Jimquisition: Irrational Decisions (Or Freedom In Chains)

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

Subjective opinion it may be, but it's one that I cannot see any sane man disagreeing with. It'd be like saying that a roast dog turd is better eating than prime fillet steak or something. I'm sure SOMEBODY would agree with that statement, but don't ask me why.

It's more like saying that prime fillet steak done medium rare tastes like a roast dog turd to you, compared to prime fillet steak done medium well.

To make clear what I'm complaining of here - it's a triple-A game with LESS interactivity and replay value than many other games I've played, at much lower prices, that are not AAA. I honestly cannot understand why anybody would pay more for less, unless all you're interested in is graphical fidelity. (I'm discounting the story and world because, again, as great as these are, you don't actually get to influence either in any meaningful way.)

At its simplest, what I'm complaining about is paying more money for less of an experience. Again, experience is subjective, but if a game actively limits what you can experience in it by an over-reliance on scripting and gameplay mechanics that you have no control over... how the heck do you argue that it's worth the money you're paying for it?

 

[chikusho]

Subjective opinion it may be, but it's one that I cannot see any sane man disagreeing with. It'd be like saying that a roast dog turd is better eating than prime fillet steak or something. I'm sure SOMEBODY would agree with that statement, but don't ask me why.

It's more like saying that prime fillet steak done medium rare tastes like a roast dog turd to you, compared to prime fillet steak done medium well.

To make clear what I'm complaining of here - it's a triple-A game with LESS interactivity and replay value than many other games I've played, at much lower prices, that are not AAA. I honestly cannot understand why anybody would pay more for less, unless all you're interested in is graphical fidelity. (I'm discounting the story and world because, again, as great as these are, you don't actually get to influence either in any meaningful way.)

At its simplest, what I'm complaining about is paying more money for less of an experience. Again, experience is subjective, but if a game actively limits what you can experience in it by an over-reliance on scripting and gameplay mechanics that you have no control over... how the heck do you argue that it's worth the money you're paying for it?

On the contrary. A game that actively limits what you can experience have much better control over what you actually do experience. Control over what you see, do and feel at any given point in the narrative.
A game without scripting and open ended gameplay mechanics require you to invent your own experience, which holds no guarantees for an enjoyable one.. Also, while the environment, world and story is smaller in games like Bioshock than other games, it has the opportunity to be more densely packed. I've personally gone through bioshock infinite three times, and I notice new cool stuff about the story, the characters and the world every, which actually enhances my first playthrough.

I think the mistake you are making is assuming that 15 minutes on a rollercoaster is an experience that is worth less than two hours in a bouncy castle. Or that walking through an art gallery is less of an experience than making finger paintings.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

Subjective opinion it may be, but it's one that I cannot see any sane man disagreeing with. It'd be like saying that a roast dog turd is better eating than prime fillet steak or something. I'm sure SOMEBODY would agree with that statement, but don't ask me why.

It's more like saying that prime fillet steak done medium rare tastes like a roast dog turd to you, compared to prime fillet steak done medium well.

To make clear what I'm complaining of here - it's a triple-A game with LESS interactivity and replay value than many other games I've played, at much lower prices, that are not AAA. I honestly cannot understand why anybody would pay more for less, unless all you're interested in is graphical fidelity. (I'm discounting the story and world because, again, as great as these are, you don't actually get to influence either in any meaningful way.)

At its simplest, what I'm complaining about is paying more money for less of an experience. Again, experience is subjective, but if a game actively limits what you can experience in it by an over-reliance on scripting and gameplay mechanics that you have no control over... how the heck do you argue that it's worth the money you're paying for it?

On the contrary. A game that actively limits what you can experience have much better control over what you actually do experience. Control over what you see, do and feel at any given point in the narrative.
A game without scripting and open ended gameplay mechanics require you to invent your own experience, which holds no guarantees for an enjoyable one.. Also, while the environment, world and story is smaller in games like Bioshock than other games, it has the opportunity to be more densely packed. I've personally gone through bioshock infinite three times, and I notice new cool stuff about the story, the characters and the world every, which actually enhances my first playthrough.

I think the mistake you are making is assuming that 15 minutes on a rollercoaster is an experience that is worth less than two hours in a bouncy castle. Or that walking through an art gallery is less of an experience than making finger paintings.

Who the heck brought BIOSHOCK into this? It's the second sequel I'm complaining about. I've completed Bioshock three times! (I've completed "System Shock" only twice, but still regard it as my favorite game ever, just for the experience it gave me... I also completed "System Shock 2" at least twenty times, and probably a good deal more.)

Again, I don't want to rain on anybody else's enjoyment of a game, and plenty of people obviously did enjoy it. BUT here's how your "bouncy castle" analogy holds up.

So let's say you go onto the bouncy castle. You've gone onto many other bouncy castles made by the same people before, so you're expecting a certain... standard.

But let's say you get on the bouncy castle, and all of a sudden, you're not allowed to put your arms or legs out when you jump - and landing on your butt is a definite no-no. You'd be pretty brassed-off, wouldn't you?

THEN let's say that the person operating the castle (do bouncy castles need operating?) told you that you HAD to make certain movements. Maybe you had to smash your head against the floor, say. Don't want to smash your head against the floor? TOUGH. Do it or get off. At this point you'd probably be regretting your purchase.

"Infinite" is smashing your head against that damn floor time and time again. The two-weapon system not only renders the weapon upgrade system redundant (since it uses the exact same currency as the ammo dispensers - which none of Ken Levine's other games have done, by the way, so it baffles me why he's done it here - because you can't buy ammo AND upgrades) but also means that you have to use whatever weapons the game deigns "worthy" of you at any particular point. The vigors not only don't fit the world (there's maybe two enemies, total, who use them, despite some of them being on sale at a children's fair - including the one that makes you commit suicide, by the way!) but the game starts you off with so few "salts" that it's basically not worth using anything BUT the "possession" vigor. Why use any of the six offensive vigors when you can just use whatever guns you manage to pick up instead?

But as frustrating as the gameplay can be, in the end even these are side issues. The problem is that there's a fantastic world there, but I don't feel that I can influence it in any way. There's a great story (albeit one ripped from one of my favorite novels almost beat-for-beat) but what I do has no effect on it whatsoever. This wasn't the case in any of Levine's previous games. In "System Shock", "System Shock 2" and "Bioshock", I mostly felt as though I was driving the action. "Bioshock" had enough scripted events, but there was a POINT to them, and they still felt driven by my actions.

In "Bioshock Infinite", I felt like I was watching the game instead of participating in it. A movie that kept getting interrupted by annoying shooting sections that had nothing whatsoever to do with the story I was supposed to be participating in.

"System Shock" is twenty years old now, yet I could do INFINITELY more on Citadel Station than I ever could in Floating Columbia or whatever it was called. (Jeez, this is how much impression "Infinite" made on me... I can't even remember the name of the damn city!) I mean, holy crap, in "System Shock" you could FIRE A GIANT LASER AND DESTROY THE EARTH. It might be asking a bit much for EVERY game to include this feature (although honestly I think a lot of 'em would be improved if they did) but c'mon, give me a little freedom to wreck some stuff?

Captcha is "Gone dolally". Feels appropriate!

 

[C14N]

"System Shock" is twenty years old now, yet I could do INFINITELY more on Citadel Station than I ever could in Floating Columbia or whatever it was called. (Jeez, this is how much impression "Infinite" made on me... I can't even remember the name of the damn city!)

...but you did remember the name of the city, it was Columbia, you just added "floating" to the start which is something it does.

Also, you missed the point of the bouncy castle analogy. Infinite is supposed to be the roller coaster, something that generally does have pretty close restrictions on what you can do. The bouncy castle is supposed to be a more open ended game where you make your own fun. The point being that sometimes the restrictive experience is enjoyable too in it's own way. Personally, the two-weapons system never even entered my mind as a problem, I certainly didn't feel like I was getting "less game" or "less experience" than I got in Bioshock 1 because of it.

Anyway, I don't think the AAA single player game will die forever and I hope it doesn't. I think the current idea of "everything needs multiplayer" is coming to an end as developers realise that they're flooding a market that can really only support a handful of successful multiplayer shooters, much as they realised a little while ago that we had completely gone past the saturation point with MMOs. I mean if you look at titles like Dishonoured or Bioshock they've managed to do quite well with just single player. In fact, all 3 of the big 2013 games (Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us and GTA 5) were very much single-player focused (I know the latter two had multiplayer modes but most of the attention was on their single player campaigns).

I kind of hope that Titanfall represents a trend of where the industry will start to go with multiplayer games actually just being their own games rather than stapled on to an unrelated single-player campaign and then single player games can exist and do quite well separately.

I really don't want it to be the case that all the creative or interesting games are independent though. I like indie games as much as the next guy but I still like to have big, polished AAA games to balance it out, just as I enjoy watching independent films a lot but still want to see well-made star studded films with big budgets too, and those totally exist. I kind of feel like it's making baby steps to an auteur-type attitude and that's what we need. If there are some creative directors or teams out there who can just reliably turn a profit then publishers can just give them a bag of money and not interfere with marketing and focus-group mentality. Stuff like that is the reason film directors like Martin Scorsese or David Fincher or Christopher Nolan can keep making interesting films and it would be nice if we had some people like that in our industry. That's pretty much what Naughty Dog get from Sony and I think it's kind of how Valve are seen by a lot of people. They just consistently put out games that are popular enough that they will make their money back, even if it's not Call-of-Duty sales, it's still reliable.

 

[chikusho]

Who the heck brought BIOSHOCK into this? It's the second sequel I'm complaining about. I've completed Bioshock three times! (I've completed "System Shock" only twice, but still regard it as my favorite game ever, just for the experience it gave me... I also completed "System Shock 2" at least twenty times, and probably a good deal more.)

Again, I don't want to rain on anybody else's enjoyment of a game, and plenty of people obviously did enjoy it. BUT here's how your "bouncy castle" analogy holds up.

So let's say you go onto the bouncy castle. You've gone onto many other bouncy castles made by the same people before, so you're expecting a certain... standard.

But let's say you get on the bouncy castle, and all of a sudden, you're not allowed to put your arms or legs out when you jump - and landing on your butt is a definite no-no. You'd be pretty brassed-off, wouldn't you?

THEN let's say that the person operating the castle (do bouncy castles need operating?) told you that you HAD to make certain movements. Maybe you had to smash your head against the floor, say. Don't want to smash your head against the floor? TOUGH. Do it or get off. At this point you'd probably be regretting your purchase.

"Infinite" is smashing your head against that damn floor time and time again. The two-weapon system not only renders the weapon upgrade system redundant (since it uses the exact same currency as the ammo dispensers - which none of Ken Levine's other games have done, by the way, so it baffles me why he's done it here - because you can't buy ammo AND upgrades) but also means that you have to use whatever weapons the game deigns "worthy" of you at any particular point. The vigors not only don't fit the world (there's maybe two enemies, total, who use them, despite some of them being on sale at a children's fair - including the one that makes you commit suicide, by the way!) but the game starts you off with so few "salts" that it's basically not worth using anything BUT the "possession" vigor. Why use any of the six offensive vigors when you can just use whatever guns you manage to pick up instead?

But as frustrating as the gameplay can be, in the end even these are side issues. The problem is that there's a fantastic world there, but I don't feel that I can influence it in any way. There's a great story (albeit one ripped from one of my favorite novels almost beat-for-beat) but what I do has no effect on it whatsoever. This wasn't the case in any of Levine's previous games. In "System Shock", "System Shock 2" and "Bioshock", I mostly felt as though I was driving the action. "Bioshock" had enough scripted events, but there was a POINT to them, and they still felt driven by my actions.

In "Bioshock Infinite", I felt like I was watching the game instead of participating in it. A movie that kept getting interrupted by annoying shooting sections that had nothing whatsoever to do with the story I was supposed to be participating in.

"System Shock" is twenty years old now, yet I could do INFINITELY more on Citadel Station than I ever could in Floating Columbia or whatever it was called. (Jeez, this is how much impression "Infinite" made on me... I can't even remember the name of the damn city!) I mean, holy crap, in "System Shock" you could FIRE A GIANT LASER AND DESTROY THE EARTH. It might be asking a bit much for EVERY game to include this feature (although honestly I think a lot of 'em would be improved if they did) but c'mon, give me a little freedom to wreck some stuff?

Captcha is "Gone dolally". Feels appropriate!

First of all, it's infinite I'm talking about, which I mentioned in my post. Second of all, blowing up the earth in System Chock is also just a scripted event. You're talking about the discovery of a game world as finding buttons to press, whereas I'm talking about discovery in the sense that the story and world becomes richer through finding the care and effort that the artists put into the smaller space.

 

[deathmothon]

I have absolutely no problems with the fact that you enjoyed "Infinite" more than I did - and again, I thought it was ok. It was certainly a HELL of a lot better than "Tomb Raider", which I couldn't even get through. (I think NerdCubed put in his review what was wrong with this game better than I ever could, so let's not go into that.)

Ugh. You can't use pewdiepie as a legitimate critique, much less whoever this guy copying him is. You could pull that treatment on literally ANY game, even System Shock 2.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

First of all, it's infinite I'm talking about, which I mentioned in my post. Second of all, blowing up the earth in System Chock is also just a scripted event. You're talking about the discovery of a game world as finding buttons to press, whereas I'm talking about discovery in the sense that the story and world becomes richer through finding the care and effort that the artists put into the smaller space.

The earth blowing-up thing isn't a scripted event in the sense that you HAVE to do it. It's a non-standard "game over". It's probably something you'll do by accident (if you activate the laser before putting up the shielding) although you can obviously choose to do it as well - just to see what happens. And that's kinda what I'm talking about. The game lets you screw things up. If you do so too much you won't be able to continue in it, but that's fine - it's the OPTION that I like having. Note that there are "scripted" events in both "System Shock" games, as well as "Bioshock" - for example, you go into a room and a bunch of monsters spawn while SHODAN mocks you - but for the most part, these are fine. It's not taking major world-changing events out of the player's hands. The golf scene in "Bioshock" is, but again, that feels "earned" because you have to fight your way there, and because of the "Would you kindly?" twist.

But it's not just the option to screw up - there are lots of things that you can do, even within the original "System Shock", that have an outcome on the world as a whole. Getting rid of security apparatus, for example, unlocks hidden stuff. (Remember the first time you found the Magnum pistol on the medical level?) And there are plenty of different ways to do this, and plenty of different tools that you can use to do so. You can go into cyberspace (which was freakin' awesome by the way), open doors for yourself remotely, set time bombs that would kill a bunch of robots on a production line, and all kinds of other cool stuff. The game had a list of upgrades and patches a mile long and each situation could be handled in a few different ways. There were so many ways to affect and interact with the environment.

And System Shock 2 was the same - you could hack turrets and turn them against your enemies, for example. You could hack computers, repair weapons and door panels, do all of this cool hacker stuff in real-time while trying not to let a zombie sneak up on you from behind.

It's more than "finding buttons to press". It's about encouraging a sense of discovery and exploration within the game's world, and encouraging the player to find inventive ways to solve problems. In the previous "System Shock" games, exploration was a trade-off: you could find some great stuff, but you could also end up using valuable resources or blundering into dangerous areas. And that's fine! "Infinite" actively punishes you from going off the beaten path, especially before you meet Elizabeth, as you have no idea where the last save was and there's no quicksave.

It's very condescending actually. It's like the game is saying to me: "No, you can't affect the story or the world in any meaningful way. So to keep you occupied, here's some stuff to shoot instead." Sorry, but this isn't enough for me. And if this is the direction that games are going in now, then no bloody wonder the AAA market is going downhill.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

I have absolutely no problems with the fact that you enjoyed "Infinite" more than I did - and again, I thought it was ok. It was certainly a HELL of a lot better than "Tomb Raider", which I couldn't even get through. (I think NerdCubed put in his review what was wrong with this game better than I ever could, so let's not go into that.)

Ugh. You can't use pewdiepie as a legitimate critique, much less whoever this guy copying him is. You could pull that treatment on literally ANY game, even System Shock 2.

...I have no idea what that means. Who's copying who?

And what the heck has "System Shock 2", an open-world first-person shooter with RPG elements, got to do with "Tomb Raider", which is none of those things? I guess they both have upgrade systems?

EDIT:
System Shock 2 is a game that starts out by giving you the chance to fight off the evil alien invaders! Yay team, go America, etc! Except of course that what you're actually doing is the bidding of a being who's demonstrably WORSE than the aliens. The game lets you in on this a third of the way through, at which point you then have to make the conscious choice to progress by following the footsteps of the being's previous avatar - somebody who shot themselves in the head rather than face what they'd done. As you progress further through the game, you learn more and more about the actions of the previous avatar, and how they mirror your own. This is every bit as affecting as you'd think it would be.

Tomb Raider puts you in charge of a screaming, crying, immortal Goddess who never shuts the fuck up, and constantly complains about how she hates to do these awful things as she's shooting the sixtieth machine-gun wielding pirate in the face with a freakin' longbow.

Call me crazy but I don't see the comparison here.

SECOND EDIT:
Ok, I may be being too harsh on "Tomb Raider" here. I bought it on sale and got through a few hours of it in total before I decided to give it up as a bad job. It's possible that it improves later on, but honestly I doubt it. I have no problem with a linear story if it suits the game - "Half Life 2" being a great example - but the main character was just too damn annoying and the gameplay too limited for me. I admit that I'm judging it solely on the basis of the start of the game though.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

"System Shock" is twenty years old now, yet I could do INFINITELY more on Citadel Station than I ever could in Floating Columbia or whatever it was called. (Jeez, this is how much impression "Infinite" made on me... I can't even remember the name of the damn city!)

...but you did remember the name of the city, it was Columbia, you just added "floating" to the start which is something it does.

Also, you missed the point of the bouncy castle analogy. Infinite is supposed to be the roller coaster, something that generally does have pretty close restrictions on what you can do. The bouncy castle is supposed to be a more open ended game where you make your own fun. The point being that sometimes the restrictive experience is enjoyable too in it's own way. Personally, the two-weapons system never even entered my mind as a problem, I certainly didn't feel like I was getting "less game" or "less experience" than I got in Bioshock 1 because of it.

Anyway, I don't think the AAA single player game will die forever and I hope it doesn't. I think the current idea of "everything needs multiplayer" is coming to an end as developers realise that they're flooding a market that can really only support a handful of successful multiplayer shooters, much as they realised a little while ago that we had completely gone past the saturation point with MMOs. I mean if you look at titles like Dishonoured or Bioshock they've managed to do quite well with just single player. In fact, all 3 of the big 2013 games (Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us and GTA 5) were very much single-player focused (I know the latter two had multiplayer modes but most of the attention was on their single player campaigns).

I kind of hope that Titanfall represents a trend of where the industry will start to go with multiplayer games actually just being their own games rather than stapled on to an unrelated single-player campaign and then single player games can exist and do quite well separately.

I really don't want it to be the case that all the creative or interesting games are independent though. I like indie games as much as the next guy but I still like to have big, polished AAA games to balance it out, just as I enjoy watching independent films a lot but still want to see well-made star studded films with big budgets too, and those totally exist. I kind of feel like it's making baby steps to an auteur-type attitude and that's what we need. If there are some creative directors or teams out there who can just reliably turn a profit then publishers can just give them a bag of money and not interfere with marketing and focus-group mentality. Stuff like that is the reason film directors like Martin Scorsese or David Fincher or Christopher Nolan can keep making interesting films and it would be nice if we had some people like that in our industry. That's pretty much what Naughty Dog get from Sony and I think it's kind of how Valve are seen by a lot of people. They just consistently put out games that are popular enough that they will make their money back, even if it's not Call-of-Duty sales, it's still reliable.

...I honestly thought that it was "Columbus" after I'd written that. Isn't that the capital of Ohio? (My knowledge of US geography pretty much sucks.)

Getting off the Bioshock topic, I agree with your sentiments about the AAA games. I want to see MORE big-budget single-player games, not less; I just want to see them done in a way that really makes them a fulfilling, worthwhile experience, and I certainly want replay value from them.

I like the idea of big-budget multiplayer-only games as well, but it seems like a risk: how, as a player, can you know whether or not a particular game will find an "audience"? If "Titanfall" flops - not that I'm expecting that to happen - then anybody who spent £40 on it would've wasted their money.

"If there are some creative directors or teams out there who can just reliably turn a profit then publishers can just give them a bag of money and not interfere with marketing and focus-group mentality."

Amen, brother. I hope the publishing houses learn that not EVERYTHING has to be treated like CoD or Battlefield. If you start letting the marketing people impose restrictions on the creative people, you'll end up with a case of "game-by-committee". And that's often a very bad thing indeed.

 

[Do4600]

I was really hoping for a cut away when you said, "Because that's how you make fucking art!" Where you are leaning gently against your podium with a cigarette in one hand, and then you take a deep drag on the cigarette and quote Denis Diderot in perfect French and then blow the smoke out of your nose before continuing the video.

 

[Brockyman]

Irrational Decisions (Or Freedom In Chains)

Major studios are not just shutting down because evil publishers are closing them. Some of them are falling on their own swords. Certain developers are trading in one cage for another, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Watch Video

Jim,

Other than the oversimplification that "if isn't Call of Duty, it's shit" with great story driven AAA game have been created and are on the way, I agree. There is a lot of room for the indy scene and AAA games to exist.

My problem is with Ken Levine as a person. All those other examples you mentioned aren't the same thing. David Jaffy, Peter Molyneux, Cliffy B, and the others LEFT THE STUDIOS, AND Santa Monica, Lionhead Stuidos, and Epic Games all remained opened with most of the staff still gainfully employed.

Also think of Jason West and Vince Zampella (and others) that left Infinity Ward to form Respawn to get away from Activision screwing them on COD Bonuses. While your opinion on COD or the Infinity Ward could be debatable, but the fact is MOST OF THOSE PEOPLE STAYED EMPLOYED AND CREATED SOMETHING.

Ken Levine is an douche auter. HE is creative and good at what he does, but to LAY OFF 100+ PEOPLE to "make what you want to make" is just a shitty thing (or even more so) than a studio shutting down due to making a shitty game.

If he wanted to work his "rapid fire brain art style", he could have left with 15 people, and Irrational could have stayed open with a new lead dev making a Bioshock followup, a brand new IP, or helped other Take Two studios (like making a PC or Next Gen port of GTA 5).

So, I hope he fails...

 

[TheUnbeholden]

Well said Jim. Excellent video.