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Bisoshock: Infinity or Ben Franklin vs The Chineemen

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Storm Rider:

--- Quote from: KvP on 24 Sep 2010, 14:32 ---I still think the rehash of elements is pretty odious, but the gameplay vid indicates that Infinite will deliver the sheer visual spectacle Bioshock proper sort of fell short on. The bird-thing was very Lynch-via-Dune.

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What elements are you referring to, specifically? Is it the 'there are plasmids and a dude that is basically a Big Daddy' thing? Or is it the 'social commentary explored via city inspired by but removed from historical America' framework? Because with regards to the latter, I would agree in principle, but it sounds like they're taking it significantly further. Tycho talked about it in the most recent PA newspost and I thought he made an excellent point.


--- Quote ---On more than one occasion I thought, do these people know what they're doing? They have to know, because they're Irrational Games; but locking horns with concepts like racism and nativism and the deification of our founders simply isn't done on this tier of the industry. San Andreas shocked the nation because it allowed two consenting polygons to "have sex," or some facsimile thereof, but I strongly suspect that when a game dares to engage with our actual nation, it'll be crickets from hell to breakfast.
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Objectivism is certainly more relevant to modern society than it merits, but even so I think the issues at heart in Infinite are much more direct and widely held. It's pretty easy to criticize Ayn Rand, but criticizing the founding fathers (or more accurately their elevation), much less the cultural identity of America, is considerably more controversial. I think Irrational didn't realize how essential the ideological elements of Bioshock would be to the final product when they started, even though I think the message of the game still soared over the majority of consumers' heads. Infinite, on the other hand, seems to be putting those themes pretty front and center. In other words, I think this is taking the elements of Bioshock that (I felt) were most effective to the next level, rather than simple rote repitition.

Buttfranklin:

--- Quote ---Now, with all the sheer detail packed into any one given room of Bioshock, that admittedly seems like an unfair criticism, but the problem is that the longer a gaming session goes the more people tend to filter out a lot of the li'l details and respond more to the big ol' blatantly obvious stuff like color and lighting. Technical concerns aren't the only reason companies like Blizzard design their time sink games around bold colors and shapes as opposed to li'l details. Such things are simply less tiring to look at over time, and that becomes a particularly important issue when you consider that gamers are constantly trying to scan the environments for objects they can act upon.
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That's an excellent point.  I see where yr coming from.

I'm totally the type of gamer who looks at every nook and cranny, has to read every poster, and tries to find every shot of the game that could make a good photograph since that's just me.  Also, the more detailed an environment is in a game the more immersed I get.  I hadn't thought to consider it the other way.

But now that you mention it, I would think that Valve is a better example of developers who have good art direction & attention to detail without having the problem of gamers blurring everything over and only going after objects to deal with.  Like, the way they'd direct the player through a level with clever usage of lighting, and the way they'd set up elements to "point" toward a specific location without literally having an arrow, or a sign, or anything to directly tell the player to go there.  All while making it cool looking.  Half Life 2 & its eps, and also L4D1&2 and Portal are all great examples of this.

Alex C:
I came very close to using Valve as an example since they were very open about all of the design decisions that were behind the wonderful thematic overhaul Team Fortress went through. Ultimately, I went with Blizzard just because the Burning Crusade expansion was quite literally color coded:



If anything, that map undersells the point. If each region was as vibrant on the game map as they are in play then it would look more like someone took a box of magic markers to it rather than just a couple of crayolas.

But anyway, I understand why Bioshock was the way it was graphically. They put all their eggs in the one iconic location basket, and I honestly don't begrudge them that choice. After all, it's not like they truly dropped the ball as far as visual cues and stuff are concerned and what they lose in variety they make up for in atmosphere. But I do think that Bioshock was calibrated for having one incomparable playthrough and after that the location starts to work against it. A lot of the visual and atmospheric tricks they do are great the first time but don't really suit themselves to the kind of achievement whoring that has apparently become a part of gaming culture for a lot of people. The first time someone gets bushwacked by a splicer in the dark, it's cool as hell. But when Dudefalla from Live is poking around in the dark to finish up the audio book or tonic collection achievement they missed the first time around, well, now you're probably getting at part of the reason why things got a bit ugly there once the honeymoon was over.

Ozymandias:
I still haven't finished my Brass Balls Bioshock run, even though brass balls mode is 100% more fun than vanilla BS.

Trynant:

--- Quote from: Storm Rider on 24 Sep 2010, 12:44 ---and probably the closest games have come to a serious artistic statement to date

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Killer7 and Braid would like to have a word with you.

Thing about Bioshock was that at the end of the day the gameplay didn't compliment the mood set by the aesthetics and the story. It would be like Ford in Bladerunner having karate fights in bullet time sequences.

EDIT:

Just to clarify, I think Bioshock is way ahead of pretty much any mainstream title to date, but there's still a long way to go before 'valid artistic statement' is commercially feasible.

Infinite looks promising, but I'm not sure if it's going to be more than another shooter under a mask of sophistication.

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