What Was The Problem With Bioshock 2?

[NeutralDrow]

The way you describe Bioshock 2 makes it sound pretty good, and I regret missing it for $10.

To be honest, I liked the way the first Bioshock played, but I was far from impressed with the story. "Would you kindly" was kind of interesting, but people keep playing up that scene and Andrew Ryan as having some kind of depth and power to it. I saw it as me hunting down and killing a hypocritical jackass who stood between me and freedom, and who I'd seen kill people for no good reason...

Spoiler

And then the bastard had the absolute gall to steal my kill. "A man chooses, a slave obeys," he says, while ordering me to kill him with his riding crop. It was basically the suicidal equivalent of "You can't fire me, I QUIT!" I had a crossbow bolt with his name on it, dammit.

I never really felt it as a horror game, either. Even aside from the Vita-Chambers, I just became pretty powerful and confident as Wrench Man, Destroyer of Splicers, and even Big Daddies went down pretty easy once I got the crossbow.

Really, the one thing I unequivocally liked in the first game was the little sisters, so Bioshock 2 sounds right up my alley.

 

[LetalisK]

I'll add my voice to this echo chamber. Bioshock 2 was a pretty good game...following an incredible game.

 

[jamesworkshop]

Sofia, like Andrew Ryan in the first game, has a driving idea that makes her goals ethically problematic. With Ryan, it was the freedom to profit from your work without intervention ? basically, he was a teabagger, which meant that most with a cursory interest in politics could identify with the game ? either with him, or against him. Lamb offers no such easy way in.

The central conceit in Bioshock 2 isn?t freedom but free will. That?s why it?s a little more difficult ? the typical person?s response to ?should we have free will?? is ?yes, you idiot?. It?s just one of those common-sense things. Life without free will is pointless. Except Lamb doesn?t think so.

Lamb has Eleanor in her custody, and she is using her in an attempt to create the first ?Utopian? ? a multi-talented beacon of excellence with no questions about sacrificing her identity or self in the process. It?s here that things are a little more complicated. The Utopian Eleanor won?t have self-doubt, an apathetic nature, nor will she be prone to violence or sadness. All she lacks is the desire for autonomy ? aside from that, she is being conditioned to be at her happiest when she?s controlled, a willing slave.

I don?t know about you, but I love stuff like this. The really interesting ethical issues are the ones that make you cringe ? where you?re forced to consider the merits of a viewpoint that just seems wrong. That was one thing Bioshock didn?t have ? from the very beginning, you were either with Andrew Ryan?s ideals or against them, and the plot was largely separate. In Bioshock 2, the fact that the ending relies so heavily on your choices makes sense; Eleanor?s impressionable mind is learning from your actions with every single step, and if you fuck up, then she will too when the time comes.

That morally murky territory is made muddier by the fact that the place you explore is the burning husk of a monument to liberty; it?s a perfect example of how the individualist passions of greedy men can tear a place apart. Bioshock 2, like its predecessor, does not deal in moderation. You?re being asked by the villain to support total submission of the self in a ruined playground that worshipped the individual.

http://www.csicon.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-free-in-defence-of-bioshock-2/

says it all really

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4AXklTY2M&HD=1

 

[Rose and Thorn]

I never played Bioshock 2 because the original Bioshock is one of my favorite games. I usually don't play sequels to my favorite games if I have the feeling it might ruin the feelings I got from the first.

Therefore I let that one pass, but Bioshock Infitie does look good. Dishonored looks better and more up my alley.

 

[Waffle_Man]

I know that I've defended bioshock 2 on some level in a couple of other threads, so don't take the following as a declaration of hate.

The problem is that it didn't have the cohesive vision of the first one. Everything had to be "bigger and badder." Everything that made the first game great was copied on a very shallow level. The game has a staggering number of options to choose from in combat, but unlike Bioshock 1, not everything serves a distinct purpose and the player never really wants for anything because they have practically every combat need filled right away. The story tried to tackle many ostensibly similar ethical questions, but where Bioshock had an examination of it's own examination, layered with various levels of self awareness, Bioshock 2 unironically just asked a bunch of straight forward questions. The plot not only didn't have any big twist ending, but it never had any gradual development. The story never goes anywhere until about the last level or two, only to develop in possibly one of the most straightforward ways possible.

Bioshock was a desconsturction of the stucture of videogames. Bioshock 2 had a giant drill that you could charge people with. One made me giggle a bit, the other made me wonder about some of the problems of the human condition.

Bioshock 2 is't bad, it just isn't even in the same category as the first game.

 

[squidface]

I liked both of the storylines pretty much the same amount, but I played BS2 first... which meant that by the time I got to BS1, I thought the gameplay was a bit boring. BS1 was long, for me.

I didn't find defending Little Sisters to be very difficult - setting a load of mines around her before you let her take the ADAM out of the 'angels' makes your job a LOT easier. I practically made her a fortress of explosives.

But yeah. I knew people disliked BS2 more than the first one but... I didn't know there was an actual problem with it.

 

[WhyBotherToTry]

I think it had the same problem as Portal 2 in that people said it wasn't as good as the first because its predecessor was the only thing to compare it to, and the first installment in both of those series was hailed as one of the best games out there.

I think the criticism was a bit undeserved though because I found the gameplay better than the first Bioshock. Dual wielding made for much more fun combat and the hacking was so much better too. It was only judged a bit too harshly just because it was a bit unnecessary.

 

[mitchell271]

Bioshock 2 was a fantastic game. The biggest problem was that is necessarily compared to the first game. If it was released first, it would probably be considered the superior game.

 

[SnakeoilSage]

I think Bioshock was about a unique setting and some "think about it" moments. Bioshock 2 was about being a Proto-Space Marine saving his daughter, which is actually pretty cool when you think about it. Classic video game premise (swapping out girlfriend or princess with daughter) and plenty of awesome toys to fight baddies with.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

It's rare that I unreservedly agree with everything that Yahtzee says about a game, but he hit the nail on the head with Bioshock 2:

-Bioshock 1 was, by many standards, a brilliant game, and one of the things that made it great was that it was very tight and self-contained. A return to Rapture took something away from that.

-Bioshock 2's ret-conning of the prototype Big Daddy, the fact that Rapture is still standing after everything we saw in the first game, the fact that Adam became a deus ex machina plot device...it all felt like a Bioshock fanfiction story that was given a pass to be made into a full-fledged AAA game.

 

[The White Hunter]

I rather loved Bioshock 2, so you won't see too many complaints from me. Combat blows the first one away, Lamb is the villain Fontaine should have been.

It is a tad short, but I'd rather have short and sweet then long and tedious (as some parts of bioshock 1 got).

Combat quite literally blew tthe first one away.

Dat shotgun man. Such an improvement. Though all the weapons were improved a lot in 2.
I personally found it less fresh and less surprising, since so much was already established. That said BioShock 2 was still excellent.

 

[crazyrabbits]

As mParadox said above, as a standalone game it's good (even great), but as a sequel to a highly-regarded game billed as the spiritual successor to System Shock and an incredibly unique and thought-provoking game in its own right, it falls short for several reasons.

- The moral decisions can be all over the place. It's considered a good thing to flush Gil Alexander (a bloated, ADAM-infested monstrosity) into the sea to fend for himself...okay?). Eleanor's decision to save Sofia has no real bearing in the "good" ending, even in light of the fact that the older woman almost smothered her to death.

- There's little to no reason to be "evil" in 2 unless you just want things given to you slightly faster. Being good nets you way more ADAM in the long run.

- The gameplay is painfully repetitive. Find Little Sister, protect, rescue, go to tram, repeat.

- As a tale about a father and daughter, it's well-done. As a sequel, it doesn't take any chances with the material, doesn't have any unique or well-known twists like the Ryan lecture from the original, and the whole motif of father-daughter bonding only comes into play in the last half hour.

- Once, I encountered severe lag and screen tearing due to all the action happening on-screen during a big battle. I've seen that major battles with enough going on can cause the game to crash.

- The end battle is lame. Just a few waves of generic enemies rushing you while you fill a room with water.

 

[SidheKnight]

The story.

The story of Rapture should have ended in the first Bioshock, IMO. It was perfectly wrapped up in that game.

 

[Callate]

A lot of Bioshock 2 kind of went in one ear and out the other, to the point that I don't have any ground-shaking feelings about it one way or the other. Which might be part of the problem. But of what I do remember, here's my thoughts.

First, to concur with what everyone else is saying: yes, a big part of the problem with Bioshock 2 is that it wasn't Bioshock 1. BS1 had a lot of "wow" moments: in graphics, story, and in generating emotion. BS2 basically had the same graphics, and as for the other two, well, more on that in a sec.

There were some things BS2 did pretty well. I said somewhere that I was surprised that BS didn't pull a cue from Clive Barker's Undying and make one hand/button for weapons and the other for spells (or in this case, plasmids.) I don't know if someone heard me, but they did that in BS2, and I think it was an improvement. I'll also agree with whoever said that the "record your enemies on video in action" was a better idea than the original research camera.

But the story... well. In some very real ways, Bioshock was your story; "Jack's" story. You were heading semi-unwittingly into the midst of a war between Atlas and Ryan, but the story was still yours in some real and significant ways, a fact highlighted by your final confrontation with Ryan.

BS2 isn't your story, a point similarly highlighted by the events leading up to the ending. (I don't want to give anything away, but I'll say that there's a certain inevitability to "your" fate combined with a sense of the inconsequence of the physical form that is "you" that puts weight on this view.) One also gets a strong sense that the creators didn't really engage with the philosophy driving Lamb in the way that they did with Ryan. Ryan, in a sense, abided by a kind of objectivism to the point of self-destruction; Lamb, by contrast, seems to drop into a supervillain "ah, screw it, kill 'em all" kind of response that doesn't really reference collectivism at all. There's a fairly obvious irony that no one apparently grasped that Ryan is willing to self-sacrifice for objectivism, and Lamb is unwilling to self-sacrifice for collectivism.

I felt more genuine emotion the first time I saved a Little Sister from her parasite than I did during the entirety of Bioshock 2.

Hopefully, they're on the right track with Infinite.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Mostly.... it wasn't Bioshock. That's what lots of people I've heard basically said. Oddly, Bioshock gets out down because it wasn't System Shock 2. Apparently System Shock 2 dispensed free blow job and candy and ran on dreams.

 

[Zantos]

I am much in agreement with many of the posts so far. It wasn't a bad game, it just wasn't as spectacular as the first. But since most people on here, myself included, own a quite considerable collection of games then "I don't like a game because it's not as good as one I've already got" doesn't really resonate here.

 

[mrdude2010]

The premise was kind of silly, for one thing. A prototype big daddy is faster and more efficient than the real ones? OK. Also, I mean, it was basically a copypaste of the first game, but with a worse story. Also, that whole little sister escort quest thing was a pain in the ass.