Gaming Hobo points justly to the Eurogamer Bioshock video as worthy weekend media. It's quite interesting. I wouldn't call it revolutionary as much as a evidence that they may have learned many a lesson from the past. It does seem to blend Deus Ex and System Shock together - or in other words it might be the game Deus Ex II should have been.
tagged: game, gaming
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Bioshock Gameplay Video
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4 comments:
I watched this and my thoughts latched onto how there appeared to be roughly 2-3 or more ways to accomplish each goal.
So I wondered: how are they going to sell game guides for this? (Laugh, but I fear that this may actually be a serious consideration sometimes.) Are they just going to pick the most obvious method for accomplishing something?
It would appear that might be a bad idea, since the choices you make should be based on what your inventory looks like at that time. The "best" way to get through a situation appears to be highly dependent upon how well you've played up until that point. So a guide could easily recommend doing something that you can't, or maybe shouldn't, do based on your inventory.
Don't get me wrong here: I think more choice in games is better. But the business angle is important, and if you make a game that doesn't do enough to lead many gamers by the nose -- or that can't have a step-by-step "how do I get past this part" guide written for it -- then it may fail for the very reasons that its fans will claim are strengths.
Just woke up, so I hope this isn't too garbled.
It looks like this time, FINALLY, the Shock peeps are going to have the first rate hit they've deserved (as opposed to sleeper hits).
I don't think the open-endedness will be a bad thing at all; even though they claim so much free will in the game, there is STILL and ALWAYS going to be a set number of things that you will have to do, in order to progress; as seen at the end of the video just now. The game guides will just be less step-by-step and more general "hey this is going to happen about now".
The only real negative thought I had while watching this was that I hope they add more incidental voice clips for each of the characters in there. While I still recall the creepy, freak-you-out feeling that the monkeys invoked aboard the VonBraun, I can see the Little Sister's "Okay let's go" statement getting pretty old, pretty quickly.
I didn't hate Deus Ex II as much the rest of the gamesphere, but it definately didn't live up to the original. It was quite like the team hadn't really studied their own work.
This vid isn't showing me anything I haven't seen before (hell, I've been hearing about pawn and herd level AI since the Amiga days) - but it does at least have the appearance of being able to pull it together in a way we don't get to see often.
I do have a couple of doubts. For one thing, System Shock 2 tried the "starvation" approach too - but they also combined it poorly designed monster respawns that often turn starvation into reloading, sometimes even causing me to try and find the last "safe" spot I really had ... or eventually just cheating out of frustration.
And I agree with WinkyBoy's notion that if the dynamic elements aren't varied enough - they'll get old by the end of the game.
There's also a few "FPS standards" I'd like to see them challenge, but I might save that for an upcoming post.
Oh - and my guess is that most walkthrough/guides will take the lazy route and simply document the path they took ... and then possibly mention some asides of what you "could" do.
Most of those don't seem shy telling players what they think the best route is.
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