BIOSHOCK DEMO on XBox Live right now

[Russ M.]

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I wish I would have held off on Madden and gotten this game instead.. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

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QFMFT I'm currently on life tilt because of this.

[Bullrun]

well seeing as I have it I should post...

picked it up today have played about 4-5 hours totall....dont feel too far into it but deep enough to have the camera....

the big daddy's are tough...wow...very tough...but just hang in there and itll work out....I've been using shotguns with the elecbolt plasmid or the winter plasmid to freeze them in place....

bots are extremely useful in fighting anything as they draw a lot of fire away from you....

but yeah first impression is that this game is nearly perfect for its purpose and story so far...

[ilya]

I read this game is trivially easy because you effectively can't die, is that true?

[Dudd]

You can choose to respawn instead of reload save games, and the enemies will have the same damage as when you died. If you don't want this, just load save games like any normal game and it's just as difficult, this is what I'm doing.

[Dire]

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You can choose to respawn instead of reload save games, and the enemies will have the same damage as when you died. If you don't want this, just load save games like any normal game and it's just as difficult, this is what I'm doing.

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Ditto here. At least on hard for sure, I think the vita-chambers should have been disabled or had some serious penalty like 40 ADAM. But it's easy to play like they don't exist and their existance probably does make the game accessible to more players.

[ilya]

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You can choose to respawn instead of reload save games, and the enemies will have the same damage as when you died. If you don't want this, just load save games like any normal game and it's just as difficult, this is what I'm doing.

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Actually that's kind of cool I think. Kinda made me sneer when I first heard about it but then I realized that this is exactly what I'd be hoping more games would start doing. I think we're gonna see more and more no-death gameplay as gaming cements its place in the mainstream & as gamers get busier & older, I think that's good thing. Maybe now that such a huge critical hit has done it, it'll really start becoming common. Death in games is kinda an ancient relic of the quarter-hungry arcade era, isn't it.

[Dire]

I think the challenge makes the game more enjoyable. Taking things to an extreme, if you enable god mode on your first playthrough of a game - you're probably not going to have much fun. The vita chambers aren't flat out god mode, but they're one step closer.

[ilya]

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I think the challenge makes the game more enjoyable. Taking things to an extreme, if you enable god mode on your first playthrough of a game - you're probably not going to have much fun. The vita chambers aren't flat out god mode, but they're one step closer.

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I definitely agree that challenge is important in games, but I think there are better ways of making a game challenging than making it hard to advance the story. For example, a game can be designed so that dying is very rare or only a small setback, yet skillful play is rewarded with point bonuses, rankings, and/or bonus content. In this way a casual gamer can enjoy the narrative and atmosphere without immersion-disrupting frustration to get in his way, while the expert gamer can replay sections to try and improve his score, etc.

Some games have kinda done this already...for example Katamari Damacy. Even a novice gamer won't have much trouble finishing the game, but the design leaves a ton of room for expert play, and rewards it with stat-tracking, collectibles, and unlockable content. The SSX games are good at this also.

I think this public-pool approach to game design should be the future...make wading and seeing everything easy, but offer a lot of depth for the expert player.

[Dudd]

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Actually that's kind of cool I think. Kinda made me sneer when I first heard about it but then I realized that this is exactly what I'd be hoping more games would start doing. I think we're gonna see more and more no-death gameplay as gaming cements its place in the mainstream & as gamers get busier & older, I think that's good thing. Maybe now that such a huge critical hit has done it, it'll really start becoming common. Death in games is kinda an ancient relic of the quarter-hungry arcade era, isn't it.

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The next step games need to take is make it so that you constantly are walking the line between life and death while rarely crossing over. If I'm some super soldier or whatever in a game, I don't want to break up the realism and immersiveness by constantly respawning and/or loading save games, but I also want to feel like I'm always close to failing. Look at any good action movie, say the Bourne movies since I've seen them recently, he always is in control of the situation, but he's always walking with a limp, with a bullet wound, on the edge of flipping his car over. I'm not sure how that kind of tension could be programmed into a game, but it would increase the level of immersion so much if it happens. Maybe some sort of adaptive AI that gets less lethal as you inch closer to death while still seeming formidable, I don't know, but I don't think a simple respawn gimmick works in anything other than a GTA/Crackdown cartoon type world.

[ilya]

You could try a mechanic where getting hit lowers your life meter but destroying enemies and generally blowing [censored] up boosts it back up, so that just when you're surrounded by the greatest number of enemies, you have the greatest number of opportunities to restore health