Tag: bioshock
Immortals of Aveum takes inspiration from God of War, BioShock, Doom, and more, says EA studio head
Bret Robbins has been around the video games industry for a while. As the founder of EA’s new Ascendant Studios – and the boss overseeing experimental the magic-powered first-person shooter, Immortals of Aveum – he brings a lot of experience to the table. He’s done his time on Call of Duty over at Sledgehammer Studios, and he was the creative director of Dead Space. He knows how to make a big, bombastic triple-A game that gets attention. And now, he’s about to do it all over again.
“I feel like because I had an opportunity to start with a blank page and sort of do whatever I wanted to, I wanted to do everything,” he laughs. “And so, for Immortals of Aveum, there is a bit of just taking a lot of different influences and putting it into a blender and then seeing what comes out.” Robbins had the benefit of taking ‘about four months’ to himself to shape the story, the world, the feel of the combat, and the core shape of the game before bringing it to his team, and in that formative period, the very heart of Immortals of Aveum began to form.
In this early period, Robbins looked to a lot of the science fiction and fantasy that’s inspired him throughout his life and career, and drew on some of the projects he’s worked on, too. “I’ve been a fan of fantasy and science fiction my whole life, and I’ve been in games for a long time now, too!” he notes. The pillars of the world, how magic was going to work, the players’ main abilities, and the option of being able to combo those together using magic – per Robbins, that all came to the surface in those integral first few months.
Luna Abyss is a brutalist bullet hell that mixes Bioshock with Nier Automata
Sometimes you see a game, and it grabs you immediately. There’s a lot to be said about the importance of that first audio visual impression a game can have, how a slick art style paired with a booming voice or sweeping soundtrack can steal your heart. Roughly two weeks ago, on the GDC expo floor, Luna Abyss may of well been just that.
To learn more about the game, I sat down and talked to creative director Benni Hill (don’t hum the tune) about the upcoming first-person bullet-hell shooter from Bonsai Collection. Where does that art style come from, and how exactly do you transfer a traditionally 2D genre effectively into a 3D game?
The game is a striking clash of dark concrete and metal, peppered with pipes, stairs, and mechanical horror. You as a convict with mysterious crimson eyes have been sent to the Red Moon, a strange orbital boy that appeared over earth 250 years ago. While there, you must serve a prison sentence, ordered by the loud everpresent voice of your mechanical warden to discover relics hidden in the megastructure.
A decade later, the Lutece Twins are still the best thing in BioShock Infinite
A long time ago (in 2013, in fact) in a student-y house far away (assuming that you don’t live too near to Nottingham), I started playing the BioShock series. I’d flirted with the idea for years, but it was the release of BioShock Infinite that finally convinced me to take the plunge. And I can’t exactly complain: the series’ Rapture arc — made up of the first and second games, plus the prequel novel by none other than John “The Crow” Shirley — now makes up maybe 10% of my personality, having given me two of my favourite video games, my favourite video game tie-in book, and a front-running contender for my favourite video game locale all at once.
I just wish that, after all that prep I did for it, I’d actually liked BioShock Infinite a bit more.
BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Cannot Reconcile Its Alternate Selves
BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 26, 2023. Below, we take a look at how its DLC, Burial at Sea, attempted imperfectly to find synthesis between its various worlds.
BioShock’s Rapture is a place of necessity. The novelty of its underwater setting comes out of a practical concern: Why wouldn’t a player character just leave a dangerous place? The game’s thematic concerns came out of these gamey considerations. Give Big Daddies Little Sisters so that players are incentivized to attack difficult enemies to get resources. A world without regulation means that players can buy ammo from vending machines and shoot lightning out of their hands with “plasmids.”
Even the game’s preoccupation with objectivism comes from these kinds of practical considerations. In director Ken Levine’s own words, “we wanted a very believable reason why they would be there.” Rapture’s founder Andrew Ryan (a thinly veiled stand-in for writer Ayn Rand) cannot imagine a place where he can build his ideal, objectivist world on land, so it must be done in the sea. Though BioShock’s narrative ultimately, tepidly, condemns him, it also finds some nobility in his mission, in the purity of his vision. Maybe that’s because his goals were similar to the designers’. They too built Rapture out of necessity, a world constructed out of gameplay constraints, that could only exist digitally.
BioShock Infinite’s Complicated Legacy Overshadows Its Greatest Failure
BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 26, 2023. Below, we reexamine the game with modern eyes, in the context of its place in the series as a whole.
If you’re reading this, odds are that you have some opinion of BioShock Infinite, and it’s likely to be a passionate one. When it released in March 2013, it generated enormous fanfare, inspiring strong stances from both excited series fans and those who felt let down by the final product. It continues to garner polarized reactions 10 years later, perhaps to an alarming extent. Once you go beyond the social media furor and the thwarted expectations, you have a game that ultimately failed to live up to the identity of its own series–and one that deserves neither the seemingly-bottomless stores of love and hate that some still heap on it.
The by-the-numbers nature of BioShock Infinite is perhaps most apparent in its moment-to-moment gameplay. Though ostensibly intended as the true successor to the original BioShock, Infinite simplifies the mechanics of the “immersive sim”-inspired series to the absolute minimum. The FPS part of this so-called “FPS RPG” series is tuned to max, and the RPG part is nearly cast away entirely.
The Assassination of Daisy Fitzroy (By The Coward BioShock Infinite)
BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 26, 2023. Below, we take a critical eye to how it ultimately mishandles its prominent Black revolutionary character, Daisy Fitzroy.
Let me tell you a story: a story about a slave.
This slave was once the absolute pride of their owner. Strong. Respected. And the slave was well-cared for. The lady ruler of the land decreed it. But the slave was still enslaved. Their only real power was the ability to control a crowd. After being declared an enemy of the state, the slave revolted. They swore vengeance, inciting an entire people to cheer for the fall of their ruler, and made no apologies for their wish to overthrow the government by force. The slave would fight, and die, for freedom.
Atomic Heart could have been the next BioShock
But Mundfish casts too wide a net
The next BioShock should return to the fundamentals laid down by System Shock 2
BioShock 4 gets a narrative designer who’s written for Ghost of Tsushima, Watch Dogs: Legion
The next, currently untitled BioShock game has added a writer on Ghost of Tsushima as its narrative designer.
“The dream is real!” wrote Liz Albl earlier this week. “So happy to announce I’ve joined Cloud Chamber as Narrative Lead on BioShock.” Albl already has a number of writing credits under her belt, having written on games like Ghost of Tsushima, Far Cry 5, Watch Dogs: Legion, and more.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about this fourth entry in the BioShock series, most of which has just been a lot of he-said, she-said rather than anything actually concrete. Back in 2020 some job listings gave us a bit of insight into what the game might be like, with a particular call for developers that have experience working on RPGs.