Sept. Game of the Month: Bioshock

[ennui]

September's Game of the Month here at Gearbox was Bioshock! We'll be having our meeting next Wednesday around 12:30 CST, and we'll use this thread to post some of our comments from the meeting.

Join in the discussion by answering these questions. If you participate (and by participate I mean take the time to thoughtfully answer the questions) in this thread, there's a good chance that your name will be entered into a drawing to win a prize from us! Don't feel limited to just one short answer, feel free to expand on your responses

1. What did you like best about the game?

2. What did you like least about the game?

3. If you were making a sequel, what would you improve?


Also, feel free to make a suggestion for the Game of the Month for October (I have a feeling we'll see a lot of suggestions of "Halo 3 ;p)

Watch this thread for responses from our devs from the Wednesday Game of the Month meeting!

[[FBI]Mech]

1. Language

2. The animations on the thompson

3. Include the pipe as a weapon

Game of the month for October : Super Rub-a-Dub

Video here

[MiniSiets]

Originally Posted by ennui

Also, feel free to make a suggestion for the Game of the Month for October (I have a feeling we'll see a lot of suggestions of "Halo 3 ;p)

No, NOT Halo 3! Hello Kitty.

Anyway I haven't played BioShock yet so I can't really answer those questions, but in all seriousness, I nominate Half-Life 2: The Orange Box for October, seeing as it comes out on the 10th, and it will pretty much pwn the universe. <3 Episode Two.

[The clogged pipes man!]

Best: Awesome story line. I used every spare minute of my time the day or two after I got Bioshock to find out how the story ended.

Worst: It felt like Ammo was scarce, and I wasn't even playing on the hardest difficulty. I was landing all my shots, so that was the problem. Oh, and the Enforcers, or whichever Big Daddy charged you. >.>

Sequal: Longer campaign. I loved the campaign, and only wish the story was longer. Multiplayer would be nice too (seriously, wtf?).



Hello Kitty.

[dilinator]

1. The sound design. This game would be half it's quality with lesser sound design.

2. The final boss.

3. Multiplayer (Ken Levine has pretty much confirmed this for Bioshock 2). Keep the difficulty the same but add a difficulty with not just harder enemies but vita chambers to cost money when used (if you do not want to reload).

[fniAA]

The best thing: The element of choice. You can kill an enemy in sideways 8 number of ways and your decisions even change the ending.

The worst thing: The endings sucked balls. I want to see something a little less cliche than those two endings. To save spoiler tags I won't mention it but seriously the ending was so anti climactic that I just about shat myself.

Change: Make your choices affect more of the plot than just the very ending.

Halo 3.

[FMT~PlasbianX]

1) The overall atmosphere of the environment was just amazing.

2) I felt like the fights were just repetitive. I wanted more uniqueness to my fights. Also, I hated the overall linear-ness of the game.

3) Less linear, more open world, more types of splicers, and some way to randomly mix ingredients for a plasmid. (example: maybe find some ice crystals or something and mix with another liquid sample you found for a freeze touch)

[dphrygian]

Best: Two things. First, the story--and more specifically, the way everything in the game was drenched in it. It felt like a real, believable, and complete place, and there were lots of little details in the world beyond just the audio diaries that tied it all together, like the PSAs or appropriately corny era advertising. Second, the combat. Instead of System Shock 2's long-term player creativity through character-building, Irrational focused on immediate creativity through "sandbox combat." Finding creative uses of the environment, setting up traps for Big Daddies, turning security or splicers against other splicers, or being forced to use some of the more esoteric plasmids in the sequence where you lose control of the ability to select your active plasmid--in any given moment, there really did feel like a vast number of options available.

Going off on a tangent here, but this reminded me of another one of their design concepts that I thought worked really well. Reposted from my blog:

<tangent>
I had a revelation regarding the AI and gameplay yesterday. As a fledgling AI programmer and erstwhile designer, I've struggled with the parallel problems of how to make compelling characters in games and how to give the player pause to strategize in a fast-paced action game. The Big Daddy is the solution incarnate. Unlike the Splicers, the common enemies of Rapture, Big Daddies will not actively pursue the player. They are guardians of the resource-gathering Little Sisters and will placidly wander the halls until they or their charge are threatened. This solves Problem Number One. By creating a character who can fight the player but will not initiate combat, Irrational has bridged the gap between enemies and NPCs. The player could simply follow the Big Daddy around for hours, observing his behavior as he knocks on the walls of Rapture to summon his Little Sister; but unlike your garden-variety NPC, the Big Daddy can be attacked--and in fact, proves more capable than any Splicer in combat. This leads to the solution to Problem Number Two. Because taking down a Big Daddy is such a formidable task, the smart player will take his time setting up the showdown on his own terms, planning in a way that most fast-paced action games cannot afford. In preparing for these duels, I have been vaguely reminded of the more intense moments in Roguelike games, where every move counts dearly but the player has all the time in the world to make his choices.
</tangent>

And back to the discussion proper...

Least: After the turning point midway through the game, I felt like it settled into a bit of a rut. The gameplay was still fun, but nothing much new was introduced beyond there. In a lesser game, I'd have lost interest around that point. Bioshock held my attention because it was still a lot of fun and I was invested in the plot.

Sequel: Multiplayer, both cooperative and competitive. While I believe Irrational made the right choice for this game in focusing on polishing the single-player game instead of dividing their forces and hacking out a subpar multiplayer mode, I'd really like to play the campaign again in co-op, and the range of weapons and plasmids available has potential for a really fun deathmatch mode. (Conversely, I think a game like Bioshock should be experienced alone the first time around. It's moodier that way and lets the player explore more--but the option for multiplayer should still be there.)

Next month: Halo 3, of course. Not just because it's the obvious new big hit game, but because I'd like to see some genuine critical discourse on the game's single-player campaign. We all know its multiplayer is rock solid, but is that good enough?

[Hulle]

1. havt played it but it looks sweet and i like the daddies
2. dont now it loooks superb!
3. It shud have multiplayer function so thats one thing i would add to the sequal

[Twister689]

1. The story and the unique fighting system.
2. replayability is meh
3. This game has alot of potential for multiplayer