Ken Levine talks about BioShock on TTLG + video
Ken Levine talks about BioShock on TTLG + video
Development Info - posted by DarkUnderlord on Thu 21 September 2006, 07:03:07
Tags: BioShock; Irrational Games; Ken LevineKen Levine, the Lead Designer at Irrational Games, developers of BioShock, has made a post on Through the Looking Glass, an old fan-site for the long defunct Looking Glass Studios. In it, Levine defines accessibilty as it pertains to BioShock or at least, so he says:
Here's what Irrational is doing to make BioShock accessible.
1) Dynamic Training. This is the big investment we're making, and we believe it's a key element to bringing deeper games to non-core gamers. And for the rest of you, it's our stake to the heart to tutorial-itis. It's a system that watches how you play and dynamically genereates advice to point you towards game play options you might be missing ("hey, ever thought of hacking?"), systems you might be using wrong ("hey, how about some armor piercing rounds on that bot!", or even game systems you just don't get ("hey that's 12 security cameras you've been spotted by in a row. want to learn more about the security system?"). You can, of course, turn this system off if you don't like it.
2) It's going to be pretty! Guess what: Shock 2 having ugly character models and no translucency in our sprites was not a design choice!
3) People who play the game guns blazing will have a AAA experience as well. In Shock 2, we don't think we really were fair to the guns guys. Without compromising all of the systems I described above (hacking, crafting, research, etc), we're going to make things blow up nice.
4) Performance. I think a big barrier of entry on Shock 2 (for the mass market, not TTLGers) was the long load times and mediocre performance. One of our core goals with BioShock was making sure frame rates and load times were competitive.
If anything, BioShock is the deepest game we've ever made. Having real time and money to make it also means it will be the most accessible.IGN also has a 15 minute video of BioShock you can check out. The first 2 minutes of the video is Ken talking about their plans to "redefine what it means to be a first person shooter". Hrmm.. I guess that means we won't be covering it anymore then? Anyway, you see a girl and... It's pretty boring actually. Like watching someone play Half-Life but with spells and more puzzles.
Thanks babyarm!
Here's what Irrational is doing to make BioShock accessible.
1) Dynamic Training. This is the big investment we're making, and we believe it's a key element to bringing deeper games to non-core gamers. And for the rest of you, it's our stake to the heart to tutorial-itis. It's a system that watches how you play and dynamically genereates advice to point you towards game play options you might be missing ("hey, ever thought of hacking?"), systems you might be using wrong ("hey, how about some armor piercing rounds on that bot!", or even game systems you just don't get ("hey that's 12 security cameras you've been spotted by in a row. want to learn more about the security system?"). You can, of course, turn this system off if you don't like it.
2) It's going to be pretty! Guess what: Shock 2 having ugly character models and no translucency in our sprites was not a design choice!
3) People who play the game guns blazing will have a AAA experience as well. In Shock 2, we don't think we really were fair to the guns guys. Without compromising all of the systems I described above (hacking, crafting, research, etc), we're going to make things blow up nice.
4) Performance. I think a big barrier of entry on Shock 2 (for the mass market, not TTLGers) was the long load times and mediocre performance. One of our core goals with BioShock was making sure frame rates and load times were competitive.
If anything, BioShock is the deepest game we've ever made. Having real time and money to make it also means it will be the most accessible.
Thanks babyarm!
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