No disagreements, man. What I was referring to was Bioshock’s self-satirizing comment on the FPS genre more than the whole ‘moral philosophy’ bit. As much as That Scene was about the consequences of choice, it was also about how those choices work in a videogame, and how ultimately meaningless that is. So, yeah, Deus Ex did the social philosophy thing brilliantly, but it wasn’t nearly as conscious of its medium. It didn’t matter that it was occurring in a videogame. You could say the same thing in a film, a novel, a comic book (see: The Invisibles), an essay… you get the idea. And, in my opinion, that makes it the less effective of the two.

But if we were stacking the two up just in terms of gameplay (and the revolutionizing thereof), you’d find me in considerably less disagreement.

I think what happened was it had been so long since a Deus Ex/Starcraft/whatever, that people wanted to love a game that much.

The last game that had even close to the impact on me the Aforementioned Greats did was F.E.A.R. I’d never say it was as good as Deus Ex or whatever, but I actually felt compelled to keep playing. I’m a serial-completionist, and the will for me to do it these days has wilted severely. I beat every single game I ever bought up until the 2000’s. Suddenly I was actually returning games, something I hadn’t even considered.

If I were to be pressed as to why this is occuring, I’d pretty much point to the development cycle. The idea that games have to spend gargantuan amounts of money to create a game that is even above average is a lie, a straight up awful lie. The games we love had terrible problems with them — what we loved was what was inside those games. Deus Ex had twitchy animations, an engine that loved to crash, a rather.. overly gray tone (It’s Quake, Only Gray!), and so on. But what drew us in was the story, the gameplay, the interactivity.

I’ll take a buggy, ugly games with plot, story and gameplay over an “ooohhhh, pretty!” game with a hojillion dollar budget any day.

I loved Deus Ex, it’s one of my favorite games of all time. However I am not going to pointlessly compare every game released for the rest of my life to it. I will enjoy a game on it’s own merits, and criticize it on it’s own faults.

Everything isn’t going to be revolutionary. In fact, I bet if you looked back to the release of Deus Ex, many people were making the same comparisons you are; claiming Deus Ex was a mediocre update of System Shock 2.

Gritty reality can’t ever compete with rosy nostalgia.

Leeks: What exactly is it that Bioshock did that no FPS ever attempted? The only things that Bioshock has that Deus Ex doesn’t are nice graphics, good voice acting, and an interactive environment, none of which are particularly new to FPS games of the NEXT GENERATION (Star Trek, anyone?).

As for story, where Bioshock deals with economic philosophy, Deus Ex deals with political philosophy, and in the end forces you to choose which system you believe will make the world a better place, from a totalitarian computer-controlled world to a secretive oligarchy to mass anarchy. Now, the exact nature of going about making this decision could be improved in Deus Ex, but Bioshock’s system of choices has remained much the same.

Point being: Bioshock is by no means a bad game, and is very comparable to Deus Ex and System Shock 2: It’s this very comparison that causes people to become bitter. The game is lauded as something the world has never seen before, but in terms of gameplay and storyline really does not have any groundbreaking improvement over these two very dated games.

It also depends on your interest in RPGs, since Deus Ex has many RPG components, while Bioshock lacks the “gained character skill” required for the game to be called an FPS/RPG. Which leads to another point: The level of immersion, choice, and story depth in all three of these games has existed in RPGs for a very, very long time now.

I think most of us here don’t hate Bioshock, we’re just worried that the treasures of gaming history are being forgotten and irritated at the short memory and attention-span of gaming media.

Wow, so three FPS games in the last decade? Thanks, I’ll happily play Bioshock, and not go with your pretentious standards.

I hope you have as much fun hating excellent games is as I have enjoying them.

As for those complaining that the moral choice has no real difference in terms of consequences, I think people are missing out on what Levine’s intention was. It was not to give the player different story branches. In fact Levine has said that he doesn’t like the binary paths that these moral choices often descend into. Instead, Levine wanted to create a moral conflict within the player. And that conflict was real, as long as you didn’t know what the consequences of your action would be (which is of course how real life is). When you first made your choice to save the little sister, and even a few choices afterwards, at that time you still didn’t know that ultimately you’d end up with as much Adam as going the other route. What you did know is that if you harmed her, there was little risk you would end up with less. So the choice at the beginning was really about the risk of less Adam for the sake of saving the girl. It was only until later down the line that you realized that it all balances out. But I don’t fault the developers for choosing this path. Because they also have to think of the enjoyment of the player, especially some who are just playing this as a FPS. And to handicap the player throughout the game by saving the little sister, while maybe more profound from an emotional and storytelling aspect, wouldn’t really fly with many gamers.

It’s like those designers who don’t allow people to save anywhere. Sure it might make the game more terrifying and instense, but it also pisses a lot of people off.

I don’t know about you but with all the talk that he ‘likes the write the game as it’s going’, the complete re-scraps and rewrites of the game, and how there wasn’t a final design doc until january 2007, makes me understand why you could get a mutiny. “You mean I have to put in 3 weeks of 90 hour weeks because you can’t make up your mind and get your shit together?”

I understand iterative design but, you also heard shit like him hanging out by himself and buying comic books at E3, It’s circumstantial, but, you know all starts to add up to a picture.

And it did sound a bit like the team imploded after launch, with the lack of the widescreen thing, and the lack of final little polishes the game has.

On the whole though it is an amazing game for the first half, and a great game for the final 1/3 or so.