Building BioShock Comments by Rob Fahey

OK! OK! Bioshock was a good game, but not this amazingly fantastic epic revolutionairy title.

It was a good game, and can we please move on now?

I think 2K just got lucky with the sales numbers. BS might as well had ended up like SS2 or DEX, but luckily it didn't.

"It was a good game, and can we please move on now?"

I know what you mean, but in fairness it is heading PS3 way so I suppose they feel they need to hype it up all over again

Levine and his team - including design lead Bill Gardner and technical director Chris Kline, both of whom joined us for this interview - are hard at work on their next project, and probably not that bothered by the slings and arrows of those who accuse them of self-aggrandising.

It seems very telling that this article has a great big italicised disclaimer at the beginning. Perhaps it's the staff og gaming news websites who out to give banging on about Bioshock a rest.

Bloody hell, I enjoyed Bioshock thorought when I played through it last year. I even defended it in the comments of your over-wordy defence of it, but I'm starting to get sick of the way you lot, and the rest of the games news machine are going on and on and on about it.

Odd that people claim BioShock is as linear as Call of Duty 4, I don't seem to remember being able to backtrack to earlier levels on the latter like you could with the former! LOL

That said, the linear nature of Call of Duty 4 means that it would be pointless doing so anyway but BioShock had stuff to find and collect so I did an awful lot of backtracking in order to get the most out of the game. Being able to do that certainly gave the game a sense of realism that most other FP games lack and made it massively atmospheric too. The whole thing took me 35 hours to complete as such and I loved every nano-second of it. Great game.

I really should pick this up at some point.

Damn work gets in the way of playing games :(

Going to buy Bioshock again as soon as my newly capable PC is assembled.

I bought it for the 360 when it came out, but couldn't stand playing with a controller (I r teh console fps n00b)

EG just go ahead and publish my blog post on it and be done with it.

I loved the way Ryan's character progressed through the audiobooks from "noble" grand objectivist, to being corrupted by his extremism (the turning point is probably when he seizes Fontaine's company, which goes against his own philospohy). Then to the end, where he tries to go back to his objectivist roots. Extremely good character development, and I'd agree it's more of a critique on extremism. It's a shame that in the end it's Fontaine's extreme nihilism that triumphs out, just like about every other game...

To be honest, the gameplay play 'problems' were much less in the actual shooter mechanics and much more in the number of tedious fetch-quests you needed to go through.

It was a good game, and can we please move on now?"

What he (and everyone else has) said.

It was a game with average combat held together with good artistic direction and story.

Loved this on 360, recommending to all PS3 only friends...

Good read too. And the people complaining about too many Bioshock articles, how about... Not reading it?

if only they could bottle the atmosphere from SS2 and apply it to all games. Bioshock was pretty cool but didnt quite hit the SS2 "high"

I've just started playing BioShock on the PC again, and it is still one of the best gaming experiences I've had. I will echo zuljin's comment - if you don't like articles on BioShock, why did you bother reading it?

yes, for gods sake let's stop hearing about stupid bioshock. honestly, what makes me most cross is that the bioshock devs seem almost to have taken over the "games as art", and the "narrative in games" argument as their own when bioshock had one of the weakest, cliche-ridden stories/narratives i've ever experienced. it's irksome in the extreme, because there are some games that do art and actual narrative (see braid for a recent example), and yet we still get this sort of nonsense (along with the likes of FEAR and oblivion) wheeled out as great examples when they so clearly are not.

every time anyone anywhere does an article, a conference or even voices an opinion on story telling in games, the bioshock people either get invited or stick their nose in. make them stop. make them go away. please.

EG should be embarrassed to their core each time they mention bioshock, it's getting so old now it's not even ironic. i don't care, no one cares, that it's coming out on PS3.

and please don't do a sequel.

/rant off

Bioshock is the best game ever and I feel it deserves even grander praise than it has got. Now kill me.

Also as I always say - if you want to shoot monsters you play gears of war. If you want a sense of atmosphere and artistic flair, your play Bioshock. Depens on what you want from games.

Ken, here's whats wrong with Bioshock, and you basiclly said it yourself, it's a straight FPS and it isnt good. Gunplay is avarge minus, its not fun to shoot, weapon handling is off, aresenal is pretty much straight forward. Rapture should have offered alot more.
For FPS, the enemy variery is laughable. Spilcers with different skins, some that can climb walls, someone shoots booms. Isn't Rapture supposed to be "no limits", how come a setting like that produces the most usable enemy types in games ever? The perfect chance to introduce crazy enemies, with un-usual powers and so on and we get a lame ass rundown of enemies in the history of the fps.

Big Daddy - The most disappointing and underwhelming encounter i had in 2007.

So, if it isn't good as FPS, people thought it's RPGFPS but obviously, they weren't making one. The game doesnt really encourages you to use them all and most of the time the electricity shock is the best choice. All the "choices" and non-linear elements dont work out too well.

Anyhow, Bioshock has two things going for it: Atmoshpere and Design. Really great. It always appeared to offer that, but the reviews close to its rls made it sound like it had more and so everyone expected a great experience, but it turned out to be a RPGFPS w\o alot of the RPG elements or a severly lacking FPS.

@justsomeone
Sorry to stir, but I know a fair amount of people that care about the PS3 version.

Not to mention theres apparently a sequel in the works.

Together with a film.

You must lead such a stressful life if things you don't care about upset you this much.

Just finished going through Bioshock again. I love Bioshock. People only talk about it still because it really IS that good. BIOSHOCK.

Gears of War gives you atmosphere too. Pity's that GeoW is as dull as Bioshock in the second half. Psychonauts, i think, handled it better. Oh right, it wasn't a shooter, but it had some kind of plasmids, artistic flair and atmosphere. And inevitably better dialogues.

The main problem with Bioshock is that it becomes uninteresting in the second half - after 'Would you kindly' free fall. All weapons, except, crossbow, are yours to play. All plasmids. Even on hard difficulty you still get that feeling that you're in some ship remains stomping off annoying rats.

Where is the wine
The New Wine
(dying on the vine)?

The game is very linear in terms of combat. More linear than Deus Ex was or even the first Thief for that matter. Bosses fight like common monsters. Maybe it would be better if they were all like Indian pantheon - eight arms, burning eyes, banshee voice. But no, they are all shadows of Ryan. Oh crap.

I am the milkman. My milk is delicious.

Geez, people don't know what linear means nowadays. So being able to backtrack to a previously visited area (that's now empty and pointless) is now non-linearity? Get a grip.

Also, YES, Bioshock is way less complex than System Shock 2! In fact, I have SS2 installed right now and it's pretty obvious from the start. I think Levine needs to boot up an old machine and replay System Shock 2. He turned a FPSRPG into a FPS and he's not sure if SS2 is more complex than Bioshock? Wow.

Very good article!

Liked the game very much and I am no big fan och FPS games.

"Yossarian
EG just go ahead and publish my blog post on it and be done with it."

I agree. Probably the most interesting and intelligent bit of work I've seen in regards to bioshock. I found myself nodding in agreement throughout the whole piece, no matter how much I love the game.

A very entertaining and insightful read - and i very rarely read the full three pages of an article written on EG these days. More of this and less of the crap in future eh? :)

@menschenfracht

+1 for bringing Psychonauts into the thread :D

Didn,t see that one coming! One of the best games of the last generation.

Can we have System Shock 3 now, plz?

Can we have System Shock 3 now, plz?

Cue the "but it's already out! It's called Bioshock!" jokes...

And the people complaining about too many Bioshock articles, how about... Not reading it?

Arrrrrgh!

Logic!

My only weakness!

man, i'm fed up of hearing about BioShock now. Seems a day doesnt go by without there being some reference to Bioshock in a news story somewhere. Meh. I got it at launch, played it over the weekend, completed it within 2 days, and haven't been back since. I enjoyed the ride, but I have no desire to play it again.

Sorry, I don't want to end up sounding like Jonathan Blow or something, but the "gamic" language.
Ouch, 'ark at 'er. Considering Levine usually manages to deport himself in such a manner as to seem one of the most charming and reasonable people in game development (don't think this can really be fanboyism - I don't actually like the games he's been lead dev on all that much), I think that translates roughly to "Jonathan Blow is a cunt, and so is his mum".

And thank god for at least one artwank dev taking the angle that "the gamer is always right" even though they're clearly not. Of course, he doesn't really mean quite that, but it's not a bad basic assumption compared to "I'm just making what my muse compels me to, not everyone can be expected to understand". If you're sincerely sure what you're doing is fine art, pitch it to a gallery or start looking for patronage; otherwise, if you're working in a medium that needs to shift a few hundred thousand or more units at a time, best you take that into account somewhere along the line.

Missing question: Why was the last 33% arse?

@Veracity
I'm not sure he meant it that way, Jonathan Blow is very vocal on the design of getting ideas across, he's given several presentations on it (some of them ranty, by his own admission!). I think Ken was just saying "I'm not going to give as passionate a response as he might."

And Braid is bloody brilliant (going slightly off topic).

You can see some of Jonathan's presentations here:
http://number-none.com/blow/

Im really feeling the need to play through Bioshock again soon. The core mechanics of the gameplay were nothing revolutionary. But it created a sense of atmosphere that so many games fail to achieve. Which is what makes it so memorable.

@mkreku

Any chance of some evidence for SS2 being significantly more complex than Bioshock? (I'm asking for information, not to start a flame war, btw)

Admittedly I've never *finished* SS2 but I have played a good chunk of it, and it was a while back too. That said, I can't really think of too much extra complexity in SS2:

Inventory management - but that's a deliberate, and useful loss

Weapon failure (didn't SS2s weapons gradually break unless you had a high enough "repair" skill"?) is gone, which removes part of the managing weapons and ammo equation, but I'm personally not convinced it's a great loss - particularly given the stated intent of making "a shooter".

What am I missing?

me thinks Bioshock PS3 will do better than MGS4.

I am in the "Bioshock is Brilliant camp"!

The big difference between SS2 and Bioshock: in SS2 you had to make careful choices about where to spend your hard-earned upgrade material, because the game cleverly kept you just a bit more powerful than your opponents by specialising in certain powers or weapons. In BS you can get every weapon, and kill every enemy, because ammo is so plentiful. That's why it crosses from being a first person RPG to a shooter with diversionary fun to be had in hacking.

It sold well because the ads/vids for the game showed you squaring up to an enemy - The Big Daddy - that was sinister, difficult and yet anthropomorphic, so lots of people fancied a go.

The one-two punch? What? I know it was there but I didn't see many uses for it. There were better one-two punches in Painkiller with the complementary secondary fire for each gun and Undying with the superb magic-and-gun combos. If you have to switch weapons to do a one-two it's too much like hard work.

It's like I'm on some other planet seeing Eurogamer mention Objectivism and Ayn Rand.

Coughthulu wrote:
I'm not sure he meant it that way, Jonathan Blow is very vocal on the design of getting ideas across, he's given several presentations on it (some of them ranty, by his own admission!).
Sorry, should've used [facetious] tags. I suppose there could be some personal beef there I know nothing about, but, no, I doubt it was meant to be a dig. The two somewhat negative things I associate with Levine are rambling on a bit and being, if anything, too anxious not to be seen to be taking swipes at competing products/design approaches in an industry where everyone else seems to consider it all but obligatory. Hence something from him that could be construed as a bit handbags at dawn made me smile. Blow I know little about and have no particular opinion on, other than broadly agreeing with his ranting about "exploitative" game mechanics (that is him, aye?), though I'm not sure who I think is principally to blame for their success or what can be done about it.

Anyway, how's about that BioShock, eh? Not nearly enough people have spouted their inconsequential opinions about it in the past year or so, we need some more. I'm still not dead sure it really needed to be a shooter...but it likely wouldn't have sold as anything else. Shadow of the Colossus got away with a game full of non-interactive scenery, though. A lot of the BS criticism also suggests Valve is right: your customers have paid for a fairground ride, so make damned sure you ram all your content in their faces, because they ain't going to play it twice or go hunting for the interesting bits. But those aren't the kind of games I much want to play, myself...crazy thought, but maybe there's room for multiple approaches as long as studios stay away from budgets that require pleasing quite so many people at once.

What a splendid interview and people still manage to spew their patented Bioshock negativism all over the comments. The hate must flow, I guess.

just put stats and an inventory screen in bioshock 2, or i won't buy it. after all it's my choice.

Ken Levine: If you showed The Matrix to an audience in 1958, they would not be able to follow one frame of it.

Bullsh*t. There were complex films available in the fifties and films which stretched filmic language far more than "The Matrix" ever did. That was just a stupid concept Ken.

Just to try and counter all the negativists here: I love Bioshock and love reading about it.

Can't wait for the sequel as well as Levine & Co's next game.

bioshock is probably THE most atmospheric game of the last few years.
You'll probably think you can name a better one.
But you know you can't.
I have to look way back to Outcast to get even close to it.