Bionic Commando producer Ben Judd has opinions and he's not afraid to use them. He's been speaking his mind on a few topics, such as why MGS mastermind Hideo Kojima needs to find a faucet attachment for his running mouth:
I liked Metal Gear Solid 4, with the exception of the story. I like Kojima's stories, but they keep getting longer and longer. He needs to put the clamps on himself and only give himself 30 minutes. If he did that I'm sure they'd be fantastic.
Considering the MGS series' biggest draw has always been its plot, saying you liked the game's last chapter except for its story is pretty harsh criticism from where I'm standing. Judd doesn't stop at Kojima, however. He also has something to say about one of 2007's hottest games, BioShock. More after the jump.
BioShock was easy as Hell, I don't care what anybody says. That's what people want. They want to play through it. They want to die once or twice. It's like an interactive movie, sort of. Gamers have lost their will to continually drill down on something. It's also the fault of the developers. If you make enough restart points; if you make it so that if you die you can restart and retry without having to go back for an hour, which is not the right way to do it, I think people will keep trying something.
Judd has a fair point. With the latest Prince of Persia apparently eliminating any sort of real punishment for failure, it does seem that videgames are putting up less and less of a fight as developers seem frightened of alienating the "casual" players. Of course, everyone knows you can make BioShock harder, but it's something the gamer has to go and change for themselves. Are gamers and developers becoming too pussified lately? What do you reckon?
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
9:43 AM on 09.18.2008
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Bioshock was fairly easy compared to other games, but it made up for it with so much else to offer... namely a blitzkrieg on our senses. Still the best game of this generation.
P.S. First?
Look at the NES. That had games that were designed to be played through in an hour or two (for the most part - some could be beaten in 30min if you were good) with no saves and only 3 lives... How many of those games did people actually complete?
The causal market wants instant gratification, it wants to be able to complete the game in an afternoon or weekend and not die. Bioshock is a perfect example, the no-cost death and the respawn points being every 5feet apart made the game a joke on the default mode...
Show the "typical gamer" DMC or NG and they'll yell and whoop for the blood and gore.
Get them to Play it though, the button mash commences and they wont see anything after the second or third level...
/rant over... for now
It didn't seem to be about the difficulty to me, it was deeper than that, but those looking for a challenge could very easily go into the settings and turn off the vita chambers and what not.
Yes, going back and replaying an hour of BioShock would completely NOT ruin the point of the game :-/
BioShock has this thing called a difficulty setting. It says "if you have played a lot of shooters" next to the one called "Hard". I found, as I have played a lot of shooters, that "Hard" was, for the most part, HARD.
also, bioshock sucked
It's just a logical extension of old checkpoint systems. Checkpoints have gotten more and more dense in levels as time passes and infinite lives have been a mainstay for years before the Wii brought these dreaded "casual" gamers.
Think of the Prince of Persia system as having a checkpoint after every jump. It's not that much different from God of War 2 which had tons of checkpoints in the platforming sections.
Not every video game has to be solely about "challenge".
I mean, dying was a momentary distraction, as you got your spanner ready and went to wack the big daddy a few mroe times.
Anyone going to call that Easy?
I don't think Bioshock was ever intended to be a hard game, its more like a piece of art that you enjoy your time with and get dazzled by. Where as harder games are there to bring a hammer to your face and see how many times you come back for more.
Kojima can't seem to muster a cohesive, well-told story to save his life. His games would be so much more enjoyable if they didn't fall into the Japanese trap of having too much extraneous and poorly written dialogue bogging them down.
And yeah, gamers are hyooooge pussies. Bioshock's gameplay depth isn't required when you aren't punished for dying. PoP is going to drop the ball in this regard as well. I really hope people don't feel satisfied with themselves or like they accomplished anything by beating a lot of today's games.
It's kind of like how people bitch about games not being as hard as NES games anymore, but really, it was because of shitty play control and a dependence on memorizing stuff (like the turbo tunnel in Battletoads).
WTF is he saying here? Hell, I'll pare down the quote and I still don't see his point:
"... if you make it so that if you die you can restart and retry without having to go back for an hour... I think people will keep trying something."
Is he criticizing BioShock because people are willing to keep trying it? Or is he trying to say they were too liberal with their checkpoints?
My opinion right there.
If you go back to old school games, difficulty was implemented in order for people to spend more money at arcades. The harder a game was, the more money they had to pump into a machine. Eventually when home consoles where made, that mentality was transferred over, and developer made games with brutal designs requiring hours and hours of commitment and pattern memorization to succeed.
Now, with Wii and casual games, you've got a new crop of gamers that don't want to deal with the frustration of repetition. They ask, "Is it really necessary to put guys outside of the camera that shoot arrows at you while your trying to platform out of a hole, and each time you get hit you fall down to the bottom and you have to start over?" (Yeah, Ninja Gaiden, I'm talking about you...) I mean is difficulty the only way to make a player feel accomplished? I don't think so, but that's another argument all together.
It comes down to personal preference and what the developers are trying to accomplish. Some people are masochists and like spending hours of frustration to feel accomplished and nostalgic. Some people want to play to relax and have fun, and skip the pain.
Back to the original question: Do I think Bioshock could have ditched the Vita-Chambers and still accommodate the new gamer? Yeah, but I guess it was just easier to throw in respawn points then address it in another way.
Bioshock was NOT amazing. GTFO.
It was a bland mesh of alot of concepts that have been used in other, better, games. I refur you to System Shock 2, its Bioshock but harder and better.
Kojima even said he didn't want to make MGS4, and yet here it is. People wanted more Solid Snake, so they got a half hour of him chainsmoking while the game installs. The rest of the game is similar in its approach to giving people what they asked for - the whole thing is so over-the-top and gratuitous that it <i>must</i> be <i>just a little</i> tounge-in-cheek. Kojima is like that, is he not?
It's all those retro gamer's faults, rabble rabble rabble.
Just instead of holding down the rewind button, the game does it for you with a cutscene.
I don't know why people keep saying that the new PoP game is easy mode, or that it doesn't punish you for dying.
It's no different than having checkpoints. It just makes it a more seemless experience.
There's a place for challenge, but it shouldn't be forced on people. If you're trying to change the world by making your game hard and toughening people up, it's not going to work. People don't really try, these days.