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."

Comments

Wise words

[spleen_blender]

"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

Re:Wise words

[Elemenope]

Good quote. OTOH, the hot fudge sundae sometimes--just, sometimes--needs to die. Sure, a reviewer is someone who knows the route but can't drive the car...but even they can still tell if the driver is going backwards on the wrong side of the road at 80 mph, and when they witness such calamities, they should say so with all the vitriolic vituperation that such a situation calls for.

I must've missed a memo.

[InfinityWpi]

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!

Videogame Ghetto!

[morari]

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).

"Real" RPGs

[Quiet_Desperation]

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. :)

Re:"Real" RPGs

[Phrogman]

Don't mistakenly identify "desire for depth and complexity" with "nitpicky and tedious". You may find complex game elements nitpicky - because that doesn't suit your preferred style of gameplay - but a lot of players want at least the illusion of depth to their game. They like the complexity because - I am supposing - it gives the feeling of accomplishment to master all that complexity. What you view as perfect, I would probably view as shallow, what you view as "tedious" I would probably see as challenging.

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.

Can't gauge backlash

[faloi]

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.

Backlash? No...

[the_skywise]

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.

Re:Good game

[daninspokane]

Ok, ok, maybe crap was too harsh.. but you have to admit it was put on a pedastel and hailed as the second coming of Christ when it was... slightly above average at best.

Totally missing the point...

[David20321]

The biggest complaint I have seen about Bioshock is that you never need to make choices in how the player character develops. By the end of the game you will be a gun-wielding, plasmid-blasting tank who is an expert hacker. This causes several key gameplay problems:

• There is little reason to play again because you will follow the same path in the same way. In System Shock 2, when you play again you still follow the same path, but you have to deal with obstacles differently depending on your character's abilities.

• Because you have so many different weapons and powers, it creates a paradox of choice. Since you have so many ways to kill any particular enemy, and there is little feedback to help find the most efficient way, it becomes less satisfying because I feel like I could have done it better.

• 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.

Game as Novel.

[Remus Shepherd]

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.

I'll disagree

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:I'll disagree

[spleen_blender]

I think you're missing an important qualifier: "who expresses rage and loathing"

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.

I think you'll find

[caitsith01]

...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.