Scots Taffer on 22/1/2010 at 02:27
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
I think the primary difference between the two is that SS2's audiologs feel organic and believable in terms of diary entries left scattered around the ship, whereas the audiologs of BioShock are purely there to educate that player from point A to B to C in the Would You Kindly Complete This Game quest.
Quote Posted by polytourist97
This is the key difference I notice between the "writing" in SS2 and BS. In SS2 the logs exist primarily as a function of some intent the author had within their fictional world for the log, and secondarily as something the player encounters and garners information from. In BS the logs serve primarily as something for the player to encounter and derive information from, and the purpose for the logs' existence aside from that is often shady at best.
YES
Fafhrd on 22/1/2010 at 02:44
And Irrational admitted that that was their intent in their whole 'Saying yes to the player' presentation. The game world had to be about the Player, instead of a living world that the player interacts with.
Scots Taffer on 22/1/2010 at 03:35
Well, that inherently makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Chade on 22/1/2010 at 03:40
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
And Irrational admitted that that was their intent in their whole 'Saying yes to the player' presentation. The game world had to be about the Player, instead of a living world that the player interacts with.
The game world
is about the player. The only reason any of you care about a living world in the first place is that you - yes you, the player - want to experience one. No one runs a game for the enjoyment of a couple of bytes of ram.
What Irrational were really saying is that players weren't finding their living world wasn't very compelling. So they gave up and did something else.
june gloom on 22/1/2010 at 04:39
And so it comes full circle- perfectly good games marred by idiotic focus groups.
Fafhrd on 22/1/2010 at 04:42
The game is about the player. There's no reason that the world the game takes place in has to be centred entirely around the player as well. And there's a strong argument to be made that to do that is detrimental to the player's enjoyment of the game. Especially when that game is ostensibly designed around exploring a decayed but living city.
Chade on 22/1/2010 at 05:29
My point is that Irrational is not saying what you think they are saying.
They didn't say open worlds necesarily result in poor user experiences. They said their open world resulted in a poor user experience.
Well, that's my interpretation anyway.
Silkworm on 24/1/2010 at 22:52
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
The
game is about the player. There's no reason that the world the game takes place in has to be centred entirely around the player as well.
hit the nail on the head with a wrecking ball. Exactly.
Vraptor7 on 26/1/2010 at 18:09
(
http://irrationalgames.com/insider/five-cut-features/) New post on the site about 5 features that were cut from System Shock 2 and BioShock. Some we know about already, but there are other weird ones too:
Quote:
Biomechanical emphasis in BioShock
“Early on during BioShock’s development, we went through a phase that placed much more emphasis on biotechnology,” says designer Alexx Kay. “Audio logs, instead of being tape recorders, would be squishy, organic things, with lips and ears. Machines that seemed mechanical on the surface would actually have mutated humans operating them behind the scenes — something that players would only come to realize partway through the game. There is a small remnant of this notion in the hacking mini-game; originally, the fiction behind it was that you were increasing the flow of Adam to this addicted, mutated slave, and he was giving you extra benefits in gratitude.
ZylonBane on 26/1/2010 at 19:44
It's amusing that of all the problems they list with BioShock's atmospheric pressure system, the one they always leave off is that it wouldn't have been any fun.
Actually, it's kind of sad that almost every interesting idea they had for Bioshock ended up getting tossed, leaving the generic FPS we ended up with.
