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BioShock Backlash
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."
"I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split."
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
Dammit, nobody told me we were supposed to be having a backlash against this game! I actually liked it and felt it was a fine bit of storytelling in a fun FPS, myself... next time, -tell me- when I'm not supposed to like a game! Next you'll tell me I was supposed to hate Kane & Lynch!
Now I haven't played anymore of Bioshock than the demo, so I don't know just how "accessible" it is. The thing is though, "accessibility" has this tendency to destroy FPS/RPG hybrids in particular. You need look no farther than Deus Ex 2 or Oblivion to see these downfalls. I don't find it elitist either, as not all games should appeal to a broad audience. I can't find a flight simulator that I'd enjoy playing in a million years, but I know the people that like that genre like it precisely because you have to map out three hundred different buttons to play, not because it's accessible. And yes, in many cases accessible DOES mean dumbed-down. All of the failed game mechanics mentioned can be at least partially because of their multiplatform status (console vs. PC). That's not a line to toe with first person perspective play, as console are vastly inferior in that regard (except, maybe the Wii).
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
When will gamers start accepting games for works of art? It used to be about difficulty. It used to be about points. It used to be about kill count. Now I think more developers are moving towards the adventure...immersing yourself in a creative and well thought out storyline...and unfortunately alot of gamers don't appreciate that. Of course there are games that ARE absolute crap and deserve a good thrashing *cough*Halo anyone? What huh... did I say that out loud? *cough* DIVERT POWER TO SHIELDS MR. CHAKOTAY! INCOMING FAN BOY PROTON TORPEDOES.
Slashdot is too nerdy for me.
that dumb isn't easy is a very easy decision to make.
then why did most of the team leave for other companies? Because they were disappointed in the consoltized mess that bioshock was.
Kevin Levine The hypocrite. He said EA would dumb down system shock 3, yet he himself did the exact same thing.
petty elitism from people who'd actually like videogames to be a ghetto consisting of them
:)
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.
Heavy backlash against Bioshock? From what I've seen most people seem to like Bioshock. It had a lot of "game of the year" mentions among my friends. Is this a Euro thing where they are supposed to hate the game because it doesn't punish the player enough? I've played the game with basically no-vita chambers (just reload from the last save every time you die) and it really doesn't seem to add much to the game. Besides, none of that makes one iota of difference to the part that really pushed Bioshock into the "great games of the year" category: The storyline.
While there are parts of the game that I thought could have used some work (the Crafting is pretty halfassed and the Hacking got tedious after awhile), I considered my complaints minor. Also, the ending was underrated. I thought it wrapped up the story nicely (at least with the good ending) and in a very touching way.
I read the internet for the articles.
Why is it that everyone claiming that bioshock really IS all that is good and right in a game ignores the arguments against that position that actually have substance. Things like the DRM clusterfuck and bloody wierd mouse controls, tallscreen FOV, and the player character's lack of impact on the world. Did anyone ever figure out how on earth the sensitivity manages to slowly change over time after loading and saving?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
For every gamer that posts some inane comment about how a game is too easy, or how it's been dumbed down, there are an untold number of gamers that are perfectly happy with the game and aren't going to the message boards about how horrible one aspect or another is/was. The same is true on every game, especially games where developers act on customer feedback (like MMORPGs). To read most MMORPG message boards, you'd think that the game in question sucks and that everybody that's shelling out $10-$15 a month to pay for the subscription is doing so only because someone has them on threat of torture if they don't.
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.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Have they gotten rid of the crazy DRM yet? I know Ken Levine said they'd drop it "in the future":
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/08/26/bioshock_activation_will_be_removed/1
Is the future now? Can I buy the game yet?
It just wasn't as GREAT as it could've been.
The game was easy, no doubt about it... but no moreso than playing Halo on "normal" level. Oh sure you've got your "Vita-Chanbers" but they weren't that much different from the frequent auto-saves in Halo either.
The game suffers from two fatal problems however:
1> The ending stinks (spoilers ahead) - There is so much care and effort to the building of the world and the philsophical interplays in the first 3/4 of the story that the early climax of killing Ryan and discovering that you are no more than a puppet and the REAL bad guy is some two-bit chump who spends the rest of the game going "nyah nyah, gonna drop your health now" just destroys the fiction. There's no conclusion to the philosophical debate or to Ryan's vision other than to rescue the lil' Sisters and abandon Rapture or not rescue the girls and abandon Rapture. To wit, Rapture is a MAJOR character of this game and it's pretty much abandoned after Ryan's death.
2> There's no replay value. Sure you can go back and get that honeybee plasmid you always wanted but couldn't afford but most everything in the game is discoverable the first time through. Even the option of playing the game again to kill or not kill the little sisters isn't intriguing because it only REALLY changes the last 5 minutes of the game. The lame ending hurts here too. Who wants to play through a game again to get to the disappointing ending? Multiplayer options would've helped but it wasn't the point of the game, which was one of discovery and exploration.
To sum up, it's not a backlash (unless you want to consider all the technological goofups the PC owners had to go through with the DRM/activation)... but merely... disappointing.
A flawed masterpiece.
I've found criticism of the ending to be one of the lamest of all. Personally, I found the ending genuinely touching, and would rank it among the best game endings ever.
Maybe their problem is that they got the "Evil" ending. Next time don't murder the little girls, jerkoffs.
The basic issue is there was no cost to dying totally undermined the atmosphere, and tension they tried so desperately to create. What fun is a "survival horror" if you're not scared?
They could have simply "fixed" the larger issues by scaling back on all the shit they gave you, like not having a vita chamber every 10 feet (I know you can turn them off now, but that doesn't solve the issue when you seldom die), or less ammo, or less health packs, or fewer/ no health stations or if you can buy health it actually cost you an amount of money you might care about like $400 instead of $10.
Basically they broke the game in play balancing. It was far more challenging playing Metroid Prime 3 on "Normal" (Easy) than Bioshock on "Hard", and thus I had a more engaging, and entertaining experience with the game as well as a greater sense of satisfaction when I beat it.
The New "Brass Balls" achievement is an acknowledgment from 2K Games that the game is too easy, so hopefully in the future there will be a patch to add a higher difficulty level and make it challenging. They don't need to change the core game, just subtracting available resources would work.
If you're going by just this article's lack of mention, there was no "backlash" of any kind about the draconic SecuROM technology in this thing. And, if that is true, I'm ashamed of today's gamers for not exercising discipline.
I knew there was something wrong with people when they said LOL IT ISN'T A ROOTKIT going merely by semantics alone, without regard for the malicious intent of the technology.
- The choice of harvesting or freeing the little sisters has very little weight, because you end up with the same abilities either way. This would have been an obvious place to add some kind of character variation.
Bioshock was also "dumbed down" in many other ways, such as having an infinite inventory capacity for weapons (and nothing but weapons). This adds to the paradox of choice, thus making combat less fun, while also eliminating other kinds of customization. Bioshock is still one of the best games of the year for me, and it raised the bar for story and atmosphere in games, but the gameplay mechanics show several clear design errors.What the sam hill is going on here?!?!
How can people possibly think the story is compelling? It's the thinnest veneer of Rand's philosophy on top of the exact same story of every single other FPS game.
I never saw the betrayal at the hand of my trusted friend from the start of the game either! Man, what plot twists. I thought Captain Polito and I were going to escape together...
If Ken Levine is so great then why does nobody want to work with him anymore?
There's no particular reason to hate the game, I just couldn't be bothered to play it after about 3 hours because it was quite frankly dull. The level design seemed uninspired, the plot was so-so, the enemies and weapons felt very generic. It just didn't entertain me at all. 2K games could learn a lot from Infinity Ward. In fact, most FPS developers could learn a lot from Infinity Ward!
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
I've been feeling like I just don't get as much "value" from games nowadays and am left wondering if the issues in TFA are really based on this. Were folks left feeling like they didn't get enough value and partially due to external forces?
Expansions that are sold at full price (new Company of Heroes, SupCom, etc.), the lack of innovation in game genres that are most popular (RTS, MMOs, etc.), the tendency for the latter third if not even second half seemingly a hurried production, wrapping up plots with Deus Ex Machinas and a number of other elements leave me often times enjoying a game but at the end not being fulfilled like I used to (and still do on rare occasions.) I normally start to analyze the game wondering what went wrong specifically but recently I realized although I could isolate elements that needed improvement, the real problem for me was larger than that and surfaced once I zoomed out. I wanted more value for my money and certain improvements I felt would help. However, I'm not certain if they had been there to begin with I wouldn't feel the same. In the case of Bioshock this certainly applied to me.
Also, I think it would help games a lot to use more crescendo. Bioshock, Kane & Lynch and many others are great games however since you're in 5th gear with just about all aspects the entire time it's almost impossible to create a truly impacting big ending in comparison. Thus I'm left feeling like a cheesy 80s cliffhanger without any hope for knowing how the rest turns out. Feeling like I got only a piece certainly doesn't help the subconscious valuation of a product. Maybe game development should be done backwards with the ending getting the most attention, work, etc?
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
I'm seeing a divergence in computer games into two camps. One is the classic 'Game as Challenge' camp, where players seek to improve their ability to play and to overcome challenges that at first seem overwhelming.
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.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I'll disagree with Kurt Vonnegut, there.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Good reviews are not just consumer information. They are also entertainment. And expressing "rage and loathing" can be a lot more entertaining than just stating that the novel was poorly written.
When a game is that much hyped, there will be a backslash.h
System Shock II was so much more fun than this game.
Bioshock was dumbed down to appeal to a larger audience. A game on rails that practically upgraded your character for you.
And it was too dark, I couldn't see a damn thing.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
But 'easier' doesn't have anything to with it being 'dumber,'
That may or may not be the case, but it's irrelevant since when people talk about the game being dumber, it's not just a case of it being easier. I don't know if this is true with Bioshock (but according to a lot of people who've played it, it is), but I know that other "consolified" games, like Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3, weren't just made easier, but had many of the things that made them interesting removed or simplified into pointlessness. Gillen's argument is nothing but a strawman.
Rob
It's not, can we try and excuse it's faults, it is, why is it rated stinking high? Not one of the faults he argues against is wrong, they all exist, and no matters how much you try to excuse them, they continue to exist. He also misses several more. So, why is a game with such glaring faults rating so freaking high everywhere? It isn't deserving of those insane scores. I'll say it every time it comes up, yes, it's a good game, but NOT the 13th best game of all time (according to Gamerankings). I think that is most of people's complaint. You wouldn't see a big backlash if this game got at 85% on average (still a great game, but not even in the top 200), but instead the reviewers are telling us that it an absolutely awesome game, which only a tiny (and I mean TINY) minority of games are better than. This isn't the does the emperor have no clothes, it is a question of is the emperor wearing off the rack clothes with fake pearls and jewels, or custom tailored and made cloth with the real deal in the way of accessories.
I was surprised that this story didn't touch on one very dark & nasty aspect of Bioshock which has prevented me (and some of my friends) from playing: chiefly, the Sony Rootkit, SecuRom, that it comes with.
... and I read about the issues that people were having, about the backdoors that this installs, and about all of the headaches related to trying to uninstall it once it's on. This was a major turn-off for me and several of my friends.
I love FPSs, and desperately wanted to purchase Bioshock. But then I heard that it uses SecuRom
I mean, I know several people (myself included) who want to buy this game, but won't because of the antediluvian methods employed by SecuRom to curb software piracy. I wonder how many other potential customers have been turned away because of this.
Without passing judgment over Bioshock itself, you illustrate a problem: assuming that what's not an issue for _you_ can't possibly be a legitimate issue for anything else. Which isn't just assuming that everyone is a clone of you (they aren't) and has exactly the same tastes (they don't), but also that their system necessarily is an identical clone of yours (again, it isn't.)
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Does something have to be a big challenge to enjoy it?
I must admit that in my life, I have little time nor patience for save-die-load progress in games. I once did, but there came a time when I realized how artificial the challenge was, and what it really amounted to for me was a hassle to get to the end of the story. I knew I would eventually make it through their challenges in such games, but there would come a point where I got tired of it and would go online to find the cheat for god-mode so I could just enjoy the story and the graphics.
When I started half-life years ago, I thought the game was amazing. The atmosphere was like I had never seen before, and my surround speakers were really putting me into the mood. But then I came to a point where I was rushed by the white soldiers and kept dying during that combat. I remember how frustrating that was that there was a such an increase in difficulty there. I ended up switching into God mode and unfortunately, that hurt my experience of the game.
So would I rather have a game that is too easy than one that is too hard? Absolutely. I buy games for the story, graphics, sound, and the escape to another world they provide- much like more involved movies. I don't buy them to prove that I can master the timing needed to fight off 30 enemies at once because I already know that I can and eventually would succeed. Its a total waste of my time to prove that over and over in every game and its not rewarding to me. I have better things to do with my time than spend an hour on one section of a game I can't make it through.
I do like difficult combat at times, but that is when I have a LAN party and focus entirely on the competition- where there is something to prove.
I think there is room for games that have impossible challenges- but I think winning those battles should be the exception and not the rule, and other options should be available to avoid the battle altogether at the cost of some prize. This allows one to feel accomplished when they win a battle that obviously wasn't designed to be beaten. But ultimately, most of the battles in games are designed to make your character look like a superhero and eventually make it through the onslaught or boss level.
Well, in _principle_ I'll agree with you. And when it comes to novels, it's usually like that indeed.
The problem with games and reviews is... often more one of perception than of genuine rage and loathing. Some people (fanboys) tend to act as if even mentioning any problem their favourite game has, is not only a sign of rage and loathing, but makes one an enemy of all humanity too.
The thing is, I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. In fact, I can't remember any off the top of my head. Even as flames on boards go, genuine rage and loathing tends to be somewhat of a tiny minority of the messages, and easily identified as such. So, you know, you don't have to read it, if you don't like that kind of messages.
What I do see more often, though, are small posses of fanboys trying to lynch anyone who disagrees with them. And painting any post or review as some kind of irrational, evil, destructive, hatred of all humanity, if it even mentions any kind of problem.
I guess the root of all evil is that, well, a lot of people seem to assume that everyone else is a clone of them. If he likes X (e.g., jump puzzles), then by Jingo, everyone else is hard-coded to love X. And anyone saying otherwise must be in denial and/or an enemy of all humanity.
Which is kinda silly. It's like saying that if I like sweet wines, then everyone else must, and anyone who likes beer or dry wine is just in denial and driven by some irrational evil urge. Or if I like Pepsi and dislike Coca Cola, then only brainwashed sheep can possibly say they like Coca Cola. I hope you can see how silly that would seem. Yet people do just that kind of blanket generalization about games anyway.
At any rate, to get back on topic, well, your point is duly noted, but I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. I see your point, but, nevertheless, I'd rather take the risk of those few proliferating, than be a part of the posse demanding only shiny-happy half-story reviews.
And to be honest, I'm interested to read the rage and loathing posts too anyway. If any game drove you nearly homicidal, I'd genuinely want to read about it. Exactly what about it was so enraging to you? No, seriously, I'm curious. I want to know exactly that kind of thing.
As I was saying, don't worry, it's not like I'll take it as gospel or anything. I'll do the sorting it into "because of this, this and this" myself, and compare it to my own tastes.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The thing with games is, as art they are on a spectrum between eye candy, and philosophical works. While eye candy is good the thing that really gets people excited about games is usually some aspect of philosophical contemplation, because you get to act and explore ramifications of a way of thought you never could in real life.
So that is where Bioshock falls down as art, because it starts out being both great eye-candy and also interesting philosophical material, but then gets really two dimensional near the end - or at least on philosophical rails, as it were (explained more below).
SO it ends up being disappointing even though from a visual standpoint, it is fantastic throughout.
[MAJOR SPOLIERS]
It all starts going wrong when Ryan gives you the speech about how a real man chooses. Killing Ryan, I can see where you have to do that because he orders you basically. But then why not from that point being able to start exerting some control? You have at that point a clear choice of inserting the card to turn off the overload (or whatever that did, I forget now) but really you have no choice since you are locked in that room forever until you do the one thing that lets the game proceed. You can't even opt to kill yourself!
After that you are just going after the typical insane power-mad bad guy with no real choices to be made.
The game would have been a lot more interesting if you could have broken free of control a little earlier and opted to side with Ryan or the bad guy, instead of killing them both....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
seven. you're so damn predictable.
I've pretty much played most FPS games for over 10 years now, and I love Bioshock. Has a nice storyline and the atmosphere is pretty hip. Give it a shot before you condemn it.
...that the backlash is really against all the pants-creaming 99.999% "greatest game of all time" reviews that Bioshock got. When that game came out there was some sort of contagious mass hysteria in the gaming press - seldom have I read such ridiculous hyperbole about a game.
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.
Read Pynchon.
The entire time I was playing Bioshock the same thought ran through my head: "This game just begs for a multiplayer element to it." 2K Games threw away some exciting multiplayer substance with the plasmid and weapon upgrade elements of the game. Combined with the unique underwater environments, it could have come together nicely.
Look at Call of Duty 4, without the online mutliplayer it would have been in the same category as Bioshock; an incredible game with very little replay value.
I'm always amazed by the people who take advantage of all the things that make the game easier, and then complain that it is too easy. Are people really so undisciplined that they are unable to make their own challenges, and have to have them forced on them? Sure, you can pop away at a Big Daddy with your pistol 'til it kills you, resurrect in the Vita chamber, shoot it a few more times, die, and repeat until the Big Daddy is dead? But why would you want to?
Don't like the Vita-chambers? Don't use 'em! If you die, just reload from a saved game. For a real challenge, don't do any manual saves, and rely on the automatic saves at the beginning of the level. If that's not scary enough, how about making the wrench your default weapon?
I thought the game was excellent! The story brought some interesting philosphy to the gamer, and explored a relevant viewpoint of a purely capitalist and elitist society. I didn't find the game too easy, there is a difficulty setting if you do. Being able to respawn nearby wasn't a bad thing in my books either. I absolutely hate having to backtrack through an entire level, or past a long sequence of enemies everytime I die in a game. i don't find it fun and I don't have the time for it. I want to get to the next area while still being challenged. i.e. I want to finish the game, whether I suck or not. I paid the same 50 bucks as everyone else for my SINGLE player experience. I thought Bioshock was a great game,a game the player could play as he wished, and a game which I think players of all skill levels can complete. I have no idea why that would be a bad thing.
-Gel214th
But it was just a bit more shallow than it was first advertised. Maybe PC gamers just have a little higher standards?
Also the marketing occasionally left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth -
on the "Cult of Rapture" site, someone asked early on:"Isn't there a risk that a cross platform UI is going to suck?" and the community representative on the site answered "No no no! This is a game that is designed 100% first for consoles, we will do everything to make the UI perfect for consoles. Consoles."
When PC gamers were upset about this, the programmers went out to say "The community representative got this a bit wrong. We are going to make it polished for ALL platforms. We are PC gamers ourselves foremost, we are obviously going to make a good PC UI." And I agree, the UI was nice, not like Oblivion or that abomination Deus Ex 2. However, many other gameplay choices were obviously made with, if not consoles, at least the casual gamer in mind. Vitachambers, all skills/plasmids could be maxed, hacking too easy, blah blah blah.
Then when it was just a few weeks left, there was a blizzard of hype saying "This is a FPS! It has always been a FPS! Totally going to revolutionize FPS genre! A fun shooter first and foremost!" It was obvious they had decided that RPG was now an acronym to avoid like poison.
So yeah, without those things perhaps some people would have been a bit more charitable.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I see you got modded down as troll.. How dare you express an opinion? Shame on you!!
I actually enjoyed the game up until the point I realized that there was no penalty for dying. After that I would just shoot the big daddies then get them to follow me back to a respawn point and use the crowbar over and over. By the time I got to the third section I was full of everything you could possibly get.
Your correct about having to replay for the ending as well. I just watched the other endings on youtube after completing the game.