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Alex

Editorial: BioShock: The Game that Wasn't

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I'm glad someone picked up on how weak the game was after that Andrew Ryan confrontation. Terrific article and certainly criticizes Bioshock as a movie or novel rather than the standard "graphics were good, game play too" method. I also wish the game didn't "take it back" a step after the A.R. scene.

Best Bioshock review I've read so far.

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I wonder if that reveal should've been the finale. I don't see how they could've accomplished what Duncan asks at all.

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To Dan: I would say no.

Anyway, playing through it basically confirmed the suspicions I had on the eve of its release: this game is System Shock 2 with more guns. The player had slightly more input into the overall story (namely rescuing or harvesting Little Sister's) but otherwise the mechanics are the same--perhaps this time with a more traditional shooter bent.

The atmosphere was undoubtedly well done. But in the end all we have are fetch quests and enemies to kill. As long as a game is enemy-encounter driven it will be almost totally visceral; if we can't interact with the environment or characters in an intelligent manner how can we expect it to react to us in any meaningful way?

What can you really say though? In an interview Ken Levine reminded the viewer that ultimately he "likes to shoot stuff"-- the game was designed to be a saleable FPS, an expensive set-piece not a philosophical treatise.

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What can you really say though? In an interview Ken Levine reminded the viewer that ultimately he "likes to shoot stuff"-- the game was designed to be a saleable FPS, an expensive set-piece not a philosophical treatise.

They had high hopes for Bioshock, and so did everyone else (thanks to the God like status that System Shock has been elevated to). If this game came along without any expectations (ie. it wasn't made by the System Shock 2 people), people would be less tough on it.

The game is flawed to be sure, but it's only flawed in the sense that it's not the best thing ever created. It's still fucking brilliant.

I haven't read the write-up linked above (yet), but I think Richard Cobbett wrote the great review of Bioshock that hit the nail on the head regarding its flaws.

Don't worry, it's an article with NO SPOILERS! :tup:

In a nutshell, if Bioshock isn’t Game of the Year, odds are good that we atheists are going to look a little silly at having to explain God showing up to make a new Monkey Island. It’s the best FPS since Half-Life 2. It’s the closest thing to System Shock 2 since Shock 2. And if there’s any justice in the world, everyone responsible for the miserable pile of arse that was Doom 3 is out there right now, slashing their wrists with the retail CDs and sobbing to sleep on unsold expansion packs.

I’m not going to go into much detail here. Much of Bioshock rests on discovery; its set-pieces are intended to catch you unawares and while there are several I’d love to talk about, I don’t want to ruin them.

<snip>

Bioshock has the most gorgeous FPS environment ever made. Everything has its purpose. Everywhere has its own feel. The most wonderful bits of architecture reach out and shake you by the throat - the constant pressure from enemies almost infuriating as you dig into the nooks and crannies, see the aching ambition that personifies the city, and dig up its darker history. Irrational repeatedly comes up with some of the best FPS design - just look at SWAT 4 - and this is their magnum opus. It’s glorious work.

Our father, who art in Boston. Irrational used to be thy name. Spare us this day our tiresome hacking mini-game and deliver us to Level 2…

Sadly, not everything can hit the same level, and by far the most disappointing part of Bioshock is its narrative. It’s not bad, far from it. The writing is mostly good, and it knocks hell’s bells out of almost any other shooter you care to name. It’s just all over the place in terms of content, too happy to resort to schlock and poor quality characterisation, and nowhere near the standard of the level design or shooty bits. That’s the most disappointing part of the whole thing for me, especially after Shock 2 and Tribes.

Not least of the problems is dealing with Rapture not as a collection of levels, but as the city that never was. Architecturally astounding as it is, it never feels real enough - and that’s entirely the fault of the scripting. Instead of building a city and then destroying it, Irrational clearly built a destroyed city and poured on a story. The audio diaries that tell the backstory tend to be from after things went to hell, and unremittingly negative.

Aside from making it feel like the city had an active population of about seven (I’m still curious to know if the stripper was an electrical engineering genius or similar), none of them - even Rapture’s creator - really seem on-board with The Vision.

Nowhere is there that spark of belief that it ever stood tall.

(The frankly silly Shock style ghosts in particular would probably have been better replaced with simple video footage of the city in its prime. Or interactive flashbacks. Or even an Undying style scrye device capable of gazing into the past. Something to convince us that the world’s elite would actually be part of this underwater folly.)

As for the diaries and characters rattling on at you over the radio, they vary in quality, but none even come close to SHODAN level perfection. Obviously. How could they, when none of them star my One True Love? I’m not planning to write any self-insertion fanfic about Andrew Ryan...

<snip>

All that said, the real catch is that for a world so heavily built on vision and ideology, there’s precious little of it tied up in your quest. Rapture failed not because of its inherent conceptual flaws, but because it was run by idiots, mostly obsessed with other idiots. Ryan in particular is a potentially fascinating character, reduced to barking ineffectual threats over the radio for most of the game. As for the other relatively sane citizens of Rapture, too often they come across like squabbling school-children.

For all the talk of philosophy and personal choices, they play surprisingly little part in things. Your linear path is determined primarily by physical obstacles and the need to simply survive, driven by the villains’ incompetence and paranoia more than anything else. Which is philosophical in its way, true. But it could have been so much more.

<snip>

Keeping things as vague as possible: where Bioshock’s story fails, it’s by not being as smart as its premise sets it up for, even though Irrational itself is. It comes in the use of some very stock characters, and our limited access often rendering them hypocritical or ineffectual. It’s in the generic quest design; a psychopath tourist’s guide to Rapture instead of really diving into the unique possibilities offered by its setting. It’s in the use of respawning enemies as the main challenge, with little to test your brain except basic observational skills. And ugh, it’s in some horrible FedEx quests.

And then there’s That Bit. By far the most divisive moment in the game; the Inevitable Plot Twist, bouncing straight from a moment of genuine, unquestionable brilliance… straight to a piss-poor attempt at pulling a Metal Gear Solid.

It’s not the basic idea that’s the problem so much as how it’s handled. Out of the blue, Irrational suddenly feels the urge to pull down its pants and start mooning you through the screen with a bit of bizarre meta-gaming nonsense. And I’m not sure why.

<huge snip>

Read the whole thing here (no spoilers!)

In short, System Shock had a more believable environment

(if there's no-one wandering around, it's because the spaceship's crew have all been killed - with an entire CITY, it's harder to believe). Plus, unlike SS2, the ONLY people who survived, were complete and total nutcases. These are the people that "survived"?! The psychopaths?! I guess that stuff is easier to rationalise if you think of BioShock as a horror game, which it is, but still.

Not only does the city's "greatness" never feel real or tangible, it's downfall is hard to fathom as well. If the game had been set in the 1970s (ie. some 20 or 30 years after Rapture's "fall") then it would have made a lot more sense. (How on earth did it become so decrepit in one year?! It's a minor point, but its look would have fitted nicely into a storyline set later on.) The story as they decided to go with feels shoe-horned in...

It's also painfully obvious that their starting idea was the horrific experiments performed in Nazi POW camps on their prisoners. But someone along the way must have noticed; "Hey, are we saying that the Nazis were right to experiment like that? Rapture has developed all this cool technology... by not having any ethics either. What are we saying here?!". So they toned down the Nazi inspiration (if that's the right word), but never replaced it/or re-worked it with something more substantial.

They alluded to a special fish being discovered that allowed them to do things, but never explored that angle, either.

As such, there's a big hole in the city's history. WHY did these people ever believe that it was a good idea? HOW were they convinced/seduced by Ryan? There must have been some elements of success or some decent rational argument that would win over rationally-minded people into moving to Rapture. They couldn't have all been ex-Nazi nutcases/raving psychopaths. Also, does the rest of the world know about this? How did he advertise it to people? Nothing really gels :(

If it was a different story, a sort of "Lost" story where

the character you play REALLY doesn't have anything to do with Rapture and just learns about its history as they go

, it would have been better. That's what gets the story going in the first place so why

add all the hard to believe, amazing coincidence, deus ex machina stuff

? Surely that's the worst bit of BioShock?

It's like their attempts at creating something huge and wonderful made them lose sight of what they were actually creating. If they'd kept the concept and environment simple, like System Shock's, it might have made the story (and therefore experience) more solid. But, just like Andrew Ryan, their ideas and goals spiralled and they lost their tight control over everything. Like Ryan's legacy, Rapture, what we're left with isn't the best thing ever, it's just fucking amazing instead :tup:

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That's one of the things I find really interesting about Bioshock (beyond the whole metagaming thing), that it really mirrors the story of Rapture and Ryan itself in its successes and failures (at least in my eyes).

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I wonder if that reveal should've been the finale. I don't see how they could've accomplished what Duncan asks at all.

Yeah, I think this would be the only sensible way around it. They'd have had to do something truly amazing to actually achieve what they promised.

I can see why they didn't make the big reveal the finale, because the game ending with

you being shot to death by Fontaine's security robots,

while better from a narrative point of view and probably being one of the most ballsy things in game history, would have pissed off so, so many people. That doesn't make the actual end any less dissatisfying though.

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I think think first of all that after the big reveal, it began to disappoint. Up until that point, I admittedly had no problems with the believability of the characters or the setting or the respawning enemies or any of that because, as I think some people have mentioned in the Zero-Tolerance discussion on Resident Evil, a good narrative will make you forget the actual gameplay flaws. I'm not sure that the very ending failed because they tried to do too much. On the contrary, the developers have said in an interview that the endings were essentially afterthoughts, and written according to a very limiting schedule. If anything, they failed because they built-up and built-up this story to a spectacular ending that they didn't try hard enough to make as incredible as the rest of the game.

I think the problems also came from the binary morality system of the game (and I know this has been said before), which would inevitably lead you to one of two endings,

either portraying your character as a Messiah or a murdering psychopath. I would have been happier with endings (ending?) that were equally final but decidedly gray, and there was so much potential. When the game was in development, we were told that you would have the choice eventually to become a little sister or a big daddy. In my opinion, that should have been the reveal: you would be equipping plasmid after plasmid that gave you big daddy protectors, made you capable of extracting Adam for yourself, etc. (slowly changing the gameplay) and then after a level or two look in a mirror and say 'Oh shit, I'm a little sister'. And then be resigned to living in rapture as one of it's decidedly neutral citizens. I think it would also give you tangible feedback for your actions, and the choices you make in terms of saving or destroying the city would really affect whether the ending was bittersweet or flat-out depressing.

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I just finished Bioshock, so I finally read the editorial. I was pining for it for a long time. The amusing thing is, in light of the negative tone of the introduction I was totally ready to denounce this article, because I was having an amazing time while playing the game. Now that I've finished it, I complete agree with everything that's been said. After the Andrew Ryan scene, it all just goes haywire. Even the shades of grey disappear.

There's some interesting stuff where Fontaine tries to reason with you that Tenenbaum is probably playing you as well and that you'll become a mindless Big Daddy. That would've been awesome, but it never happens. I do like how Fontaine, in the end, even takes up the appearance of a bronze Atlas like in the pictures, that's very smart. But the ending itself completely misses the point and is utterly unphilosophical.

I'm reading Atlas Shrugged at the moment, which inspired Bioshock, and up until That Scene it really shows. There are hugely interesting things being said and implied. The banners saying 'the strong will not be held back by the weak' and such are fantastic. But

it simply turns out that the characters can't keep up with the ideals of the city. Andrew Ryan built his magnificent Rapture, and then turned into a blithering psychopath. The narrative itself provides an interesting backstory, but it's all about warring factions that are never explained well enough. That was awesome when I thought it was just extended backdrop, but when I found out that was it, the whole story, I was disappointed. Where were the grand philosophical conclusions?

For that matter, why wasn't Rapture itself better explained? I never understood why the city is filled with Splicers. Did they go mad because they spliced one time too many? Why did everyone go insane? Where are all the other people? It's also a bit unlikely that one thug was able to overthrow them all and suddenly become more powerful than Andrew Ryan himself. But then they were all selfabsorbed idiots, apparently. Disappointing.

I think what I would have liked as well was more backstory. More information, be it through diaries or even Oblivion-like books, about how Rapture was built, how it was all done. Now it's this megalomaniacal bubble of fancy, but never really believable.

My favourite part was probably Fort Frolic and your intereactions with the wonderfully weird Sander Cohen. He was the only person that stayed completely gray. A madman, but you never had to kill him. That is, not in his own level. Afterwards the game more or less forces you to do it anyway to get an achievement, but well... let's not be too critical.

As it is, I still think Bioshock is a fantastic game. The gameplay and the setting are just superb. Despite it shortcomings and the game tumbling off the Babylonian tower of its own construction, it's a swell game. But it's better when you play it the first time through than when regarded from hindsight.

I never liked that thug Fontaine, and after Ryan's departure it all went to hell. Or rather, I liked Atlas too much! He was such a sympathetic character, and really wanted to shake his hand, and as such it was such a stab when he turned into that loathsome buffoon. Beautiful work-up of the mind control though; would you kindly?

Still, a marvellous adventure which I hope will inspire other games to be as ruthlessly deep. More ruthless, even.

(I think it's funny by the way that the editorial greatly emphasizes the game referring to itself, to gaming, in the Andrew Ryan scene. Absolutely justified, but it can just as easily be taken as a 'normal' philosophical statement, without the gaming context. It's just professional deviation, I suppose. We see what we want to see :tup:)

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Oh, and I just remember something else.

What the hell was it all for? Why on earth would anyone still want to rule over Rapture? Was that Fontaine's goal? He even said so himself that Rapture was doomed. And sure enough, a city full of deranged splicers is hardly good conquest. And why not just escape with Tenenbaum? Why go through all that trouble killing some crook who wants to stay at the bottom of the ocean? That's poor plotting.

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Maybe the point of the last third of the game was that the designers were trying to say something like: when it all comes down to it, philosophy is a wank - staying alive and (if you are playing nicely) helping out a bunch of abused children is just more important.

I'm not sure I'm willing to assume that much post-modern thinking on the part of the designers, and I am very sure that its not the best way to tell a good story; but perhaps the problems stem from too much philosophical sophistication, rather than too little?

Or perhaps I am just still trying to get some mileage (kilometreage?) out of my undergraduate degree?

P.S. Sorry for the "thread-necromancy".

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Ken Levine basically already confessed that he gravely underestimated the player's desire to follow the emotional and philosophical story (which is weird because the game is otherwise so smart and sophisticated). He recognizes the ending was disappointing. So, I also think it wasn't meant to contribute anything else to the message or theme of the game.

And kilometreage is Great.

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