BioShock Will Return; L.A. Noire, Beaterator Delayed Until FY09
Zelnick was addressing an analyst's question on how to avoid watering down a franchise with annual releases but still foster innovative development on a regular basis. The chairman said Take-Two would be roughly on a biennial schedule for game releases if it didn't have to worry about fostering creativity in game design.
"I would say, probably, roughly an every-two-year schedule would be optimal. And if you look historically that has been largely the case with GTA, and I'd expect we'd apply rougly the same strategy to BioShock because BioShock is shaping up to be a very important franchise," Zelnick said in response to an analyst's query. "I don't want to say more than that about BioShock because I certainly don't want to jinx it, but I feel awfully good about where that's going."
Another analyst asked Zelnick about the sell-through numbers for BioShock, since the company has revealed shipment numbers of 1.5 million, but not retail sales. Zelnick would only say Take-Two thinks BioShock is "one of the fastest selling games in video game history."
The call also revealed two delays from previously predicted development schedules for Team Bondi's hard-boiled PS3 action game L.A. Noire and Rockstar Leeds' Beaterator--a PSP music game collaboration with hip hop producer Timbaland. Both titles are now expected to ship in Take-Two's fiscal year 2009, which begins in November 2008.
"Right now we're just pushing out the release date, and we'll be more specific as we have more information," Zelnick said. "We are continuing to develop the titles, and I think our decision was driven in part by the fact that we have such a strong release schedule for '08 and a pretty robust one."
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erotic sock
replyi hope when they say "turn into an ongoing franchise" they don't mean "beat a dead horse so the maggots squirm enough to keep filling our moneyhats"
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This is the type of game I really want no kind of sequel to. It's like Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. It tells a completely self-sufficient story in a world that is entirely constructed for the sole purpose of telling that story. Rapture was not conceived like some pulp fantasy world, with the world fleshed out first then the story injected into it--the world itself was borne out of the story's own thematic needs. I don't want to go back to Rapture, or even really do stuff in it before BioShock took place. I want Rapture to always exist as a crumbling metaphor for unchecked hubris, as it was intended to do, and I want Irrational to spend its creative energy on new things.
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I agree, I never want to see Rapture pre or post Bioshock. One of the most awesome things about Bioshock was how they left it up to the player's imagination to picture what Rapture was like before or after the events of the game with suggestions through the plot.
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Actually, according to the making-of, the world was fleshed out first. Levine states "I was sort of waiting for the game to tell me what it should be."
They knew they wanted the world to be isolated, and the player couldn't leave. "I had to ask myself, if we're going to make this believable, why would somebody build a city at the bottom of the ocean? And you know, that's where bioshock came from, asking that question, why would somebody do this? And trying to come up with a believable answer, and everything came out of that."
The more you know-
That still sounds to me like they were created largely in tandem, and it also suggests that the cause of Rapture's downfall is intrinsic to the whole of the world's identity.
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Yeah, probably largely in tandem. However, the impression that I got from the DVD was that they wanted to set the world up and then decide "Okay, things are going to go wrong. Why?" and from that, they would set up the stories for the characters and the civil war. So it all comes from this pseudo simulation through discussion of the underwater world that they've set up for the characters.
They did go in with certain themes in mind, but I'd say the stronger themes didn't come along until the world was fleshed out.-
Though, I guess that depends on what I mean by "fleshed out". Certain things wouldn't be there without those strong themes, and certain themes wouldn't be there without the things. So yeah, that sounds like tandem to me.
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No way, they built it up with the intention of breaking it down. In other words, they built it to have those fundamental flaws.
Bioshock is Rapture in its' entirety of flawed principle and execution.
I think a sequel would...be a much lesser game.
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2k isn't Id software
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