Irrational Games shutting down

[RK47]

Don't cry folks, Ken will be back!

 

[Roguey]

Not sure where the problem is, the first Bioshock was sufficiently "Open World"-y in its Level design to give me that System Shock 2 feeling of discovery and had just about the right amount of environments (from creepy to interesting to beautiful) to the right amount of gameplay (hacking, puzzles, preparing for fights by setting traps and whatnot, upgrade system and non-dumbed down Plasmid/Weapon system with a lot of variation) and innovation in technology (especially all the water and shadow stuff) to feel new and interesting.

Bioshock 2 came too late (3 years later) to still seem fresh, impressive or interesting and was just a bunch of "Me too" moments by a mediocre secondary studio that was also recently released from its misery after delivering another mediocre game, the characters, events and levels were less interesting as far as I can remember, they had the me-too "Big Sister" and barely changed much of anything regarding gameplay or setting, if anything they made it worse. I guess the few "Big Daddy"-related levels were interesting enough but overall it was too little too late and I remember getting bored with it.

I believe I've "defended" the first game more in-depth in the long thread if you want more to about and I stand by it:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-bioshock-infinite.69869/page-12#post-2408157
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-bioshock-infinite.69869/page-65#post-2580865

The Bioshock experience for me soured with the rote repetition of the Big Daddy fights after the first few, the utter stupidity of the storyline following the big reveal ("It was me all along!... Now I'm going to send a bunch of bots to kill you instead of asking if you'd kindly blow your brains out like a smart person would."), followed by the complete mess of padded-gimmickry to extend game length (doing the same things you've been doing but now the enemies have a lot more health and your health bar is shrinking!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now you're becoming a big daddy and have to endure an annoying and impossible-to-lose escort mission!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now a really awful boss fight!).

Bioshock 2 felt like a product from people who recognized the flaws of its predecessor and tried to address as many of them as they could.

• It removed the vestigal-feeling crafting aspects.
  
• They took hacking, something that took up the entire screen and was very slow and became more obnoxious over time, and made it very quick and something that didn't pull you out of the world.
  
• The take-pictures-of-enemies-to-get-damage-bonuses feature was a bit eh in execution, and they improved it by turning it into a film camera that gives you bonuses based on the various ways to damage enemies, encouraging you to use as many weapons and plasmids as you can instead of doing the same thing every time.
  
• Being able to use guns and plasmids at the same time was something that should have been there in the first place, considering it existed in Undying back in 2001.
  
• A lot of the shitty plasmids from the first game were given boosts to make them actually worthwhile.
  
• You couldn't upgrade every gun to the maximum.
  
• Big Daddy fights were still meh, but the waves of splicers you'd fight when harvesting corpses was more interesting since you could choose and prepare the location beforehand.
  
• The ~moral choices~ were more about taking revenge versus showing compassion rather than kill a girl/save a girl (though that was still there).
  
• They removed the "only six tonics of each type" restriction, allowing more customization.
• The content was consistently solid from start-to-finish with an actually-enjoyable end-game and final fight.

I also more or less agree with this article sea wrote http://gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchw..._2_is_better_part_1_Its_all_in_the_pacing.php

 

[Infinitron]

http://theconversation.com/games-by-humans-23399

Games by humans

While in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, I had the great pleasure to be able to casually hang out with some of the developers from Yager, the studio responsible for Spec Ops: The Line. In 2012, I wrote a book about Spec Ops: The Line, and it was a revealing experience to be able to hang out with the people who made that game.

As it was just a casual, off-the-record chat over beers, I am not going to regurgitate any of the conversations here. Suffice to say, to me, as someone outside of development, they were absolutely fascinating. It was eye-opening to hear about the utterly mundane reasons parts of the game turned out the way they turned out. Things that myself and other players had projected layers of meaning onto existed, largely, because of technical hiccups or urgent deadlines.

The people I was talking to were, predominately, the grunts of the studio. Not the lead designers or producers or creative directors, but the ones making the game in the most literal sense: creating the models and typing the code and applying the textures. They were, predominately, exactly the kind of people that a game journalist or player such as myself rarely, if ever, is able to communicate with.

If a games journalist is interviewing a developer about a game, they typically only have access to the lead developers, the ones in charge. Usually, the journalist’s access to these developers is through the publisher that is bankrolling the game. The dozens or hundreds of men and women actually making the game are hidden from the public behind the doubly thick wall of their employers and their publishers. We can’t speak to them and, more often than not, their employment contract means they can’t speak to us.

It’s not something I had ever really appreciated before, and hearing these fascinatingly mundane stories about making games in a AAA studio was eye-opening. Nothing scandalous or corrupt or horrendous – just … mundane and everyday events leading to particular creative decision. It got me thinking about how we – players, critics, journalists – really struggle to appreciate that these games are created not just by the one or two people we see in a dozen pre-release interviews and profiles, but by dozens if not hundreds of people, each with some small say in what the final creative work will look like.

We know this is the case; we tweet about how long the credits are, but we don’t really appreciate it. Instead, we talk about how Ken Levine made Bioshock Infinite or Todd Howard made Skyrim and that is that.

It’s not a problem unique to videogames. In any creative form, as we instinctively try to picture the creator behind the artwork, and it’s much easier as an audience to boil the author down to a single person: the director, the lead singer, the conductor. But this obscures the realities of how that work was produced and why it is the way it is.

Often, when we play a game and lament about an obviously terrible design decision in one stage and ask nobody in particular “Urgh, why would they design it like that?” the answer isn’t that the creators were idiots, but something much more mundane such as: two level designers worked on different floors of the studio, or a post-it note fell off a monitor.

That doesn’t excuse a poor design decisions, of course, but I think it is worth understanding and appreciating the very real and often straightforward reasons why something is the way it is: because this thing was made by a large team of dispersed and imperfect humans under actual, boring constraints.

Earlier this morning, this tendency to boil the entire creative output of a large studio down to a single individual was starkly clear in a press release about the closure of Irrational Games. Irrational, responsible for the Bioshock series, is headed by one of mainstream gaming’s better known auteur figures, Ken Levine.

The press release, written by Levine, explains how the studio is closing down so that he can take a much smaller group of 15 employees to work on smaller games. The rest of the studio’s employees will lose their jobs.

It’s a very weird press release. Studio closures and downsizings are not rare in thevideogame industry, but the idea that the studio would be shut, with almost everyone losing their job, because the creative lead feels like doing something new, is incredibly strange. Taken at face value, it implies that the many other people who created Irrational’s games are irrelevant to the studio’s creative output: just grunts that can be replaced when Levine gets bored of them, like sacrificing the servants when the master passes away.

Taken at face value, it’s an almost shockingly arrogant megalomania, one that ironically plays into the exact labour and capital conditions the studio’s games attempted to critique.

But it’s a press release, so of course there is more to it than face value. My suspicion would be that publishers 2K are closing down Irrational for far more typical financial reasons; but in an effort to hold onto the valuable source that is Levine’s auteur-ness for future products, allowed him to write this heartfelt letter about what he would like to do next.

The other employees are, again, hidden from sight. A couple of paragraphs are spent benevolently discussing how they will be assisted in finding new jobs (conveniently with no mention of the fact that such new jobs will inevitably require life-altering relocation to studios in other cities for many employees), but the main thrust of the release is “What Will Levine Do Next?”, relying on the crux that its audience has long personified Irrational’s creative output in Levine alone.

By taking advantage of the need to personify the creative output of the studio and promising new and exciting projects from the supposed auteur, the labour conditions that lead to many others losing their jobs is successfully downplayed.

And it is successful. Many games news outlets reporting on the closure are taking the press release at face value, mentioning the job losses briefly as sidenotes before moving on to an exciting anticipation of What Levine Will Do Next.

I don’t think it is necessarily the job of journalists to fight for the industry’s employees. That’s what unions are for – or would be if the games industry wasn’t so embarrassingly lacking in unions. Indeed, there’s a very valid case to be made that games journalists and developers are already too chummy with a lack of critical distance between the two fields.

But there is a responsibility to read between the lines of press releases to find the “actual” story. But it’s not simply a case of lazy journalism, either. Even if we tried to get the story from former employees, they would not be able to speak to us: either because of contracts they’ve signed or, much more simply, because they still want to find a new job in the industry. And so, they remain invisible to us.

The ease with which 2K and Levine are able to spin a studio’s closure and the loss of over a hundred jobs to one of an auteur’s exciting new venture reveals just how poorly we – journalists, players, critics – appreciate the full breadth of people whose labour creates these works.

But theirs are the only voices we will hear on the matter, and so the myth of the great creative auteur continues.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

Why do people think it was Levine that fired those people? Does Levine hold a position of power in 2k?

Edit: People do realize that Irrational Games is just a subsidiary of 2K Games, right?

Maybe it's the letter he wrote himself.

I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers. In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience.

I am winding down Irrational Games as you know it.

Yea that stuff threw me off as well. Having thought about it thought, pretending it's his own doing may be megalomania or trying to take the blame from 2k. Probably my own hypothesis is correct, and biockock didn't sell enough to warrant their continued existence. of consoletards

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211139/Irrational_Games_journalism_and_airing_dirty_laundry.php

So Take-Two already planned to shut down Irrational a year ago if "BS:I didn't sell a ton".

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211139/Irrational_Games_journalism_and_airing_dirty_laundry.php

So Take-Two already planned to shut down Irrational a year ago if "BS:I didn't sell a ton".

From the comments:

Whoever runs Take Two's PR/marketing should get a raise, because they've done a pretty masterful job of spinning this news. It feels like the bulk of comments (here and elsewhere on the web) about this news are eithering blaming Levine for this move or wishing him well for his brave new endeavor to elevate narratives in games. It seems like very little conversation is being had about what this really is -- a renowned developer with a critically acclaimed GOTY title less than a year old had to shut down because 4-plus million copies and tons of great reviews can't sustain a business in today's economic model.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Yup. Expendable footsoldiers they are. But overall I think it's better if the industry moves away from all these megalomaniacal efforts. Keeping games smaller and more creative is what serves the medium and the customers best.

 

[Siel]

 

[FeelTheRads]

a renowned developer with a critically acclaimed GOTY title less than a year old had to shut down because 4-plus million copies and tons of great reviews can't sustain a business in today's economic model.

It's all because of piracy and second-hand markets, imo.

 

[Caim]

Um, last time I checked there were still games coming out for the PS4. That thing ain't dead yet. If anything, Sony is very good at keeping their consoles being sold, with the PS2 being made until way into 2012 IIRC.

 

[tuluse]

Um, last time I checked there were still games coming out for the PS4. That thing ain't dead yet. If anything, Sony is very good at keeping their consoles being sold, with the PS2 being made until way into 2012 IIRC.

Platinum's last two games were Wii U exclusives.

 

[Caim]

Um, last time I checked there were still games coming out for the PS4. That thing ain't dead yet. If anything, Sony is very good at keeping their consoles being sold, with the PS2 being made until way into 2012 IIRC.

Platinum's last two games were Wii U exclusives.

Huh. Well, wasn't The Wonderful 101 a system seller and won't Bayonetta 2 also pull up the sales for the console? Because as I see it the Wii U isn't quite dead yet.

 

[Angthoron]

Let them eat cake.

 

[ZoddGuts]

W101 bombed hard worldwide and Bayo 1 wasn't exactly a system seller, sold only 1 million despite the strong advertising from Sega. The sequel is going to sell far less on a dead system.

 

[Infinitron]

SA thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3609760

It's clear that Levine fucked up massively / was forced to gut it by 2K, used the assets to make the corridor popamole and nonsensical story which shipped as BI, and has spent the following 11 months making sure his eggs are all in the correct basket to wind down the studio. The winding down is the key to understanding all of this: Levine got burned once before when the System Shock IP got lost in limbo and ended up in the hands of an insurance agency in Michigan, and I wouldn't be surprised if he took steps after that to ensure that Irrational retained sole ownership of the IP they developed in later years.

Hey.

 

[Roguey]

I enjoy how that person is totally wrong too. Levine owns nothing.

 

[Infinitron]

He's setting his new base of operations to rape SS2 directly now. Who wants to bet that in the next years they'll unfold System Shock (yeah, not System Shock 3, just System Shock, you wouldn't want to alienate your userbase would you now?) on E3 or VGA? Eagles will shed their final tears before total extinction on that day.

Also, SHODAN voiced by some random bitch instead of Terri Brosius, just like Thi4f did with Stephen Russell.

They'll have to buy the IP from that insurance company in Michigan first. And who knows, Bethesda might just get there first.

 

[Xor]

Um, last time I checked there were still games coming out for the PS4. That thing ain't dead yet. If anything, Sony is very good at keeping their consoles being sold, with the PS2 being made until way into 2012 IIRC.

Platinum's last two games were Wii U exclusives.

Huh. Well, wasn't The Wonderful 101 a system seller and won't Bayonetta 2 also pull up the sales for the console? Because as I see it the Wii U isn't quite dead yet.

As dead as the Gamecube.

 

[Akasen]

I don't know what to think of this news. I personally enjoyed the fuck out of Infinite myself. Then again, much of my experience with an Irrational Games title boils down to Bioshock 1 and Infinite. So on one hand, I really can't say I give too much of a shit about its fate about now. On the other hand, I cringe hearing that fucking Bethesda is offering jobs to the recently laid off.

For any of them to even choose Bethesda, it is in effect selling your soul to the devil. You may gain great wealth and power, but at the cost of damnation.

 

[Farage]

I don't know what to think of this news. I personally enjoyed the fuck out of Infinite myself. Then again, much of my experience with an Irrational Games title boils down to Bioshock 1 and Infinite. So on one hand, I really can't say I give too much of a shit about its fate about now. On the other hand, I cringe hearing that fucking Bethesda is offering jobs to the recently laid off.

For any of them to even choose Bethesda, it is in effect selling your soul to the devil. You may gain great wealth and power, but at the cost of damnation.

Atleast we might see a rad plot twist at the end of Fallout 4

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

Those butthurt former-hipster faggot devs should go tranny in one way or another and post on the 'dex. With that level of butthurt they'd fit right in.

 

[RK47]

I take pleasure in knowing that Ken Levine fucked up somewhere.
This is probably his last chance.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I take pleasure in knowing that Ken Levine fucked up somewhere.
This is probably his last chance.

With a mere 15 men team, he can fuck up 10 times and still not inflict as much financial damage as he did with Bullshit Infinite.

 

[RK47]

Wow, that's a great positive change isn't it?
Ken Levine will be back, with 10 more failures.
But don't cry kids, it's fine.
No.
He's got one more release.
If that one is fucked too, he's done.
I refuse to believe that Take 2 is smart enough to go 'small' with a talent like Kevine Len.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

You're talking out of a butthurt ass now. Why do you assume he's gonna fuck up again? For all we know, he excels best when working with smaller teams.