Also, I love the idea in this post about the tape recorders being organic machines with lips. I think that would have fit right in without having the parts of that idea.

My two cents on the atmospheric pressure… For the audio and visual clue, you could have the walls, floor, and ceiling flex and creak. If the floor is bowed up slightly, you know that the pressure is low. It would be a subtle thing that would still allow you control the mood if you made the fog kind of thick during high pressure. It would have added to the suspense and realism if sometimes the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see all the way across the room. Based on the fact the Rapture is leaking, I would think the humidity would be a little thick anyways. Of course, you would bypass the fog in the breezeways since you wouldn’t be able to see the fog except for around the light source anyways. Skipping that part of realism would not have been a problem for the gamers.
Instead of that, you could have simply made is breath barely visible under normal conditions, high pressure equates to thicker breath while lower pressure equals invisible breath. Subtle but visible. You simply pause for a jiffy at the start of the room and find out what is up with the pressure.

With weapons breaking down, I hated how Fallout 3 handles it, every shot is so much damage to your weapon. This idea would work better in a war games than any other. Being a Marine, I can tell you that you never know when your weapon will fail. I would like to see a war game where you have to “clean” your weapon. Not a mini-game where you have to break down the gun, etc. Instead it could be a 60 second countdown that you could trigger whenever. Throw a random number generator in there for when every round is fired. If a certain number comes up, you got a broken weapon and now have to take 105 seconds to repair your weapon.

Just my two cents….

However, I do think it’d be cool if some of the features were left in secretly. Maybe the Schrödinger’s Cat in the second game would reanimate and scurry away under higher pressure. :3

Seriously, it’s interesting to see how far the game progressed from the beginning point!

I also find it interesting that each of these ideas has something to do with the issue of communicating ideas to players.

The quick weapon degradation wasn’t explained away sufficiently. There was no clear way to let players know about the effects of the pressure system. The nav-bot demanded too much of the player’s attention and wasn’t as easily read as a plain ol’ map. (I may be filling in too many blanks here, but it seems that) players would understand and know how to deal with the more conventional machinery and NPCs than they would the more bizarre original concept.

Thanks for posting this kind of stuff. It’s always interesting to learn a little more about the * Shock games—why they are the way they are, and how they might’ve been.

I’d love to see a proper Bioshock. If anything at all was disappointing about Bioshock for me it would be how un-bio it was.

As for the audiolog explaining the gun degradation in SS2, that just sounds stupid to me. If you have a virus that eats metal why isn’t it eating the ship? It poses more questions than it answers and it’s very obviously a constructed excuse for a game mechanic. Had that explanation been in the game I would have shrugged the fiction off and continued being annoyed by the gameplay

I like the biomechanical idea though. The idea of the game slowly revealing a biofreak underclass powering the machines the player was mindlessly operating for the first part of the game seems pretty cool/disgusting.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4508664361400518462#