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Bioshock ain't that bad...

Yosharian

Arcane
Joined
May 28, 2018
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Grand Chien
I like all three of the Bioshock games but its undeniable that the series gradually moved away from what made System Shock 2 so good (and it was only sorta present in Bioshock 1 anyway)
 

Yosharian

Arcane
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May 28, 2018
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Grand Chien
Rapture didn't go to complete shit really until Ryan got spooked that Fontaine was using the free market to get more powerful than him and then sacrificed all his principles to stop that. Not saying the game is pro-Libertarian, the complete lack of regulation is shown to allow some bad shit, but the game does depict Rapture as being more or less successful until Ryan fucks it up by going authoritarian. The sequel, Bioshock 2, has a far-left commie take over and remove all individuality and control from the people, so it attacks extremism on both sides.
Yes absolutely, one of the series' strengths is that it shows the evil that many different political ideologies can commit
 

Dayyālu

Arcane
Joined
Jul 1, 2012
Messages
4,466
Location
Shaper Crypt
Point is, the politics in Bioshock are kind of unnecessary.

Yes yes Ryan wanted to create a libertarian paradise, it fails because people gene-edit themselves with mutant science-fiction slugs.

Yes yes in Bio 2 Sophia Lamb wants to create the Ultimate Human like some kind of JRPG boss.

Yes yes in Bio 3 Ken Levine wants you to draw hardcore porn of Elizabeth.

The political approach is clumsy at best, but also essentially meaningless in the game: it's just dress-up and ambience, arguably even less relevant to the plot that the peculiar conflict between the factions in SS2 (The Many have a point, but they're completely alien and inhuman in expressing it). I will give it a pass because we're talking about a goddamn video game. Good for what it is.

I will however give some points to Bio2 for trying to make Ryan less of a muppet, I remember clearly some logs where he laments the cult of personality he himself built, wondering if it's not ghoulish and counter-productive.
 

DalekFlay

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New Vegas
I will give it a pass because we're talking about a goddamn video game. Good for what it is.

"Good for what it is" is my summary, so... yeah. It's a decent shooter in a cool setting with some okay magic/exploration elements. It's only seen as horribad by some because they wanted it to be System Shock 3 or hate how praised it was by media at the time.
 

karoliner

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Oct 31, 2016
Messages
5,092
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Most skilled black nation
The games had so much potential. They had all the individual elements to be great games but in the end were poorly put together. So we end up with two average shooters and one dumpsterfire.
 

kangaxx

Arbiter
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Jan 26, 2020
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Atop a flaming horse
I'm replaying it now, and it hasn't aged well IMO. The atmosphere is ok and the setting is good, but the the combat mechanics are way too shonky for what is pretty much a pure shooter.
 

JDR13

Arcane
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Nov 2, 2006
Messages
3,930
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The Swamp
A pure shooter to me would be something like Doom or Serious Sam. I never liked the Bioshock games for the shooting.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
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A pure shooter to me would be something like Doom or Serious Sam. I never liked the Bioshock games for the shooting.

I think it's correct to say Bioshock is way more of a shooter than something like System Shock or Prey though. I'd say it's a shooter with very light "immersive sim" elements, but still a shooter. I was surprised in my last replay just how fast-paced and shooting focused the game really is.
 

JDR13

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A pure shooter to me would be something like Doom or Serious Sam. I never liked the Bioshock games for the shooting.

I think it's correct to say Bioshock is way more of a shooter than something like System Shock or Prey though. I'd say it's a shooter with very light "immersive sim" elements, but still a shooter. I was surprised in my last replay just how fast-paced and shooting focused the game really is.

Well yeah, if you're going to compare it to an immersive sim, of course it's more of a shooter.
 

kangaxx

Arbiter
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Atop a flaming horse
The other thing is just how badly the game simulates sound propagation, particularly when compared to something like SS2, nearly a decade earlier. It's really disorientating and inaccurate, and not in a "deliberate game design" kind of way.
 

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,279
Sound propagation? The sound cuts out completely if there's too many bots shooting or you click on a toilet too many times, ambience, music, everything.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
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Hyperborea
The shooting feedback in 1 is fucking terrible in both a tactile and visual way, maybe the worst I've ever come across. Even the old Shock games felt better.
 

DalekFlay

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The shooting feedback in 1 is fucking terrible in both a tactile and visual way, maybe the worst I've ever come across. Even the old Shock games felt better.

The shotgun's alright, and I think the plasmids are better overall, but yeah no one's playing Bioshock because it's such a good shooter.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
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Hyperborea
But I can't front, I did enjoy the game, despite it paling in comparison to SS2, which I had played for the first time right before it. They built a compelling environment, I can't take that away from them. I still have backup saves I might continue some day.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,014
I will give it a pass because we're talking about a goddamn video game. Good for what it is.

"Good for what it is" is my summary, so... yeah. It's a decent shooter in a cool setting with some okay magic/exploration elements. It's only seen as horribad by some because they wanted it to be System Shock 3 or hate how praised it was by media at the time.

The first is enjoyable, there's some nice systemic gameplay elements, and aesthetically it's very nice, (your Plasmids are still probably the best looking representation of what magic you have selected in a first person game - really, the aesthetic is the most interesting thing about the game) but the Vita-Chambers system completely breaks the game. I'm a little surprised Vita-Chambers didn't just function as normal save points as I'm sure how easily they could be gamed was pretty clear during development. I wonder if in this post-Dark Souls landscape a new BioShock would have Vita-Chambers that functioned in the same manner as Bonfires? Would have been interesting to see a BioShock game fully developed after Dark Souls had gotten big, because there are parts of its formula that would've worked well in BioShock.

It's too bad they dropped the RPG elements and lost the teleportation power they showed off in one of the first big demos of the game. The combat in BioShock still feels like a game which was meant to be a RPG, which is to say it's not up to the standards you'd expect a pure FPS to be.
 

Drakortha

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 23, 2016
Messages
1,657
Location
Terra Australis
I played through it once on release when I was 18 years old. I was also a retard back then. Every attempt to play the game since then I reach the gunplay section of the tutorial, realize how shit it feels --> uninstall game.
 

JDR13

Arcane
Joined
Nov 2, 2006
Messages
3,930
Location
The Swamp
but the Vita-Chambers system completely breaks the game. I'm a little surprised Vita-Chambers didn't just function as normal save points as I'm sure how easily they could be gamed was pretty clear during development. I wonder if in this post-Dark Souls landscape a new BioShock would have Vita-Chambers that functioned in the same manner as Bonfires? Would have been interesting to see a BioShock game fully developed after Dark Souls had gotten big, because there are parts of its formula that would've worked well in BioShock

Um... the vita-chambers can simply be turned off in the options.
 

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,279
The shooting feedback in 1 is fucking terrible in both a tactile and visual way, maybe the worst I've ever come across. Even the old Shock games felt better.
One reason would be that long and elaborate hurt animations like you saw in quake/hl1/ss2 stopped being fashionable by the time Bioshock came around, another reason is you have very easy access to stuns with cheap Electrobolt, so the game would be balanced around monsters reacting to plasmid debuffs more than to being shot.
It's not designed at all for you to rely too much on weapons or plasmids separately, if you do the plasmids don't do enough damage, and the guns cannot suppress even basic splicers.
You pretty much have to use the intended "build" with lots of Electrobolt one-two punches.

I will give it a pass because we're talking about a goddamn video game. Good for what it is.

"Good for what it is" is my summary, so... yeah. It's a decent shooter in a cool setting with some okay magic/exploration elements. It's only seen as horribad by some because they wanted it to be System Shock 3 or hate how praised it was by media at the time.

The first is enjoyable, there's some nice systemic gameplay elements, and aesthetically it's very nice, (your Plasmids are still probably the best looking representation of what magic you have selected in a first person game - really, the aesthetic is the most interesting thing about the game) but the Vita-Chambers system completely breaks the game. I'm a little surprised Vita-Chambers didn't just function as normal save points as I'm sure how easily they could be gamed was pretty clear during development. I wonder if in this post-Dark Souls landscape a new BioShock would have Vita-Chambers that functioned in the same manner as Bonfires? Would have been interesting to see a BioShock game fully developed after Dark Souls had gotten big, because there are parts of its formula that would've worked well in BioShock.

It's too bad they dropped the RPG elements and lost the teleportation power they showed off in one of the first big demos of the game. The combat in BioShock still feels like a game which was meant to be a RPG, which is to say it's not up to the standards you'd expect a pure FPS to be.

Vita Chambers have support for being turned on like SS1/SS2 and support for costing money when they resurrect like SS2, those features just aren't used in the game. You can make it drain money with a mod but even that is broken as you will still resurrect once you're out of money.
The old demo was surprisingly close to SS2, they had a lot more abilities that weren't just point and shoot, teleport, sanctuary shield barrier, agility speed boost...
RPG elements were there too, the plasmid and tonics slots were your skills, they started with just one slot and unlocking more slots gave a static bonus the same as increasing a skill, one extra physical tonic slot and you'd get more health, one extra combat tonic slot and you'd get more weapon damage, etc.
If you were to compare the look of Bioshock's tracks for tonics and plasmids (5 tracks total, 6 slots each) you would see it looks exactly like SS2's stats screen, which has 5 stats (STR, END, AGI, PSI, CYB) that can be upgraded from 1 to 6;
All this stuff was not removed but rather disabled in late 2006 when the big push was made to turn the game into an FPS, it's all still there in the engine.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
Why people still bitch about the vita chambers when you can turn them off is beyond me. Just flip one little switch in the options menu and the game functions exactly like Dishonored, Deus Ex or a million other quicksave based games. There are real reasons to find Bioshock unworthy of the "shock" name, but vita chambers is not one of them.
 

RolePlayer

Augur
Joined
Oct 3, 2009
Messages
203
Location
Portland, Oregon
After FEAR and Crysis 1, are there any non-mp exclusive shooters that aren't fucking garbage? Compared to nuDoom/Wolf, Bioshock doesn't look as bad. Still pretty "meh", but not "escort lampshade girl while she whines nonstop" tiers of bad.

Any hint of a "fps Renaissance" any time soon?

No you can't nickel and dime the customer base in single player campaign FPS.
 

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