BioShock 2 Comments by Tom Bramwell

Plus, there'll probably be another fucking WHALE in the intro.

I'd like to see another whale. Whales are badass. ; )

A lot of people seem pissed off about this.

I loved Bioshock. The first 3/4 of the game more than made up for its underwhelming finale. No other videogames, apart from a select handful that are firmly entrenched in my 'top 5' list, have immersed me so completely in their world right off the bat (the brilliant intro certainly helped).

As for the sequel...

It seems contrived, but I hope it doesn't suck. For now I'm keeping my mind open.

I'll be trying to keep an open mind too, i really want this to be good, but do have a few reservations after all that's been mentioned thus far.......

What the...

Complicated? Over-thought-out? Huh?!

When a person says it seems "contrived", what are you actually meaning by that?

I don't like these 'protect the little sister while she does her thing' climaxes.

They always come off frustrating if a player fails. And besides, the Big Daddy could surely just drag the body of interest to a safer spot?

I loved Bioshock, but this isn't looking to great right now.

I can't speak for other people who used the word, but by 'contrived' I was referring to the plot. It doesn't seem like a natural progression of the first game; it seems like a forced extension of it.
A Little Sister returns to Rapture because she took a liking to psychotic substance abusers (probably has something to do with her dad) and prefers a crumbling submarine dystopia to the comforts of the normal world. She takes over the city somehow, etc...

I know Bioshock's plot was ridiculous and contrived' in more ways than one, but... fuck it, we'll just wait and see.

MisterCraig, I don't want to protect a little sister while she 'does her thing and climaxes' either. The Daily Mail brigade will be outside my house with torches and pitchforks.

As long as EG doesn't write another pathetic defence piece on why they gave it the inevitable 10/10

Bioshock's plot wasn't ridiculous and contrived it was quite simple, philoshophy aside it was a story of identity and power.

Also you should know that the big sister can be killed before the end of the game. Skeptics should read the Games tm article.

+ From what I understand the little sister only needs protecting during harvesting, also since you can get adam from the slugs themselves outside.

+ A return to the setting cant really be criticised my main complaint with bioshock wasn't the fact the fps and roleplaying elements were somewhat half baked, it was that such a small part of rapture was open for exploration.

+ In reality the game a marketing machine would make would be one where plasmid biomodification came to the surface.

just make it better, or at least as good as system shock 2 this time, mmm?

for one, i never quite understood why they got rid of the real-time inventory and hacking - those contributed to some of those scariest moments in SS2, but the stop-start nature of bioshock let you 'game' the system too easily (running up to turrets with no risk, swapping to the ideal weapon mid-combat with superhuman quickness, etc).

other than that, a different plot to SS2 would be nice! i suppose with bioshock so fresh in everyone's minds, that much is almost g'teed.

"a return to the mixture of map-based exploration..."

Speaking of which, will they do away with that ridiculous, incomprehensible cartoon map from the first game, with all of its arbitrary swooping arrows, etc, and replace it with something with some kind of spacial coherency? I spent much of BS1 wandering in circles, hoping to eventually find my way by chance.

"...promising stronger FPS fundamentals"

We can only hope. As an FPS - in terms of feel and precision - BS1 was a real disappointment IMO.

Hi guys. Sorry I haven't dived back into this before now. My bad.

Reihn:

"Ken Levine said in an interview (on the Bioshock bonus DVD) he made a conscious design change during development of Bioshock to 'open the game up for the player, to be less restrictive' and . . well . . I didn't like it. I feel that if you force players to make choices, like by saying 'you can only choose one out of the big crazy gun and the awesome crazy plasmid', then it's more rewarding. I know if I make that choice, I'll place more value on the gun or the magic I've gone with."

I think, then, that you'll be disappointed. Admittedly, nobody at 2K told me they don't plan to restrict players based on their choices, but the feeling I got from the discussion (especially with JP LeBreton here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-bi... was that this will be inclusive on that level. My interpretation was that they want to make a significant, thoughtful game, but they want to avoid frustrating players through overt (or, indeed, invisible) restriction in gameplay choices. I suspect there will be a degree of restriction, but probably only as much as there was in BioShock - i.e. do you spend ADAM on *this* or on *this*.

Yossarian:

"Most modern devs seem to be terrified of putting restrictions or limitations on the content the 'average player' will experience, and so allow their players to do *everything* in one playthrough, doing their best to shepherd them through any obstacles which might result in them switching the game off in frustration... which renders any purported 'choices' about character development/role-playing pretty inconsequential. I suspect this is a fairly recent trend (last five-ten years)."

Admittedly, I've not "done" Fallout 3 yet to that degree (and it feels like a "done"), but it's interesting to hear that you felt restricted by it. I can only suggest - based on the 10 hours of FO3 I've played and my three completions of BioShock 1 - that you'll feel the same way, although I'd question whether it condemns BioShock outright, as I felt - as somebody who bought the special edition at launch - that I got value for money. It may be a relative value vs. gameplay depth thing I guess.

The Comedian:

"The ONLY thing that could have supplemented Bioshock's philosophical and narrative canon is by seeing the initial demise of Rapture at the hand of those turning into monsters and changing their environment to reflect their inner torment."

Well, The Comedian would say that - he died on page one :-) But seriously, while I understand the point, I don't think the way BioShock 1 played out excludes the setting from subsequent contemplation (look at The Godfather, for instance). It's not an obvious way to go with it, but if anything it's interesting and ambitious - I mean, many of the rules were set for a prequel, assuming it was in Rapture. Going *after* is tabula rasa, and a bit scarier. Kudos for trying, no?

metalangel:
I get that. That's how I felt going over to see it. And even in light of what they showed off of the actual game, I had massive doubts too, and still do. The thing is - and the most important thing is - these guys inhabited the original game as we did. They adored it and then got to choose how to build upon it. For all our doubts and horror at the idea of a sequel, what they've *said* now (mainly) deserves the benefit of the doubt. Ultimately, we'll know a lot more by the time it ships - enough to make a buy decision - and I don't think you could disguise a poor BioShock sequel to that point. Do you?

sirtacos:

"I can't speak for other people who used the word, but by 'contrived' I was referring to the plot. It doesn't seem like a natural progression of the first game; it seems like a forced extension of it."

To bring up The Godfather again, wasn't Part II contrived? All that Cuban stuff, mostly? Fredo? Or the De Niro origin story! Of course it all fits in hindsight, because it fits in hindsight (and, er, there were books - oops). BioShock 2 may not fit (we'll see), but the key point, as I said to metalangel, is that for now there's nothing to suggest it can't. There's the superficial "big daddy boobies lol" view, but that seems a bit shallow next to the depth of their commentary at this early stage, and it wasn't the way the Big Sister was designed. Benefit of the doubt for now, I reckon.

Actually, it's something Rob Fahey (formerly of these parts) and I disagree on *enormously*. He can't accept episodic stories if the designers don't know where they're going. For me, sometimes the best stories emerge from experimentation - even with the Stephen King "On Writing" thing of 'just start and see where it goes'. With this, it's somewhere in-between. They had a finished thing, BioShock 1, then they got to work out how to continue it. They did. The cool thing is that they also clearly worked out the whole thing before they started actually making it - and that would not least have been informed by the difficulties Ken Levine and others had completing BioShock at the 11th hour.

Rodchenko:

"As long as EG doesn't write another pathetic defence piece on why they gave it the inevitable 10/10"

It should be pointed out that, as a fan of the first game, I commissioned that, and edited it (you know, a little). It's entirely my fault. If it offended you, blame me, and hate me. Kieron just did what I asked. As Harvey Smith once said, I believe in accountability. It wasn't so much to defend a 10 as to address a growing backlash that I felt was miscalculated.

That said, I love BioShock, and would have given it 10. Kristan (then editor) reviewed it differently to the way I would have done, but we disagreed less on BioShock than on a lot of stuff we did in those years. There's a lot of things I would have written against it, but in this world of videogames, they settle into grooves that run off the first one's general superiority, and BioShock was superior to a degree beyond the majority that year. It still makes me happy to think about the time I spent playing it, and that's why I went to see the sequel in the first place.

Worth bumping this in case the posters referenced missed the reply.

Re Episodic - Mugwum, are you saying that Bioshock will become Episodic?