THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CLIKC => Topic started by: KvP on 11 Aug 2010, 12:00
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Schwing (http://www.whatisicarus.com/).
It's being officially announced sometime today, with a teaser airing tomorrow. This is what Ken Levine has been working on.
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It's about fucking time. It's been almost 3 years since Bioshock came out, I love Levine and all but the constant cockteasing has gotten a little annoying. I am very curious though, I'll say that much.
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Constant cockteasing? Man, there has been next to nothing concerning PR hype for his stuff since he first announced the project. Also, 3 years isn't that absurd.
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I dunno man, they laid it on pretty thick when they 'relaunched' the Irrational website a few months ago. And 3 years is a pretty long wait before even announcing your next project, unless the announcement is 'oh and by the way, it comes out in November', which I think we can be all but certain isn't the case. 4 years is the same length of time between Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, and that was after Double Fine had to deal with being dropped by a publisher and the corresponding lawsuit. Project Icarus will probably meet, if not exceed that.
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huh. well, that's interesting (http://kotaku.com/5607451/bioshock-infinite-goes-beyond-the-sea--into-the-skies)
I'm kinda torn. On the one hand, Bioshock 2 wasn't very good. On the other hand, this one actually has the man, the myth, the legend involved so...I dunno....
but then again AIRSHIPS
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So it looks like "Columbia" is the Rapture of the skies, and that is has something to do with racial purity ("Burden Not Columbia With Your Chaff"). So probable eugenics theme, which fits with the time period (unlike Bioshock 2). Also probable parallel to the Civil War, with Columbia seceding into a supra-nationalist enclave (not unlike the Enclave).
He doesn't call it prequel though and drew no narrative connections between the BioShocks we have played and the one his team is making. "I don't want to think about that," Levine said to me. "I don't think it's particularly constructive to have that conversation."
Good fucking luck, dude.
Could be neat, but gameplay-wise it sounds worryingly like a Bioshock Total Conversion Mod with extra bells and whistles. After the pretty dismal sequel (before that, even) I've been worried about the "CHA-CHING CHA-CHING" sound that no doubt sounded loud between the ears of the 2K brass who, if you remember, were in pretty dire financial straits around the time of the first Bioshock, looking for a buyer but possessed of too many expensive franchises (GTA and Bioshock, in particular) to find one. Bioshock 2 was a rush job with some pretty stupid ideas, where it actually had them.
Anyway, the 4 years of development time might not really be a smooth unbroken process. They could have gone through several revisions of the game or they may have started a different game before working on Infinite. Game development is littered with false starts and cancellations that fans never hear about. My hope is that they've used that time to fashion a new engine, because the version of UE3 they used for the first two had some major limitations.
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Was Bioshock 2 so bad? I never played it.
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It's not really an outright bad game by most metrics. It's just that conceptually they were playing around in the bones of a much better game and familiarity breeds some contempt-- and rightly so! You can't hang your hat on originality and atmosphere to the extent that Bioshock did and not expect to take some knocks when you revisit things to the extent Bioshock 2 did. The developers really needed to be more ambitious to have a crack at being as good as the first one, and in that regard I guess you could call it a failure.
Really, I'd say the big liability was Rapture itself. If you can't rejigger things from the ground up you should at least try and deliver a bigger and badder gameworld, and unfortunately being limited to Rapture, as iconic as it may be, was a huge liability there. Contrast it with the Fallout series-- Fallout 1 wasn't really crying out for a sequel either. It had a pretty nicely self-contained story. But Fallout 2 still managed to get away with being pretty decent simply by virtue of sheer size and having so much new ground to cover. Maybe it wasn't up there with its forebear conceptually, but it was easy to admire the craftsmanship and the sheer variety of things you could do in the game. Bioshock 2 didn't have that going for it.
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Turning Bioshock into a Final Fantasy-like series seems the best way to go, I'm really looking forward to this game, albeit, cautiously-optimistic.
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On the contrary, I like historical sci-fi as much as the next guy (then I eat pie and fly in the sky) but this is pretty much exactly Bioshock where you drink gene tonics instead of taking them intravenously and there's a city in the sky instead of underwater (which is far less cool in my estimation). Just offering variations on Rapture's peculiar setting and ideological critiques are a surefire way of making them less compelling.
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as much I would LOVE to see that work, it just won't.
Imagine: Have each game take place in various alternate realities that are all similar (or even the same) besides the main focus of the plot, which could vary wildly. Objectivist Sea City? check. Racist Airship? check.
What's next? A vegetarian resort inside a volcanoe? An anarchist moon base? A wildlife preserve that secretly holds a delusional cult of primitivists? (that last one is The Village, in case you were wondering how bad it could get. It could get Shamalamanan bad, if they aren't careful.
The possibilities are endless (-ly stupid)!
that said, I like airships way too much to not be curious and a little hopeful.
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I do really like Ken Levine's games, but frankly I was hoping for something a little more out there from him. He's done a huge variety of stuff, from System Shock to Freedom Force to SWAT 4, it would have been nice to see him go outside the Bioshock model gameplay wise.
That being said, if it can offer the same atmosphere and level of social critique that Bioshock did, both of which were in my opinion unparalleled within the video game medium, then I'll be satisfied. Right now I'm still skeptical.
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Is it sad that I'm really looking forward to this for throwing people off airships?
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I really don't know how I feel about this. Bioshock 1 was great. Bioshock 2 was so so. One of my main draws was the underwater theme(I mean, this is coming from the girl who has two cephalopod tattoos, and wishes she could live under the sea), so I'm really unsure of the air theme.
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this looks pretty awesome, although setting it before rapture is always iffy. how are they going to be able to explain the powers used? part of the draw of rapture was that it was something no one had ever tried before andrew ryan did. if they're not careful, this game could just trample all over the story of the original bioshock. kind of like how the prequel star wars featured more advanced tech than the original trilogy
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That... that wasn't the problem with Episodes I - III at all.
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GET OFF MY AIRSHIP
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i don't really want them to tie it into the original bioshock like at all
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I don't think they will. It seems to be an entirely different timeline. Rapture was easy to keep secret. Columbia's a fucking flying city. Bioshock 2 had enough shitty retconning for several games.
Plus Infinite would have taken place when Andrew Ryan was a child. And they wouldn't have access to Adam up in the sky.
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Sky ADAM
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i closed the tab and can't be arsed to open it back up but the theme of the game ain't eugenics specifically but rather american exceptionalism, which is like infinitely more fascinating
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Plz, there are obvious aryan overtones to all the propaganda / swag they've released for it. Check the videos later into the announcing Kotaku article (http://kotaku.com/5607451/bioshock-infinite-goes-beyond-the-sea--into-the-skies). Unless the magic powers in Infinite are actually magic there's going to be a genetic angle to acquiring them and odds are good there will be a racial, possibly classist component to at least their development. It fits into the post-Civil War period when the search for scientific explanations for the inferiority of non-whites began in earnest. I don't see how it couldn't.
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i think eugenics is like a way to express the theme of american exceptionalism? like, one of its methods of articulation, the same way you could just cold buy off whatever you wanted to work for you in rapture.
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and i mean the racist and classist elements you talk about are elements of, again, the big A.E., manifest within eugenics but not exclusive to them.
basically it's a super interesting concept
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Bums me out that anyone would be OK with a comparison to Halo's warthog. I hated the warthog.
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One of my friends' personal forums features a lot of bitching about Columbia and how it's a dull name that makes them think of the record label. It's kinda making me want to skullfuck the stupid out of people.