BioShock Backlash 163
Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a Kieron Gillen piece at Eurogamer about the heavy backlash from PC gamers against BioShock . Gillen tackles all of the most common complaints, including favorites like 'it's too easy,' and 'the ending stinks.' "BioShock is both a more accessible and easier game than System Shock 2. But 'easier' doesn't have anything to with it being 'dumber,' and hating 'more accessible' is just petty elitism from people who'd actually like videogames to be a ghetto consisting of them — especially when some of the things to make the game more accessible can be turned off. As long as point two's not true, then the former really doesn't matter."
Wise words (Score:5, Insightful)
Kurt Vonnegut quoted in "The War Between Writers and Reviewers," New York Times Book Review (6 January 1985).
Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut [wikiquote.org]
Videogame Ghetto! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Real" RPGs (Score:5, Insightful)
I like RPGs of all types. American, Japanese, European, action, methodical, turn based, real time, whatever. Hell, I even enjoyed Two Worlds on the X360. I thought *I* was nuts.
But try going to the message boards for some of these games, and I mean the boards run by the developer/publisher where players make suggestions for the next game. Bethesda's Oblivion forum, for example.
So much of it can be boiled down to "please make the game 100 times more nitpicky and tedious". I swear, some of these guys would cream their pants if an RPG came along where you have to spend 20 minutes tending to your charatcer's bathroom activities every morning, another 30 minutes sharpening their sword and polishing their armor and then two hours deciphering an elven scroll in order to make a level 1 fireball.
There's a thin line between "hard core RPGer" and "inanimate object", I think.
Re:Wise words (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't gauge backlash (Score:4, Insightful)
And it behooves players to realize that elitism isn't the way to get your game improved. The more people playing the game, the more likely it is someone will spend resources on making expansions or updating it. If your hardcore l337 group of friends really likes a game with a steep learning curve that only a small subset of players enjoy, it's likely you'll still be playing that version of the game in 5 years.
Re:Good game (Score:3, Insightful)
A world where games like Beyond Good & Evil and Psychonauts are ignored and Halo is applauded is, in my mind, a topsy-turvy one.
Re:Good game (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Activation still around? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why do these companies make it so hard for us to give them money?
Re:"Real" RPGs (Score:5, Insightful)
Some examples. I used to play Counterstrike quite a bit when it first came out. It was moderately challening (ie, I wasn't very good at it) and it had a sort of immediate gratification aspect to it when I could pull off a headshot on someone or surprise them because I had determined where they would go and put myself in a position to take them out. Eventually I got bored and stopped playing, so bored in fact that i stopped playing FPS entirely.
At the same time more or less, I began playing a crafter in SWG. I found the difficulty of making money playing that game *solely from crafting* a real challenge. Most of my friends thought I was a loon because it seemed truely boring and repetitive, yet I managed to find something in that gameplay that kept me coming back, pre-CU, CU, NGE (all phases of the devolution of the game), it didn't matter. I managed to make well over 200 million credits in that game exclusively from crafting and selling items (no lootwhoring in otherwords).
In Dark Age of Camelot, I was primarily a PvPer. I barely scratched the crafting system because it was so shallow and unrewarding. Yet I played that game for at least 3 years. Why? Because the PvP game, called RvR there, had a Meta-gaming experience where a player could lead armies and get involved in the overall strategy of their realm, not just gank newbies.
Now I am in the beta for Pirates of the Burning Sea, and looking at making a Freetrader with the same intention: I want to master the economy because thats a far more interesting challenge to me than mastering PvP. I will likely try out the PvP but it looks ultimately like I would simply grow bore with the game in the end.
My point here I suppose is that it is quite possible to enjoy the complexity of a highly complex system (ie the crafting system in Starwars or POBS) even though some people find it shallow and uninteresting. for the most part I completely fail to understand how anyone can get any enjoyment at all from games like Halo (I played the first one through with a friend in 18 hrs, never touched it again and wouldn't spend another dime on the franchise, ultimately a complete disappointment to me, yet its a massive bestseller for other players).
Obviously I don't want to have to help my player take a shit every day - since there is little or no skill involved in taking a dump (beyond "don't miss the toilet"), nor sharpen their weapons - but if the game offered the opportunity to affect the performance of that weapon by how you sharpened it, even that might not be true. But don't mistake (your perceived) tedium as some universal truth. Your perception is not everyone's perception.
Re:Good game (Score:2, Insightful)
1- up to 16 people deathmatch 2-Vehicles 3-No clunky weapon switching 4- Coop
All of these things were done previously in PC Games, and usually done MUCH better, but at that time in the console world, you were stuck with FPS's on the Playstation 1&2, which we all know how awesome THOSE are.
Complain all you want about how Bioshock sucks more than System Shock 2, and go play System Shock 2, but for the console kiddies, Bioshock is pretty unique for them. After all, we all know that Halo:Marathon::Bioshock:System Shock 2
Re:Wise words (Score:3, Insightful)
Cue Riven comments.
Here, I'll start: "What a beautiful world. How impossible to play."
Game as Novel. (Score:5, Insightful)
But we're trending toward a 'Game as Novel' paradigm, where the purpose of playing the game is to see the story unfold and to make our own impact upon it. The challenge is reduced to the point that many games (like Bioshock and Prey) have zero costs for failure -- you just keep playing, keep the story progressing, as if nothing happened.
These two camps aren't completely in opposition to one another, but they can ruin each other's experience. The central nature of the Challenge game is that you may reach a point in the game past which you cannot proceed. That's anathema to the Novel game, which wants its reader to experience the entire story.
Not sure how to fix this divergence. Artificial limits (such as playing with X, where X is some helpful game mechanic) are one way but they feel contrived and hollow to the challenge player.
I'll disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see how he comes to such ideas, seeing that he's the writer. It's his work that those nasty reviewers are pissing all over. Yes, I'd _expect_ him to feel pretty strongly about it.
I, however, come from the angle of the consumer. I like to have the _whole_ picture before I decide whether I blow 50$ or more on a game.
There are entirely too many people who tell me only half the story. They tell me what they liked about a game. Or in the case of some reviewers, what the publisher's PR department told them to write. And I'm grateful for that info, too.
But that's just the problem: the "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" school of reviewing, only tells me half the picture. It's presenting a skewed picture, that serves no purpose except to try to help some vendor swindle me out of some money that they didn't deserve.
The purpose of a review isn't to be nice and friendly to the publisher. And that's a perversion of the whole idea. A review was never supposed to be just an extension of the publisher' marketing. A review is for the _consumer_. As a paying customer, I want enough information to decide if I'd genuinely like that game or not. If, according to _my_ tastes, it's worth _my_ money.
I'm actually grateful to the reviewers which give me the other half of the picture. Even if it's in the form of rage and loathing. We need more review sites like Something Awful, just for balance sake. Because God knows we already have too many who focus only on pleasing the publisher and being nice to the devs.
I don't hate games, I just like to know the _whole_ story. The good _and_ the bad. Only then I can make an informed choice.
And since there are already too many competing to tell me only the former, I'm genuinely grateful to the disgruntled folks who'll tell me the latter. I want to know every single bad detail. Everything that the reviewer didn't like. Every debatable aspect or design choice. Every glitch, every quest that feels unfinished, every moment when the reviewer's suspension of disbelief broke.
Don't worry, it doesn't mean I'll swallow the reviewer's opinion whole, as some Holy Truth, though. Trust me, I'll still use my own judgment there. If a reviewer goes "omg, it sucks because it's turn based" about a game, I'll probably just go, "hmm, that sounds good, actually." But now I'll have one more piece of information to base the decision on.
And if some some publisher, dev or fanboy ends up thinking along the lines of Mr Vonnegut's quote... well, they can consume excrement and expire, for all I care. I'm sure there would be a lot who'd like people's purchase decisions to be based only on corporate-approved PR and hype, but, see, that's exactly the thing I hope to avoid when I go to a review site.
Re:I'll disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
A calm and logical examination of the facts and noting their flaws and merits is where true criticism should lie, not inflated rhetoric intended to drive up your pagerank.
Oh, really? (Score:2, Insightful)
How much of a problem widescreen is, differs from TFT to TFT and from driver to driver.
A lot of early widescreens can't deal with a 4/3 image other than rescaling and deforming it to 16/9, for example. And I still have an Acer display for example, which ATI mis-detects and can't scale properly to.
A lot of TFTs do a piss-poor job of scaling any 4/3 image even if they keep it 4/3. E.g., if you have an 1680x1050 (which is what most wide-screen owners have), most of them insist on rescaling a resolution like 1280x1024 to something that has 1050 lines. And on a lot of them it's a piss-poor scaling too.
Etc.
There are very valid reasons why one could complain there. But nah, you've already decided that you're the judge and jurry of what everyone else should think.
Heh.
Re:Videogame Ghetto! (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. The console as a platform for FPS -sucks-. I HATE dual analog controllers for FPS games. And adding auto-aim, auto-lockon, or auto-headhshot features to help compensate for the fact that the controllers are gimped just adds insult to injury.
That said the Wii -is- an excellent platform for FPS titles. The controls are a bit less precise than keyboard+mouse, and its more effort to hold your crosshairs steady on a point, but its 'realistic' effort that adds to the immersion.
I think you'll find (Score:4, Insightful)
As such, when people who have played great PC games of the past (e.g. System Shock, Deus Ex, Oblivion) they fire this up in the expectation that it will exceed even those titles they know and love... only to find that it's not actually as sensationally amazingly fabulously revolutionary as the reviews have promised it is.
I must say for myself that I felt the same way about Half Life 2 - it was a good game, but no way in hell is it the greatest game of all time, or even close. Hence I now have mild negativity attached to it in my mind after the reviewer love-in which took place when it came out.