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BioShock shouldn't have worked News
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by
Robert Purchese
Damnation developer Blue Omega reckons there was "no frigging way" BioShock should have ended up being successful.
Game designer Jason Minkoff was comparing it to Damnation to illustrate that all you can do in the shooter genre is pour your heart into a project and hope it gets noticed.
"We're just making the best we can, because a good game is a good game. And if you make a good game, somebody is going to notice and somebody is going to play it," Jason Minkoff told Eurogamer on our trip to see Damnation.
"Take BioShock: no frigging way that thing should have actually worked out. Fantastic game, awesome design, and beautiful artwork, but the thing is a damn underwater Steampunk 1930s combo thing. How should that ever have done well?
"But it's a damn good game. They just put their hearts into it and happened to hit the mark. And that's what we're trying to do."
Minkoff went on to talk about the lottery of launching and finding you're maybe not in fashion that season, or launching and hitting it "right on the nose" and winding up as successful someone like Valve.
Whatever the result, Minkoff firmly believes a good game will not go unnoticed by a publisher and hey presto you get your next project commissioned.
Damnation is due out on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 this winter.
Head over to our hands-on with Damnation to find out much the shooter described as Gears of War meets Prince of Persia with a splash of Quake 3.
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Honestly what a pile of crap. Bioshock isn't some kind of oddball indie success story, it was a mainstream game with a huge development and marketing budget. The fact that it was pretty good helped it to succeed well, but it would have had to be pretty bad not to sell well with the massive backing it had from Microsoft.
So basically this is just a way for some no-name dev to hype their own game. Thanks for that EG. |
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timberwolf
08/07/08 @ 16:15
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bioshock shouldn't have worked because it was a fundamentally shallow and short experience. It succeeded because of hype, good reveiws, clever advertising and people for some reason thinking it was cleverer and deeper than it was. i played bioshock for 20 hours finished it, got bored. damnation wil be much the same... without the success part.
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Vice.Destroyer
08/07/08 @ 16:28
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-2 @ Timberwolf and Physically_insane.
:) Different games mean different things to different people. Personally speaking, I thought that Bioshock was THE highlight of my gaming year in 2007. I had more fun with that game than Halo 3 or COD4. Or any other shooter that I played that year. |
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Anthony_UK
08/07/08 @ 16:36
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+2 @ Timberwolf & Pysically_insane
Bioshock is good, the graphics and design were great, and it was fun just to wander around at times and explore, but what alot of people failed to miss is that under all that was a basic shooter with slight RPG elements, and when it came down the actual combat it really was average at best...... /Hides |
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I think Bioshock would have been improved 200% if only they added a "music off" option in the menu. Jesus christ, some of that music was like audio cancer. How many times in one play session did you really have to hear that awful jingle and some guy shouting WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS OF VALUUUUUUUUE!?
Answer: None. It was horrible. They probably use it as a torture device in Gitmo. |
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I think it goes more like.. without the 1930s steampunk motif and the underwater setting it WOULDN'T have worked. Without those things it's basically just a rediculously depth-stripped System Shock rerun.
If anything it goes to show just how important it is to mix things up and not have every game set in space base X or real world location Y. |
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Also it's strange that they could of done so much more with bioshock but they chose to make what ended up as a corridor shooter with slight larger corridors every now and then. That's not to say it was bad just that your left with a feeling that it could of been so much better.
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most recently on 08/07/08 @ 18:08
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Bioshock must be the most overrated game of last year. I dont think the people who claim to like it realize theyve just been fooled.
Dont get me wrong, its a good/polished game. You can do worse as a developer, no doubt! But..I was SO PUMPED for this game, due to reviews/hype/SystemShock2/etc, and I thought it was amazing for about an hour or two, but then..maybe I just saw past the layer of hype. It did nothing for me after that. |
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I think a lot of Bioshock's success was down to timing... it came during a long, dull summer and ended a drought of decent games.
At the same time, it came out before the hype machines for COD4, Halo 3 and all the other mega-games of last Christmas had really geared up. Obviously it was a good game and it wouldn't have succeeded otherwise, but I really think the timing (and the demo) had a lot to do with the game's success. I imagine at least 50% of the 360 sales came from people who played the demo and thought "finally, a 360 game worth getting!" |
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...at least half of BioShock was good enough (the first half). Then it sort of repeated itself over again without changing any of the mechanics. Can't say I will ever bother to fully complete it.
I hope Damnantion is any good. We really don't need another shitty cowboy game (I love the Western genre).
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most recently on 08/07/08 @ 18:50
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bigshot316
08/07/08 @ 17:56
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This gimp should f**k off and refrain from passing judgement on successful game design studios and come back when hes got a success on his own hands....tosser
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SleepyMagpie
08/07/08 @ 17:58
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People here write about "seeing past Bioshock's hype", and then realizing it was shit.
Well, to me, those of you who feel that way didn't get it, much less saw past anything at all. Bioshock was a grand gaming achievement because it transported you to this underwater steampunk dystopia. It was all about ambience. There are much tighter shooters than Bioshock. There are games that do upgrades much better. But for sheer audacity of vision in a GAME; the Ayn Rand connection, portrayal of a madman leading a society into a drowned ruin, what people will do to themselves genetically to progress or keep "clean" - All of this was great stuff, albeit handled a bit lightweight at times, but this IS a game, not a movie or a book, and given that it managed to place you relatively believably inside this vision, that is some achievement. If you don't get this, you're not seeing past anything, your just not getting it. And people, remember - Jon Stewart has said it's ok to be an intellectual and well read again. Maybe however, you want your games a bit less pretentious and a bit more Mario. That's cool too. As for the Damnation dev - he should learn to crawl before he tries on Ken Levine's shoes. |
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Magpie:
"It was all about ambience." The ambience was the exact thing that kept me hooked for 2 hours, but then just..died out. Alot of it had to fo with the anticlimax of fighting your first BigDaddy I think. Suddenly they were not so frightening anymore. Same thing with the kids/story/soundclips/setting. The further I got, more and more of the mystery/ambience was lost and with it my interest. So, did I really not "get it"? |
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I bought it because every reviewer was whoring out 10/10 scores and it was made to be an underwater System Shock 2 sort of game. I kept playing it to the end waiting for the bit where it improved on SS2. It didn't in any way at all and could be played as a run&gun shooter. Apart from an early scene where water rushes in you can effectively forget that the game was underwater as it made no difference at all.
I did like the intro part though, with the plane crash and finding the lighthouse. Then the door slamming behind you and the lights flickering on. Lovely. Then it became a game of superhero clown attack. Flogged it and made my money back. 8/10. |
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stoopidgreg
08/07/08 @ 18:51
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i dont see why he sees the underwater steampunk art deco environment wouldn't sound appealing. personally i just thought it was a spark of genius and wondered why no one else had thought of it.
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SleepyMagpie
08/07/08 @ 19:32
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I see a lot of the people not liking Bioshock handing out "+1" and "+3" and "8/10", and so forth and so on.
That figures. |
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Was a time when you put out a shooter, it got 90+ ratings, and you knew it would be a big (relative success)
I think it's more about marketing now then it ever was. Not necesarrily in the traditional sense, more word of mouth. There seems to be a certain level of popularity which games can achieve now, at which point "everyone is talking about it" and the number of players goes up exponentially. Look at WoW. It's a good MMO, with a few solid little innovations. But it's not ten times as good as the MMOs that only have a tenth of the number of players. The same thing was true of the record industry. In the sixties you put together a skiffle group with good looking members, wrote some catchy songs and success was assured. Nowadays there are plenty of bands that don't make if, for often completely arbitrary reasons. Same thing goes for films and other media. It's not enough to check the boxes anymore. It's much more of a gamble now. |
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Vice.Destroyer
08/07/08 @ 19:53
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Don't worry, Magpie. It looks like when the sequel arrives, it will just be me and the non-EG reading crowd that will be first in line.
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Vice.Destroyer
08/07/08 @ 19:59
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@Nithron
I don't remember whether there was an option to turn the sound effects off, but there is a cool little trick to turning off the music in games which don't have the option. Play a song from your HDD and then press the pause button on the mysic player. I realised that by accident playing GTA. |
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And this is precisely why when a developer is interviewed, they're usually careful not to express anything close to a personal opinion.
What a tabloid headline. I work for a publisher / developer, and am interviewed a lot. We are really careful what to say for fear of some ridiculous quoting, or headline, that isn't actually what you said. EG. You're (usually) better than this. |
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Emilia'sHorse
08/07/08 @ 21:21
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Bioshock was the best game of 2007; it easily justified every single line of gushing praise heaped apon it by the world press and gamers alike. If Damnation wants to enjoy the same level of success make sure it is brilliant.
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kangarootoo
08/07/08 @ 22:16
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I was going to write something on this thread to try continue what I thought might be an decent discussion, based on the article at hand, but I see all is lost to the mire of fanboy Bioshock love/hate.
Ah well. Charge it to the internet I guess. |
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kangarootoo
08/07/08 @ 22:20
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"Pfft as others already said Bioshock is overrated and I'm glad we're no longer the vocal minority in this debate "
Of course you are still in the vocal minority. Until the vocal anything outnumbers actual sales, you are in the minority. Seriously, the vocal minority does not increase their number just because they shout louder or for longer. On a more serious note though, everything that is written on this website is in the vocal minority when it comes to gamers at large. Welcome to the internet :) |
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timberwolf
08/07/08 @ 23:35
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i tend to rely on pure game mechanics when rating a game because at the moment every game has groundbreaking and totally unique plastered all over it. in the name of selling a gimic usually.
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@Vice.Destroyer:
If someone had told me that when i was playing it through first time, that would have solved a hell of a lot of annoyance. And yeah, for anyone who cares, I fall into the "bioshock is good but massively overrated" category. Everything was great, except the shooting. That was quite frankly pants and not very fun. |
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That is a disappointing headline, I'd hoped for better from EG.
On Bioshock, this feels cathartically like an AA meet. OMG I'm not alone in being disappointed with Bioshock once the 'wow' wore off. They seem to be pretty up front with the dumbing down they did to get it to be a mass market hit on consoles. Hopefully having hooked people in they can put some fat back with the sequel. We can live in hope, right? |
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