BioShock Infinite's '1999 Mode' is harder, old school
Do you long for the days when games put the hard in hardcore? BioShock Infinite's newly announced "1999 Mode" is for you, then.
Do you long for the days when games put the hard in hardcore? BioShock Infinite's newly announced "1999 Mode" is for you, then.
"We want to give our oldest and most committed fans an option to go back to our roots," director Ken Levine said in the announcement. "In 1999 Mode, gamers face more of the permanent consequences of their gameplay decisions. In BioShock Infinite, gamers will have to sweat out the results of their actions. In addition, 1999 Mode will demand that players pick specializations, and focus on them."
1999 Mode will tweak Infinite to be more challenging and "old school," regardless of the set difficulty level. For example, you will not be able to magically respawn in 1999 Mode if you don't have the right resources. If you took advantage of the Vita-Chambers from the original BioShock, 1999 Mode is definitely not for you. 1999 Mode will also feature more demanding weapon, power, and health management.
Levine added: "I'm an old school gamer. We wanted to make sure we were taking into account the play styles of gamers like me. So we went straight to the horse's mouth by asking them, on our website, a series of questions about how they play our games. 94.6 percent of respondents indicated that upgrade choices enhanced their BioShock gameplay experience; however, 56.8 percent indicated that being required to make permanent decisions about their character would have made the game even better."
BioShock Infinite will be available on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 later this year.
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, BioShock Infinite's '1999 Mode' is harder, old school.
Do you long for the days when games put the hard in hardcore? BioShock Infinite's newly announced "1999 Mode" is for you, then.-
But will it have 1999 Unreal Engine mousecode? Will it have 1999-era DRM?
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a spinning wheel where you have to line things up in order to get a password?
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Even that is better than SecuROM or SolidShield activation DRM or GFWL 15-use code or SSA activation DRM.
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No, it will never happen again. Now go away.
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I was thinking more of UT99 retrofitted with Dan Vogel's OpenGL driver, which IIRC was released in mid-2000. That mousecode was awesome, comparable to Quake 3.
My primary message here is that if Ken Levine wants to fix one problem from Bioshock (the Vita Chamber respawns making the game too easy), then he should seek to fix two other egregiously bad things from Bioshock (the activation DRM, and the execrable mousecode that the 1.1 patch only partially fixed).
I'm at the point where I want to give Ken Levine my Bioshock PC box with a note of "return to sender; unacceptable DRM". But I want to do it in a way that won't result in a panic or a lawsuit. This is not a joke; those parties who can help can contact me through the usual channels.-
The best part of the OpenGL driver was epic saying they couldn't write one for UT because it would run slower than the D3D render. Then this guy releases the openGL driver it and it runs much much faster, even with the S3 high res textures.
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Yeah, that made Dan Vogel a hero in my book, until I saw that he was one of the senders of the "Gears comes first" emails disclosed in the discovery process of the trial against Silicon Knights.
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:sigh:
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you know all those games still run great in Win7. you can play them over, and over, and over forever.
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I still can't play SiN in Windows 7. Won't be able to either, since there were no engine port efforts similar to those for Quake 2, and because Ritual got dissolved five years ago.
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im assuming you are not talking about the steam version because I have never had an issue on Win 7 64
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I really wish idTech4 didnt tank so hard, Unreal looks pretty but it falls hard in the whole 'looking at things' arena.
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Not that it matters, but this just sealed the deal for me. I mean, let's be honest, I was going to buy the game anyway. But now I'm really, really excited for it.
The worst part about Deus Ex: HR for me was the fact that you can pretty much get every enhancement in the game. There are limitations, but it's certainly not as specialized as DE1, which is the guy to beat, really. -
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Too much work still. I want to play a game and just press A to win.
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lol. "Lordy"
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I think it's clearly a reference to 'gaming in 1999.' If not specifically 1999, then it refers to the paradigm of game design that was prevalent back then before Gears of War shit on modern shooting games.
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lol, I'm curious as to why you chose Gears of War as your target for this statement in a discussion about Bioshock.
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Because that's where cover mechanics were birthed into the masses. The beginning of the end.
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Does Bioshock Infinite have a cover system?
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Even better: it has a "Press X to create cover" system.
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If you think that was the beginning of the end you are very young.
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cover systems are just like any other gameplay mechanic when first introduced to the wild. it's overused for a few years, then toned down, then finally intelligently implemented. same as a lot of other features that got hammered to death in the 90's and 2000's.
not every game now released has a cover system. some do - probably more do than need it - but it's nowhere near as bad as 2006-2010 IMO. -
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And technically it even came before that, with games like MGS2 - though not really done in the same way.
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Well, arguably you could take cover in any FPS prior, just step behind a wall, or something like that.
I believe that kill.switch's version is acknowledged as actually having a button press to make you go into cover mode, hugging what you were behind, and give you the option of firing from it.-
In MGS2, you press against the cover and you're in cover mode, you can also fire from behind it. It's just not sticky.
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In fact I think you can do it in MGS also, but it's been a long time since I played that one.
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I think the only difference was that you couldn't fire while in cover, but I may be wrong.
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Yeah, it's the firing from cover that I can't remember if you could do in MGS. I know you could use cover though.
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I really loved kill.switch, such an enjoyable game
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It's a feature that was nowhere close to hitting critical mass till Gears and Rainbow did it (as well as GRAW 1 the year before, but that was a different sort of implementation).
Cover or wallhugging before that, like other dudes have pointed out, was a stealth game thing. It was Gears that used it as a shortcut to actually forcing the player to learn how to navigate and strategically read the environment.
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Sweet, I'm down. Seems like there shouldn't even be a 1999 mode and it should just be apart of the core game. But either way, options are cool! *thumbs up*
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+1
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This game really needs to hurry and come out.
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Looks like 65 degree equivalent in all the screenshots. FPS developers have been wearing tunnel-vision blinders since 2007.
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It's awesome, and when someone posted about it last night I was all :Ding about it, but really this should have been in the first game.
No really, Levine was posting on the TTLG boards a lot right before the last big media push for Bioshock, and the kids told him, "No your respeccing sucks, that will not work man" but of course what they got back was "You don't know, you have to play the game!"
They told Ion Storm the same thing about the DX2 interface... sometimes devs should just listen. -
Sort out the FOV and crappy mouse code or GTFO!
