On the Ball: Teabagging in Rapture

[Jordan Deam]

On the Ball: Teabagging in Rapture

Who knew Objectivist ideology could translate so well into a free-for-all deathmatch?

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[Lost In The Void]

An interesting look at multiplayer, can't wait to try out this thing for myself, hopefully sooner rather than later

 

[J40kfan15]

Well said

 

[Jared]

An interesting look at multiplayer, can't wait to try out this thing for myself, hopefully sooner rather than later

Aye, same here. Need to check it out myself still

 

[Jim Grim]

Ha ha, that's an awesome way of looking at it. I really want to pick up this game, but Aliens vs. Predator comes out in a coupla days...

 

[Fearzone]

So, would ordinary society fare better with telekinetic, fireball slinging sea slugs than Rapture? I'm sorry but Rapture is not an objectivist critique. But good point about the ongoing problem of teamwork and victory-oriented strategies on RPG team-based PvP.

Okay, now that you got me thinking, the core of objectivism is not living for yourself, but that your talents and services to society should be fairly and voluntarily rewarded by those who benefit from your work. Collectivism, by contrast, demands the services from its participants for free. Socialism conscrips citizen's economic freedom so that those in power can spend other people's earnings as it suits them.

Now, back to topic: it is all about reward. People do what you reward them for. If you reward banks for handing out dumbass subprime mortgages, expect them to do just that. If you reward players in Arathi basin for zerging their honor kills rather than defending flags, then that is what they do. If one is rewarded for victory and victory only, then teamwork toward that goal would form naturally. The only problem there is if one side is better and always wins, the other side would be unmotivated to play and there would be no game at all.

 

[Wolfram23]

Well I too had some disdain for the multiplayer of BioShock 2. I just beat the game last night and it was so amazing, but I've yet to explore the multiplayer and did not know what to expect. Now I'm looking forward to a little more of Rapture...

 

[Pseudonym2]

I found a similar interesting thing in the Halo 3 zombie mode. I kept winning the zombie modes where the Humans had to stay alive through the time limit or just get the most kills. In those modes, I would position myself with everyone else so we could protect each other and create a strong defense. In the last human standing version, I always lost because I would protect the other humans but they wouldn't protect me.

 

[ccesarano]

Actually, I've found that I forget about the ADAM vials and sometimes even research the more hectic a room is. Despite most players remaining silent (or probably organized into parties), I've seen quite a bit of good teamwork. Whoever nabs the Little Sister is adequately guarded as best as possible.

In fact, it took me over an hour until someone tea-bagged my corpse...I think. They were doing research and may have tea-bagged, but I'm not quite certain. Either way, any game that takes that long before someone acts like a TRUE dick is a game with a community I want to be a part of. And this is Xbox Live I'm talking about, which is supposed to be full of cockholes.

I've never enjoyed a competitive multiplayer game so much in my life.

 

[sean.A7x]

I think the multilayer is quite good, level 23 now :L And im always after adam constantly researching people for the 10 adam

 

[Rednog]

But as much as I appreciated these embellishments, I was most struck by how well the story of Rapture's civil war fit within the framework of an online shooter. In BioShock 2's multiplayer - as with Modern Warfare 2's - the goal isn't so much to win as it is to become more powerful by accumulating XP (or, in this case, ADAM). Winning nets you a solid bonus, but it's all too easy for your team's ultimate objective (capture and hold a Little Sister, control a map's zoned-off territories, etc.) to be obscured by your own lust for more ADAM. It's a problem as old as multiplayer shooters themselves, but BioShock 2 has finally offered a convenient explanation. Teamwork falls apart for the same reason Rapture itself does: Online FPS players, like the caricatures of Objectivist philosophy that populate this world, are a bunch of selfish dicks.

First I'd like to point out that you really don't get stronger in MW2 with exp, most of the end guns are not really any more accurate or stronger than early ones, they each have trade offs that are fairly negligible in the end. What makes you stronger is completing the challenges for guns and unlocking their addons. The same with Bioshock 2, the end plasmids aren't really stronger than the beginning ones and the gun attachments in the end really aren't a huge change (granted some are slightly more powerful, but they do come with 1 cost or another. For example the heat seeking attachment for the grenade launcher while cool, is pretty bad at distances.)
Also, why would you not want to complete objectives in Bioshock 2? Dropping a big daddy or capturing a little sister is worth huge amounts of ADAM. Dropping a big daddy is what 100 or 200 Adam? People going after an easy kill instead of objectives are actually fairly dumb. I guess people don't wonder why they are stuck only gaining a single level or two after a few hours when people like me who did objectives flew through the high 20 ranks after the first night it was out...

 

[Fenixius]

Well, as much as I'd like to play, it's impossible for me. I bought the game on Steam, and live in Australia. So every match has game-ending lag, and unacceptable matchmaking time to boot. Absolutely worthless to me.

 

[yanipheonu]

The Bioshock guys are masters at taking a game element and toying with it to make really cool twists on the game.

The most obvious one is where they used the mentality of a player to not question their objectives in the first Bioshock.

It's pretty masterful.

 

[Avatar Roku]

You know, I felt the same way at first as you did before, then I played the MP at a friend's house (strapped for cash right now) and got hooked.

 

[Sporky111]

This is a good way to add some guilt to the online experience. The reason most of us stay away from multiplayer is because of the selfish, ravenous, douchbags that populate it. At least this time around they might have some context to see themselves in.

 

[phosita]

I love a lot of the ideas behind BioShock 2's multiplayer, but I'm rather disappointed with the execution. I do think the story is incorporated in a really clever way and I love the atmosphere, but the actual play mechanics are simply inferior to 2007's Shadowrun. Shadowrun mixes special abilities and traditional FPS combat in a far more balanced package and I wish the BioShock 2 multiplayer team had borrowed from that game a bit more. I still enjoy BioShock 2's multiplayer, but it's far too imbalanced and silly for me to return to as a competitive shooter.

 

[Therumancer]

My big problem with the multiplayer is that all of the time spent on it could have been better invested in beefing up the single player experience. The multiplayer isn't the train wreck that we got with the attempt to do multiplayer in say "Condemned 2", BUT I think it's simply being more highly rated than it deserves simply for not being a complete failure rather than being anything truely incredible. People have for example mentioned that it's unbalanced (I don't think I've even seen many defenses of it's game balance, which is odd because even the most grotesquely broken games seem to have legions of drooling fanboys claiming any competitive game is pefect, especially if they are winning with things the way they are).


As far as the main review goes (not here directly) reading between the lines, it seems to me that a lot of people in the industry are reluctant to call this game as good as the first one because it's sort of flipped the political message around. Bioshock was pretty much a banner being carried by the left wingers that by and large make up most vocal gamers. "Oh great, they are zapping Ayn Rand, and busting on the conservatives. Take that Bush!" (trust me, it was everywhere). This time around the bad guys are exactly the opposite and it makes some very clever comments about left wingers, grass roots movements, and pretty much the opposite side. Not much else has changed, and actually the game has improved on it's own, so it strikes me as a lot of people are going "ummmm, errrr, it.. uhhhh lacks innovation".

But hey, that's just my opinion.

Bottom line is we'll see what happens with Bioshock 3 if they ever decide to make one. I just hope they set it in the 1980s and find some way to introduce some actual punk into this so called "retro-punk" game. I also hope they just flat out scrap the bloody multiplayer.

 

[Slayer_2]

If you don't like it, don't play it, it's really quite simple. It was even developed by another studio, so it didn't detract anything from the singleplayer.

 

[Colonel Alzheimer's]

My big problem with the multiplayer is that all of the time spent on it could have been better invested in beefing up the single player experience. The multiplayer isn't the train wreck that we got with the attempt to do multiplayer in say "Condemned 2", BUT I think it's simply being more highly rated than it deserves simply for not being a complete failure rather than being anything truely incredible. People have for example mentioned that it's unbalanced (I don't think I've even seen many defenses of it's game balance, which is odd because even the most grotesquely broken games seem to have legions of drooling fanboys claiming any competitive game is pefect, especially if they are winning with things the way they are).


As far as the main review goes (not here directly) reading between the lines, it seems to me that a lot of people in the industry are reluctant to call this game as good as the first one because it's sort of flipped the political message around. Bioshock was pretty much a banner being carried by the left wingers that by and large make up most vocal gamers. "Oh great, they are zapping Ayn Rand, and busting on the conservatives. Take that Bush!" (trust me, it was everywhere). This time around the bad guys are exactly the opposite and it makes some very clever comments about left wingers, grass roots movements, and pretty much the opposite side. Not much else has changed, and actually the game has improved on it's own, so it strikes me as a lot of people are going "ummmm, errrr, it.. uhhhh lacks innovation".

But hey, that's just my opinion.

Bottom line is we'll see what happens with Bioshock 3 if they ever decide to make one. I just hope they set it in the 1980s and find some way to introduce some actual punk into this so called "retro-punk" game. I also hope they just flat out scrap the bloody multiplayer.

The multiplayer was made by a different studio, so it probably had no effect on the single player at all. Personally, I think it's an interesting addition and was very well done considering that they were dealing with what is very much a single player game.