Bioshock's Ken Levine has taken a moment out of his time to post on the Through the Looking Glass Forum to explain how Bioshock is going to be made "more accessible", which to us more seasoned gamers (read; glittering gems of hatred) always sets off "dumbed down" warning lights:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>Point 4 is of course a fair and predictable point, as is #2. #3 offers little new as plenty of classic cRPGs can generally be finished by fighting only (though to say this will not compromise other parts of the game is a bit spurious). #1 is a bit interesting and new and sounds like a good solution for stupid people. Thank Frith it can be switched off, though.
Link: Ken Levin post on TTLG forum
Spotted at RPGDot
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.</blockquote>Point 4 is of course a fair and predictable point, as is #2. #3 offers little new as plenty of classic cRPGs can generally be finished by fighting only (though to say this will not compromise other parts of the game is a bit spurious). #1 is a bit interesting and new and sounds like a good solution for stupid people. Thank Frith it can be switched off, though.
Link: Ken Levin post on TTLG forum
Spotted at RPGDot
