Bioshock - Review Roundup

Moriendor said:

*snip

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I think as much for marketing purposes as anything else. The original poster was essentially dismissing the game as console crap. Are you suggesting that quote endorses that point of view?

Dhruin said:

I think as much for marketing purposes as anything else. The original poster was essentially dismissing the game as console crap. Are you suggesting that quote endorses that point of view?

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Huh? Console "crap"? He said -full quote- "They are both console games first and foremost.". Which is simply a fact. Levine has been heading the X360 team, hasn't he? While the team in Australia did the PC version (obviously not in full parallel development mode but using the same base code that was provided by the X360 team). I think it is great that they have apparently tried very hard to avoid "consolitis" as much as possible and I hope that they have succeeded but the fact remains that this game was primarily developed for the Xbox 360. Whether this is a bad thing or a good thing is up to everyone to decide for themselves. It's still a fact though.

First, if a site posts what their ratings mean, (with a 5/5 being a milestone of it’s time to some degree or other) and person misinterprets that meaning, to mean it’s a perfect game, then it’s the person’s fault not the review site.

Secondly, it's rather erroneous (no offense) to speak in generalities when claiming only some stories are linear and others aren't.
How can a story not be linear, if it has a beginning and an end, what’s your example of a non-linear game?
Fallout, maybe I am remembering incorrectly but it has a beginning and end, certainly there are side-quests that can divert you, but still there is a linear story, iirc.
I don’t see how anyone can claim Bioshock just a shooter with a linear story, what are the criteria since you seem to be using this phrase to cast a dispersions, of not being worthy as a quality game?
SS2, had a beginning and an end yet it received critical aclaim, that most gamers do Not dispute.

Thirdly, Bioshock is clearly not a console first game and taking interviews of how important it is for Irrational to make the console game up to their standards as a game developer, is out of context.
Making Bioshock available to play as console game is most likely how Irrational was able to get funding to afford to make, this potentially ground breaking game.
Please, the idea Levine sat back in his chair eating his sushi saying to himself, “how can I make the greatest console game, ever!”, just makes me laugh.

Also when Levine says, “No relation to SS2” that is Legal Protection to keep EA from suing the crap out of him and 2K.
It clearly is the same formula that Irrational uses very successfully, Isolation, character development, a story of dept, horror and socially relevant topics.

I am not sure where this negitivity stems from against Irrational but it sure doesn't seem warrented, especially since they are so in touch with fans and old school roots of development that are such a rare quality currently, in game development.

abbaon said:

How many years? Are you just referring to "high-scoring" games, or all of them? Dropped into this graph, Bioshock would look less like the culmination of an upward trend than a ridiculous outlier, but I'm not sure exactly which scores you think are being inflated. Can you be more specific?

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This gives a clearer picture. At the start of the 360's life, its scores were clustered higher and more tightly than Xbox reviews were at any point, but that didn't last beyond the first year. Its current spread resembles historical patterns. And reviewers of 360 games don't appear to have been more liberal with scores in the 90s. This is only two of the six consoles, but it's not unreasonable to conclude that game scores are not currently trending upward.

This is fun.

bioshock was in development long before the australian studio was even up and running to my knowledge. wasn't the game announced before the xbox 360 was even known to be coming out? also if a man fathers children with different wives (platforms) i'm pretty sure those children are related. just because someone suddenly changes their job or career is everything they've done before forgotten and meaningless...wow i don't envy the world some people live in.

1111 said:

OMG!!! I'm like so excited I peed my pants. Hello bioshock/oblivion games, good bye rpgs!!!

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1111 said:

From what I see, what is gathering a lot of attention is the graphics. I might have peed my pants, but we'll see if this game is a game, and not just a pretty screensaver.

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Reyla said:

They are both console games first and foremost.

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When I read this progression of comments, the intent behind the words I see is "console crap" - nothing but a "pretty screensaver" for the console kiddies who don't know better. If it isn't what was meant, then the intended idea wasn't communicated to me, sorry. Oblivion and Bioshock are completely different genres and approaches, so I don't see another relationship - unless 1111 was saying they are both game of the year material, so bring it on! ? No, didn't think so.

Ken Levine is lead, sure, but Jon Chey was co-owner of Irrational and project lead, lead programmer and lead AI on System Shock 2, so I doubt the Australian office was just doing a bit of interface tweaking. Basic development seems to have been on the X360 but I still think the development was reasonably parallel and saying "console first and foremost" biases towards a poor port.

Brother None said:

Scores that high can not be deserved. It's a conceptual impossibility.

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If nobody can ever get the highest score, all that does is make the second-highest score the highest score in reality.

Second, game reviewers are faced with the same problem as any tech reviewers: a moving baseline. Music, for example, has not "evolved" in the sense of "getting measurably and objectively better in some respect" since the Renaissance, perhaps before. Films have not "evolved" in this sense since some vaguely drawn line between the 1920's and the 1960's, depending on whom you ask.

That makes the music or film critic's job that much easier -- they can compare something that came out today with Citizen Kane or Metropolis or even Mass in B minor without sounding completely ridiculous.

A game reviewer always has to adjust for the tech baseline: as awesome as Deus Ex was, if it came out today looking and feeling exactly like it did upon release, it would catch a quite a lot of flak for low poly counts, clunky animations, and what not.

This, of course, leads the problem of score inflation. If Deus Ex was 5/5, and somebody today made something that does everything well that it did well, only with cutting-edge tech and some nice new gameplay and story innovations thrown in, what would that make it?

I believe most reviewers attempt to address this problem by taking the current state of the market as the baseline: a game that's "average" compared to what's available now would be 3/5, a game that's "outstanding" compared to what's available now would be 5/5. As you put it in another message:

Brother None said:

I think the issue is that a lot of gaming journalists have moved to a conceptual level where 10/10 represents "game of the year," not "this game is flawless."

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So, assuming that someone does come out with an "outstanding" game, and assuming that reviewers attempt to treat their scores this way, I don't think it's impossible for it to (legitimately) score very high among very many reviewers.

If nobody can ever get the highest score, all that does is make the second-highest score the highest score in reality.

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A rule in mathematics is that for two numbers to be different, there has to be an infinite number of numbers between them. So if a site uses decimals (and doesn't cut off at two places) then 'the second highest score possible' is, in fact, an impossibility. If X is any number less than 10 there are an infinite number of numbers that are both greater than X and less than 10. You can always keep going higher and higher as long as you never give a 10. In reality, most sites, if they even do decimals, limit it to one place, or even limit it to 'point fives'.

Any system like this has to be considered an abstraction, and thus 10 is not nescessarily a perfect score. In the abstraction, a 10 is whatever the site says it is. I don't know of any sites or mags that use 10 to mean that the game is absolutley flawless, the perfect game. For a site that limits itself to whole numbers or point fives, their score of 9.5 means that the game is closer to 9.5 than 9 or 10. A 10 might mean that the game is closer to 10 than 9.5. PCPP Australia justified it's switch from percentages to marks out of 10 by saying that any scoring system is too subjective to be able to give an exact percentage score. They're right on the money there, I think.

Therefore, it is entirely possible that the scores Bioshock is getting are justified. Based on the actual words in the reviews that accompany the scores, I'd say it's pretty likely that they are justified.

Prime Junta said:

If nobody can ever get the highest score, all that does is make the second-highest score the highest score in reality.
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I don't think that's what he meant. I think when he said, "It's a conceptual impossibility", he was talking about absolute perfection.

GhanBuriGhan said:

Linearity may be a design flaw for (a certain type) of RPGs, but you can't say that for shooters. Linearity is inherent to most of that genre. That you don't like that (and therefore most shooters) doesnt make it a flaw. That there are indeed non-llinear shooters, doesn't mean that linearity is necessarily a design flaw either. Its a design decision. You can certainly strive to make a "perfect" linear shooter (like Half life, or maybe this Bioshock) just as well as you can try to make a perfect platformer, arcade fighting game, and ping pong simulation, etc. Its silly to ask for every game to incorporate your preferred design, or expect review scores to take into account that it cant be played in everyones preferred manner.

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Nope, it's not. First of all I don't think linearity is inherent to that genre. There is no natural law or necessity to make a shooter linear. Second I give a damn about genre - genre boundaries are straight from hell. If I play a game I'm not thinking, "Was this a good rpg?" or, "Was this a good shooter?" - I'm thinking, "Was this a good game?" I'm tired that flawed design is constantly defended by bringing in genre as an argument - it isn't one. If you think that linearity is an inherent part of the genre, I tell you it's time to break some genre boundaries then.
And third, and this is basically why I claim that linearity is a flaw, games are not books or movies. If I want linearity, I read a book or watch a movie. A videogame however that is linear is simply crippled that's all. It doesn't make optimal use of the medium it takes place in. That linearity is a design decision is a statement that lazy ass game developers came up. You'll often find it in connection with similar idiotic statements like, "A linear gameplay and plot makes it easier to tell a good story." That's all bla bla... it makes it cheaper to tell a story that's all.

Acleacius said:

First, if a site posts what their ratings mean, (with a 5/5 being a milestone of it’s time to some degree or other) and person misinterprets that meaning, to mean it’s a perfect game, then it’s the person’s fault not the review site.

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Misreading is never purely the reader's fault, it is always partially the writer's fault.

abbaon said:

This gives a clearer picture. At the start of the 360's life, its scores were clustered higher and more tightly than Xbox reviews were at any point, but that didn't last beyond the first year. Its current spread resembles historical patterns. And reviewers of 360 games don't appear to have been more liberal with scores in the 90s. This is only two of the six consoles, but it's not unreasonable to conclude that game scores are not currently trending upward.

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I do believe it is. Because your chart shows a tendencies to centrifugally compensate higher scores with lower scores, it does not reflect on the trend of scoring games higher and higher. For that, we need to date the Metacritic top games; the top 10 includes 4 games from 2007, 5 games from 2006, 1 game from 2005. Any direct conclusion drawn out of that as you're doing is ridiculous because the sample material is too small, but considering 2007 is half-over, that looks like a steep incline to me.

Prime Junta said:

If nobody can ever get the highest score, all that does is make the second-highest score the highest score in reality.

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Yes, that's the argument they use. Amusingly, it shows a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of a rating system.

The fact that a score isn't used doesn't "just" relegate the second-highest score to the theoretical, it also changes the mental scale. If I say 100% is an unreasonable rating and it is removed, that doesn't mean 90% defaults to the same position as 100%, it means that mentally, 100% is an unattainable peak in a scale, that means you can actually, as a reader, get a perspective on where the game belongs on a scale from 0-100% rather than all games ending up pushing the 100% roof.

It's that simple, really.

Prime Junta said:

Second, game reviewers are faced with the same problem as any tech reviewers: a moving baseline.

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Fascinating. That's just another reason the rating system is inherently flawed, though, it doesn't really address my argument, it just adds to it.

Besides, I don't directly care why game reviewers are so incompetent, I care that they are. It's not my job to figure out the why and fix it, that's theirs.

Prime Junta said:

So, assuming that someone does come out with an "outstanding" game, and assuming that reviewers attempt to treat their scores this way, I don't think it's impossible for it to (legitimately) score very high among very many reviewers.

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As I already said, that won't work because of the eventual drainage of superlatives and, more importantly, because of the difference between the people reading it and the journalist writing it.

Brother None said:

Besides, I don't directly care why game reviewers are so incompetent, I care that they are. It's not my job to figure out the why and fix it, that's theirs.

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Funny, I actually find most game reviews I read are pretty useful and give a fairly good idea of what to expect in the game. Of course, there is the occasional complete blooper, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. From where I'm at, most gaming journalists most of the time attempt to do the best they can, and succeed reasonably -- although, of course, being people, they're no more immune to getting caught up in the hype than the rest of us.

Brother None,
I can't quite see, why you have the need to regard a 5/5 as a flawless game just out of principle. When for example RPGWatch writes that a 5/5 isn't a flawless game but just "the best of the best" at the current and past time then you can't argue that they are only allowed to rate flawless games a 5/5 because the general public is used to that rating system. One can define its rating system as one wants just as long as they define it, otherwise the default rating system might just be 5/5 = flawless game.
And because the gaming platform is a dynamic platform then it isn't possible to create a flawless game and what is a flawless game? So I can't see why not the gaming media shouldn't use a rating system that awards "the best of the best" 5/5.
Just as long as there hasn't gone inflation upon the ratings.

As far as I know, the film media and music media works the same way.

And by the way. The general public isn't used to the definition of 5/5 = flawless game because most people hasn't attended university and in lower educational institutions a 5/5 for "the best of the best" can easily occur.

5/5 looks really weird for Russians.

But I agree with Dhruin's point made there, so you're right. When we're talking 5/5 you're basically saying the 5 has a range from 81% to 100%, you don't detail further, so that doesn't apply here. Such ratings are often indicated by "stars," as in "five stars." And you two are right, that's difference and less confusing.

The further you narrow it down, like IGN, the more confusing it gets, tho'.

I actually find most game reviews I read are pretty useful and give a fairly good idea of what to expect in the game

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I used to agree. Until the past few years, culminating in Oblivion. It was like my experience in playing Oblivion was diametrically opposed to what reviewers were writing. I simply could not possibly identify the game I was playing based on the reviews I read, it was like they were reviewing a completely different game.

There's a lot of incompetence out there in the gaming media. Too much, if you ask me, which harms the status of gaming towards the actual, serious media indirectly. Real journalists just chuckle when they see the way gaming journalists operate.

Brother None said:

I used to agree. Until the past few years, culminating in Oblivion. It was like my experience in playing Oblivion was diametrically opposed to what reviewers were writing. I simply could not possibly identify the game I was playing based on the reviews I read, it was like they were reviewing a completely different game.

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Oblivion was one game that disappointed me too, badly, and the reasons it disappointed were not apparent in the reviews I read. So you have a point there. Still, the fact remains that Oblivion *does* do a great many things very well, it *was* first out of the gate doing these things well, and many if not most gamers *do* appreciate precisely these things (and are not bothered by the things that bothered me).

Examples? Wide-open, seamless, enormous world, tons and tons of characters, quests, and locations, thousands of different loot items, solid combat "feel," very pretty graphics... but poor writing, shoddy voice-acting, simplistic minigames, severely out-of-balance game mechanics. Meaning, all the stuff that makes you go "wow" when you first start it up and start learning it was there, while the actual flaws only come to the surface as you get deeper into it.

So, while a really good reviewer would certainly have dug something of this up even in the short time frame they have to write a review, IMO it's not quite gross incompetence to get caught in the hype, be wowed by the obviously well-done things, and miss some or even most of them.

There's a lot of incompetence out there in the gaming media. Too much, if you ask me, which harms the status of gaming towards the actual, serious media indirectly. Real journalists just chuckle when they see the way gaming journalists operate.

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"Real journalists" chuckle when they see any specialty press "journalists" operate. Specialty journalists are enthusiasts first, journalists second. That's just the way things are, and that's why it should be taken with a grain of salt.

(Disclaimer: I used to review games for a publication a while back. It was pretty poorly paid and in the end not very interesting, so I eventually moved on to other things.)

Prime Junta said:

Oblivion was one game that disappointed me too, badly, and the reasons it disappointed were not apparent in the reviews I read. So you have a point there. Still, the fact remains that Oblivion *does* do a great many things very well, it *was* first out of the gate doing these things well, and many if not most gamers *do* appreciate precisely these things (and are not bothered by the things that bothered me).

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Oblivion was definitely a good game. The issue I took with the reviews wasn't that they identified it as a good or even great game, it was the fact that they missed flaws that are so obvious they should be mentioned, even if the reviewer mentions them with "but this flaw is so small it'll hardly bother the average gamer on a play-through."

They've only started identifying these flaws now, a year too late.

Prime Junta said:

IMO it's not quite gross incompetence to get caught in the hype, be wowed by the obviously well-done things, and miss some or even most of them.

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I feel it is incompetent, if not necessarily grossly so. But maybe I'm judging too strict.

Prime Junta said:

"Real journalists" chuckle when they see any specialty press "journalists" operate. Specialty journalists are enthusiasts first, journalists second. That's just the way things are, and that's why it should be taken with a grain of salt.

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Having a worked as in the editor's room of a speciality (political) press for a short while, I can say that's not necessarily true, and not equally true everywhere. There's a difference between the scope, expertise and enthusiasm of people covering sports, automobiles, music or movies. By comparison, gaming journalism looks like a Marx brothers movie. Not good.

Ionstormsucks said:

linearity is a flaw, games are not books or movies. If I want linearity, I read a book or watch a movie. A videogame however that is linear is simply crippled that's all.

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I'm glad you're not head of all game development. I like some of my games linear, thank you.

Thaurin said:

I'm glad you're not head of all game development.

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Yeah, me too. I probably would hang myself after a few weeks because I simply couldn't take all the ignorant publishers, the retarded journalists, and the uncritical players anymore.

Dhruin said:

..."console first and foremost" biases towards a poor port.

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OK, we just have a different level of perception then . I thought it was factual, not biased.
If Oblivion is any indication then the X360 version of Bioshock is probably going to outsell the PC version by a factor of 1:3. It would seem only natural that the developer would cater to the stronger (in numbers) customer base.
Besides, I'm sure that they did have to make compromises somewhere along the way. Developing for the X360 as the "lead platform" means you need to consider certain limitations such as the console's relatively low RAM. You can't pull a Gothic 3 and make a totally wide open game where you can wander seamlessly from level to level... and who knows? Maybe that's what they would have done if they would have made it PC-exclusive? Maybe they would have gone for a more non-linear approach? We'll never know.
However, to develop a game primarily for a console doesn't have to mean that the end result has to be a poor port or that it will suffer from "consolitis" (as I said I'm sure that Irrational did their best to avoid this) but it means that the whole design is most certainly influenced by the "lead platform". With every single design decision they had to ask themselves "Will this work on the 360? Will this work with a gamepad? Will it be fun? Can we do it?".
That's why I think that it is simply stating a fact when someone says that it is "first and foremost" a console game.

Ionstormsucks said:

You make a a shooter with kick ass gfx but basicaly no content other than killing enemies in various ways you'll get a 10/10. You make a rpg with decent gfx and tons of content and you'll get 6/10, 7/10 if you're lucky.

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Exactly this is my source of overall bitterness concerning the PC platform.

The PC platform is slowly, but steadily being turned into an "action platform" by this, with other, innovative games being thrown out. Or once popular genres, like the adventures. I recently read someone calling "Technomage" an "Action-adventure" game. Huh ? Now everything's action, or what ?