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BioShock's Ken Levine on hype, dev challenges, advancing action games
shacknews.com — Ken Levine, co-founder and creative director at Irrational Games, speaks about BioShock's mass internet hysteria, potential missteps with the hacking mini-game, development challenges, creative freedom, philosophy in games, pushing the action genre forward, drawing from System Shock 2, and much more. A must read for anyone interested in BioShock!
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- DrUc1f3r, on 10/10/2007, -3/+5Great interview.
- TheIneffableBob, on 10/10/2007, -11/+3*****!
- sleeepy, on 10/10/2007, -10/+1did i do it rite?
- futtbucker, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Those aren't the usual questions you hear from gaming websites. excellent stuff.
- seriousguy, on 10/10/2007, -25/+4Another Digg article asked: "Is 'Bioshock' the best game of 2007?"
I ask: Have the makers of 'Bioshock' spent the most money on buying Diggs and paying off writers and sites to promote their game? (Digg is the best platform to game for video game makers - 9 in 10 Diggers have a video game addiction, the other 1 in 10 game the rest into buying their games).- crazybrit, on 10/10/2007, -5/+12I promise I didn't get paid to digg you down.
- DudleyInnocent, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8Neither did I.
Scout's honor. - abben, on 10/10/2007, -5/+1Maybe he has a point. Maybe instead of making a good game they just pay people to submit stories to digg and hope for the best. That's definitely more plausible.
- battletrax, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3oh shut up you kind of people hate any popular games.
maybe its popular because its good moron. Sadly this theory doesn't apply to music.....- seriousguy, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1Or celebrities
- brufleth, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Played the demo, wasn't impressed. I like lots of popular games. Bioshock is nothing particularly special though. A good game but not THE BEST game by any means.
- crushtheenemy, on 10/10/2007, -14/+1bioshock gets "spammed" almost as much as ron paul does on here.
- Sarzec, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Next big digg headline: Ron Paul hacks iphone to play Bioshock
- Dustin00, on 10/10/2007, -12/+2What? Nothing about the great power of modern PC security software?
He can go lick my cat's litterbox.- quaunaut, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Or you could use some common sense. 2k the publisher made that decision, not his development team.
- shuffle2, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2he could still comment on the issues at hand....
- VeganG, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1It's not really a wise decision to talk ***** about one's boss in a very public forum.
- kitaljevich, on 10/10/2007, -6/+4Widescreen Biach!
- SSCrow, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8I'm really liking Bioshock so far. But seriously, Its WAY overhyped. Its a Great game, I'm glad I bought it.
But there is something about it, It feels very Deus Ex at a certain point, where some tasks feel like such a chore.- abben, on 10/10/2007, -5/+0I think this should be called the "middle-ground troll".
- kelbear, on 10/10/2007, -5/+1What is overhyped? It's a good game. It's due to the sum of its parts really. It's building on the sleeper-hit SS2, so it's not really going waaaay out of line into new territory. It's revisiting an older idea and doing it better with greater detail and it's getting the acclaim it deserves.
I think the most adventurous chance they took here was 1.) The entire presentation around Little Sisters. And 2.) Art Deco. Goddamn that's hot.
The rest is stuff that has been done before, but is just done extremely well here.
It doesn't have to be particularly new. It just has to be /good/. And that what this game has done. Half-life did it too. Halo. Look, even Deus Ex spawned off of System Shock which came before it. - brufleth, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I agree. Definitely over hyped. It is a nice game. It isn't mind blowing and it doesn't warrant the constant digging but it is nice.
- BradMW, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Bioshock today isn't even half the game Deus Ex was. It looks great and enjoyable for the most part, but the combat is horrendous - absolutely horrendous. I spend 75% of the game simply searching every single inch of the world for extra ammo and eve so I can actually use the fun plasmids, which aren't really that fun. Also, the game is far to linear. The best part about Bioshock is it's environment, hands down, nobody is arguing. If they made the focus of the game on exploration, then the environment would be highlighted and people wouldn't mindlessly follow the map helper while scrounging for ammo. Also, the hacking mini-game is beyond bad, I'm patiently awaiting a mod to remove it entirely. Am I saying the game is bad as a whole? Definitely not, but it could be so much more. Imagine Bioshock as a Metroid-style game where you're free to explore the world in any way and ordering is done by "locking off" certain areas until you have the proper plasmid to obtain access. That would be a phenominal game regardless of how combat works. Now take that same game and add guns that don't feel like peashooters. Also, having to use the environment to down Big Daddies would be a much more enjoyable experience since it would vary the gameplay. I did not enjoy knowing how many Big Daddies were in each "level" and having to track them all down just to lob 5 grenades at them and call it quits. Great game, could have just done more to push the genre to truly new heights. /arm-chair-designer
- DudleyInnocent, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Paragraphs! English teaching Nazi demands thought separation!
- ArmchairAthlete, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3"potential missteps with the hacking mini-game"
The Pipe Dream ripoff as the only hacking game over and over is my biggest complaint so far, but that's not saying much.- AK10, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2As he points out in the interview, there are two ways to skip the mini-game and there is only one time in the whole game you must hack to proceed.
Personally, I really like the hacking game!- jsmith39, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I liked it the first 10-12 times, now it's kind of annoying.
- dillibob, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2ya i think its almost a nice little break
- Lunarbunny, on 10/10/2007, -1/+0It keeps making me want to download a copy of Pipe Dream somewhere
- AK10, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2As he points out in the interview, there are two ways to skip the mini-game and there is only one time in the whole game you must hack to proceed.
- abben, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Funny, I remember it used to be Warren Spector who was the "mastermind" behind games like Theif and System Shock. It was probably just hundreds of coincidental misspellings where they meant to write "Ken Levine".
- kelbear, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2OMG X-COM.
That last comment was the best part of the whole interview. Please. Be. True. - ZephyrNinety, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4I haven't played games very much recently but I gotta say, there's something about BioShock that's just new. Yeah, it's a shooter, but 1. The story is brilliant. 2. The gameplay just keeps getting more and more fun.
Gears of War was overhyped to HELL. Yeah, it was good but the story was *****. Admit it.- battletrax, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Graphics overhype anything... Killzone 2 anyone?
I bet it gets an at most an 8 from websites, and prob 10 from sony fanboys
- battletrax, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Graphics overhype anything... Killzone 2 anyone?
- Dustmuffins, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Pretty sweet interview. I think the fact that Bioshock is popular isn't so much that everything is awesome, it's just that nothing sucked.
- SteelChicken, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I still can't get the damn game to run.
Another sucker who fell for the hype. - isuisorisuaint, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3i think the hype is warranted. the majority are agreeing that this game is spectacular and at this point, I'm glad I'm on the side that agrees because it's fun as ***** to talk about.
- kahjah, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I just want the damn thing to run with all the settings and dx 10 maxed out. Am I asking for too much oh and maybe a patch
- BradMW, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I think the high point of Bioshock for me was when a commercial for a real-life movie came on the television next to me and I thought "wow, those graphics are almost as good as Bioshock's, what game is it?"
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