Videogame Journalism 2015 - The readers strike back!

Games
600

I agree when it comes to the games they make. But the E3 demo was just a sales tool, and it’s perfectly viable to describe it as a piece of cinema. It’s like a movie trailer, designed to evoke a certain feel. And furthermore, Irrational has done a great job with that type of sales tool going back at least to the original Bioshock. The gameplay demo at E3 was all smoke and mirrors, but it was an amazing example of how to introduce what the developers were trying to achieve: the world, the tone, the gameplay, just the overall look and feel.

-Tom

601

I don’t agree with that author’s logic, but I do think there is a subsection of video game followers (I’m not sure I would call them “fans”) that place an unreasonable amount of importance on graphics and tech. Let’s take the silly Witcher 3 downgrade dust-up for example. That was a bunch of sturm and drang over nothing. The game is terrific despite any reduction in graphics quality from one build to the next. Would it be as highly regarded if it looked like the first Unreal game? Probably not.

At the end of the day, that’s what I care about. Is the game any good? Are the graphics in service of what the game creators are trying to do?

Some of my favorite games have graphics that were well behind the leading edge of tech when they launched. The crucial bit is whether or not they used their art direction to further the game. Super Meat Boy’s look is perfect as-is. Same with Mass Effect 3 or Crysis or The Sims. The art works regardless of how badass the tech was behind it.

But that’s where his argument falls down. You’re not going to tell the story that was told in Bioshock without pushing some polygons.

602

Nailed it.

603

But what if it was an isometric RPG with almost no polygons?

:P

604

That has a zillion polygons. They just happen to be prerendered ones.

605

That is (mostly) hand drawn, baby. Very few polygons.

http://stasisgame.com/web/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=33

http://stasisgame.com/

Tremendous artist!

606

There’s no doubt that the isometric Bioshock mock-up looks really good. You’re still going to have a difficult time telling Bioshock’s story that way because the whole point was making the player view things through the protagonist’s eyes. The reveal is going to have a lot less impact in anything other than a first-person view.

607

They are indeed lovely shots!

I’m not seeing anything in those links that says it’s “hand drawn,” though. And this link you posted shows clearly how the levels are made: in a 3D architecture program. He shows the 3D curved walls, talks about rotating them, then we see them textured in a later screen shot. It’s possible the foliage and skeletons are painted in by hand, but the large structures-the walls, the evelvator-are clearly 3D modelled. Same with the other shots- the buildings, statues, etc. are pretty obviously 3D-modelled. (And then a 2d isometric render of the 3D model is made, and bells and whistles added.)

Not that it matters: good art is good art. But yeah, there are lots and lots of polys in those shots.

608

The world of STASIS harkens back to Sci-Fi classics like Alien, Event Horizon and Sunshine.

Aliens is a classic, yeah. You can make a case for Sunshine, I suppose. But Event Horizon? Really? :)

609

Giant Bomb: Why We Write: On Game Critique, Influence, and Reach

But there is one line of thought that I’ve seen a lot of over the last few days which isn’t a refined argument so much as a big, club-like assault. It goes like this: “No one should be forced into changing their games just because you want them to.” I’ve seen this in the comments, in my Tumblr’s ask box, on Twitter, and in the few threads on Reddit and NeoGAF. There are variations on it that use words other than “force,” but they almost always remain words adjacent to coercion: “Make,” “demand,” “order,” “dictate.”

When I see this, something bubbles up in me that wants to immediately shout back a response: “Come. On. I’m not forcing anyone to do anything!” But I know that this sort of response doesn’t get us anywhere. It hitches itself to a binary of “forced” vs “free” while in reality things are a lot more complex than that. The knee jerk response also misses an opportunity to engage with that specific issue: What does it mean when a writer criticizes a work?

610

A cult classic, I think.

611

Yeah, I might have been mistaken about the polygon content. Definitely a large contribution of hand-drawn art and touch up though.

612

I don’t buy that.

I thought the whole thing about the Bioshock series was that it made the player think about the storyline? The first time I saw a big daddy, I wasn’t thinking about how free I was to move in three dimensions. I was thinking that with the build up and the atmosphere and the sheer ferocity of the thing, I was HSMFing screwed. Similarly, the reveal for me didn’t have to do with the perspective but the story and the leadup.

Difficult is an interesting word in this context. Good stories are hard to express almost as a rule. But Planescape: Torment has a good story and is isometric. Silent Hill has a good story and is third person.

613

That’s a uselessly broad interpretation. You could say that about literally anything with a storyline.

What Telefrog is getting at is Bioshock’s themes of player agency. It’s a crucial turning point in Bioshock 1 and a consistent throughline in Bioshock 2 when you realize you’ve been developing the Little Sisters all along by the choices you make. Furthermore, both games (and Bioshock: Infinite) have identity tricks based on the protagonist being a cypher.

Sure, Bioshock would work as a third person game and lots of people would share your sentiment that, whoa, Big Daddies sure are awesome! But the genius of Bioshock 1 & 2 is that there’s so much more than that going on, and part of how it accomplishes that is with the first-person perspective.

-Tom

614

Big Daddies are huge and intimidating in the game in a way that would never translate to isometric third person, nor would the contrasting size and vulnerability of the Little Sisters.

615

See also such seminal works as The West was Won, I Met Your Mother, and To Train Your Dragon.

Hey, Deathclaws in the original Fallout scared the crap out of me.

Jesus what? SIX characters onscreen at once? On a game system that could handle Dead Rising in the first year of its life? How many billions of polygons did each of these characters use? Were they folding proteins at the same time they were attacking the player?

616

Actually, by definition it’s not broad because we’re talking specifically about the Bioshock series. More specifically, the first game in the series. Specific is not broad.

What Telefrog is getting at is Bioshock’s themes of player agency.

You’re demonstrating a bit of a habit of speaking for people on your forum when you want to speak to me. That includes speaking for ME when you’re actually trying to converse with me. You should probably knock that off.

It’s a crucial turning point in Bioshock 1 and a consistent throughline in Bioshock 2 when you realize you’ve been developing the Little Sisters all along by the choices you make. Furthermore, both games (and Bioshock: Infinite) have identity tricks based on the protagonist being a cypher.

Sure, Bioshock would work as a third person game and lots of people would share your sentiment that, whoa, Big Daddies sure are awesome! But the genius of Bioshock 1 & 2 is that there’s so much more than that going on, and part of how it accomplishes that is with the first-person perspective

I guess that’s where our perspectives differ then, even though you don’t elaborate at all on how the series’ impact is dependent on the 1st person perspective.

But for me it wasn’t so much that DUDEBRO BIG DADDAAAAAAAY! as much as it was that the first Big Daddy battle was genuinely mismatched to the point where I was hiding under geometry hoping it wouldn’t see me. That was significant for the time because it had been a good few years since FPSes cared to create the psychological element as opposed to pulling a Crysis and just relying on cheating AI and polygon pushing.

And the reason I have a problem with tying it to the perspective is because it is very similar to the conditions of the first zodiac boss battle in Final Fantasy Tactics. Moreso because I wasn’t aware that a boss battle could be engrossing and terrifying in not only an isometric game, but a turn-based one on top of it. The conditions were the same: the arena was claustrophobic, the enemy was monstrous, and your party was weak enough to have to really scramble.

That’s why I take the view that it’s not the perspective, but the story and the proper buildup, that makes any game work, let alone Bioshock. I think that’s the magic of game design and narrative over engine tech, just as it was with Planescape: Torment. And as it happens, even in Bioshock the BDs become trivial, and it has nothing to do with the perspective.

I disagree. Even in games, huge and intimidating has little to do with visual perspective. It’s perspective in general that paints them so.

617

I’ll attempt to elaborate on what Tom Chick was getting at. Spoilers ahead for anyone having not finished Bioshock 1. One big thematic element in Bioshock 1 was society’s relationship with human nature, exemplified primarily by the genetic mutations and their destructive affect on the under-water “utopia”. Another big theme was the political ultra-libertarian concept of removing all control from people and having them flourish as a consequence (these themes feed into eachother throughout the game).

These themes come to a head when the dude you’re playing kills Andrew Ryan. Your character fights against control exerted through his own modified biology, but ultimately cannot stop himself from killing Andrew Ryan (who still to the last believes so heavily that you can overcome your nature and make the decision for yourself that he himself orders you to kill him). A big part of why this scene is so powerful, at least for me, is the shock of having control of your character taken away from you in a first-person game. Having a character act, still in first-person, without input from the player was at the time a noticeably strange and shocking moment (I still don’t think this is something that happens in first-person games very often). In third-person or isometric games, characters act all the time without user-input (often in cutscenes, which don’t really exist in Bioshock other than in this moment).

The other big element of this scene is meta-concept of the control the game-designer has exerted over the player through level layout and objectives, and the game acknowledging that hopefully makes the player a relate to the character a little as well. I don’t think first-person perspective is necessary for that part (though it arguably helps), but I think it adds a lot of power to the moment of Ryan’s death.

618

Yeah, I should probably knock off trying to converse with you. If your goal on this forum is to act like a dick and alienate people in multiple threads simultaneously, you’re doing a heck of a job.

-Tom

619

This only points toward you apparently not having played many games. First-person games pop into cutscenes no more or less than any other genre (well, maybe less than, say board games). The “big moment” of Bioshock fell utterly flat for me because at the precise moment the game takes control of your character, it brings in the letterbox bars over the screen, clearly declaring to the player “Just sit back and watch, you are now in a cutscene”. Thus the big shock of Bioshock was that you can’t control your character in a cutscene. Well gee.

Ironically, at every earlier point in the game where it takes control of your character, it does so without bringing in the cutscene bars, even up to turning you around and walking you in the opposite direction (if you try to leave an area before you’ve accomplished your objective). So go figure that in the climactic moment of the game they had an attack of the stupids and flew the cutscene flag for no apparent reason.

Now, if that scene had left the player in partial control, triggering automated attacks against Ryan in spite of all attempts to get away from him, that would have actually been interesting. Instead we’re left with an internal struggle that’s entirely informed rather than experienced. I didn’t even feel bad about Ryan getting killed, since the game went to great pains to portray him as an antagonist and a sociopathic jackass. Hell, I probably would have killed him myself if I’d been given the choice. Consider this another strike against the big moment-- “Behold as we force you to do what you would have done anyway!”