Quote from thisnameistaken :

I heard it was pretty linear tbh, and I hadn't heard about "improving" or "growing" your character in any way. To me it looks like a FPS with decent art direction, and that's about it.

All the reviews I've read have described it pretty much as 'Deus Ex set underwater, in the 60s'. Its an RPG with a strong emphasis on shooting things, rather than a corridor-shooter.

Disappointingly average.

There`s just nothing at all in the demo that stuck out as being anything other than that.

Fear and Doom3 did scary and spooky. Condemned:criminal origins had much better melee fighting (it wasn`t great, but at least it had a block button leading to some nice solid face to face trade-offs)

The weapons just feel bland and uninteresting, and the graphics aren`t anything special at all (just check out that "lovely" moon when you first come out the water and reach the rapture dock).

Apart from the AI actually running and jumping at you really quickly rather than just slowly shambling towards you waiting to be shot, there`s just nothing at all new, exciting or different meriting all the huge review scores that are currently going around on the net, magazines, etc.

I was really looking forward to playing this too, but it`s just another bland shooter in a slightly different setting.

Meh

Ahh great, and how much would a DX10 OS cost?

£67 for Vista 64-bit, £62 for Vista 32-bit

Quote :

While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time,

- Gamespot Review

I have to say I'm really looking forward to be able to play Bioshock at some point. With the plethora of positive reviews flooding in, it does seem as though expectations have largely been filled, which is a good sign really as the game's been over hyped for months on end.

OMG! i just played the demo,and i have to say this is awesome,the grafs are beautiful,specially the plane scene/water but ist..dang.. i never thought i gonna like this1,but it got me! waiting couple days for the fullversion

I've heard the demo has disappointed a lot of people so far. Seems it's not quite the revolution in FPS gaming that the reviews have said it is. Or at least not for everybody.

I'm glad they've tried to introduce a strong narrative - that's desperately needed - but if the gameplay hasn't evolved to the point where it's different to play compared with other FPS games I'll be disappointed.

Maybe the demo is too short to bring out the brilliance of teh storyline? Maybe someone go into the demo with the wrong attitude? The actual action might not be revolutionary, but the 'whys' and the 'whats' seem to be.

the story seems interesting and kinda original, but for a 1.8gb demo i was expecting more than 20mins of play time.

yeah.. Not like LFS, where you get 4 years of enjoyment for free... I can't wait for friday!

Hehehe, just reminds me how woofully out of date my PC is.......

I played the 360 demo a few days ago and was pretty impressed. I think a few people in this thread are missing the whole point that the people aren't zombies (ie, mindless). Quite the opposite - they each have reasons for being the way there are. Of course, you only notice this if you don't sprint around trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible and ignoring all the actual content. Personally I found it well creepy.

I won't be buying it though, because I think once you've been through it there won't be that much call to do it again. No multiplayer FTL.

I'm just curious as to whether my PC will run it at a decent lick. If it does I'll probably buy it. The likes of system shock and deus ex couldn't be evaluated properly by a 20min demo, so I doubt this can either.

This video had me in complete AWE.(spelling? XD ). I can't believe people compare it to DOOM after playing the demo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD_u06UYc40

on a side note this would make a damn good movie.

EDIT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy6hWyhq_hc (PART ONE)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVDTWMrjde4 (PART TWO)found an actual gameplay vid to help me back this up

Quote from Electrik Kar :

In my own words, the different shader models are different versions of a language which work with DX to render graphics. The higher the version, the more things you can do, as long as you also have the proper hardware to do it. (how's that?)

Yep. That's more or less it. The Shader Model defines the feature set available to pixel/vertex/geometry shaders written for Direct3D. That includes restrictions/requirements on instruction count, floating point precision, that sort of thing.

SM2.0 for instance was unable to do so called dynamic branching in shaders. (if <some condition> do <this> else do <that>) That meant that if you wanted to shade a surface with let's say 4 light sources, you'd have to compute the light contribution for 4 light sources, regardless of whether they actually lit the surface or not. You couldn't jump past the code doing the math for light 3 if a certain pixel was in shadow from light 3 for instance.

In SM3.0 and up you can add a test to determine whether the light actually contributes to the final pixel/vertex color before computing its light contribution in detail, thus saving GPU time. (Moar FPS!!1!!one )

There's a lot of other differences too of course, but that's one example.

I can't decide whether to buy this or not.

The setting appeals to me, but I am so bored of FPS games. I got suckered into buying Stalker by people who said the AI was something special when it wasn't, and again the setting was cool but the gameplay was very average.

Oh I don't know!

Take your time man, It only came out today, I personally think that this game is something special, but hey, i thought the same about Colin McRae rally 4 until i tried the Richard Burns Rally demo.

Quote from Dajmin :

No multiplayer FTL.

Oh, singleplayer only? It's not for me then.

is it correct that this thing can only be unlocked twice on the same pc and the same installation of windows without having to jump through hoops ?

honestly if they keep this kind of crap up scene versions will ony become more appealing than they already are

Quote from Shotglass :

isa it correct that this thing can only be unlocked twice on the same pc and the same installation of windows without having to jump through hoops ?

honestly if they keep this kind of crap up scene versions will ony become more appealing than they already are

That was the impression I got before the official forums turned into a warzone and died.

Us with widescreen monitors have been shafted as well, for WS modes, they crop the top and bottom of the picture.

Link

Quote from Bean0 :

Us with widescreen monitors have been shafted as well, for WS modes, they crop the top and bottom of the picture.

i fail to see whats wrong with that
its a storytelling decision if youre gonna show the user more or just as much fov on a widescreen and especially with the horror genre this is a important one

Well, some kind soul has gone ahead with a project to get Bioshock working with SM2.0 cards. Bless his little cotton socks!

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5680

I'm downloading his 'patch' now so I'll probably re-edit this post to tell you how it goes...

edit: well, I tried it out. And it indeed does work, but as the author says, there are some textures which don't display properly, and I also got a device error message and had to reboot shortly into the game. I think I'll hold out for a more stable fix before continuing with it.

Pretty cheap and shoddy way to force people to upgrade their hardware if you ask me. As the guy said, he put in 20 minutes effort and could get most of the graphics to work. There isn't that much difference between SM2.0 and SM3.0- so I'm guessing it's either plain laziness on the part of the programmers or (much more likely) the GFX company (Nvidia) who has paid the devs to discontinue support for older cards.

Sucks.

Looks like 2K is giving the PC users the good ol' 'ramming a pole into paying customer's ass' treatment. Apparently you get two (2) install credits. Install once, lose a credit, etc. Only way to reclaim your credit is to uninstall Bioshoop through 'Add or remove program' before your hard drive went dead or Windowz killed itself. Too bad! Can't see how that is helping the sales.

How does it do that? Some online registry? It can't write to the CD.

Quote from Crashgate3 :

How does it do that? Some online registry? It can't write to the CD.

Online activation a-la LFS it would seem. Except you only get two unlocks (period), and you can "restore" an unlock by uninstalling.