(no subject)

[egypturnash]

As a side note, since some people seem to want to convince me that Bioshock is actually a really good game - an opinion you're welcome to have; it's clearly a finely-crafted instance of an experience I simply don't care to have - I would like to note that so far, the only FPS I've actually enjoyed as a game is Thief, which I've been playing on and off the past week via Rik's machine. I had fun with System Shock 2 a couple years back but by the end, I was sick and tired of the basic game mechanics and just wanted to find out what happened to SHODAN. I really don't like FPSs.

As I've gotten older, I've slowly learnt how to see people as, well, people. I'm not very good at it; I never was. As video-game technology marches on, the creatures the games pit you against have gotten more like people. When I play some games made in the last decade or so, I can feel them training me to see people as just things. I'm still working out what factors make this happen; it's only a handful of games that do this so far.

I really think that the increasing drive for 'realism' in video games means that the game industry has a big moral quandry coming up. The forty-year-long focus on the hurt button as the core mechanic becomes creepier as the things you hurt become more and more like people. What happens when the project lead on a game focused on killing and blood plays his game and feels that weird sense that it's gnawing away at something in his soul? What happens when this is a regular occurrence?

A few major choice-points over, there's another me who went into video games. Is she (or he; I might never have transitioned in that life-path) getting ever more uncomfortable with these themes, or has it been completely burnt out of her by this point?

Comments

(frozen)

[http://users.livejournal.com/innerlife_/]

Minor spoilers ahead.

The idea that it's a moralistic play is just a sick joke. There is no meaningful choice given to you in the game,

Actually playing through the game reveals that to be a major theme that doubles as a meta-commentary on videogames, since you ARE a slave and can't do anything but follow other characters' orders. There's a bunch of stuff like this that's a few steps more provocative and thoughtful than you'll find in 99% of other games.

It's a bad game, game-design wise

That's both a ridiculous and ridiculously broad statement. :) Sheesh.

It sounds like your expectations for branching storytelling are far higher than current technology allows for. Check back in 15 years, maybe?

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Actually playing through the game reveals that to be a major theme that doubles as a meta-commentary on videogames, since you ARE a slave and can't do anything but follow other characters' orders. There's a bunch of stuff like this that's a few steps more provocative and thoughtful than you'll find in 99% of other games.

It's an interesting conclusion that you came up with, but it's just merely a convint one. Yes, I read about the Ryan twist, which is just yet another excuse to kill of a character so that you aren't left with a meaningful choice in the game. Any comment in the game about the metagame is put in there as a joke, not as thought provoking material, especially when you aren't allowed to think about things as you are going to be running off killing things again.


It sounds like your expectations for branching storytelling are far higher than current technology allows for. Check back in 15 years, maybe?

Try this year? Elder Scrolls: Oblivion allows for open ended game play, allows you to wander around to your hearts content, kill whoever you want, and in the end your actions pretty much describe what kind of game you get back out from it.

Check back 2 years? Neverwinter Nights 2 allows for a broader ability, more ways of accomplishing goals, and quite frankly has more going for it then your Bioshock is.

Oh, heck, let's go for broke. Try back 17 years. If we want to talk about straight branching shooter games, then Wing Commander outdoes this particular game in complexity with 6 different endings and 21 different campaigns.

Complexity of branching storytelling? We're there. We're beyond there. The LACK of all but one story line is laziness that is riddled in the FPS genre. The storytelling aspect would be wonderful, if you were actually allowed to make any significant differences in any outcome. Your Bioshock will continue merrily to it's end no matter how you play through it, because they were looking for flexibility in how you could play rather then complexity in what you could accomplish.

(frozen)

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

It's not so much laziness as a production problem. Branching storylines tend to require significantly more game data (object descriptions, models, textures, animations, sounds, movies, script code, and so forth) than a linear storyline of equal play length. Game data require more time and money to produce as it become more detailed, so multiplying the amount of game data required is often a losing proposition financially. The game will either be shorter than usual, more expensive to make, or lower in quality as a result. Branching storylines do offer replayability, but for every person playing through the game multiple times to try the alternatives, there are many more playing through once and moving onto the next big thing. If a game offers (say) ten hours of gameplay from beginning to (one) ending, most players will find it much too short. In addition, many branching storylines have common story segments that players will have to play again and again to get to the branch points. After a while, most people will get tired of playing those segments and give up before exploring the entire game. The "save often, fail often, and reload" school of design (especially prevalent in PC games) will definitely wear out the enjoyability of those repeated segments. (As much as I liked Half Life 2: Episode One, I wouldn't want to play the fairly difficult "escort the civilians across hostile territory to the rail yard" mission again.)

Open-world sandbox games can offer a lot longer gameplay at the expense of storytelling and controllability. If 90% of your time is spent wandering around an open environment with nothing much beyond random encounters, that's not necessarily much of an improvement even if you can do whatever you want. It's also easy to "break" the story script if you do something that no one anticipated or tested. If the player can go anywhere and do anything, developers have to create a fully-populated world for the player to go and do things. The amount of game data required escalates drastically when it can no longer be "faked" or "implied" by channeling the player character down specific routes.

If it were easy, more developers would be doing it.

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

If it were easy, more developers would be doing it.

Thank you. ^_^

(frozen)

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

The game industry may be completely screwed up in a lot of ways, but I generally assume that professionals know what they are doing. I've run into some flagrant examples of programmer arrogance in my career, but those usually get a reality check sooner rather than later. :)

(frozen)

[ineffabelle]

I kind of agree about "sandboxes" but, to take the meat world as an example, it's like "you can do what you want, but other people will try to resist you". What needs to exist are better adversarial forces.

As far as development goes, I think things are horribly unbalanced. A lot of it is language evolution. There just aren't a lot of good assembler/c (not ++) guys out there anymore that can work on bit mapping/shading/vertexing routines. (*v8 moment* kicks self and goes looking for that book on C rendering techniques)

But the game design part should take precedence. I'm not sure how the market got the way it did, but I'm definitely sad about it. I'd rather play a game with 2002's graphics and 2012's story engine than the other way around.

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Um, what the hell? NWN is an RPG? Not an FPS? Why is this so difficult to understand? And Wing Commander is an incredibly simple shoot-em up. Go back and play it, it doesn't exactly hold up. It's a lot easier to gin up a campaign and a whole bunch of branching endings when your only art assets are star fields, some static illustrations, and some spaceship art.

Oblivion is a fine game, but it also is a completely different game with completely different intentions than Bioshock. Oblivion could not, and does not, maintain the level of presentation and story that Bioshock, or Half-Life 2, or any number of more linear games do. You seem to be wholly interested in the amount of freedom and the number of ending cinematics as some arbitrary measure of what makes a game good. I'm happy to not have such narrow tastes.

(frozen)

[xyzzysqrl]

... Wait, OBLIVION is your example of good game design? A game so broken that the only way to have fun with it is to subvert the developer's intent with as many mods as humanly possible?

Wow. I have to add you to my friends list solely for the purpose of dropping you from it.

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Bye Bye

(frozen)

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

If I'm going to bitch Matt out for being dismissive and insulting, I have to apply the same standard to other people. I don't think you reacted fairly to Ken. I don't see a single personal attack or unfair argument in his comments. Admittedly, Matt's got a pattern of resorting to name-calling when he'd otherwise have to listen to a contrary opinion, while I've never seen this behavior in you before.

I mean, we all lose our shit now and then - god knows I have, even tonight - so god knows this doesn't hurt my lasting opinion of you. You're normally such a sweet guy. I just don't think your response was appropriate in this case. You're seriously in Comic Book Guy territory tonight, dude, and I thought as a friend I should call you out on it. Now shake hands and come out gaming. :p

Besides, all the games you love suck and unless you can beat Civ4 on Monarch you're a complete loser. Absolutism cuts both ways. ;)