Valerie Valens
09-27-2007, 05:27 PM
In the interest of chipping in to this brewing rivalry that is Halo 3 and Bioshock, I will assert my well-reasoned opinion that Halo 3 is better.
Now, in the interest of fairness, I'd like to state first that when it comes to telling a story with an immersive atmosphere. Bioshock has Halo 3 beaten hands down. However, most Bioshock fanboys I've talked to seem to completely miss the concept that story, narrative and atmosphere has, at most, only a secondary importance to making a game good. When it comes to gameplay and experience, Halo 3 eats Bioshock for breakfast and here's why...
Smoke and Water
Most of the best features Bioshock seems to tout as revolutionary and creative are in fact, something gamers have seen for a while. In fact, playing through the game, I am left with this uncanny uncomfortable feeling that it is simply System Shock 2 with a facelift and better narrative. The parallels are too close for comfort. Everyone talks about plasmids being the best gameplay concept since Jumpman/Mario is created, but in reality, they are just fancy names and graphics tied in to the concept of guns shooting weird shit. Moreover, FF7 : Dirge of Cerberus had something simillar called Materia, and you know how THAT went. Hacking? had that in System Shock 2. Interactivity with environment? For one, there's GMod. Also, all this interactivity means nothing ultimately if there is no negative reinforcement to force players to think before rushing.
Halo 3, on the other hand, had no such pretenses of reinventing the wheel and concentrated on making every squeeze of the left mouse button as satisfying and enjoyable as possible.
Careless Gameplay Mechanics
Bioshock is a victim to two of the most careless gameplay design problems I have ever seen in a game. Lack of negative reinforcement and currency overabundance. I'll address the former first.
The lack of negative reinforcement is not to say that the game had no difficulty. In fact, Bioshock had plenty of difficulty and beginners often find themselves dying very often at first. The problem is that it's all there is to it, you die...and that's it. You simply respawn to the last checkpoint, no penalties, the enemy health does not reset to the state when you reached that check point. That makes dying more of an annoyance than a real setback in gameplay progress. Passing through an area unscathed also feels empty because you can, in theory, bumrush the same area 56 times with a wrench and still pass through it eventually. Or you can also bumrush the Big Daddies with a wrench and still gain gargantuan cash rewards until you run out of things to spend them with. Which brings us to the next point.
There is simply too much cash being thrown at the player as a reward for killing enemies. You are never short on money when you want to buy upgrades/weapons or items and thus, you are never forced to make choices on what to purchase because the best/an overly adequate item is already available to you. In fact, towards the end, you quite literally run out of things to waste money on.
How did Irrational games make such a careless mistake even with 4 years of development, I will never know.
To be fair, Halo 3 does suffer a bit from gameplay design on the other end of the spectrum, the "The Computer is a Cheating Bastard" syndrome. At harder difficulty levels, the snipers or more harder enemies can really be a pain in the ass to get past, but I'd much rather have that than an empty gameplay experience begat by terribly broken gameplay design.
Multiplayer
Simply put, Bioshock has none. Joe NcNeilly, Senior GamesRadar Editor made the tragic mistake of only recalling his worst experiences online (http://www.gamesradar.com/us/pc/game/features/article.jsp?articleId=2007082293455732049&releaseId=20060426172718471012§ionId=1003&pageId=2007082295058276064), which are rare in reality. My online gaming experiences have been nothing but enjoyable. Perhaps, Joe needs to learn where to look for an enjoyable gaming group, or better yet, create his online gaming group. If he's that upset about the trash talking, then he needs to learn to understand that it's all that it is, trash talk, it says nothing, it means nothing, it gets the adrenalines pumping and it shouldn't carry over outside the game.
What should have been discussed here regarding the lack of Bioshock's multiplayer modes are the numerous possibilities of gameplay modes that can be used beautifully with multiplayer. Maybe bonus levels that can only be completed with the help of a friend, or secrets that can only be accessed with 2 or more players working together. Team versus modes that involved rigging an arena and then doing battle in it. The possibilities are endless. To downplay the importance of multiplayer in PC games, especially with a game like Bioshock, is to be ignorant of the gaming demographic. There's a reason games like MDK and MDK 2 are pretty obscure, there's a reason System Shock 2 got the nice boost in its lifespan that it needed with it's multiplayer patch ; People love playing awesome games together.
When you look at Halo 3, with its saved movies feature, its very detailed stat-tracking system and the Forge utility. You can see that Halo 3 is designed with the enjoyment of the entirety of the Halo fanbase community in mind and that, my friends, is something no single player experience can beat.
I am a fan of neither side, so this is my unbiased opinion on the matter. Despite the differences, I love both games, honestly.
Now, in the interest of fairness, I'd like to state first that when it comes to telling a story with an immersive atmosphere. Bioshock has Halo 3 beaten hands down. However, most Bioshock fanboys I've talked to seem to completely miss the concept that story, narrative and atmosphere has, at most, only a secondary importance to making a game good. When it comes to gameplay and experience, Halo 3 eats Bioshock for breakfast and here's why...
Smoke and Water
Most of the best features Bioshock seems to tout as revolutionary and creative are in fact, something gamers have seen for a while. In fact, playing through the game, I am left with this uncanny uncomfortable feeling that it is simply System Shock 2 with a facelift and better narrative. The parallels are too close for comfort. Everyone talks about plasmids being the best gameplay concept since Jumpman/Mario is created, but in reality, they are just fancy names and graphics tied in to the concept of guns shooting weird shit. Moreover, FF7 : Dirge of Cerberus had something simillar called Materia, and you know how THAT went. Hacking? had that in System Shock 2. Interactivity with environment? For one, there's GMod. Also, all this interactivity means nothing ultimately if there is no negative reinforcement to force players to think before rushing.
Halo 3, on the other hand, had no such pretenses of reinventing the wheel and concentrated on making every squeeze of the left mouse button as satisfying and enjoyable as possible.
Careless Gameplay Mechanics
Bioshock is a victim to two of the most careless gameplay design problems I have ever seen in a game. Lack of negative reinforcement and currency overabundance. I'll address the former first.
The lack of negative reinforcement is not to say that the game had no difficulty. In fact, Bioshock had plenty of difficulty and beginners often find themselves dying very often at first. The problem is that it's all there is to it, you die...and that's it. You simply respawn to the last checkpoint, no penalties, the enemy health does not reset to the state when you reached that check point. That makes dying more of an annoyance than a real setback in gameplay progress. Passing through an area unscathed also feels empty because you can, in theory, bumrush the same area 56 times with a wrench and still pass through it eventually. Or you can also bumrush the Big Daddies with a wrench and still gain gargantuan cash rewards until you run out of things to spend them with. Which brings us to the next point.
There is simply too much cash being thrown at the player as a reward for killing enemies. You are never short on money when you want to buy upgrades/weapons or items and thus, you are never forced to make choices on what to purchase because the best/an overly adequate item is already available to you. In fact, towards the end, you quite literally run out of things to waste money on.
How did Irrational games make such a careless mistake even with 4 years of development, I will never know.
To be fair, Halo 3 does suffer a bit from gameplay design on the other end of the spectrum, the "The Computer is a Cheating Bastard" syndrome. At harder difficulty levels, the snipers or more harder enemies can really be a pain in the ass to get past, but I'd much rather have that than an empty gameplay experience begat by terribly broken gameplay design.
Multiplayer
Simply put, Bioshock has none. Joe NcNeilly, Senior GamesRadar Editor made the tragic mistake of only recalling his worst experiences online (http://www.gamesradar.com/us/pc/game/features/article.jsp?articleId=2007082293455732049&releaseId=20060426172718471012§ionId=1003&pageId=2007082295058276064), which are rare in reality. My online gaming experiences have been nothing but enjoyable. Perhaps, Joe needs to learn where to look for an enjoyable gaming group, or better yet, create his online gaming group. If he's that upset about the trash talking, then he needs to learn to understand that it's all that it is, trash talk, it says nothing, it means nothing, it gets the adrenalines pumping and it shouldn't carry over outside the game.
What should have been discussed here regarding the lack of Bioshock's multiplayer modes are the numerous possibilities of gameplay modes that can be used beautifully with multiplayer. Maybe bonus levels that can only be completed with the help of a friend, or secrets that can only be accessed with 2 or more players working together. Team versus modes that involved rigging an arena and then doing battle in it. The possibilities are endless. To downplay the importance of multiplayer in PC games, especially with a game like Bioshock, is to be ignorant of the gaming demographic. There's a reason games like MDK and MDK 2 are pretty obscure, there's a reason System Shock 2 got the nice boost in its lifespan that it needed with it's multiplayer patch ; People love playing awesome games together.
When you look at Halo 3, with its saved movies feature, its very detailed stat-tracking system and the Forge utility. You can see that Halo 3 is designed with the enjoyment of the entirety of the Halo fanbase community in mind and that, my friends, is something no single player experience can beat.
I am a fan of neither side, so this is my unbiased opinion on the matter. Despite the differences, I love both games, honestly.