BioShock Backlash

Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a Kieron Gillen piece at Eurogamer about the heavy backlash from PC gamers against BioShock . Gillen tackles all of the most common complaints, including favorites like 'it's too easy,' and 'the ending stinks.' "BioShock is both a more accessible and easier game than System Shock 2. But 'easier' doesn't have anything to with it being 'dumber,' and hating 'more accessible' is just petty elitism from people who'd actually like videogames to be a ghetto consisting of them — especially when some of the things to make the game more accessible can be turned off. As long as point two's not true, then the former really doesn't matter."

Is this a Euro thing?

[jandrese]

Heavy backlash against Bioshock? From what I've seen most people seem to like Bioshock. It had a lot of "game of the year" mentions among my friends. Is this a Euro thing where they are supposed to hate the game because it doesn't punish the player enough? I've played the game with basically no-vita chambers (just reload from the last save every time you die) and it really doesn't seem to add much to the game. Besides, none of that makes one iota of difference to the part that really pushed Bioshock into the "great games of the year" category: The storyline.

While there are parts of the game that I thought could have used some work (the Crafting is pretty halfassed and the Hacking got tedious after awhile), I considered my complaints minor. Also, the ending was underrated. I thought it wrapped up the story nicely (at least with the good ending) and in a very touching way.

Backlash? No...

[the_skywise]

It just wasn't as GREAT as it could've been.

The game was easy, no doubt about it... but no moreso than playing Halo on "normal" level. Oh sure you've got your "Vita-Chanbers" but they weren't that much different from the frequent auto-saves in Halo either.

The game suffers from two fatal problems however:
1> The ending stinks (spoilers ahead) - There is so much care and effort to the building of the world and the philsophical interplays in the first 3/4 of the story that the early climax of killing Ryan and discovering that you are no more than a puppet and the REAL bad guy is some two-bit chump who spends the rest of the game going "nyah nyah, gonna drop your health now" just destroys the fiction. There's no conclusion to the philosophical debate or to Ryan's vision other than to rescue the lil' Sisters and abandon Rapture or not rescue the girls and abandon Rapture. To wit, Rapture is a MAJOR character of this game and it's pretty much abandoned after Ryan's death.

2> There's no replay value. Sure you can go back and get that honeybee plasmid you always wanted but couldn't afford but most everything in the game is discoverable the first time through. Even the option of playing the game again to kill or not kill the little sisters isn't intriguing because it only REALLY changes the last 5 minutes of the game. The lame ending hurts here too. Who wants to play through a game again to get to the disappointing ending? Multiplayer options would've helped but it wasn't the point of the game, which was one of discovery and exploration.

To sum up, it's not a backlash (unless you want to consider all the technological goofups the PC owners had to go through with the DRM/activation)... but merely... disappointing.

A flawed masterpiece.

Re:Am I the only one...

[twistedsymphony]

Why is it that everyone claiming that bioshock really IS all that is good and right in a game ignores the arguments against that position that actually have substance. Things like the DRM clusterfuck and bloody wierd mouse controls, tallscreen FOV, and the player character's lack of impact on the world. Did anyone ever figure out how on earth the sensitivity manages to slowly change over time after loading and saving?

As a player of the 360 version, none of that really applied to me. While I am playing on a widescreen and did read the FOV comments before I started after a few minutes I decided it wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be. That and most of the other bugs you mentioned were all fixed in the patch that was just released.

As for the player's lack of effect on the world... well... did you pay attention to the story at all? The whole story revolves around how the world effected YOU, you play the grunt, the pawn in the bigger story... something tells me that not changing the world around you was by design. This wasn't Fable or Oblivion where you're the hero of the hour every hour, Bioshock's story has you play the role of a slave.

Totally missing the point...

[David20321]

The biggest complaint I have seen about Bioshock is that you never need to make choices in how the player character develops. By the end of the game you will be a gun-wielding, plasmid-blasting tank who is an expert hacker. This causes several key gameplay problems:

• There is little reason to play again because you will follow the same path in the same way. In System Shock 2, when you play again you still follow the same path, but you have to deal with obstacles differently depending on your character's abilities.

• Because you have so many different weapons and powers, it creates a paradox of choice. Since you have so many ways to kill any particular enemy, and there is little feedback to help find the most efficient way, it becomes less satisfying because I feel like I could have done it better.

• The choice of harvesting or freeing the little sisters has very little weight, because you end up with the same abilities either way. This would have been an obvious place to add some kind of character variation.

Bioshock was also "dumbed down" in many other ways, such as having an infinite inventory capacity for weapons (and nothing but weapons). This adds to the paradox of choice, thus making combat less fun, while also eliminating other kinds of customization. Bioshock is still one of the best games of the year for me, and it raised the bar for story and atmosphere in games, but the gameplay mechanics show several clear design errors.

Re:Totally missing the point...

[grub]

All are great points!

In reference to your first re: character abilities... I've played System Shock 2 through several times while trying different strategies each time. The last time I decided to go for "pure" PSI. I made it through the game with whatever weapons I was able to use without improvements (mainly the wrench and pistol) and worked on developing the PSI abilities. Early on it was hard but once I got the hang of remote hacking turrets and using brains rather than brawn it was a great round.

I played through Bioshock and I was at the "shit, just hurry up and finish this thing"-level of boredom. I'll probably never play through Bioshock again but SS2 is calling me once again... (that and Thief fan missions!)