Sulphur on 18/8/2011 at 08:21
Quote Posted by Briareos H
I'm all for mocking people who extrapolate metaphors from obtuse material or paraphrase "subtle" "literary" references from overly pompous plots, but... seriously? The struggle of the player between the single emotionless individual and the all-loving, all-embracing community didn't strike you as an obvious and pretty innovative (for the time) background theme of SS2?
I'm not sure I would talk about "pearls", but at least it was a smart move back then.
Unfortunately, everything in sci-fi you can think of has already been done. That facet of SS2's narrative - gestalt consciousness - is just as compelling and better-told in Theodore Sturgeon's
More Than Human, which was written in the fifties.
Briareos H on 18/8/2011 at 08:41
"Every sci-fi has been done" is something I can get behind. But in our case it wasn't a video game.
I didn't say gestalt or global consciousness (which even dates back to the begininning of the XXth century) were new ideas when they were tackled by games, but their addition as a theme and the associated narrative techniques were new.
System Shock 2 had overtones of serious sci-fi not usually seen in a video game, narrated just enough in the background to allow the player to decide whether they wanted to care about it or not. That was innovative, and that was excellent. That's the difference with Bioshock, which tries very hard not to be a game by forcing the narration onto you through cutscenes or rehashing the audio log technique which by then was a trope.
I'm still not sure how it relates to Deus Ex - which chose a completely different narrative architecture - though. I was just taking the piss out of DT with my post.
june gloom on 18/8/2011 at 09:29
System Shock 2 rehashed the log thing from System Shock 1 which rehashed it from any number of a million things, up to and including Edgar Allen Poe but also Star Trek if you want to blaggle on about how it doesn't count if it's not sci-fi.
And Bioshock had cutscenes? Could have fooled me.
Briareos H on 18/8/2011 at 09:31
Inline Image:
http://anodal.org/down.gifEDIT: Well okay.
Quote Posted by dethtoll
System Shock 2 rehashed the log thing from System Shock 1
No, it expanded a lot on it and gave it a good interface. It's not to say I don't like SS1 better, but the audio logs were just better in the sequel.
Quote Posted by dethtoll
which rehashed it from any number of a million things, up to and including Edgar Allen Poe
You are stupid.
Quote Posted by dethtoll
but also Star Trek if you want to blaggle on about how it doesn't count if it's not sci-fi.
Yep, definitely stupid.
Quote Posted by dethtoll
And Bioshock had cutscenes?
Yes.
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Could have fooled me.
I'm not surprised.
june gloom on 18/8/2011 at 11:41
i was kinda feeling guilty about the post i made in commchat a few minutes ago but now i don't anymore because suddenly every word in your post that isn't attributed to me just reads CRUSHED UNDER A MESS OF DICK HURRRRP DROOL
Briareos H on 18/8/2011 at 12:00
situation: refer to jerkcity
Matthew on 18/8/2011 at 12:26
PS: no region locking within Europe any more, so screw you whichever Square Enix director thought that that was a great idea.
Pyrian on 18/8/2011 at 22:10
Would you kindly watch this cutscene? :p
froghawk on 19/8/2011 at 04:01
Quote Posted by Briareos H
System Shock 2 had overtones of serious sci-fi not usually seen in a video game, narrated just enough in the background to allow the player to decide whether they wanted to care about it or not. That was innovative, and that was excellent.
Um... innovative? I'm pretty sure that's just an extension of how most FPSs that came before Half-Life kept their story exclusively in the game booklet so that you could engage with it if you wanted to or ignore it otherwise... only in SS2 it's just the backstory in the booklet instead of the whole thing. There were exceptions like SS1 and Strife, but for the most part all id games and their clones had already been doing that for years.
I can't see it as an intentional and intelligent design decision - just seems like they couldn't figure out a way to actually integrate that stuff into the game just like early FPS developers couldn't figure out how to integrate any story into the game at all.
