Ken Levine and the crew at Irrational Games do a lot of things extremely well, but that doesn’t mean that they do everything up to that standard. There are some parts of the BioShock games that have been some of the best in the industry, while other times things feel ho-hum and like a bit of a letdown. While BioShock: Infinite might still be fresh on store shelves and in the minds of a lot of players, there has been a ton of talk about it in the past week; most good, some bad. The game is picking up some great reviews and players tend to love it, but everyone seems to be in agreement that somewhere along the way, actually playing the game gets to be a bit monotonous.
For any game’s story to be good enough that the reaction from fans is that they wanted more of it and grew tired of actually playing to get to the story parts, that is an achievement to be sure, but one at the cost of the gameplay. In a way, the industry and games in general are changing, so the needs of the gamer are changing as well. Gamers need less-and-less of long, wave-after-wave of enemies type of battles. For most gamers, that adrenaline-pumping feature of past games should be left in the past as competitive online multiplayer has become the new place to get that adrenaline rush, not in a story-driven game.
In a way, killing has gotten really old, really fast, to a lot of gamers. It has been a core gameplay mechanic in just about every genre of game throughout the history of games, but videogames have come a long way now and long periods of intense shooting sequences is starting to become an eyesore. Characters in games are going on the craziest, longest ordeals ever imagined and slaughtering entire enemy armies on their own in the span of a game and no matter what innovations and balancing are done to the gameplay, not everyone wants to be a part of that. Maybe it is time to allow players to scale how much shooting and killing they get to (or have to) do.
We saw a similar feature last year in BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 where the difficulty levels were more scalable than usual and gamers were given a “Narrative” difficulty, where the focus was on the story of the game, less on the shooting. Obviously there were other difficulties as well, more traditional ones and at its core, “Narrative” could be considered just a “very easy,” but it did thin the herd out and take the focus away from the shooting and killing in Mass Effect 3 and put the focus on the decisions and actions that the player took.
If we saw games in the future maybe have expanded options, options that would allow for them to keep the difficulty of enemies and their AI where it is, but to have less enemy interactions or just thinner waves it could be incredibly beneficial to games like BioShock: Infinite. Because while difficulty in a game can be a good thing, sometimes “difficulty” can mean different things to different people. Games don’t have to be easier, just maybe be more selective with how much of the same thing players are doing or at least give them some more options.
I agreee. While bioshock is an amazing game, it took me longer to finish it than it would have otherwise because the shooting just got so boring…
Well written article and a good topic.
The difficulty level I’d like to see is a blend of the Mass effect Narrative and Insane. In other words, not much combat, but what combat there is will challenge you.