Irrational Games shutting down

http://kotaku.com/bioshock-studio-irrational-games-is-winding-down-all-1525186316

Some people just HAVE to win game of the year. ;)

This makes me a little anxious in that the games I tend to look forward to are ambitious, immersive, narrative-driven, triple-A titles. In other words, the brainchilds of people like Ken Levine and Cliff Bleszinski, who are now leaving that field.

On the other hand, the writing has been on the wall for a while--the appetite for these titles is waning, and the audience splintered. These games' lack of staying power in the marketplace combined with ballooning budgets was making the economics untenable.

I'd love to hear Jason Jones' take on the state of triple-A gaming.

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Narrative games with multiple stories? Isn't that an oxymoron?

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Narrative games with multiple stories? Isn't that an oxymoron?

He is under a few misconceptions:

1. Game narratives should be anything other than support for the world created, in order to further increase immersion.
2. People played Bioshock Infinite once because it has a fixed story.

With regards to 2, people don't replay Bioshock Infinite because it is easily mastered, and the world is not immersive, but rather a facade. This does not promote exploration, or the desire to remain in the world.

With regards to 1, the best stories in games are not ends to themselves, but rather means to enhance the world of the game. Even in a game like Beyond Two Souls, the multiple narrative paths increase immersion by making you feel like you are effecting the world in ways beyond explosions and death, because that's your primary interaction with the game. In a game like Halo, the story gives you a backdrop and a reason to shoot stuff, enhancing that experience.

When he bemoans that Civ is replayable and Bioshock Isn't, that's because it has a lot to master and discover. Deus Ex is a narrative driven game, but it's 1000X more replayable than Bioshock because it too has a lot to discover and master, both in terms of story and mechanics.

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I enjoyed Bioshock the first time I played it but found the scavenging a PITA. I think I tried a second play-through but got bored with it. Didn't fancy the sound of Bioshock 2 and didn't see anything attractive about what I read of BI before it came out. I think I burnt out on the first game :-) And the story 'reveal' was about as insightful as 'revealing' that you need to breathe to live.

Mass Effect has multiple endings (all 3 of them) and most of the fans hated those. But, endings aside, the game had multiple story tracks and you had an illusion of agency in the story. Its gameplay was always weak but its obvious shortcomings didn't matter to me because I loved being in that world and I liked my companions. The draw was the story, the world, and the characters. Gameplay was just the icing on the cake. It was like being able to walk into the Star Trek universe, to captain a starship. It was more role play than gameplay but still gave me a sense of agency.

It achieved what success it had because of massive human input, dialogue writers, voice actors, story tellers. Does Levine think that he can automate that? It's easier to have responsive combat AI but responsive people? How would that work?

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Gameplay was just the icing on the cake.

I totally disagree with you. Gameplay is the cake. Mass Effect supports Cody's points more than you know. The conversation system is part of the game, along with the shooty bits, but it's primarily about the conversation bits supporting the shooty bits. I mean, that's what you're doing for a huge part of the experience. While I can leave the shooty bits in ME1, ME2 and ME3 prove they wanted to make a great 3rd person shooter along with everything else. If you think it's just mostly the story (and the writing in all three games had moments of sheer WTF), you miss what makes Mass Effect great.

Example time: Legion and Thane

It'll be a long time before I forget that Collector Base assault where Harbinger ASSUMED CONTROL of a minion right in my face. I ordered Legion to summon a combat drone behind it, just to give my butt an extra second to regroup. Next thing I know, Thane drops its shields with a warp blast and Legion follows with a gorgeous headshot to its smarmy little dome.

That moment was enhanced through all the conversations in ME2 by degrees I can't think to imagine. In my playthroughs, Thane and Legion were clearly in Shepard's inner circle.

Fast forward to ME3, and the resolutions to Thane and Legion's stories. You don't think I'm getting a little emotional here just thinking about them in terms of the story? Naw, the story served the gameplay, and made it better than it could've been otherwise.

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Dammit, son! Your other post had me ready to tackle Dishonored next, but now I want to finally do my renegade playthrough of ME3.

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Just get them both done before April!

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And the story 'reveal' was about as insightful as 'revealing' that you need to breathe to live.

Honestly I didn't think the twist was supposed to be shocking or insightful, I think it was the experience in Bioshock Infinite that was supposed to be compelling (and was for me at least).

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This makes me a little anxious in that the games I tend to look forward to are ambitious, immersive, narrative-driven, triple-A titles. In other words, the brainchilds of people like Ken Levine and Cliff Bleszinski, who are now leaving that field.

...

I'd love to hear Jason Jones' take on the state of triple-A gaming.

-------------
I'm not "in" gaming currently, but I like to think that I have my ear low enough to the ground that I can give, at the very least, and observation worth its merit. If I am wrong then I will learn.

Kickstarter Vs The Investor, Mobile games, the casual gamer, and the future of consoles as a business model. I'm not going to be talking about these - but they should be noted.

So with all that said, I can say that they arn't "leaving", they are changing their approach. Between the lines of Cliff Bleszinski's 'I'll Never Make Another Disc-Based Game', to Ken Levines statement (with added emphasis) on Irrationals site of

In time we will announce a new endeavor with a new goal: To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable. To foster the most direct relationship with our fans possible, we will focus exclusively on content delivered digitally.

...

I thought the only way to build this [new] venture was with a classical startup model, a risk I was prepared to take. But when I talked to Take-Two about the idea, they convinced me that there was no better place to pursue this new chapter than within their walls."

...leads what they are saying between the lines.

For me - for MY (limited?) interpretation of this, the aforementioned "brainchilds" (though they are just a small, abit more reported piece of the large pie that is the industry of games), are acting off their experience and the change of the industry. What we have gotten used to these past 7 or so years is no more. We can see that just in the few games that we DO know about, by just the idea of potential fun that is being sold to us - Destiny included.

The slate has been proverbially ("console cycle") wiped clean and they are bringing all those factors together and acting upon them. They grasping the moment are making new games.

The question is - What format and How. They aren't done yet, so that is all I can say.

TL;DR

I think both Cliff Bleszinski & Ken Levine still have a few more "AAA" ideas up their sleeves. Time will tell.

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I think both Cliff Bleszinski & Ken Levine still have a few more "AAA" ideas up their >sleeves. Time will tell.

Oh, I do, too, and I'll be interested in whatever they do. I think it's possible to make a great game for mobile, so it's not like I think we'll not have great games.

It's the huge worlds and immersion I'm worried about losing. That costs money and man hours.

I left out the Bioware doctors who are now out of the biz.

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I think both Cliff Bleszinski & Ken Levine still have a few more "AAA" ideas up their >sleeves. Time will tell.

Oh, I do, too, and I'll be interested in whatever they do. I think it's possible to make a great game for mobile, so it's not like I think we'll not have great games.

It's the huge worlds and immersion I'm worried about losing. That costs money and man hours.

I left out the Bioware doctors who are now out of the biz.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-wars-knights-old-republic/id611436052?mt=8

Huge worlds - Check

Immersion - Check

Mobile - Check

Bioware Involvement - Check

It might just be a port - but its a start.

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I think both Cliff Bleszinski & Ken Levine still have a few more "AAA" ideas up their >sleeves. Time will tell.

Oh, I do, too, and I'll be interested in whatever they do. I think it's possible to make a great game for mobile, so it's not like I think we'll not have great games.

It's the huge worlds and immersion I'm worried about losing. That costs money and man hours.

I left out the Bioware doctors who are now out of the biz.

I honestly think they are done build a grand prison for themselves. They want to make games that push farther, do more, actually move the yardstick. But, if they do that on a grand scale, they are guaranteeing the mothership will want slow burn iteration on the series of those types of game they want to make.

It kinda makes sense, why raise the bar if that means you are using more money to unnecessarily extend your current game's scope and relevance? If making a stable cash stream is the game, then you'd want to make one big achievement and ride it for a few years of slowly iterative sequels. But, I'm guessing that's not the aim of Cliffy, Kevin, or the BioWare docs. Just a thought.

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Irrational Games, journalism, and airing dirty laundry

Games By Humans

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Those were good. Thanks for posting.

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Games By Humans

Time to move to the way the movie industry does things? You hire folks on a per project basis. In a sense the 'developer' dissolves after every film, and is recreated for the next one. Unionize so you get good enough pay / working conditions to hold you over, and he can do stuff like this without losing sleep.

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Heck, even engineering companies do this here in Brazil all the time, much to my chagrin.

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Irrational Games, journalism, and airing dirty laundry

Games By Humans

Great articles!

While there is cause for concern, I'm not sure if all the worry is warranted.

If you allow me to perform some math:

A = [noun] Irrational Games Studio
B = [noun] Narrative-Driven Video Game
C = [verb] Game Studio Closes

D = [noun] Any Other Game Studio

If A + B = C, it in no way implies that D + B = C. The variables are different, and D will assuredly make a different game than A.

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From the "Humans" article.

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

Absolutely devastating.

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From the "Humans" article.

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

Absolutely devastating.

We just haven't as a culture been able to catch up to art in the age of mechanical reproducibility. The arts now are higher arts, yet each individual contribution to the work is less. That doesn't mean each artist has less skill (in fact, for good works it's the opposite).

Part of the problem is still focusing on the sign value of art. There's prestige in owning an original Picasso, since it's utterly unique, and the man himself laid hands on it. There's no prestige in owning a copy of a film or video game, yet we still cling to that idea by attaching a creator's name. So "A Hideo Kojima Game" has more sign value than "A Shinji Mikami game", even though the latter is better art :-p

There's a lot of ego in art that doesn't translate as art becomes higher.

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Part of the problem is still focusing on the sign value of art. There's prestige in owning an original Picasso, since it's utterly unique, and the man himself laid hands on it. There's no prestige in owning a copy of a film or video game, yet we still cling to that idea by attaching a creator's name. So "A Hideo Kojima Game" has more sign value than "A Shinji Mikami game", even though the latter is better art :-p

Could you please expand on your idea of sign value? Do you mean strictly dollar-conversion of a developer's name on a game, or something more? We here sure put a lot of sign value on Bungie's name as an organization, don't we?

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Part of the problem is still focusing on the sign value of art. There's prestige in owning an original Picasso, since it's utterly unique, and the man himself laid hands on it. There's no prestige in owning a copy of a film or video game, yet we still cling to that idea by attaching a creator's name. So "A Hideo Kojima Game" has more sign value than "A Shinji Mikami game", even though the latter is better art :-p

Could you please expand on your idea of sign value? Do you mean strictly dollar-conversion of a developer's name on a game, or something more? We here sure put a lot of sign value on Bungie's name as an organization, don't we?

It relates to the value of art as a signifier. Imagine you have a perfect forgery of a Renoir. It is identical to that of a real Renoir. Well, given that it should be equally valuable right? It's not. A real Renoir is seen as more valuable, since it is old and rare, which is irrespective of the actual quality of the work. The forger might have cranked out 50 last month.

So you can see having a particular artist to give praise to can help enhance a work's sign value.

This is why rich people pay tons of money for shitty abstract art - it signifies that they are of a higher class and able to afford it. This is also why Hipsters like obscure shitty art - it gives them a unique identity.

Most normal people just buy what they like.

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- No text -

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This is why rich people pay tons of money for shitty abstract art - it signifies that they are of a higher class and able to afford it. This is also why Hipsters like obscure shitty art - it gives them a unique identity.

Most normal people just buy what they like.

That phrase causes my right eye to twitch and my brain to make this sound: "Gvvvgh-arrrgghh-haaargghh."

I don't necessarily disagree with your point of originals and duplications - but why throw in all these condemning generalizations about people you don't even know to try and help prove your point?

I've been called "hipster" once or twice before in a derogatory manner by folks who've never even talked to me. Just like I was called geek or nerd in middle school by bullies who couldn't fucking fathom people different from themselves and had to over-simplify a person's character to fit within some label they've created to diminish and shrink the world to match their opinions.

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I don't necessarily disagree with your point of originals and duplications - but why throw in all these condemning generalizations about people you don't even know to try and help prove your point?

I don't know, because that's what drives 'high art' nowadays? Is it true of all rich folks who buy art? No. Is it true of all young people living in Silverlake? No. But the state of 'high art' is largely driven by what I describe.

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I don't necessarily disagree with your point of originals and duplications - but why throw in all these condemning generalizations about people you don't even know to try and help prove your point?

I don't know, because that's what drives 'high art' nowadays? Is it true of all rich folks who buy art? No. Is it true of all young people living in Silverlake? No. But the state of 'high art' is largely driven by what I describe.

That type of logic is what props up a lot of generalizations even worse than the ones Leviathan described...

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I don't necessarily disagree with your point of originals and duplications - but why throw in all these condemning generalizations about people you don't even know to try and help prove your point?

I don't know, because that's what drives 'high art' nowadays? Is it true of all rich folks who buy art? No. Is it true of all young people living in Silverlake? No. But the state of 'high art' is largely driven by what I describe.

That type of logic is what props up a lot of generalizations even worse than the ones Leviathan described...

I don't think it's so much logic as in describing what he sees based on the knowledge and facts he's collected.

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There's a lot of ego in art that doesn't translate as art becomes higher.

Do we hold up folks like Ken Levine because they are actually awesome or because they are good enough to be idolized, and therefore provide our egos with a deperately desired facade of artistic respectibility?

Or, in other words, games are art cause Bioshock lolz.

Maybe Bioshock is just pretty good, and Ken Levine is a realtively talented asshole who just used the closure of his studio, and the distruptions to the lives of 100s of people, as cover for his new sexy artistic boner inducing project?

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I don't think this is a comment on "games" or the "gaming industry". You have these huge studios that employ hundreds, work for two to three years on a project before seeing any money, and heavily rely on that project doing well to succeed.

I compare it to big industries. Auto manufacturers take three years to design, build and test a car before it goes into production. There are billions invested in thousands of salaries, parts and infrastructure. If the new design doesn't sell, a small company will go under. The bigger groups like Ford or Toyota need to have multiple designs coming out every year or every other year just to cover for the flops. Even if something does sell, there is stiff competition and you cannot always charge what you want for it, which means you can't really use a minor success to compensate for a major fail.

Game studios are even more vulnerable. Most have one or two flagship projects which most of the studio rides on. If they don't perform well, or only perform ok, there may not be enough to float the studio for the next two years while they work on a new concept. News gets around for the big flameouts like Silicon Knights, where the leadership drove things off a cliff, but studios can also be shuttered or disrupted due to bankruptcy by their owners like THQ selling Relic.

None of that has anything to do with the people who play the games. You can still make cool games, I see kick starters for old school stuff all the time. Just the big studios with hundreds of staff can easily get too large and fail. A 5$ shareware game made by two people for 140,000 over two years only needs to sell 28,000 copies to break even.

If Bungie pays 106 employees CA minimum wage (76k/year), they need 8 million per year of development just to cover staff costs. Add in hardware, subcontractors, and the fact that not every employee is a disembodied soul and the costs balloon even higher. At 60$ per game box sold, they probably need to sell over half a million boxes total just to break even with my estimate above.

Now consider that I am woefully underestimating costs. I truly have no idea how much I'm missing. But again, you have 60$ per box, and Halo 3 sold 15 million copies. If Bungie expects to repeat that, they have 900 million to pay for everything over the 10 year life cycle and still have enough left over to start developing their next great game.

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I don't think this is a comment on "games" or the "gaming industry".

I don't know what you mean by that except that yes, the rules of economics apply to everyone. You basically fleshed out what I think, too, and yes, there were be plenty of games, and even AAA titles, but the latter may be fewer and less ambitious in terms of trying something new. You could say that's already the case.

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I don't think this is a comment on "games" or the "gaming industry".

I don't know what you mean by that except that yes, the rules of economics apply to everyone. You basically fleshed out what I think, too, and yes, there were be plenty of games, and even AAA titles, but the latter may be fewer and less ambitious in terms of trying something new. You could say that's already the case.

Kinda out of left field, but it's been on my mind latey that the surest sign of our poverty is our use of money.

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Money is just an abstraction, a solution to the primitive question of "how do we feed everyone?". Use of money does not make one any more impoverished then using a pen makes one illiterate. One is literate regardless of the instrument used to write, just as one can be impoverished without regard to the amount of paper they possess.

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Money is just an abstraction, a solution to the primitive question of "how do we feed everyone?". Use of money does not make one any more impoverished then using a pen makes one illiterate. One is literate regardless of the instrument used to write, just as one can be impoverished without regard to the amount of paper they possess.

My point still stands. It's proof we haven't figured out how to feed everyone.

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Money is just an abstraction, a solution to the primitive question of "how do we feed everyone?". Use of money does not make one any more impoverished then using a pen makes one illiterate. One is literate regardless of the instrument used to write, just as one can be impoverished without regard to the amount of paper they possess.

My point still stands. It's proof we haven't figured out how to feed everyone.

So, money is going to disappear the very moment everyone has access to at least 1500 calories of food per day? Vanish into thin air?

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Well, no, of course not. :P My point is that there isn't enough to go around, and we use money as a way to arrange that scarcity.

At least far as I can tell. I should clarify that I'm a layman just wondering aloud.

EDIT: which isn't too say I'm trying to back away from the conversation, just establishing a baseline.

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My point is that there isn't enough to go around, and we use money as a way to arrange that scarcity.

I thought you were going to go in a direction about how our money system creates imbalanced food distribution.

Food scarcity isn't necessarily "the big" issue with famine. In the modern, highly connected world, there's a lot of food to go around that simply doesn't go around for various socioeconomic reasons.

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Well, no, of course not. :P My point is that there isn't enough to go around, and we use money as a way to arrange that scarcity.

At least far as I can tell. I should clarify that I'm a layman just wondering aloud.

EDIT: which isn't too say I'm trying to back away from the conversation, just establishing a baseline.

Take it from me, the scarcity in our food supply is due to the roadblocks in delivery. If we can waste arable land on ridiculous fads like corn ethanol or organic foods, we're definitely growing more than enough.

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Totally agree with you and uberfoop here.

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Thank you, Norman Borlaug.

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Thank you, Norman Borlaug.

A lot of people remember what they were doing when they heard Kennedy died.
I remember what I was doing when I heard that Norman Borlaug died.

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Thank you, Norman Borlaug.

A lot of people remember what they were doing when they heard Kennedy died.
I remember what I was doing when I heard that Norman Borlaug died.

Make some movies, and everybody loses it when you die.

Save a billion lives (literally), and nobody knows your name.

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Make some movies, and everybody loses it when you die.

Save a billion lives (literally), and nobody knows your name.

Indeed. One caveat out of respect for the departed. There are movies, and then there is the perfection of Groundhog Day, which has provided soul food for many, many people.

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Voyager has the brain waves of a human in love on it. So fucking cool.

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