Game endings, like BioShock's, suck
Game endings, like BioShock's, suck
Editorial - posted by DarkUnderlord on Fri 20 June 2008, 11:08:21
Tags: BioShockAn interesting article over at the Den of Geek. It's about game endings and how unsatisfactory they are:
This scenario played itself out repeatedly throughout the 80s: I fought through five levels of bare-knuckle violence in Renegade to watch my rock-hard avatar get a peck on the cheek from his pixelated girlfriend; I hacked off limbs and chopped off heads in Barbarian, and was rewarded with a static graphic of a woman in a bikini sitting at my muscle bound warrior's feet. Thrilling.
Fast forward to 2008, and I've finally completed Bioshock (yes, I know it came out last year, but at least I got there in the end), and that same feeling of gloom I got from all those games back in the eighties comes welling up again - after several hours of play time, I'm confronted with a brief and largely forgettable cut-scene that features a lot of hand holding. From a game that revelled in stark, disturbing imagery, it was a terrible disappointment. Interestingly, even Bioshock's creator Ken Levine agreed, even stating in a recent interview that his ending was something of an anticlimax.
It was sort of understandable, given the technical limitations of the time, that an 80s game like Stop the Express or Manic Miner couldn't end with a dramatic or awe-inspiring FMV sequence, but these days there's simply no excuse for a rushed - or practically non-existent, in the case of Half Life 2 - denouement. And yet it seems that genuinely satisfying or surprising game endings are the exception rather than the rule.Hmmm... Makes you think about Fallout 3's six billion different endings or whatever number they're up to now. However, I don't agree with the article's assessment that the crappy endings are a result of the length of modern games. Apparently people get bored playing these modern "long" video games, so a decent ending isn't worthwhile developing. Sorry, but when did 10 hours become long?
Spotted @ BluesNews
This scenario played itself out repeatedly throughout the 80s: I fought through five levels of bare-knuckle violence in Renegade to watch my rock-hard avatar get a peck on the cheek from his pixelated girlfriend; I hacked off limbs and chopped off heads in Barbarian, and was rewarded with a static graphic of a woman in a bikini sitting at my muscle bound warrior's feet. Thrilling.
Fast forward to 2008, and I've finally completed Bioshock (yes, I know it came out last year, but at least I got there in the end), and that same feeling of gloom I got from all those games back in the eighties comes welling up again - after several hours of play time, I'm confronted with a brief and largely forgettable cut-scene that features a lot of hand holding. From a game that revelled in stark, disturbing imagery, it was a terrible disappointment. Interestingly, even Bioshock's creator Ken Levine agreed, even stating in a recent interview that his ending was something of an anticlimax.
It was sort of understandable, given the technical limitations of the time, that an 80s game like Stop the Express or Manic Miner couldn't end with a dramatic or awe-inspiring FMV sequence, but these days there's simply no excuse for a rushed - or practically non-existent, in the case of Half Life 2 - denouement. And yet it seems that genuinely satisfying or surprising game endings are the exception rather than the rule.
Spotted @ BluesNews
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