Now, I was planning on doing this at some point in our Advent games, but Tom over at EG and I were talking about the backlash against Bioshock. He wondered if I had anything to say, and waved some of that fat EG dollar. And lo – I did. 4000 words worth. I may keep my sanity by not reading the EG comments thread – as I noted in the piece…
You see, I was surprised to find BioShock’s not my favourite game of the year. I’m also aware that perhaps the intensity of discourse around the game had something to do with it. When I think of BioShock, I have to wipe away pages of forum nit-picking and genuinely bitter pub-based rows before I can even start thinking about, at its best, how clever and elegant it is and how on its own grounds it makes everything else released in this incredible year for videogames distinctly second-rate. For most of this year, I’ve been too tired to actually do this. But when the response to a patch with free new content is just a shrug and a bunch of whining over free stuff, I can’t help but think we – as a community – need a good slapping and a reminder that we should be a little bit grateful.
Something to annoy virtually everyone herein, I suspect. But, as my old mate Rorschach once said, we don’t do things because we choose to. We do them because we’re compelled.
Related Stories:
I can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t come off as gushing nonsense. I love you, Kieron Gillen.
Oh balls, there it is anyway.
Jim Rossignol: Late back in the game, but nonetheless; yes, my problem with RPG elements in an FPS is the implementation of their mechanics. This was a flaw in System Shock 2 as well as in Deus Ex, games which I otherwise consider either important or just outright a joy to play. I have absolutely nothing against world-building or options (even pacifist ones: Imagine how great it would be if Deus Ex 3 would allow you to talk your way through everything, not even having to resort to tranquillising, like either a manipulator or a charmer, or how much in atmosphere BioShock would have gained if ‘crazy’ didn’t automatically mean ‘hostile’ towards the player), and Levine has done this before with the Thief series, the second one in particular. What BioShock offers is little more than expanded corridors with a few odd alcoves for either objects or, perchance, an intriguing piece of setting or plot detail. Hell, the only part which went against this somewhat, and not without irony, were the apartments, which allowed you to dig up all the neat info you wanted if you cared to. Shame it was otherwise unremarkable. I believe I’ve brought up the issue of the map beforehand, and how the bathysphere transport, i.e. the 90s loading screens, sabotage any sense of place you could get.
I think on the whole, you could sum up BioShock’s problem as it’s a 90s game, which doesn’t deliver on its ambitions or even fully on even its most blatant influences. That a new audience get to discover a Shock-like is all well and good, but it still feels utterly outdated to me, and not very enjoyable either.
Bioshock: Strangely About Fate
pre-backlash article I wrote (in fact it was about a week after it came out — I killed myself writing it). sadly I don’t think anyone ever read it
Someone else might have mentioned this, but that angle of “we must defend games like this or no one will make any more!” and couch every criticism in words about what the game does right really bugs me. If we don’t criticise it then surely we’ll get more truncated, constrained games that don’t follow through on their own set up and fall back on slathering on gimmicks and prettiness.
This is when the pro reviewers say “Dude, every game is like that already” (well, maybe not “Dude”). Ok fine it’s true and thanks for steering me away from 90 percent of them.
But Bioshock set itself up as the grand saviour of shooters. And I don’t mean in the publicity at all. I mean in the game itself. It took the recognised problem of getting people into the game and handled it beautifully, gradually expanding gameplay and narrative right up until, you know… that bit. And then shortly after, you the player shrug off your previous limitations and controls. Kieron has, perhaps inadvertently, brought this up with all his talk of subtexts and meta narratives and gamplay & narrative working together (pretty much all of which I agree with btw). It is obvious what the game has to do next, after you are freed, and that’s make you free in Rapture. Here it becomes a bit more like Systemshock in that you wander around and figure out things for yourself, maybe Tennenbaum and Fontaine still bark at you but not in the same goal structured way.
The game sets this up perfectly. And I, naively perhaps, believe it would also have prepared players for it gameplay wise as well. But it doesn’t do it. Its failure to follow through on this masterful set up is always going to hurt it. Even if its micro level gameplay wasn’t greatly altered, I think, had they managed this (and its probably not easy) those niggles would be more forgivable. It’d be like a potted history of the FPS in a single game, dragging mainstream gamers into a present the hard core have known about for 13 years.
Bioshock baulked at the hurdle it made for itself. We know this. We can sit there and counterpoint every criticism by pointing at its depth or subtext all day long. Had it made good on the narrative and structural ambitions we can clearly see in the game, though, we wouldn’t really have to.
Bioshock might have been a better game if it had not attempted to cludge its plot with System Shock 2’s. The little sisters were blatantly emotionally exploitive while having no reasonable narrative justification for existing. It really, really didn’t fit. Are the splicers supposed to represent the dangers of stem cell research and steroid use, or something? They were not compelling enemies from a plot standpoint, and the art and sound teams were not able to make them interesting. The Objectivist cult is a gold mine for horror material, but the narrative was spread too thin.
Abused Creepy Little Girls are used far too often in games. You’ve got one in F.E.A.R, Dreamfall and now Bioshock. We get it already. Find a new metaphor, you fucking hacks.
I agree with the two posts above me, in terms of setting up a hurdle and failing to surmount it.
Bioshock made claims (whether directly or via in-game focus) that this was going to be a return to the System Shocks and Deus Ex’s of yore. That we were going to have compelling gameplay with a great story and narration.
What we ended up with was a half-completed story, characters that didn’t fit (I still cannot understand what the splicers are, exactly. Are they normal citizens? Are they a cult? Why don’t they kill EACHOTHER? What about the little sisters? How the hell are abused little girls the best solution to gathering Adam they could think of?), and so on.
In the end, it’s a mostly forgettable game. Other than the Big Daddies, which were fantastic enemies, there is pretty much no aspect of that game that sticks out in my mind.
When I finished it, I felt like I’d just completed the tutorial for a larger game.
I also wanted to comment on certain parts of the Defense, but obviously that would take forever. Basically, I think a lot of your Defenses fall apart because you pick at extreme comments, and say “See, the naysayers are wrong/crazy/asking too much.” The problem is, most people haven’t used a single one of the blanket statements you’re defending against.
For example, the ‘dumbed down’ comments are something I haven’t heard a tonne of. I HAVE heard lots of people say that the enemies, while not exactly tactical geniuses, are at least semi self-preservation centric. See: running to heal themselves are health dealies.
Your “IT’S JUST SYSTEM SHOCK 2.5.” comment really confused me – I thought people were enraged that anyone would even compare Bioshock and System Shock/Deus Ex?
Most of the negative comments are towards the story falling apart a bit, the fact that the gameplay itself isn’t great, and that it starts to do something interesting, and then fails to do so. Or, not so much fails, but shies away from going the distance.
I’ll stop here, but this kind of reads like a strawman defense – you’re telling us why Bioshock is good, and giving us random extremes (that are wrong), and prove those wrong.
I was really trying to avoid seriously commenting on this, but it’s late and I’m all hopped up on goofballs, so what the hell?
Just a bit of a minor thing, anyway– What’s really confusing me about the “Bioshock sucks” arguments is their inevitable fallback on a blanket statement of “the gameplay was average,” which is almost always thrown in as an afterthought. Hang on.
Ivory Tower (and honestly, utterly masturbatory) discussion about the game’s meta-narrative and philosophical significance aside, am I the only one who had a total blast playing Bioshock? Sure, there wasn’t a lot of variation in the enemy types, but (as Kieron points out) there was enough variation in the ways you could dispatch them to make up for this, I thought. My first Big Daddy fight will stick with me for years as one of the most intense, visceral battles-of-will that I’ve ever undertaken in a digital world.
And, as a bit of a side note, I thought the idea of men driven mad by Genetic-modification-as-drug-addiction was a villian concept a whole hell of a lot more compelling than Nazis, Ex-KGB agents, orcs or–say–dead horses. And did no one else feel a pang of sympathy for them when you realized why they were wearing masks? For me, at least, I nearly rang my mom to tell her I was playing a videogame where the faceless villians actually had some *depth.* She really wouldn’t have cared, but still.
Anyway, I’m sorry, I realize this basically turned into a fanboy rant. I’m not convincing anyone who’s set on hating the thing, and those of you who love it probably love it for the same reasons I do. I’m just saying… It really was *fun,* wasn’t it? I mean, I really hope it wasn’t just hype and good reviews that had me playing for two solid days. I’m not sure what that would say about me.
I’m very ‘meh’ at the moment about BioShock. I’ve waited since release day for a patch which could make it playable (after spending ages trying to get it to work), which rather took the edge off my enthusiasm, and now even with the patch it’s incredibly difficult to play (on easy) because the controls have a nasty habit of lagging by up to five seconds. I’m also finding the story rather dull and uninteresting. There’s a lot going for the setting but it’s just not grabbing me as a gameplay experience.
I think I’m going to just write it off, delete the local content from Steam and go back to playing Super Mario Galaxy. Perhaps if the game had worked when it first came out I would have cared.
Leeks: I think the people who enjoyed the combat were those of us who were creative with the weapons provided, and were always trying to find new ways of fighting. Those who thought it was awful were those who noticed that whatever attack they tried first would work on everything, and just used that.
Which I think is something Kieron talks about in the article.
you didn’t tackle the most important issue level design & that’s the only beef i had with bioshock & i mostly agree with you on all of these issues in your article.
but & i know this isn’t going to be popular, the level design in blacksite shows that in DX & System shock which inspired SS2 was down to Harvey Smith, yes theres a lot wrong with blacksite bt i think the main thing you see with it is a missed opertunity & this is why so many people were quite passionate about not liking it. the utilitarian nature of his levels combined with generating a space for the player to what he’s got to do is what makes Harvey Smith a good level designer & what broke the Immersion for me in Bioshock
Fort frolic is easily one of the greatest levels in recent times
Can I interest anyone in buying my collectors edition (with Big Daddy figurine and a music CD) of Bioshock? Anyone?
The funny thing is that SS2 and Deus Ex were mostly terrible from a combat mechanics perspective. Like Bioshock, most of the weapons were not worth using.
SS2 had the crystal shard, and the pistol was good enough to kill anything with special ammo. The invisibility psi power trivializes practically the entire game.
Deus Ex has the sniper rifle, the GEP and the Dragon Tooth Sword overshadowing everything, with other weapons being situationally useful.
Bioshock has the wrench (powered up with tonics) and TK, which kills any splicer for practically 10% of the EVE of any other power. The weapons are only really worth using on the Daddies.
All three games really get by on the merits of the narrative and the atmosphere. Complaining that the weapons and powers are horribly balanced is a legitimate complaint. Chess is an enduring game because there are myriad viable strategies, and very few dominant ones. When an RTS has a dominant strategy, it’s generally considered a major flaw and the developers work to fix it immediately, or it destroys the integrity of the game. Granted, the stakes aren’t so high in a single player game, but it’s silly to blame the users for discovering the weaknesses in the game design. It’s still a problem. The game would have appealed to me more if they had approached the gameplay design from the perspective of making it actually fun, challenging and balanced rather than just making it look cool. People forgive SS2/DX1 of their substantial gameplay flaws because everything else about them rocks so hard.
roBurky: As I’ve said, the players shouldn’t be to blame for being efficient. Ever.
Not really. It’s not like they came off as anything other than cannon fodder. What I noted was that the very, very vast majority of (randomly and non-sensically placed) audio logs came from people I wouldn’t meet face to face. Yes, you have the boss characters being built up at times, who are still nothing more than Dick Tracy villains gone wild, but what about the minor ones? The people you come across while you wander? They all look the same either way.
And unfortunately, the depth was not as convincing. There’s never a real sense of truly character-motivated actions: Even Andrew Ryan and Fontaine are clearly written to portray a particular ideal.
Then again, this is also a (laughably obvious) flaw in Ayn Rand’s writing, and maybe that’s the point.
Thanks for this, KG. I won’t ramble on after over 100 comments have been added, but I’ve agreed with you for a long time about this kind of thing. Personally, I liked having the arrow on BioShock, because I always knew when I was exploring and when I was progressing the main quest, and it meant I was spending all my time actually playing the game than looking at that confusing map on a constant basis.
Tons of people also had a fit with Oblivion for similar silly things, like having a compass, because they feel that “consolizes” things by not forcing you to wander around with no idea where to go for an hour.
This stuff never ends with the hardcore crowd though. I remember tons of gamers up in arms at Lucasarts back in the day because they thought an adventure game that didn’t contain dead ends was “dumbing down” the genre. Laughable when you think about it now.
Dracko: I think you’re confusing blaming the player and making a note about human gaming psychology. It’s hard to make it not sound pejorative, much in the same way it sounds perjorative to note that MMO players like doing simple repetitive tasks to slowly increase the numbers. The players would rather the numbers go up faster than have fun.
(Over on Qt3, I was watching some MMO designers talking recently – I almost mentioned it in the piece. They talked about how on one – Dark Age of Camelot, I think – there were many quests with decent AI and scripting and whatever, but the players all gravitated to the one which they could grind quicker, and then spent all the time on the boards complaining that there was no decent scripting or AI.)
This isn’t really blaming the player. This is discussing the way we’re wired or not.
Oh – that I actually DID stop reading on the word pretentious, I didn’t notice the words aftwards. While you can disagree with me as violently as you like, you don’t get to call me a cunt on RPS and carry on posting in the thread. You can apologise, or you can have all your posts deleted. Which would be a shame, as you say smart things.
We need a level of civil discourse, and since I can’t insult you back, I can’t let you get away with it. Disagree as violently as you like, but please stop short of insults.
On the topic of the Escapist… you know, when they put out such a random variety of stuff. Walker’s comedy wizard thing? ZeroPunc? Big name designers writing design-lead features about the way they think? The Escapist puts out a LOT of content every week, and grouping it together in a multch is just unfair.
Oh – Garth: “Your “IT’S JUST SYSTEM SHOCK 2.5.” comment really confused me – I thought people were enraged that anyone would even compare Bioshock and System Shock/Deus Ex? ”
If you look at Dracko’s arguments, he’s mainly annoyed it seems like a late 90s game – in fact that’s his actual phrasing. Lots of people make it. And, as I said, it’s a smarter one than the Dumbed Down Shock argument.
KG
I feel that this whole talk of a backlash is unfair.
I was not impressed by the game from the start and really didn’t feel it deserved the perfect scores it got at all.
I haven’t even noticed that big of a backlash apart from a discrepancy between the review scores given and the players for the most part. Most of the people I know and spoke to about the game when it came out thought it was ok, not great.
I don’t mind at all that the game was quite easy, I tend to turn difficulty settings down on many games as I am not a twitch player and am usually looking for other things in a game.
I was going to write a big counter argument to Keiron’s but I decided not to, there seem plenty of counter-arguments already I doubt I could bring anything new to the argument. Despite the fact I have some problems with it seemingly assuming some kind of intellectual failing on the part of the gaming community, which is frankly wrong.
Essentially I think the problem is the game was given perfect scores by critics and clearly the game is not perfect. The game promised something it did not deliver and people’s expectations were high. It had some nice things going for it but really it was just an above average game in terms of presentation with fairly average game-play underneath. Its themes were often a bit obvious and clumsily presented, though I guess it gets credit for having themes, and the plot was convoluted and used a simple mechanic of withholding information about the main character to keep you playing.
I just don’t like the term “backlash” myself. It suggests people liked the game then suddenly changed because of some internet movement to be cynical about it. And for me at least that was never the case. My criticisms of the game have been directly related to the game and my experience with it, not because of some popular cynicism.
I just re-read my previous post I don’t think I worded it well. The point about the intellectual failing; what I mean is that the fact some of the things you felt were great in the game, that perhaps others haven’t focused on, are not in my opinion the reason there is a strong criticisms being made about the game. I concede that some of the things mentioned in the article as reasons to rate the game highly, might have been missed by many.
The tone of the original article comes across as more condescending than was intended I expect, which probably accounts for the aggressive nature of some of the counter arguments posted.
Also I don’t mean to say critics are to blame for the supposed “backlash” because they were wrong, just that, the reviews gave people very high expectations. Also the talk in reviews as I recall focused on certain features of the game, which ultimately were not as impressive as they were described in my opinion.
My problem with the game in regard to the thematic aspects of it is that for every smart thing it tries to do, it does a dumb thing that undermines any sense of intelligence the game had. It approaches some idea or concept in a simplistic way and then shows a distinct lack of understanding, or at least a very blinkered form of it, in other respects. If that makes any sense.
Right, I liked Bioshock.. so much so I bought it, brilliant storylines and brilliant visuals and side plots an artistic piece of brilliance. Would have made a brilliant film!
But as a game, it was average. For a game with so many upgrades, weapons and ‘choices’ it was surprisingly linear. There wasn’t much variation of bad guys and/or missions/objectives although oddly there was plenty of stories and so much opportunity to add in more characters and big boss battles.
I was disappointed every time I finally made it to one of the more main characters only to find they looked just like everybody else.. I wanted a doctor who’d graphed on extra limbs, or the theatre guy who would attack me with soundwaves, or the gardener who had mastered the control of the trees or something.. but each time disappointedly it was just a normal splicer again who i just needed to hit more times with my wrench. I did BTW actually complete most of the game with my wrench (fully spec’d out to hurt people with it) and the electrobolt.
I think to have truly made this game one of the best ever it needed just that little bit more variety… oh and some fish men…. and damn it I wanted to shoot the whale at least once is that too much to ask..
i actually think there should less variation in the number of enemies in most games tbh i think it breaks immersion to have invented chaingun grafted super soldiers when functionally it rarely fits
most people who you kill should probably be random guy with a gun but he should also look like a random guy
i think Bioshock done well to bring “Enemy Types” down to the ground a little
Yeah, but varied enemies would be have been so easy to add to Bioshock. Imagine fighting enemies that have access to the same variety of plasmids as you do. Where are the telekinesis splicers? Or cyclone trap splicers? Or splicers that incinerate you with a snap of their fingers?
Apologies then, Kieron. The article hit a very sour nerve, quite frankly.
Accepted, man. I could tell it had got your goat, but insults are insults.
KG
Muzman, you pretty much nailed it. Problem being, to really pay off “You’re Free Now” thematically would have required at least one extra year of development and we’d still be sleeping under our desks. Alternately, the story could have been reworked so the act 2 climax came at the end of the game, as a setup for a sequel.
Either way, highly non-trivial but probably worth it (to me at least) because theme and gameplay and fiction all being on the same page is what many of the best games ever have in common. Sadly we are always faced with some or other resource limitation.
You keep my goat out of this, or I’m calling Jeff Minter! (Poor Jeff…)
I can’t think of a lonelier place than past Comment #100 on a gaming blog. Still.
I’ve actually just written a piece about the piece about the game. Partly because, one the one hand, I think you’re wrong to defend it so strongly. A game with a Metacritic score of – and it makes me disbelieving every time I see it – 96 seems like it should be able to stand up for itself.
And the problem is just that – the score is so overwhelmingly positive, that I worry what signals that sends out to other development companies. It says that we’re willing to accept very vaguely innovative ideas, as long as it’s graphically beautiful and has at least three talking points.
For me, Bioshock was a shooter that failed at as much as it succeeded in. And, I don’t know, maybe that does deserve credit. I do know this, though – gaming, as an industry, tears apart games that attempt just as much and succeed in more obvious areas.
Invisible War is, for me, to Deus Ex what Bioshock is to System Shock 2. A solid gameplay base, tacked onto what should have been a brilliant progression of a great concept, but what ended up being a slightly clumsy repainting of it, with fewer colours and a slightly dog-eared brush. We hated Invisible War, despite my protests. Now we love Bioshock, despite my protests.
Life goes on, though. The hyperbole for this was nothing compared to Super Mario Galaxy.
I think it depends what we want from games, now, doesn’t it?
On the one hand the initial, positive, critical reaction to Bioshock was much like that line in Life of Brian, “I say you’re the Messiah, Lord, and I should know, I’ve followed a few!” But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some very good things to say.
Essentially, what the Bioshock debate seems to me to say is that we, as gamers and critics, seem to want from gaming in general, a mechanics-free, totally immersive world in which we are told a deep and complex story well, that evolves around the player’s actions, where the setting is a believable world, and where we can’t see the maths behind the action or the design that’s making us feel so immersed. Also, some of us, would quite like to have fun. People got annoyed because Bioshock didn’t do a), and some people didn’t have b), and they were expecting rafts of both.
When someone commented that they would quite like RPG mechanics in Bioshock’s FPS world, I would hazard a guess that what’s behind that idea is the desire to feel, in any game, a sense of control over yourself in the game, as opposed to a desire to see mechanics transposed across.
It’s mainly about feel.
Personally, I think computer game genres are woeful things, because most of the best games break those boundaries. Or try to do away with convention. Deus Ex gets called an FPS/RPG, but really, it wasn’t either of them properly. It was a game which was trying to break the conventions of the time because it could, since games cost less then, and it was seen as less of a risk. Half-Life broke the FPS conventions by trying to have more of a story, more of a world. Mario 64 broke platforming conventions (and created a whole raft of new ones) by breaking the 2D wall.
What I find personally disappointing is that the genre-pushing of the great few of the late 90s/early 00s (HL, Deus Ex, etc.) seems to be less common. Or at least when it takes place, it happens like Stalker – not in a particularly broad way, good though it was.
Ironically, I think the perfect game of our time is Mario Galaxy. It emphatically does not revolutionise the platformer, but it does show how limited the boundaries are – in this case, the boundary of gravity. And the boundary of staying in three dimensions. Crysis points out the limitations of non-destructable trees, and non-flingable chickens. What’s going on now seems to be to be fervent evolution, not revolution. Half-Life, Deus Ex, SS2, were at the time revolutionary, which is why they get talked about in such awestruck tones. But as I said in the Deus Ex 3 post, I’m not interested in Deus Ex 3, because it will only be at best more Deus Ex. What I would rather see – and what Bioshock was hyped by some people to be – is the next revolution.
But – and here’s the rub – maybe it isn’t coming. Maybe there’s been too many games; graphics have evolved to a peak, but the way we physically play games hasn’t changed at all; that actually evolution, rather than revolution, is the way forward. It’s slower, but maybe in a crowded, expensive-to-produce market, more necessary.
We’re getting there. I hope. A piece at a time.
Pretty much everyone I heard from in the first week or two of release was blown away by Bioshock. It was only after it’d been out a few weeks and I’d actually beaten it that I started seeing much in the way of negative talk about it. And even then, early on, it was more “I really loved Bioshock, but here’s a few things that bothered me”. It was longer still before I saw the “oh, this was terribly overhyped” or “this game sucked”, the stuff I really don’t understand or empathize with.
So I do feel there’s been a backlash. Part of it really does seem to be the usual internet contrarianism, but I think part of it may also be that more time meant more people getting past the really shiny early-to-mid-game and hitting the less successful later chapters. Which seem to have soured some people on the game entirely. (Again, I don’t really get that – I liked all of it except the final boss fight, which was trivial and rather silly, even if much of the late game wasn’t *as* brilliant.)
“Oh – Garth:…
If you look at Dracko’s arguments, he’s mainly annoyed it seems like a late 90s game – in fact that’s his actual phrasing. Lots of people make it. And, as I said, it’s a smarter one than the Dumbed Down Shock argument.”
I read above and did indeed find his comment, but again he says it’s a late 90’s style game. Other people may have said System Shock 2.5 (there are obviously more comments here than I’d like to go over, heh,) but in my experience the most common outcries would become much louder, and more of a screech if one compared Bioshock to System Shock.
System Shocks main problem is that, unlike Deus Ex, it’s problems aren’t balanced by a particularly well done aspect of the game. Every part of it is, at best, ‘good,’ and I have absolutely no drive to play it again.
Consider things that completely remove you from any immersion possible – you disable two turrets and a camera, run up, and in the nick of time… play a puzzle. Then, just as you beat it, you get to the second turret just in time to… play a puzzle. There’s also problems like: if I’ve been here 10 minutes, and I can take 4-5 of these people who’s entire lives have been dedicated to making themselves stronger through their Adam use… what exactly am I doing that they aren’t? Deus Ex made you out to be a pseudo God-soldier. In this game, if anything, they’re the God-soldiers, although they sure as hell don’t act like it.
There’s also the fight over who gets to control Rapture… only there’s nothing left to control. Why the hell is there a huge war between these two people? And hell, who is even reading the propaganda put up everywhere? The citizens are veritable zombies, yet so much of the game is focussed around Rapture as some kind of, at least partially, functioning society.
I found that, on the whole, my biggest problem was that I could never accept what was going on. It was mostly a ‘wait, how did they get from A to B if they…’ mindset. The backstory and the current story don’t seem to link up.
I do agree on your point that people are being over-critical, but a lot of that is because, on the opposite side of things, people are being too lenient. This game was literally hailed as a FPS rejuvenation, something that would forever change the way FPS’s would be made. In the end, it was basically a bunch of interesting ideas tossed together, without being finished.
While I did enjoy much of it on the play-through, I have no intention on beating the game twice, as I feel I’ve seen all that I need to.
Err, when I said “System Shocks main problem is that…” I meant Bioshock. Whoopsydoodle.
The vita chamber issue isn’t a plot hole, by the way.
The story explained that Ryan set all the vita chambers to be coded only to his genetic signature. A signature that you, as his direct offspring, share. The lack of ability to use the vita chambers was referenced in the logs and story.
Reply to Garth
“There’s also the fight over who gets to control Rapture… only there’s nothing left to control. Why the hell is there a huge war between these two people?”
Better to rule in hell.
“And hell, who is even reading the propaganda put up everywhere? The citizens are veritable zombies, yet so much of the game is focussed around Rapture as some kind of, at least partially, functioning society.”
It’s automated. Just like the vending machines laugh the same propaganda reel has been repeating since the new years riot. Whilst the posters have become torn and overgrown.
“I found that, on the whole, my biggest problem was that I could never accept what was going on. It was mostly a ‘wait, how did they get from A to B if they…’ mindset. The backstory and the current story don’t seem to link up.”
You’re going to need an example to back that up.
“There’s also problems like: if I’ve been here 10 minutes, and I can take 4-5 of these people who’s entire lives have been dedicated to making themselves stronger through their Adam use… what exactly am I doing that they aren’t? Deus Ex made you out to be a pseudo God-soldier. In this game, if anything, they’re the God-soldiers, although they sure as hell don’t act like it.”
You’re built from the ground up to take advantage of your surroundings. Who knows what Fontaine, Suchong and Tenebaum added to you in your accelerated adolescence. You’re certainly faster, stronger and possibly smarter than anything else. Also think in terms of a new disease added to an ecosystem which has balanced itself out.
I’m not saying its perfect, the Fontaine/Atlas twist seems pointless and the normal difficulty setting is a tad too easy, but with fifty or so varied weapons, chunky combat and a story rich with foreshadowing and side plots it richly deserves the rewards it got.
“The vita chamber issue isn’t a plot hole, by the way.
The story explained that Ryan set all the vita chambers to be coded only to his genetic signature. A signature that you, as his direct offspring, share.”
It just became one for me…
What was the point in killing Ryan, if the Vita-Chambers were just going to revive him?
This may or may not have been covered in the 2 audio-logs I can’t seem to find…
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Reply to Psychopomp
So Atlas/Fontaine could nab his genetic key and take over Rapture’s computer system.