2K Boston / 2K Australia (formerly Irrational games) has finally released the epic game Bioshock, the Ayn Rand inspired vision of the 60s that takes place in a decaying underwater city. It’s truly an amazing experience, and will get a proper review once I’ve completed the story.
But shortly after the release, postings were made to various message boards stating that the widescreen version of the game was missing parts of the screen that were visible when playing in normal 4:3 resolutions. This problem appears in both the PC and 360 versions of the game. A lengthy discussion erupted, soon turning into a troll flame festival, but the fact is, you see more running in a 4:3 screen than you do on a widescreen tv/monitor. And that is not what people expect. Some folks devised a fix for the PC version to enable the field of vision to extend out further on the Widescreen version on PC, but nothing can be done at this time to adjust the 360 version (apart from running it in 480p, which defeats the purpose of having an HDTV).
2K Games responded earlier today that everything is as they intended. They are saying that the game was designed with the Widescreen gamer in mind, and that the 4:3 folks have the same horizontal fov (side to side) as the widescreen people, but simply have more vertical vision.
“Instead of cropping the FOV for 4:3 displays and making all 4:3 owners mad in doing so, we slightly extended the vertical FOV for standard def mode: we never wanted to have black bars on people’s displays. (This way, everybody is happy…) This does mean that people playing on a standard def display see slightly more vertical space, but, this does not significantly affect the game-play experience and, we felt that it best served our goal of keeping the game experience as close as possible to the original design and art vision on both types of displays. Reports of the widescreen FOV being a crop of the 4:3 FOV are completely false.”
Ok, so they say the widescreen version is not a crop of the 4:3. They say it’s just that the 4:3 version has more than the widescreen. 2K… Regardless of how you term it, it means the exact same thing! They will likely release a patch enabling a different FOV for 360 users, especially with some users reportedly getting very motion sick.
While I haven’t noticed any major glitches in my couple of days with the 360 version of Madden 08, this guy on Youtube has video evidence of a couple (although that second bug is hardly worthwhile of getting all worked up over). Here’s a reproduction of the bug.
So what gives? Have you seen bugs like this? The only problem I’ve seen is the much maligned number of fumbles and turnovers you see in basically every game you play. I really hope that is adjusted in a patch.
But will it be? One of the hugest problems I see with sports gaming is that, because there is a new version coming out within a year, there is basically NO motivation to fix broken things in a released product. I saw this with MLB 2k7. The outfielders have a horrible tendency to, instead of jumping and climbing up the wall to reach for a catch when you flick up on the stick, they dive. This is a known issue, and when IGN posted the problem to 2K Sports producer Ben Brinkman, he said “I personally think that whole fielding system sucks.” And yet, this year’s game will continue to have this problem.
In non-sports games, where the game is a self contained, finite experience, a patch would be issued to resolve a major problem. But sports titles rarely have significant patches. Anything apart from a few tweaks here and there will be pushed off as a feature in the following version. This “sequels as a means of patching” mindset is a bane on Sports games.
But there’s no end in site, as millions of us continue to buy the game, hoping for a fun experience with a sport we love. I really wish the sports games would extend the support lifecycle to 2 years or so, where major bugs would be worked out, online games would continue to work, and rosters would continue to be updated for 2 years from the release. A bi-annual Madden with a service pack type upgrade in the middle years would be SO MUCH better than the current way things are done. Here’s to hoping somebody at EA figures this out.
There’s much to catch up with here at Xbox Topic, but first off I’d like to apologize for the slow updates. But wow, what a week! Madden 2008 has finally been released, and I’ve been pretty much playing the 360 version when I’m home, and the DS version when I’m away. The game is tight, and while I didn’t much play Madden 07 on 360, it seems as though having 2K sports pushing EA (with All Pro Football 2k8), a more inspired product was released. Full review will be forthcoming, once I’ve done some more with the franchise mode.
Secondly, I have one simple command for all of you. Download the Bioshock demo. If you weren’t one of the lucky ones to grab it from Toys R Us before they halted the broken street date, that is. I played through the demo last night, and was met with an amazing world, immediately reminiscent of Ayn Rand, right down to the fonts used. The game is stylistically superb, the gameplay tight, and the story captivating. With the game scoring 10/10 from most reviewers, it’s easy to understand what all the buzz is about. Without a multiplayer option though, Bioshock’s audience will unfortunately be more limited than it’s Unreal Engine cousin Gears of War.
As I mentioned earlier, updates have been slow from time to time, and typically those times coincide with me spending a lot of time on DS. As such, I’m thinking of ways of expanding Xbox Topic to incorporate other topics as well. Stay tuned for details as I work through the kinks. But worry not Xbox faithful, the 360 coverage will remain.
Online co-op, one of Gears of War’s most loved features, and a feature that was rumored to be axed from Halo 3, is now being confirmed as included in the upcoming game. But unlike Gears, which was made for 2 players only, Halo 3 will allow a 4 player co-op experience.