So, what was the big deal about Bioshock? (spoilers)

[Johnny Novgorod]

On top of being fun and imaginative, it was one of the first games to dissect the relationship between game and gamer.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Bioshock was ironically a breath of fresh air in a 'shoot-the-alien-with-pewpewpew-lazers' and 'Nathan Drake is God!' world.

For the record the very first BioShock precedes the very first Uncharted by some months.

 

[happyninja42]

But still, it is a fairly competent game (unlike Infinite)

Didn't like Infinite? Best FPS I've played, maybe ever. The roller coaster mechanic was a hoot.

I wasn't too impressed with Infinite either. The game felt very samey with the combat, and I didn't find the plot all that amazing. Granted, I was spoiled about the "twist", but even if I hadn't been, I wouldn't have found it all that impressive. It just...didn't really do it for me. It felt like it was trying to be amazing and shocking, and just came across as pretentious.

Same. Infinite wasn?t bad, but as what I consider to be the ?true? sequel to Bioshock (Bioshock 2 felt like too much ?me too, just not as good?) Infinite left a far smaller imprint on me. I liked Bioshock because of the constant feeling of despair and horror, plane crashing into tumultuous seas only to find myself trapped in the leaking remains of an underwater city and a societal experiment gone terribly wrong. Had you told me that in the next Bioshock, I?d start off watching an aloof 20-something dancing on the fairway at a late 19th century state fair, I?d have laughed in your face, but that?s exactly what happened. All the horror was gone and what was left was pretty much just an Action FPS. About the only thing Infinite did insofar as making an impression, was *spoiler* the lead up to the moment you have to choose whether to throw the baseball at the tied up interracial couple or the carney. Everything up to that point had been so pleasant and lovely, then they unveiled THAT, and it knotted my stomach; I?d never seen a Triple AAA game tackle such a taboo subject so overtly. So in that regard, Infinite was good; it was cathartic killing all those bigoted bastards and fucking up their city in the clouds, but as a sequel to Bioshock? Not so much?

I would slightly disagree with your statement that all the horror was gone. I think they just went for a different flavor of horror. It went from body horror and all the classic kinds from the first BS game, to the horror of human culture and bigotry. Giving us a presentation of a society where the aspects we find most vile, are actually lauded and praised, so that it's completely on display. I actually appreciate the guts it took to do that, but my problem is that it just has a very short shelf life for me in a game. The opening bit, when they give you the ball and you have the option to throw, that was pretty strong, I agree. After that though, it was just...how things were. I didn't have any direct connection with anything else really. The "resistance" were equally assholes when you encounter them, and they just screamed "we're going to betray you when it's convenient!" That and the whole jumping realities thing made it where any emotional connection I might've had to one group or person, was completely severed. When we jumped through the Slider tunnel and that person was entirely different now, I didn't really have any compulsion to continue to care for them. As the person I knew, literally was no longer the person in front of me. So it felt more like some kind of bizarre roller coaster ride, straight out of Willy Wonka or something, where you are just constantly bombarded with weird shit, and don't really have any time to process any of it, before it's all completely re-written. And I just realized the game really is "on rails", as that's the most common form of transportation in the game, with the skyhook and everything.

I dunno it just...meh. I didn't find the combat all that engaging, though the salts were a fun bit of experimentation. But I don't know about anyone else, but I basically just found the 2 salts I liked the most, and just stuck with those. So there wasn't a lot of experimentation with it. The rest was just pew pew bang bang of guns.

 

[Xprimentyl]

I would slightly disagree with your statement that all the horror was gone. I think they just went for a different flavor of horror. It went from body horror and all the classic kinds from the first BS game, to the horror of human culture and bigotry. Giving us a presentation of a society where the aspects we find most vile, are actually lauded and praised, so that it's completely on display. I actually appreciate the guts it took to do that, but my problem is that it just has a very short shelf life for me in a game. The opening bit, when they give you the ball and you have the option to throw, that was pretty strong, I agree. After that though, it was just...how things were. I didn't have any direct connection with anything else really. The "resistance" were equally assholes when you encounter them, and they just screamed "we're going to betray you when it's convenient!" That and the whole jumping realities thing made it where any emotional connection I might've had to one group or person, was completely severed. When we jumped through the Slider tunnel and that person was entirely different now, I didn't really have any compulsion to continue to care for them. As the person I knew, literally was no longer the person in front of me. So it felt more like some kind of bizarre roller coaster ride, straight out of Willy Wonka or something, where you are just constantly bombarded with weird shit, and don't really have any time to process any of it, before it's all completely re-written. And I just realized the game really is "on rails", as that's the most common form of transportation in the game, with the skyhook and everything.

I dunno it just...meh. I didn't find the combat all that engaging, though the salts were a fun bit of experimentation. But I don't know about anyone else, but I basically just found the 2 salts I liked the most, and just stuck with those. So there wasn't a lot of experimentation with it. The rest was just pew pew bang bang of guns.

Oh, we're in complete agreement; my use of "horror" was more in the literary sense, as in traditional "boo" type scary. Yes, the societal themes they tackled were indeed horrific; no argument there. It was refreshing to see a AAA dev tastefully address them (well, as "tastefully" as a game that lets you shove a skyhook into someone's face could) so directly without harping on it constantly and making the player uncomfortable. They established the deplorable status quo early on, and left it at ?you versus them.?

Further agreed that beyond that; the game underwhelmed. It was beautiful, to be sure, but after the glamor wears off, you?re left with a fairly bland-if-functional shooter.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The setting (underwater, art deco city) and the fact that it handled a subject matter few other games did was primarily what made the game stand out. And obviously the Big Daddies. It was still early in the 7th generation and Bioshock was one of the first new gen games with a real identity.

I never cared much for it myself. The shooting -- both guns and plasmids -- felt wooden, and the way it chose to tell it's story through audio logs felt incredibly lazy and never made me connect to anything that was going on. I was constantly waiting for an actual character to apear so maybe I could finally get invested.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I think BioShock, just like every other title that gains legendary status, is a game that you had to play around the time it came out to fully understand the love it has today. There are people out there who pop in Half-Life or Half-Life 2 today that have the same reaction.
The same goes for Final Fantasy VII, and given a bit more time, Portal will follow in their footsteps.

Much like seeing Star Wars in theaters for the first time back in the seventies, you kind of had to be there to truly understand why these games shook the foundation and stuck with people for years.

 

[Redryhno]

I would slightly disagree with your statement that all the horror was gone. I think they just went for a different flavor of horror. It went from body horror and all the classic kinds from the first BS game, to the horror of human culture and bigotry. Giving us a presentation of a society where the aspects we find most vile, are actually lauded and praised, so that it's completely on display.

The problem though is that very few, if any, people that played the game have any kind of attachment, be it emotional or experience, with that kind of "horror". Everyone has the "what lurks in the darkness just out of sight" fear, however minor it might be for them. "Bigotry" and "racism" are largely just words to most people these days, even the people that say it being their top fears as a society don't really have a huge amount of experience with it beyond a handful of bad interactions and often thinking far too much and reading too much into any particular thing throughout their lives.

The thing is that for Horror to work, you have to have something that people can connect it to, and the majority of people just can't really connect that kind to themselves so much as other works of fiction and historical events, neither of which lend themselves well to recollection for most people. Body horror works because it's easy to imagine some childhood injury that kept you in bed for two days being used as a basis. Psychological works because everyone's had at least one complete shut-down that they think could've led to something else.

Columbia is not really an alien environment that lends itself to the majority of horror ideas, it's a floating city kept aloft by fucking balloons for fuck's sake in what everyone would widely consider circus dressing and attire. And it never tries to subvert it or make anything seem a bit "off" beyond people trying to kill you. Everything is basically always colorful and largely happy until the homestretch where it seems to remember it's a Bioshock game. Add in the plot making no fucking sense once they start heaping on the "INFINITE WORLDS AND POSSIBILITIES" angle, and you've got a clusterfuck of ideas and themes that don't really mesh together well for most people.

 

[Cortez'sCoffers]

Didn't like Infinite? Best FPS I've played, maybe ever. The roller coaster mechanic was a hoot.

I felt it was worse than the original in just about every aspect.

The story just feels like a series of completely unconnected events happening. A lot of story elements (songbird, the vox populi, fink and fitzroy, the whole "get the guns to the vox" segment) are built up for hours and then they get the most anticlamactic resolution imaginable.

The songbird shows up a few times to move the plot forward and then it just dies in a cutsscene.
You never actually get the guns, you just hop over to another dimension where another version of Booker did it for you.
The only thing that changes after the Vox revolution is that now the enemies you fight have red clothes instead of blue ones.

While the gameplay in the first Bioshock was far from amazing, I still had some fun with it, but Infinite's gameplay did away with many of the things that made the original fun.

There's little exploration, there's less variety of playstyles, there's no scarcity of resources forcing you to make meaningful decisions on how to use what you have. The guns all feel weak, every enemy is a bullet sponge, the boss fight with the ghost is ten times worse than Bioshock's final boss, you can only carry around two guns at a time for some reason. Tears and sky hooks had potential to be great new additions but were poorly implemented.

The only improvement Infinite has over Bioshock so far as I remember is that it actually punishes you for dying, however mildly.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Bioshock was ironically a breath of fresh air in a 'shoot-the-alien-with-pewpewpew-lazers' and 'Nathan Drake is God!' world.

For the record the very first BioShock precedes the very first Uncharted by some months.

Fair enough. Point still stands it was a stand-out game in a market that had become pretty homogeneous.

 

[gorfias]

the first thing that occurred to me when I read the title of this thread was "wait, Dishonored's whole your-off-hand-is-a-spell mechanic was pretty much done by Bioshock first."... As for Bioshock Infinite, I personally reckon it's the better of the three Bioshock games. I don't get why people seem to hate on it so much.

Good point about the hand magic! I think there are objective reasons to support and dis like the game. At the end of the day, there was just so much that I loved about it.

I had more fun with Duke Nukem Forever.

I take some solace in that! I have it (Paid like a buck in a sale online) and... I liked the opening part. AADD though... started playing something else before getting into it. I'll play some more soon for a "so bad its good" kind of hoping.

I felt it was worse than the original in just about every aspect.
The story just feels like a series of completely unconnected events happening. A lot of story elements (songbird, the vox populi, fink and fitzroy, the whole "get the guns to the vox" segment) are built up for hours and then they get the most anticlamactic resolution imaginable.

As someone that loves Final Fantasy X, you'd have to have a pretty screwy story to make me feel completely lost By comparison, Bioshock Infinite was "The Bicycle Thief".
I'll have to see if anything like that roller coaster mechanic is coming out in any other game anytime soon.

 

[happyninja42]

I would slightly disagree with your statement that all the horror was gone. I think they just went for a different flavor of horror. It went from body horror and all the classic kinds from the first BS game, to the horror of human culture and bigotry. Giving us a presentation of a society where the aspects we find most vile, are actually lauded and praised, so that it's completely on display.

The problem though is that very few, if any, people that played the game have any kind of attachment, be it emotional or experience, with that kind of "horror". Everyone has the "what lurks in the darkness just out of sight" fear, however minor it might be for them. "Bigotry" and "racism" are largely just words to most people these days, even the people that say it being their top fears as a society don't really have a huge amount of experience with it beyond a handful of bad interactions and often thinking far too much and reading too much into any particular thing throughout their lives.

The thing is that for Horror to work, you have to have something that people can connect it to, and the majority of people just can't really connect that kind to themselves so much as other works of fiction and historical events, neither of which lend themselves well to recollection for most people. Body horror works because it's easy to imagine some childhood injury that kept you in bed for two days being used as a basis. Psychological works because everyone's had at least one complete shut-down that they think could've led to something else.

Columbia is not really an alien environment that lends itself to the majority of horror ideas, it's a floating city kept aloft by fucking balloons for fuck's sake in what everyone would widely consider circus dressing and attire. And it never tries to subvert it or make anything seem a bit "off" beyond people trying to kill you. Everything is basically always colorful and largely happy until the homestretch where it seems to remember it's a Bioshock game. Add in the plot making no fucking sense once they start heaping on the "INFINITE WORLDS AND POSSIBILITIES" angle, and you've got a clusterfuck of ideas and themes that don't really mesh together well for most people.

Yep, which is pretty much what I said in the rest of my post that you quoted xD That the horror they presented just didn't really have staying power. Hard for me to be too terribly shocked about a society that throws balls at a mixed couple, when we live in a real world where women will throw acid on their teenage daughters for daring to look at a person with "lustful intent". Like I said, the initial "here! have a ball! throw it at the man and his negro girlfriend!" thing was a bit shocking, but it quickly stopped being shocking. Partly because the game didn't really ever continue with that level of abuse. The rest of the time (as best as I can remember at this point, the game was pretty forgettable) that any blacks were shown, they were simply working, with overseers watching. They weren't being horribly tortured, we weren't seeing children playing football with a severed head or anything. It was just "Yep, that's them working, now I will go shoot all the white people in my way." So it was just sort of...meh, the shock faded real quick.

Same thing with the Sliders angle that I mentioned. Jumping around from reality to reality severed all possible emotional investment I might've had with any of the characters, because they weren't around anymore. I basically tuned out really early and just tried to finish it, but I didn't really have much heart in it.

 

[Derekloffin]

I personally didn't find bioshock that great either. It was amusing enough, but the reviews were making it into so much more than it was. It's story is cute, and the twist most interesting of all (not the twist it copied from SS2, the other one), but ultimately it wasn't that great, especially the actual gameplay which was rather weak. BS2 unfortunately, while I feel it improved the gameplay, it weakened the story and setting, so didn't really advance things. BSI seemed to do both, use a weaker story and weaker gameplay. Just can't win with this series.

 

[Don Incognito]

Yeah, at the time it was a pretty big deal. I'm pretty sure that it was one of the first to use audio recordings to flesh out the story and environment. I could be wrong. Of course since then that has become somewhat cliche, but if I recall correctly, it was a fairly fresh story telling concept at the time.

Well, you are.
Bioshock is a simplified copy of System Shock 2 down to hacking turrets and cameras.
It's not that novel, except for one specific moment.

Hell, even that one specific moment is lifted directly from System Shock 2.

 

[King Billi]

Bioshock's would you kindly is an in-lore reason why you keep moving forward. You do so not just because its a game, but because the character feels compelled to, he wants to doit because he is made to want to do it due to the mind control phrase. Motivation in a game is important. The "Why?". For awhile you can just assume the protagonist either feels morally compelled to help Atlas, or because he has nothing better to do. Or maybe the game is poorly written, until its revealed the "motivation" was right under your nose, from the second the letter on the gift in the plane, which says "would you kindly..."

Thanks for the explanation. That's kinda what I figured it was all about but all the fuss I heard about it as a plot twist and how many people seemed to claim their minds were utterly blown by it made me feel there was something more to it I was somehow missing.

I guess it's just I'm more interested in the internal story being told within the world than I am in the meta textual, though that is still interestimg .

 

[Saelune]

Bioshock's would you kindly is an in-lore reason why you keep moving forward. You do so not just because its a game, but because the character feels compelled to, he wants to doit because he is made to want to do it due to the mind control phrase. Motivation in a game is important. The "Why?". For awhile you can just assume the protagonist either feels morally compelled to help Atlas, or because he has nothing better to do. Or maybe the game is poorly written, until its revealed the "motivation" was right under your nose, from the second the letter on the gift in the plane, which says "would you kindly..."

Thanks for the explanation. That's kinda what I figured it was all about but all the fuss I heard about it as a plot twist and how many people seemed to claim their minds were utterly blown by it made me feel there was something more to it I was somehow missing.

I guess it's just I'm more interested in the internal story being told within the world than I am in the meta textual, though that is still interestimg .

Well, I still like the in-world stuff too. Its a game about what it means to have free-will, about extremes, and about how morality isnt always so black and white. There are very few if any truly moral characters in the game, but its done very well in that regard.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I never got what was so great about Bioshock either. The commentary on player agency wasn't mindblowing at all. The plot was perhaps the worst assassination plot ever penned; seriously, Hideo Kojima couldn't write a more convoluted assassination plot. There was that whole middle section of the game where you were basically just doing busywork (sidequests) that made me stop playing a few times out of boredom; Infinite has the very same issue smack in the middle of the game (but at least the gameplay was more fun). The game even gave up on its horror aspects early as well. I still remember those creepy scenes early on that were immensely effective and the game just sorta stops doing that. With all that said, Bioshock is a still a good game but it was never anything great. Games like Bioshock get overrated because there's no proper game criticism and any game that tries to be anything more than a standard video game becomes a "masterpiece".

 

[Poetic Nova]

I aswel, never understood what was so great about Bioshock.

The atmosphere never seemed to grab me, neither did the plot. I actually vaguely recall being bored by it.

It's maybe ironic that I do enjoy Bioshock 2, and Infinite but Infinite has one huge problem that immediatly sucked me out of the game.

Spoiler

When the super natural goes to 11 and you end up dealing with ghosts

I gave up on Infinite right there.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

Put me in the "it's okay but not great" camp. Gameplay was fun enough, story was alright but the pacing was kind of shit, characters were good, particularly Atlas and Ryan. The setting seems to receive high praise but it didn't really do much for me to be honest. It looked nice but the environmental world building and audio logs are things I just didn't find all that interesting.

Plot twist was great, everything that came after it was garbage. Ryan is gone and Atlas is "replaced" by Fontaine, the world's most boring villain. The final couple of hours of the game were a tedious slog, culminating in a shitty boss fight and an anticlimactic ending.

I never finished Bioshock 2 but I did enjoy what I played. I was even enjoying the story and characters. Maybe I'll finish it one day.

Infinite was a huge step backwards in terms of gameplay. I liked the story though, even if it was a bit all over the place. Burial at Sea, particularly episode two, is probably my favourite part of the entire Bioshock series.