Bioshock’s very much back in the news at the moment. And goodness, what a lot of people seem to hate it all of a sudden, if folk in our comments threads are to be believed. You big sillies.
Would being able to play it with new Plasmids help? What about in proper widescreen? Or, and I suspect this will be the clincher, what about with those controversial insta-respawn Vita Chambers turned off?
Yes, the Bioshock patch, promised back in August, is coming at last, and it brings with it free extra stuff. The delay might be more than a little insulting, but nevertheless: celebrate! Sounds as though there’ll be other fixes and additions in there too, but no news on what, exactly. I strongly doubt there’ll be an option to make the final stage any good whatsoever, unfortunately.
I guess some folk will immediately see the option to deactivate the Vita whotsits as some kind of admission of failure – certainly, they were the element of the game that its critics tended to dole out the most vicious pummeling to. Made it too easy, they said. Not fair for you to come back to life on the spot, but for the bad that’d just killed you to still be missing whatever of his health you’d chipped away first, they whined. One suspension of disbelief too far, they gibbered.
I was fine with it though – better than a gameover or a quickload – and I doubt the option to remove them is any kind of mea culpa. I would imagine it’s more to do with introducing a purpose to play through the game again. Once its tale is told, the (faintly disappointingly) linear nature of Bioshock isn’t something there’s much drive to rush back to, and the as-yet-unnamed new Plasmids wouldn’t change that on their own. Without Vita Chambers, it’ll be a significantly different experience, I suspect.
Related Stories:
Another positive for Bioshock: it rewarded you for exploring. Two of the scariest moments, in my opinion, are well off the beaten track, and I only found them because I was carefully checking my map and making sure I hit every room.
I thought it was a great game that suffered from ridiculously high expectations due to the glowing reviews, a sloggy endgame, and some extremely repetitive gameplay. Perfect it wasn’t, but it was still head and shoulders above most FPS games.
I thought the vita chambers were a neat idea, though I preferred to reload. The chambers gave you your health back, but not your ammo, and ammo was pretty scarce in Bioshock.
EXTREME SPOILERS incoming.
PiratePete: Basically just before the big reveal, as the twist is being uncovered, the Vita-Chambers were designed to only work with Ryan’s DNA. As you were created from Ryan’s tissue, and thus had his DNA – you could use them as well.
Ryan had them keyed specifically to his genetic patterns for security reasons. It’s all in one of the logs.
Piratepete:
*
*
*
*
*
SPOILZzzalert – *******-genetic-key-ring-a-bell?********
*
*
*
*
Okay everyone you can look now. Not that it’s much of a spoiler, but I know how annoying it can be.
Wow – his question was hanging for hours and all 3 of us answered at once. SPOOKY.
Come on, people. All this fuss about VitaChambes. System Shock 2 had those – almost (there was the 5 nanites fee – but that was extremly cheap if you had the vaguest idea about how to play). There was even a speedrun that used death and medical units as a way to move faster.
I simply don’t understand all the controversy about the VC’s. Every game we play, we die at some point. And that’s how we “beat” the game. Figure out why we die, then reload/wash/repeat until we get it right. This has been a staple of gaming since the FPS genre came into being. And we “all” do it, whether people want to admit it or not.
I myself would rather use the VC’s to stay immersed in the game than see a “game over” screen. Yes the reason you and only you are able to resurrect is pretty implausible, but in the context of a game where you’re able to fling electricity through your fingertips, not so bad eh?
The game offers no challenge because I can’t die is a lame excuse. Use the chambers and you lose you’re resources. Load/reload, you don’t. Which one is easier?
But I can kill a BD with just a wrench. Sure if you want to take a 1/2 to do it. I know I don’t.
The problem with the VCs is that they are completely unbalanced. In SS2 the QBRCs had to be activated first, had a nanite cost and only restored a fraction of your health, thus requiring you to spend extra nanites to get your health back at acceptable levels. In Bioshock, on the other hand, the VCs are completely free and restore half of your health making them a huge game balancing issue.
Yes they had to be activated at a cost of a measly 5 nanites. As to the activation, yes Bioshock should have implemented that into the game, (and I was hoping they would in the patch), but it’s not a deal breaker to me.
Believe me, I was dissapointed in parts of Bioshock myself. Stealth was pretty much non-existent and it was scripted for non stop action which absolutely sucked. But overall a fine game that for once made the story as important as the gameplay. Now how often do we see that in an FPS?
On Hard and Impossible, the nanite cost was definitely not nonexistent, and was a rather harsh penalty for dying.
As for Bioshock’s qualities, I certainly agree with that compared to current FPSes, it certainly stands out, although that’s just because the competition is so incredibly dire. However, I don’t feel those qualities should make people turn a blind eye to everything else it botches which is what seems to be happening.
As far as combat is concerned, Bioshock doesn’t hold a candle to games like Crysis, F.E.A.R. or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and that’s a real problem when Bioshock was so clearly labeled by the devs as, first and foremost, a FPS.
I agree about the combat in the above mentioned games. But those games are tactical based shooters, whereas Bioshock is not, nor was it billed as such. IIRC, Levine, despite some gameplay elements that obviously didn’t make it into the final version, publicly hyped the combat by the variety of ways to kill your enemys. And that is in the game whether people like it or not.
As to SS2, I don’t question which is the better game. What amazes me is that a game made almost 10 years ago is still better than 99% of games being made today.
But to me, to compare Bioshock to games like HL2, Fear and Crysis is absurd. I haven’t played Crysis, however have played both Fear and HL2, and while both are good shooters, storywise they both contain covoluted stories that leave the gamer with more questions than answers. Maybe Crysis has a “deep” story, I don’t know as I haven’t played it, but I tend to doubt it given it’s Far Cry roots.
Combat in Crysis?! In FEAR?!?
Come on both those games’ combat was complete rubbish [stealth suit kill stealth suit run for Crysis and FEAR's combat was a rehash of Max Payne].
People forget how much walking about for 10 minutes at a time was done in Half Life [and Half Life 2].
But anyway the issues with Bioshock was that yes you ‘could’ play it as complex as you like [which increased how much joy you got out of it] but the simplest way was always the easiest and most mundane; which was how most people played it.
One thing that was definitely missing from BioShock was any kind or resource management.
In Half Life, especially on the harder difficulties, conserving ammunition was absolutely vital to success. Lots of times you killed things with the crowbar to save bullets.
In SystemShock 2, given unlimited Assault Rifle ammo and not having to worry about your gun breaking, you could just blast your way past any opposition. Except ammunition was rare as frog fur, and your gun tended to jam after a clip and a half.
Bioshock was very obviously designed so that the player could run and gun their way through it without ever having to worry about conserving resources. Wow! A Big Daddy! I’ll just shoot all my bullets and win!
With the addition of the Vita chambers to the mix, there was no minimum level of skill to actually complete the game. You heard me, progress through the game is totally irrelevant of the skill of player.
To put it another way, there is absolutely no incentive to play skillfully.
I can argue that the target market is a mouth-breathing, knuckle dragging console gamer ‘tard who has difficulty with a knife and fork. Which is fine, because their money is just as green as mine.
But it is a fucking shame. BioShock could have been just as good as SystemShock 2. But that would have hurt sales.
I’ll wait to see if this patch gives any incentive or reward for the player having an IQ bigger their shoe size. Time will tell.