ZylonBane on 21/10/2009 at 22:14
Quote Posted by DentonSHODAN
I mean, was it not fun as hell setting up traps before taking on a Big Daddy? I would put an electric bolt here, an electric bolt there, a mine here, etc., and I would hope to destroy the Big Daddy in one seamless go. And if I succeeded, there was no more rewarding feeling.
So you admit that Bioshock is at its best when it's treated as a toy, not a game.
DentonSHODAN on 21/10/2009 at 22:43
ZylonBane, I've seen you post a couple times, and I have to say, you're probably the single most annoying person on this forum. I don't know what makes you so grumpy and so hostile, but you're going to have to chill out.
Nameless Voice on 21/10/2009 at 22:57
Oh no, not another one... :nono:
Dam on 24/10/2009 at 20:56
Quote Posted by DentonSHODAN
I mean, was it not fun as hell setting up traps before taking on a Big Daddy? I would put an electric bolt here, an electric bolt there, a mine here, etc., and I would hope to destroy the Big Daddy in one seamless go. And if I succeeded, there was no more rewarding feeling. System Shock 2 just doesn't have that, and it's entirely not its fault.
Sounds familiar. You mean like Edward Diego meetings in SS1 :rolleyes: ?
Enchantermon on 25/10/2009 at 00:24
Quote Posted by DentonSHODAN
I mean, was it not fun as hell setting up traps before taking on a Big Daddy? . . . System Shock 2 just doesn't have that, and it's entirely not its fault.
Actually, I have done that with some bots, Protocol Droids, and spiders. I'd lead them back to where I had hacked turrets and let it go from there. And coming back to an area you passed through to hear the joyous sound of a hybrid falling to its knees before your turrets is also quite fun. :)
In other news, hey Dam. Long time, no see.
Jenesis on 31/10/2009 at 21:54
Quote Posted by DentonSHODAN
Combat, Plasmids, Atmosphere.
The major problem I have with combat in Bioshock is that, the odd boss fight aside, the game would not be made significantly harder if you removed all the weapons apart from the grenade launcher (for Big Daddies) and the wrench (for everything else). Sure, you can set up the odd trap, but there's never actually a need to. With those two weapons, plus Electro-Shock and lots of melee-boosting Tonics, you're pretty much set. But as D'Arcy said, in SS2 you had to worry about ammo and this affected the way you went about attacking enemies, and it meant that the various weapons were all useful, simply because being able to use them meant you could use an extra ammo type. The energy pistol is a key piece of kit because you can recharge it any charging station, and so on.
As for the plasmids themselves - you're right, they are more powerful than Psionics, but they have no sublety to them. Psionics was a delicate thing in SS2. You could do some very nifty stuff with it, but you always had to weigh up whether it was worth the modules to get the powers you were after. Your choices were actually important, unlike with Plasmids where you're so brimming over with Adam you can buy pretty much everything you want.
On the atmosphere front, I think one of the problems Bioshock has is this: The VB and the Rickenbacker are dead, filled with insane mutants. Rapture is dead, filled with insane splicers. But Bioshock tried to pretend that Rapture wasn't dead, and didn't manage to pull it off. In SS2, it makes sense for the hybrids to stalk the halls, waiting to become fully integrated with the Many, on the lookout for normal humans or agents of the Metal Mother. But there was no human social structure or economy. It's much the same in Bioshock, the splicers are just wandering aimlessly looking for someone to kill and steal from, but Ryan (and possibly Fontaine as well, I forget) keep talking to you about how they'll rebuild Rapture, it'll all work out, even though you'll be dead. The Little Sisters are still harvesting (although you might argue that's just their conditioning), there are still people, like Dr Whatsherface (the one who set up the forest, I forget her name), who aren't surprised to see a normal human wandering around when you turn up, as though things were, on some level, still working normally. And yet when you just stop and look around, it's obvious that there's no society as such still going. Maybe that's just the limits of the AI scripting, but nonetheless it means that the atmosphere falls flat, because it seems fake and painted on, at least to me.
Enchantermon on 1/11/2009 at 19:27
Quote Posted by Jenesis
atmosphere stuff
Bioshock didn't try to pretend that Rapture wasn't dead,
Ryan did. He was the one who claimed that he could rebuild it, while everything around you (the splicers, the wreckage, the decay and destruction) proved otherwise. At least that's the feeling I got from it. Every time Ryan would blather on about using my tombstone as a pavement tile, I would think about how mad someone would have to be to think that they could ever make something out of the rotting Rapture. And, indeed, I believe Ryan had gone mad.
Fontaine, for the record, just wanted to harvest all the Adam he could and then destroy Rapture, setting his sights on an Adam monopoly topside.
As far as Dr. Langford is concerned, I'll agree that it was a little odd that she wasn't surprised when she saw you. Other than that, however, the only encounters you have (besides Ryan and Fontaine) are with Tenenbaum and Peach, both of whom had been in contact with Atlas and therefore knew of other unspliced survivors. Remember, there was at least one other person with Atlas when the game starts: the guy who got killed when you arrived. Tenenbaum probably thought you were another of Atlas's survivors. Peach could have assumed the same thing, or ha could have been told by Atlas that you had come from the surface.
You could also count Steinman and Cohen as encounters, but they were spliced up and insane by the time you get to them, so they weren't banging on all cylinders anyway.
Kolya on 1/11/2009 at 21:33
I wonder if there's going to be a Postfontaine in Bioshock 2.
Enchantermon on 1/11/2009 at 22:23
:laff:
I never thought about that until just now. Good job. :thumb:
cosmicnut on 3/11/2009 at 10:21
I just wonder how it would have been if we had the original concept.
Big daddies were really nasty and almost impossible to kill, far worse than the game we had (see if you can find some of the really nasty big daddy pre-release footage)
Also, splicing choices were more permanent. You still had the gene banks but they were supposed to be rare and only work once or twice.
Imagine wlaking round rapture with a cold based adam arsenal and meeting a splicer resistant to cold based attacks... Add a rapidly dwindling ammo supply and you start to see how deadly a mistake would be!
