Comments on: Ken Levine: BioShock gameplay innovates well compared to Portal, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor

By: SticKboy

SticKboy — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:51:01 +0000

The fact is, the game *deserved* to be so much more than just an FPS. I was having this conversation yesterday – I ended up having far more fun exploring, hacking and taking photos than blasting bad guys.

By: absolutezero

absolutezero — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:08:20 +0000

Even thinking of it as a straight FPS, to me it was seriously lacking.

The shooting, the core of an FPS, was lacking. The enemy AI was terrible, little opportunity to actually use alot of the plasmids because all the enemies just charged towards you. Endless respawning splicers all the way through. Urgh making ammo.

By: Blerk

Blerk — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:52:42 +0000

It’s a long-standing bug-bear of mine that 99 times out of 100 if a game features a first-person perspective it’s automatically a shooter. I really don’t understand why should this be the case.

By: patlike

patlike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:48:25 +0000

I think FPS is just their “thing,” to be honest. I should have asked him about genre though, Blerk, you’re right.

wz: Yep, agree, but that said there’s no way it could be said it’s a run of the mill game. It may not be the gameplay advance he suggested it might be, but it is still innovative on lots of levels. I think his quotes above are perfectly valid, really.

By: wz

wz — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:34:01 +0000

pat: The problem is that Mr Levine sounded like BioShock was a game-industry- and gamer-changing experience. Which for me and some others, as it seems, it was not.

(Oh, and as a side remark: Weapons are weapons are weapons, no matter if they are good old guns, magic, powers or pies.)

Edit: Maybe I should add that BioShock is a great shooter, easily among the best, and that it’s “visual integrity” is awesome. The story is adequate, at the end, it’s a bit too shootery especially when you already know what’s going on, but it is easily one of or the best shooter of it’s generation.

By: Blerk

Blerk — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:22:55 +0000

You might be right there, Pat. It did seem to change over time, though. Initially it sounded very ambitious and varied, gameplay-wise, but as time went on it became more and more shooty. I seem to recall people murmuring about publisher interference to make the game more mass-market at the time.

Regardless of the truth of all that, is an FPS really the best place to aim for new standards in narrative and back-story building? I can’t help but think if they’d aimed for a more survival-horror type of game rather than a vanilla shooter they’d have been able to do so much more with it.

By: patlike

patlike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:16:54 +0000

There’s more on this subject, which I’ll do either today or next week. He said he was clear the game was an FPS. We talked about the possibility that the problem was down to gamer expectation rather than a problem with the game itself.

By: CastellanSpandrell

CastellanSpandrell — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:16:24 +0000

Innovates???
An FPS with pipemania hacking???
It’s a marvellous game with a really nice art-style carried by some sweet ass technology but gameplay innovation???
Step away from the crack-pipe!

By: Blerk

Blerk — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:54:51 +0000

It sounds like a general misunderstanding of the complaint. He thinks we wanted more things adding to the FPS model, when actually it’s the basic FPS model that is the issue, not the additions.

By: Whizzo

Whizzo — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:52:40 +0000

Did he really think hacking in Bioshock was innovative? Pipe Mania came out in 1989 and the hacking in Bioshock got bloody tedious fairly quickly.

By: patlike

patlike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:52:18 +0000

Heh.

I think he felt the criticism was unfair. Bless them, they really do take it on the chin, but he was pretty firm about this.

By: Blerk

Blerk — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:48:41 +0000

I should really get a blog.

By: Blerk

Blerk — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:47:46 +0000

I think the point is that your Medal of Honours and your Half Lifes and your CODs aren’t claiming to be revolutionary new experiences, they’re just straight-forward refinements of what came before. Portal certainly DID do something different – it (mostly) took the shooting out of the first-person shooter.

I don’t think it’s necessarily more gameplay innovations that were needed (because that makes it sound like he thinks we wanted more mini-games) but rather a shift of the gaming balance away from the ‘every problem can be solved with gunplay’ model. A game with such a strong narrative should also be prepared to think outside of the box when it comes to what your first-person protagonist can actually do within the game world.

imho. Of course.