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Nah. Very first requirement for that is increasing cyborg conversion chamber quantities to every few rooms and enabled by default, as well as putting a yellow navigation arrow top-middle of the screen. Then you have your clown game where the entire thing is an act; pretending to be a game.
You do know that the arrow and vita chambers can be turned off right?
-Not on all gaming platforms.-Not at first on those that you can; was added via patch.-They're enabled by default; will be what the majority experience. -Making it optional is a band aid on top of a gaping flaw of fundamental design.I'm not going to bother addressing how you think they function identically to SS1, nor explain what I meant earlier. I'd be wasting my time (again).
I'm heading out, but I want you to sit down tonight and really think about these concepts, and not blindly defend something that breaks the very fundamentals of game design. It's OK to find value in the audio-visual experience, and have positive feelings for what was likely novel and cool to you at 13 years of age, but to grow as a person you need to be able to practice objectivity, to be able to parse facts and feelings: Bioshock's gameplay is bottom of the barrel.
@RocketMan saying you liked it then going on to blaming a particular modder's implementation of it...well that's an unfair argument don't you think? It's all well implemented in Doom. Game's a stone cold classic.
(anti-patterns are the study of a “wrong” solution to a problem, to understand why it’s wrong and how the problem could be solved in a better way.)
When I first played Bioshock (long after it came out), I wrote this article about some of the deep flaws in its UI and gameplay design, with reference to their design documents and why I think they missed the mark.Might as well re-post it here since the Bioshock discussion doesn't seem to be going away.
It might be worth creating a Bioshock thread.I sort of wish "game analysis" was more prevalent in this forum (and maybe had a dedicated space) since a lot of people here have very interesting, non-mainstream takes on gaming which I find interesting.Also, I am reading your article now. One quick thingI would go further and say that anti-patterns (at least when used in the programming sense) are generally considered good design and are thrown around as general-purpose or working solutions, but are in fact detrimental to any project they are implemented in. Singletons come to mind - used by everyone, praised as a solution to a problem, and fundamentally destructive by their core design.I would say this even applies to Bioshock too, and makes the comparison even stronger. In the same way bad developers will riddle their code with singletons in an attempt to gain "structure", bad game designers will streamline and undermine gameplay systems for reasons such as "realism", "streamlining" or "game flow", all of which end up making the game worse as a result.Bioshock specifically seems to be a game where the developers likely had far bigger aspirations than what was delivered, but it was streamlined and streamlined and simplified all to get rid of the "awkwardness" and "bloat" of SS2, only to end up with a hollow shell of a game devoid of substance.I have not read the developers design docs and I can't read their minds, but that's the impression I get when playing Bioshock - it wanted to be System Shock 3 but then everything got removed and it became just another shooter.
I have not read the developers design docs and I can't read their minds, but that's the impression I get when playing Bioshock - it wanted to be System Shock 3 but then everything got removed and it became just another shooter.
The original vision for Bioshock, from the old design docs, was really interesting. It had a lot more complicated systems in it, like changing the pressure in an area to affect its enemy ecology.
Bioshock was not a hollow shell and had plenty of substance and wasn't just another shooter...Also Bioshock =/= System Shock, and there is more than just the 1st game
It was and is a great game, and there is no way to have a topic about it that doesn't devolve into arguing
IDK what singletons are, but doesn't seem to have affected anything if I didn't notice
Again it is fine to have a preference but don't act like anyone who likes it is wrong or blind, cause that shit is not true, whether something is good or not isn't up to just you all, it depends on the person and a number of factors.
Tho again, too many people treat BS like SS3, when it isn't
The issue is that Bioshock seems to have literally been designed as a successor to System Shock 2, was supposed to use largely the same mechanics, and was sort of supposed to be "System shock 2, but less clunky".Comparing Bioshock to System Shock (2) is completely fair since that's what Bioshock was inspired by and what it sought to be a modern reinterpretation of. That's why the mechanics are so similar (albeit much more simplified).Most of it's mechanics were essentially stripped-down versions of SS2 mechanics. Lootable items but no inventory. Plasmids but no PSI skills. Stats and player upgrades replaced with Tonics. Hacking pauses time and is minigame based with no skills or resources required. Vita chambers, etc. Virtually every mechanic in Bioshock is directly comparable to a mechanic in System Shock 2, and in almost every case, the System Shock 2 version is deeper, more involved, and offers more decision making.I guess you can technically say it's not JUST a shooter in a technical sense. It does have a few mechanics other shooters don't have (although even shooters like DOOM are now adding RPG mechanics. I would argue the character development options in Doom 2016 are far more advanced than Bioshock, for instance). But it's certainly also very substanceless, in that it's mechanics are very shallow, barebones versions of standard imsim mechanics, and it leaves the game feeling underwhelming and undercooked for a lot of people. You could say calling Bioshock a shooter is sort of a meme, a comment made to troll, but there's an element of truth to it - it is first and foremost a shooter, and the rest of the mechanics are very peripheral to the core shooting gameplay.Discussion of the game would be the entire point of a Bioshock thread.A singleton is essentially a class with a private constructor, and a public static Instance() method. Because it can't be instantiated, other code references it through the static Class.Instance() method, rather than instantiating it. When called, a private static instance variable is checked - if it's null, the instance instantiates itself and associates the instance variable with the newly created instance. If it's not null, it returns the instance that was previously created.This SOUNDS like a good idea on paper because it gives every class in your codebase very convenient access to a particular class without having to go to the effort of passing around references. It's very tempting to just use PlayerManager.Instance().Health somewhere, for instance, rather than having to pass in a Player object to a class and then reference it's Health variable.But it's a mistake, because it creates a hard dependency on the singleton class, makes polymorphism impossible, and permanently limits it to one instance, which can undermine your design in spectacular ways. You are always, in 100% of cases, better off passing an interface through constructors for every class that needs to know about it, rather than using a singleton. If you want to get fancy, DI frameworks can do this for you (although I also consider DI a bit of an anti-pattern as it tends to overcomplicate what should be a relatively straightforward task).Anyway, programming talk aside...Nobody is saying that you're not allowed to like Bioshock. You aren't blind for enjoying a game. I enjoy plenty of games that I don't think are particularly good. I love Star Trek Away Team, partly because I grew up with it and it's a somewhat solid top-down tactics game, the first one I ever played. But I won't pretend it's remotely good, just sort of competent, and if someone asked me if it was worth seeking out and investing time into playing, I would say probably not.It's possible to have a rational discussion about the quality of a game, including how well it accomplishes the goals it sets out to accomplish, without ever mentioning whether or not it's enjoyable or whether or not people are allowed to like it. That's a completely separate discussion.Go ahead, play and enjoy Bioshock. There's plenty of fun to be had there. Go nuts, nobody is stopping you. A lot of people just don't think it's particularly well designed, me included, and since we have access to the design documents, I think I can pretty objectively say that it fails to do what it set out to do. That has nothing to do with whether or not the game is "fun". I like games with complex mechanics, so Bioshock bore me. But you're free to enjoy whatever you find fun.
Well that probably wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t sold to us that way. Most of the buzz around Bioshock before launch was specifically about it being a System Shock successor of sorts.It literally has “shock” in the title. They knew what they were doing.Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Invisible War? That’s the level of regression that we’re talking here.
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