that vision.
Infinite suffered from its massive budget and lack of time pressure. The end product was an astonishing spectacle, with tremendous volumes of incidental cosmetic content, so polished you could shave, with a neat story, taking the Alyx companion concept from HL2:Ep2 to the next level.
Problem is it wasn’t much of a game. We accept and applaud “non-games” like Gone Home, The Walking Dead, and The Stanley Parable because that’s their point. But Bioshock Infinite was supposed to be a shooter, and it suffered for its lack of focus on gameplay. It was a fantastic experience, but a poor game.
Oh god what the hell, you sound like Ken Levine’s resume. The overwhelming majority of opinion I’ve read holds that the actual gameplay of BS1 was bland and mindless.
Don’t forget consequence-free death and total bullet-sponge boss fights of attrition! Way to remove all the thrill, challenge, and the desire to improve! (Playing with the chambers off doesn’t count since the game was “balanced” around them.)
I think we all agree that Bioshock 1’s combat was not optimal, but it wasn’t exactly having your intestines drawn out through a slit in your stomach, either.
It’s pretty telling, though, that the game had a major nerd-culture impact without having awesome combat. That’s how it evolved the genre, so to speak… BS1 was bigger than its gameplay mechanics.
Which is why BS2 was a step backward for many folks… even though the mechanics were much improved. I had more fun playing BS2, but my mind was blown more by BS1.
Don’t get me started on BSI, which, after playing through it twice, I consider a cobbled-together, mediocre rehash.
Yup, there it is-- Bioshock was popular because it had a strong (to the exclusion of all else, including logic) visual aesthetic. The Big Daddies/Little Sisters were, from the sound of that interview, deliberately made to hang a marketing campaign off of. There’s a reason Rapture often gets dinged for feeling more like a theme park than any sort sort of realistic living space.
It also had the whole Objectivism veneer for reviewers to sink their teeth into. “Look, a game sort-of about something that’s not space aliens! Four stars! Take that, Ebert!”
Not really trying to de-rail the thread or anything, but I totally disagree. I actually could not get through the game, tried twice when it came out. You were given all these powers and stuff, and never required to really do anything interesting with them, or to really master the systems. You just followed the arrow, to go to the place, to pick up the thing, and shot things along the way. Then when you died, you just respawned and continued on. Sometimes you played pipe dream for a minute.(seriously?) Also, since it was an underwater city you just ran from room to room in little tunnels. Moment-to-moment it could have been set anywhere and wouldn’t have changed a thing. The underwater city stuff was just wallpaper and wasted potential.
As far as the presentation is concerned: it looked real nice, nice art direction, good graphics, sound was fine, etc. But it felt SOOOO video-gamey on the one hand(vending machines, eating chips for health or whatever out of garbage cans, opening drawers to find keys, boring audio-logs in places that made no sense(like one on the floor of a bar on new year’s eve of a woman who’s unhappy about something or other, why would she sit in the bar and record that right then? It makes no sense.)). Then, on the other hand, at the same time, it’s trying to present all these supposed deep ideas and try to make Rapture seem like a real place with it’s own history, culture, and life. I found the juxtaposition laughable.
In the end I didn’t enjoy the moment-to-moment (lack of)challenge or mechanics, and I didn’t care about the “story” at all either. The whole thing just felt like a mess to me, and it didn’t even end up with any auteur feel like it was trying to SAY something, or BE something. It was just a bunch of stuff to do trying to appeal to some mythical everyman I guess? I never did understand how it could feel so much like it was trying to appeal to people, yet simultaneously have no idea who it was trying to appeal to exactly. It had no real sense of purpose or voice of it’s own outside of the look.
tldr: The original Half-Life is better. Bioshock may have been a major player in this whole AAA games-as-movies shit-show we’re in now.
HL1 was one of the first non-abstract shooters, but it’s no longer the best.
BS1 is not a games-as-movies shit show. CoD brought that in. Have you played CoD (or The Last of Us, or Tomb Raider, or…) lately? There’s your Michael Bay shit. BS1 is System Shock 2 with a budget.
For people that played System Shock 2, we felt right at home with eating chips for health, and scouring for audio logs. That was what was fun! As for the “supposed deep ideas”, I know that’s how the press presented it… at the time the press was really into the idea that video games needed to be regarded as culturally legitimate (whatever that means), and they would take any old thing to hold up as an example regardless of how strained the argument. No, Bioshock may not have been a particularly deep game, but the story was elegantly told. It had a nice twist without getting convoluted, and there was enough there that on a repeated play you were likely to pick up on and appreciate some details you missed the first run through.
