According to BioShock's lead programmer, the game should have flopped massively.
Lead Programmer Chris Kline was obviously delighted when
BioShock turned out to be such a success, gathering many Game of the Year awards, but admits that he didn't actually expect the game to do very well at all in a recent interview.
Speaking to
Gamasutra, Kline says that when he was working on
BioShock, he was convinced the game was going to die of mismanagement.
Apparently for the first few years of development, the team had little more of an aim than to remake
System Shock 2 and the development of the game stalled more than once.
"
The very first failure was that we wanted to base this whole thing on System Shock 2," says Kline. "
After a couple false starts, it wasn't until the E3 2006 demo that the team really had to think about things like making the game work and creating a "compelling user experience."
"
BioShock should’ve failed... In fact, it did fail a lot, over the course of time. A series of big mistakes and corrections and slipped ship dates, but all of these helped make it a good game... Some people think that constantly messing up, and pushing dates isn’t a good way to make a game, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to make a good game."
So, there you have it - proof that beauty can sometimes come from chaos after all.
What did you think to
BioShock? Was it really all it was cracked up to be, or did the polarising endings and weak final boss ruin the final stretch for you? Let us know what you think in
the forums.
39 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replyname a game that isn't repetitive....
Uh, no. Art Deco and Nuvo are fantastic art styles.
but thankfully, it turned out to be great.
the art deco was by far the best thing about it! i'm quite annoyed that no other games have experimented in style the way bioshock did
CoD4 is quite repetitive;
Get to checkpoint
Die
Restart from checkpont
Die
etc.
Bioshock could have been a legendary epic game, but instead it turned out to be a better than average FPSRPG, although I did enjoy the game, I think it could have been so much more.
So your opinion goes...
Art Deco makes me, personally, feel sick. I hate it.
True, but the game is set in the 40s and 50s, not the 20s anyway.
Mere technicalities in the face of art deco hate!
This man has said it all.
I love COD4 as much as the next person. But I have to admit it took me about 15minutes of repetitive shooting from the same building (mid game) before I realised that the enemies were going to respawn forever.
The only flaw of Deus Ex is it's too awesome :p
The Art Deco environment, and the whole mood of the scenes was the only thing that kept me from putting it away. Unfortunately, as a game it wasn't good enough for me to even bother to finish it. (And I even finished Dreamfall: The longest journey (for the very same reason, really))
The sad thing is, even being that short the game is repetitive after 20 minutes, same as COD1.
It did so well because it was different. The whole theme, the choices, the plasmids, the story etc.... it deserved to do well, even if the management behind the scences was poor.
Roll on Bioshock 2.
Some might call me a heretic but personally i thought Deus Ex was a crock of ****......
But certainly looking forward to Bioshock 2 hopefully see more of the city (loved the art deco styling) along with learning more about it. Id really love the game to be in there when the city turned bad perhaps from the plebs point of view all those people who were used and abused by the powers that be.
Deus Ex is one of the best games of all time (the best one being UFO: Enemy Unknown of course). I don't have high hopes for Deux Ex 3, because it is nearly impossible to top the original.
as far as shooters go you cant really have a game that isnt repetitive....
i did occasionally find the "go to this place and get that" tasks to be monotonous, but overall i liked the game quite a bit
Same goes for when people burn prairies, burn a prairie down and in it's place grows a more bountiful prairie.
It tried ever so hard to be Fallout and System Shock 2 in a really horribly art deco themed universe. I enjoyed bother Fallout and System Shock 2, but if I wanted to play those games, I'd play those games, not some crappy attempt to recreate them :/
Polishing a turd does not make it beautiful. It just makes a shiny turd.
Rubbish game that failed as a shooter and was completely pointless as an RPG. Most of the plasmids were useless, there is no strategy to them as you get enough adam or what ever it was called to power them all up anyway and there is only about 5 different enemies.
Also true.. But art deco is almost synonymous with the 20s.. I don't like the fashions which were prevalent in Britain and the US during that time.. looking at pictures of people wearing those awful clothes, in those awfully decorated buildings.. Urgh...