I normally have a sense of dread of sequelling games +18 years on. Usually it's done by a different team who simply didn't "internalize" what the games felt like, the original design team's vision, or ended up trying too hard to be everything to everyone and changing too much of the "core", but if they really do have the former LGS team on board, it sounds pretty promising in the "This won't turn out a Thief 4" sense.
SS2 still one of my favorites... damn hybrids will probably always creep me out.
Starbreeze is a very capable studio, but after Syndicate I'm a little worried about length and replay value. That game was one of the best-looking turds of the early 2010's
Warren Spector also invisible war'd the deus ex series, (and George Lucas lucas'd the star wars series) so simply having the original team doesn't mean good things.
SS2 is practically a work of art and I believe Ken Levine was the "mastermind" behind that. It will be a VERY hard act to follow (even Irrational gave it a fair attempt with the Bioshock series).
Yes, it is true that the development was suspended for awhile due to ownership. 2007's BioShock was developed by Levine and a handful of ex-Looking Glass personnel.
I believe the concept for SS2 was originally pitched to EA but was turned down.
I have been wondering how much of my remembered fondness is nostalgia. I remember both for being highly atmospheric, but also for being able to make me go back through sections without feeling manipulated by cheap tricks. The writing was so good that it just seemed to make sense that I had to back track through that section.
I have been wondering how much of my remembered fondness is nostalgia. I remember both for being highly atmospheric, but also for being able to make me go back through sections without feeling manipulated by cheap tricks. The writing was so good that it just seemed to make sense that I had to back track through that section.
It's just endless corridors shooting the same enemies, over and over again. There's not even any NPCs to interact with.
Actually Bioshock was like that too.
I never understood how anyone enjoys these repetitive games. They lack immersion.
The only single player PC game I've ever truly loved was Skyrim.
It's just endless corridors shooting the same enemies, over and over again. There's not even any NPCs to interact with.
Actually Bioshock was like that too.
I never understood how anyone enjoys these repetitive games. They lack immersion.
The only single player PC game I've ever truly loved was Skyrim.
Different people have more than one metric for enjoyability and immersion itself is completely relative. System Shock and Bioshock have great atmosphere, good writing, good voice acting, solid "core" gameplay / gunplay, and superb soundtracks. People who like that get easily immersed in that, even replaying a 2nd / 3rd time. OTOH, whilst I loved Elder Scrolls games too, open world hardly "cures" repetition. One minute you're on a critical mission pursuing a bad guy to save the world, then after 2 weeks of playing postman for the 75th fetch quest, picking the 250th Nirnroot, fencing the 2000th item of stolen pottery / clothing, entering yet another pseudo-identical cave guarded by the 400th Cliff Racer / Bandit / Crab, etc, you're then supposed to pickup the trail as if no more than 7 minutes have passed from the previous main quest sequence?
To others, that's even more immersion breaking / repetitive than corridors and rooms in linear titles, which if you tried to force open world wouldn't even fit the plot, pacing or style of gameplay for many of them (certainly not in games like SS2 which have deliberately "claustrophobic" settings by design, ie, a distressed space ship like the Von Braun is supposed to feel a little cramped and have fewer arboretums vs the entire continent of Tamriel). Likewise, "there's no living NPC's" is done to increase the sense of loneliness / isolation and is simply the System/Bioshock "thing" to have the plot revealed via audio logs of dead men.
Same goes for other space-ship based FPS titles like Alien Isolation or Prey, give them a Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim style open map and the game would not work at all. This is why I've never seen linear FPS vs open-world RPG arguments as making any sense. Some games are only meant to have 8-15hr long plots (and focus on quality of writing rather than quantity of padding) and lose absolutely nothing in being linear and not forcing themselves to be something else that would instantly break the natural pacing.
Different people have more than one metric for enjoyability and immersion itself is completely relative. System Shock and Bioshock have great atmosphere, good writing, good voice acting, solid "core" gameplay / gunplay, and superb soundtracks. People who like that get easily immersed in that, even replaying a 2nd / 3rd time. OTOH, whilst I loved Elder Scrolls games too, open world hardly "cures" repetition. One minute you're on a critical mission pursuing a bad guy to save the world, then after 2 weeks of playing postman for the 75th fetch quest, picking the 250th Nirnroot, fencing the 2000th item of stolen pottery / clothing, entering yet another pseudo-identical cave guarded by the 400th Cliff Racer / Bandit / Crab, etc, you're then supposed to pickup the trail as if no more than 7 minutes have passed from the previous main quest sequence?
To others, that's even more immersion breaking / repetitive than corridors and rooms in linear titles, which if you tried to force open world wouldn't even fit the plot, pacing or style of gameplay for many of them (certainly not in games like SS2 which have deliberately "claustrophobic" settings by design, ie, a distressed space ship like the Von Braun is supposed to feel a little cramped and have fewer arboretums vs the entire continent of Tamriel). Likewise, "there's no living NPC's" is done to increase the sense of loneliness / isolation and is simply the System/Bioshock "thing" to have the plot revealed via audio logs of dead men.
Same goes for other space-ship based FPS titles like Alien Isolation or Prey, give them a Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim style open map and the game would not work at all. This is why I've never seen linear FPS vs open-world RPG arguments as making any sense. Some games are only meant to have 8-15hr long plots (and focus on quality of writing rather than quantity of padding) and lose absolutely nothing in being linear and not forcing themselves to be something else that would instantly break the natural pacing.
I think some people's brains work differently, so they experience games differently. Skyrim never feels repetitive. And every cave looks unique, and every quest feels different. Every quest ties into some NPC story, some interactions you have to do, some decision you have to make, something new you will find out. Maybe some people are not sophisticated enough to be able to take it all in, and instead just run around mindlessly wanting to kill stuff.
Also I didn't play system shock 2 long enough to find out the story, but Bioshock story was basically like this:
First thing to is how horribly it's presented, there are no NPCs to interact with, you're just barraged with audio logs or one-way radio messages every ten meters, so you really don't care much about any of the characters or what's going on because you never see any of them.
Second thing the writing is not engaging, the audio logs are disjointed and pretentious. They give off the stench of a writer thinking "Look at me I'm such a good writer". "Morality" in this game consists of either saving the children or killing the children (Oh no! Not the children!). It has a lame plot twist you see from a mile away, and it has the generic Chris Metzen villain whose only purpose is to taunt you over the radio every minute: "I will kill you now!", "You will never escape!", "I am too powerful!", and this lasts half the freakin game (until you defeat him in the generic boss battle of course).
And then the endings, unimaginative as f*ck, either sunshine and rainbows where everyone lives happily ever after "and everything is right with the world", or stupid sad ending where the world is doomed and you are a big meany face. Yay for video games! Now they rival movies!
Maybe gamers have much lower standards for storytelling. Anyway I found Skyrim infinitely more interesting, engaging, and better written.
I think some people's brains work differently, so they experience games differently. Skyrim never feels repetitive. And every cave looks unique, and every quest feels different. Every quest ties into some NPC story, some interactions you have to do, some decision you have to make, something new you will find out. Maybe some people are not sophisticated enough to be able to take it all in, and instead just run around mindlessly wanting to kill stuff.
First up, being a relatively new member here, it's probably best not to suggest others are dribbling idiots for not sharing an "I've only ever liked 1x single player game" thing when some of us have played near +1,000 games going back +30 years and enjoyed hundreds for various reasons. I "get" (and thoroughly enjoyed) Skyrim just as I did Oblivion and Morrowind for the distinctive style Elder Scrolls are in their own right. But I also "get" why not every other FPS ever made "must" strive to be a Skyrim clone especially when comparing different genres of games 15 years apart.
Precisely my point. System Shock 2 is only around 10hrs, and that's all it's meant to be. If you didn't even manage to play long enough to figure out the story, then how on earth would you rewrite that to be a 200hr open-world RPG on a enclosed space-ship? You couldn't. Either you drag the plot out +1900% longer and ruin the pacing or you stuff it full of 97.5% "obvious filler" and both ruin the solitary atmosphere / level design plus end up feeling as fake as DAI's "125hrs" does vs DAO's natural 60-70hrs without the "sidequest spam". SS2 is just one of those "one day games" whose strength is precisely it doesn't feel the need to pretend to be anything else to fit some very skewed comparisons 15 years later. If it's not your kind of game and it bored you, that's fair enough we all experience that. But you seem to be complaining that every FPS written over a decade before Skyrim was even released, is bad because it isn't Skyrim...
Sounds like you didn't play that long to figure out the story about that either. Hint :
1. There are no "in person" NPC's to interact with precisely because the splicers ARE what's left of the mutated NPC's that totally compromised the city (just as the hybrids did with the Von Braun in SS2).
2. Bioshock is an FPS not an RPG. It doesn't HAVE to have NPC's, trading, barter, character mods, conversation trees, skill trees, crafting, levelling-up, etc. If Skyrim genuinely is the ONLY single-player game you like, then part of your problem is falsely expecting every single player FPS game to have RPG mechanics
How would you seriously rewrite Bioshock 1 to be "exactly like Skyrim"? Imagine Sander Cohen's masterful "psycho artist" performance in Fort Frolic replaced with a wooden "I would go with you to kill Andrew Ryan, but I took an arrow in the knee. Have a look at my wares and join my guild. Could you pick me 50 clams and find Azura's Seashell? Stay safe citizen". Then as you leave and walk past 30 NPC's with the same 4 voice artists, hear comments like "Look at the muscles on you!", "I heard you know how to fire a rifle!", etc. It would look and sound laughably lame as it isn't remotely that style of game (nor meant to be).
Again, it's utterly futile comparing a 1997 linear-short-by-design FPS to a 2012 open-world-by design RPG. Totally different genre, pacing, franchise, plot progression, and general style of play. If you flipped the genres around of what you're attempting to compare across 15yr time periods, you'd essentially be saying how rubbish Dishonored is because it isn't Daggerfall or that Deus Ex 1 was trash because it isn't Ultima IV...
Spot-on, BSim500. I really, really love the huge, open world games like the Fallout and STALKER series, but expecting every game to be similar would be counter productive. We've seen what happens when a pure shooter gets stretched out and made open world; it was called Chaser, and it reeked to high Heaven. Frankly I grew tired of Bioshock and never finished it, but I still appreciate the highly atmospheric, intense world the devs created. Likewise, although Bethesda finally learned its lesson about using the same four voice actors for 90% of the world, no developer can provide unique voices and interesting, in-depth dialog for hundreds of characters, and many of us find non-player characters with whom we cannot even marginally interact to be much less immersive than a total lack of NPCs. I think mainly it's a matter of personal preference which avenue of maximizing scarce game resources we find most enjoyable, which is a totally separate thing from being a good or bad game.
There is a place for intense, highly scripted very short games like Call of Duty, short but intense games like System Shock, and very long open world games like Fallout, just like there are places for RPG and RTS and FPS and all the rest. We each have our preferences, but there are good and bad games within each.
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I "get" (and thoroughly enjoyed) Skyrim just as I did Oblivion and Morrowind for the distinctive style Elder Scrolls are in their own right. But I also "get" why not every other FPS ever made "must" strive to be a Skyrim clone especially when comparing different genres of games 15 years apart.
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