Irrational Games shutting down

[Lagole Gon]

All it costs is just a minute now

Stop wanking to animated porn. It's bad for you.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Goodbye Irrational, you are going to be known for trying to make mediocre System Shock 2 clones for years and failing even harder each time. Goodbye, nobody will miss you as you are dead since 1999. Finaly, 2k put bullet on your undead brain.

I disagree on this one. SWAT 4 and Freedom Force were pretty good.

Ah, shit, misread the post a bit. Oh well, modern console kiddies won't play them.

 

[Caim]

I do believe I'm seeing a pattern of "creative" people not doing so well as studio heads. Every Avellone needs his Urquhart, I suppose.

Bingo. Even if you can lead by example you need someone to wrangle the art team/code monkeys/sound guys/game designers and give them stuff to do.

Earlier this year I've worked with a small team to develop a game and I quickly found myself in such a position: since I cannot do art or code worth a damn I was more of a designer/director: talking about what we needed to do in the next iteration, giving the coders stuff to do then cut their leashes to let them work their magic. It worked pretty well.

 

[Azalin]

I do believe I'm seeing a pattern of "creative" people not doing so well as studio heads. Every Avellone needs his Urquhart, I suppose.

Mosrt creative people(Tim Schafer,Ken Levine,Peter Molyeneux,etc) aren't that good managers actually,they need someone to keep them grounded to reality

 

[Roguey]

Levine wasn't going to change, so the employees would need to change around him.

2k sure is awfully accommodating to a guy who wrote some entertaining genre fiction 15 years ago.

 

[J1M]

Shouldn't "1998 mode" of the DLC be a free patch? Where you can pay money to unlock 2014 mode?

 

[Martius]

Shouldn't "1998 mode" of the DLC be a free patch? Where you can pay money to unlock 2014 mode?

Nah, it could be another paid dlc. Just like last Metro had hard difficulty as paid dlc (and preorder bonus).

 

[J1M]

Shouldn't "1998 mode" of the DLC be a free patch? Where you can pay money to unlock 2014 mode?

Nah, it could be another paid dlc. Just like last Metro had hard difficulty as paid dlc (and preorder bonus).

The joke is that in 1998 nobody asked for money when they patched extra content into their game.

 

[Xor]

Well, they did, but they called it an expansion pack and it usually came with about half a game worth of content, plus additional features. Nowadays expansion packs are just slightly longer DLCs and you're lucky of they don't split it into 3 pieces.

 

[LESS T_T]

Levine on his new game's narrative structure:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...ans-for-a-new-approach-to-narrative-structure

Levine described the nuts and bolts of the system he hopes will facilitate that as a broadly faction-based system, where groups of NPCs are motivated by various and often conflicting 'passions'. Those passions, when met or confounded, will affect an NPC's attitude towards players, granting advantages or causing difficulties for the player. Whilst those factors may be broadly aligned within groups, individuals within that group may have conflicting motivations. A village of orcs, for example, may have a broadly held animosity against a nearby elven settlement, but an individual orc could carry a secret torch for an individual elf. Slaughtering elves wholesale will broadly raise your profile with orcs generally, but lower that individual's opinion of you.

The complexity of that interdependent narrative web offers a significant variation of perspectives within a story. By appeasing different passions and affecting your relationships, a player experiences different journeys.

So far, so Fallout, you may think - or Elder Scrolls, or Fable or STALKER. What makes Levine's plans more interesting is his idea of shuffling those passions around each time, meaning characters change each time you play, forcing players to renegotiate that network of social interactions differently in each playthrough. NPC stars could have a list of 10 or 20 potential passions, a few of which can be randomly assigned at the beginning of each playthrough. Those passions will be related to the point of not being mutually exclusive, but could vary wildly in each iteration.

These passions relate to quests, which affect the passion 'sliders' of everyone who is invested in them, either positively or negatively. In Levine's system, goodwill is a limited resource, making appeasing passions a zero-sum game. You can't please everybody all of the time.

Levine went on to to ponder the ability to add content 'in' to a game, rather than 'on' to it. DLC for BioShock was an add-on, he says, because it's in addition to the original content. Adding new technologies or social systems to Civilization would be adding 'in', because it affects the path of the play through by creating new branches and paths. In the system Levine describes, this could take the form of new characters, passions for existing characters, entire new factions or races, or the imposition of external forces which unite otherwise warring factions, overriding passions or giving focus to certain motivations like survival.

By the time Levine had wrapped up, what his audience was left with sounded a lot like a loose plan for semi-procedurally generated narrative systems which could provide a basis for a game operated as a service. Whilst he didn't explain that explicitly, the outline here would clearly fit that mould: an iterative, easily updated game which would be massively monetisable, with obvious potential for user-generated content, scenario generation or modding. As he was very clear to point out, Levine wasn't revealing any specific game plans or making definite announcements, but this marks a considerable shift in process for a man who is famed for his authorial intent and grand narratives.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it's molyneux all over again.

 

[Xor]

it's molyneux all over again.

This will be worse. Levine's managed to build up a huge fanbase with his "a good story should confuse people" approach to design, whereas Molyneux never really had anything other than the eternal slavish devotion of the gaming press because he made a good game once in the 80s and was the CEO of a company that made a few OK games in the 90s.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

it's molyneux all over again.

The difference being that Levine at least delivers ~20% of what he promises. That's ~20% more than Molyfraud.

 

[Astral Rag]

a company that made a few OK games in the 90s.

 

[Xor]

Truth be told, I never much cared for Dungeon Keeper, and that's just about the only Bullfrog game I've played. In any case my point was about Molyneux being a hack.

 

[Athelas]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-21-ken-levines-next-wont-be-a-linear-narrative

One example Levine gave was deciding which of two NPCs to date. One might have a personality the player likes more, while the other has more practical gameplay bonuses.

 

[Xor]

Well, that sounds like it's going to be a train wreck. Should be fun to watch, at least.

 

[DalekFlay]

All female gamers will choose gameplay bonuses. All male players will choose waifu.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY!

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-04-17-the-true-story-of-bioshock

Have only skimmed over it but it appears that Ken was a real dick to his team, and they appreciated it very much.

 

[Infinitron]

After an hour or so, the men put down the controllers and gathered for a Q&A session to answer questions about what they'd seen and played. The players spoke candidly, not knowing that the developers could see and hear everything. The feedback was brutal. The game was too dark. They didn't know where they were supposed to go. They had grown weary of collecting all that loot. Nobody trusted Atlas, the disembodied voice who acted as both welcoming party and guide to Rapture. One attendee described Atlas, who at the time spoke in a Morgan Freeman-esque Southern drawl, as a "lecherous Colonel Sanders". Another player somehow missed the fact that Rapture was an underwater city. Most of the group found the story entirely confusing.

The feedback was direct. It hurt. With only a few months to go before the game's release, the temptation for the designers was to criticise the players, rather than listen. Someone pointed out that one of the players didn't seem to know how to hold the controller properly. Someone else cast aspersions on the players' literacy: perhaps these people lacked the education to catch the game's highbrow references? Someone else suggested that they had perhaps shown off the wrong sections of the game. Jonathan Chey, one of Irrational Games' three co-founders, suggested the way that the session had been organised was as much of a problem as the game itself. But behind the carapace of bargaining, everybody knew there was truth to what had been said.

"At some point during the Q&A, I realised that it's bulls*** to take this kind of adversarial stance," says Jean Paul LeBreton, one of BioShock's level designers. "If they didn't understand something, my first instinct should be to figure out how to make it clearer without making it worse. Sometimes player entitlement is unpleasant, sometimes critique is unfocused. There is almost always truth hidden in it, though." Levine, the weight of a $25m underwater world on his shoulders, agreed. "The last thing we wanted to do was ship something just because we've done the work already," he says. "Looking back at it, you think of those days as some of the high points, because those are the ingredients for making something special. They are the price that you pay."

Oh man.

Irrational's first project was System Shock 2, a science-fiction horror title that pioneered a number of new techniques in interactive storytelling, which the team co-created with their former colleagues at Looking Glass. The year after System Shock 2's release, Levine sent a two-page pitch for a sequel to publisher Electronic Arts. The document was bare bones, describing how the previous game's cliff-hanger would be resolved. EA rejected the idea, most likely because, while System Shock 2 was a critical success, it was also a commercial failure.

Aww.

"One of the central themes of BioShock's development was the tension between our initial aim to make a spiritual sequel to System Shock 2 and the need to make a very successful mass-market console game," recalls Chey. "Shortly after the game's strong showing at E3 2006, Ken emerged from discussions with 2K marketing and announced to the team that we would be marketing the game as a shooter - but not to worry, we were still making the same smart FPS/RPG hybrid, we might just make a few small design adjustments here and there to make it accessible to the Halo crowd." Lead artist Shawn Robertson understands why 2K made the change. "At the time, creating a game that was set in an underwater failed utopia espousing objectivist values didn't really seem like something that the public at large would enjoy," he says.

As the game's budget swelled, the pressure to create something with mass-market appeal increased in kind. LeBreton considers that Levine's outburst derived not only from a desire for creative rigour, but also fear. "I think it stemmed from a growing lack of trust in the people he'd hired." Levine's strong objection to the reference to 'cyborg ninjas' may also have stemmed from a tension between his own formative nerd interests, and the desire for his work to reach a wide, mainstream audience and to be respected as a creator outside of the video game playing public. During a BAFTA interview in 2013, Levine talked candidly about how, as a lonely child, he would play Dungeons & Dragons by himself. Video games were "my only friend," he said at the time. "Anything that reminded Ken of the nerdy roots from which BioShock sprang was terrifying to him," says LeBreton.

 

[Caim]

Wait, hold the fucking phone here. They could have made Atlas sound like Morgan Freeman... and they ditched that idea?

so much it curves back, flatlines and starts to become again.

 

[Xor]

So it's EA's fault there was no SS3. Just another reason to hate EA, I guess.

During a BAFTA interview in 2013, Levine talked candidly about how, as a lonely child, he would play Dungeons & Dragons by himself. Video games were "my only friend," he said at the time.

Wow, that's pretty fucking pathetic. I was very anti-social growing up and even I had friends to play D&D with.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Games testers are mentally challenged and denying theory of evolution.
News at 11.

And SySo3 exist, it's just rebranded to modern audiency, based on other group of horrors (slashers?) and renamed to Dead Space.
Which is highly suprising considering magnetism of publishers to franchises raeps...

 

[DragoFireheart]

So it's EA's fault there was no SS3. Just another reason to hate EA, I guess.

During a BAFTA interview in 2013, Levine talked candidly about how, as a lonely child, he would play Dungeons & Dragons by himself. Video games were "my only friend," he said at the time.

Wow, that's pretty fucking pathetic. I was very anti-social growing up and even I had friends to play D&D with.

Even I had friends and I played a fuckton of video games.

 

[Melan]

So they lobotomised their own game to appeal to the brain-dead, and what's worse, Ken Levine became a hero for it because the gaming press wanted to hold up someone as proof that games were Art and auteur theory applied to game designers.

"I didn't want to play pinball or whatever so I decided to replace the grenade that the grenadier AI used with a 3D model of a cat, which would explode on contact." Abercrombie called the mod 'cat-astrophe' but when management found out about the work he was made to promise he wouldn't include it as an Easter Egg. "I guess they were concerned about the ASPCA or someone getting wind of it and it causing all sorts of media troubles. So I just made a video locally and then went on, fixing bugs."

Such a random detail that still tells stories about the kind of priorities they had - don't offend anyone! Don't risk anything! Not even in an easter egg!