Analysis: Bioshock

After over a year since its initial release Bioshock continues to be very highly regarded in the gaming community for its story, its graphics, and its gameplay. With developments on all of these fronts pushing forward so strongly it's impressive that Bioshock endures so well, but let's take a dive into the underwater city of Rapture to see what really makes this game tick.

Gameplay

Bioshock traditionally settles in the realm of the First-Person Shooter/RPG, as did its spiritual predecessors from the System Shock series. Players are of course given a series of guns and the ability to move around, aim, and shoot. The additional features that qualify it as an RPG in most peoples' minds are the plasmids, which resemble a spellcasting system in that they take the form of spell-like effects that consume EVE, the game's equivalent of MP or Mana. Players also have the ability to build the character as the game progresses by equipping various abilities, customizing weaponry, and obtaining new plasmids. There is also a hacking system that allows the player to interact with various machines throughout the game's environment as well as an economic system that can be tampered with through said hacking.

Weapons

The workhorse of any first-person shooter; the guns are the player's primary killing tools and include the old classics--a revolver, a machinegun, a shotgun, and a wrench for melee combat--and a host of more exotic, specialized weapons--a chemical thrower, a grenade launcher, and a crossbow. All of them feature three different ammo types.

Wrench

Any first-person shooter has some kind of melee alternative, either as a contingency for when the player runs out of ammo or as a more risky power attack for ammo conservation. The player's ability to shoot lightning and stun enemies through various means--either through the various ammunition types or through the lightning bolt plasmid--renders the wrench a powerful weapon. Additionally there's a whole line of abilities the player can equip for the purpose of bolstering their strength with the wrench alone. Players speculate that it's possible to beat one's way through the entire game with only this weapon, and with the wrench's power being multiplied by four with electric stun and multiplied multiple more times over with tonic abilities, it's not surprising.

Revolver

The simplest gun imaginable, the revolver offers a six-shot clip that's reloaded via speedloader for a smooth and comfortable reload time and that can be upgraded to a bizarre steampunk 12-shot revolver via upgrade stations. Its single shots are reasonably powerful and reward precision aiming at any range. It can be loaded with either regular, antipersonnel, or armor-piercing rounds. The antipersonnel rounds are more effective against people and the armor-piercing rounds are more effective against machines, Big Daddies, and anything made of metal while the regular ammo fares equally well (or equally poorly) against either type of enemy.

Machinegun

This Tommy Gun is ideal for taking on large groups of enemies at a time at moderate to close-range, spraying ammunition liberally with auto-fire. Like the pistol it features antipersonnel and armor-piercing rounds in addition to its regular ammo.

Shotgun

As tradition holds the shotgun is ideal for close-range encounters with single enemies, its ammo fanning out and weakening the farther it travels. Its ammo is a little different than that of the other traditional guns in that it features incendiary rounds that light people on fire and electric rounds that stun enemies. While both will work against anything in general the incendiary rounds are more effective against organic enemies that actually have some carbon to burn and the electric rounds are more effective against armored enemies that are covered in conductive material, which keeps with the regular-antipersonnel-armor piercing relationship that's been established so far but mixes it up with a few additional effects that make it a viable, desirable option in a game where the close-quarters killing power of a shotgun can easily be superceded by the stun-and-wrench tecknique, if only as part of this technique as the electric rounds can be used to stun enemies the way a lightning plasmid would.

Grenade Launcher

It looks like someone took an old coffee can and stuck a bunch of gadgets to it, but this is a deadly weapon. Unfortunately it doesn't see a lot of use apart from fighting Big Daddies--the only enemies truly tough enough to warrant this kind of firepower. Otherwise much of the game is too chlostrophobic to make decent and safe use of explosives and the vast majority of enemies don't have the endurance to withstand a shotgun blast, let alone one of these. An upgrade called "shaped charges" stops the explosion from damaging the player, but even then it's a little bit of a stretch to think of using this gun and not the safer, more efficient machinegun, especially since the player can only carry about six of each type of grenade and they are all few and far between. It might be a more useful weapon if the indirect nature of grenades--their ability to pass over barriers and the like--found more use, but as it is virtually all enemies are suicidally insane and will attack the player as directly as possible rather than using cover, and grenades don't bounce but simply explode on impact, so that won't be happening any time soon. The grenades themselves come in three types: regular grenades; sticky bombs, which act like proximity mines; and incendiary grenades, which light anything caught in the blast on fire. The sticky bombs would make for useful traps if the player could carry more of them or if it were easier to lead multiple enemies into them, but as it stands they're just another subset of regular grenades that's hard to get at because the player has to switch ammo types and reload to use them.

Chemical Thrower

A powerful and exotic gun that begs not to be ignored, the chemical thrower presents three volatile fluids: liquid nitrogen, napalm, and electrical gel. Again, these ammo types correspond to regular, antipersonnel, and armor-piercing archetypes and will damage enemies accordingly. The electrical gel will hold an enemy in place for as long as an enemy is caught in the beam of electricity that the gun fires and stun them for a short period after the player stops firing. the liquid nitrogen will freeze enemies the longer a stream of it is held on them. The napalm will light them on fire. While they appear powerful and this gun can easily spray a whole group of enemies with any of these exotic effects, streams of fluids consume a great deal of ammunition. It works well as an alternative to using plasmids that conjure the same effects and gives players potentially more room to choose different plasmids if they don't want to carry around incinerate, electrify, and freeze all the time but otherwise isn't extremely practical.

Crossbow

The game's "sniper rifle," the crossbow is easily the most accurate and long-ranged gun in Bioshock, but let's remember that Bioshock takes place in a chlostrophobic underwater network of corridors, which means that long-range sniping is virtually a non-existent option in most cases. The electric bolts allow the player to set up electrified tripwires, which are surprisingly powerful but difficult to set up in a useful fashion. They can be manipulated through telekinesis but doing this at the wrong angle invites the tripwire to accidentally tangle the player and shock them half to death. The incendiary bolts--as one would expect--set people on fire in addition to piercing their skulls with a sharpened metal rod, making it the most unnecessary and excessive additional feature ever put in a weapon. All types of ammo are extremely effective at piercing enemy armor, making this an especially effective weapon for fighting--you guessed it--Big Daddies. Still, otherwise it's another plainly excessive exotic gun that never really sees its fullest potential since in addition to being perfectly out-of-place in this game it has very limited ammunition and a load time too slow to make it useful for close-range fighting.

In general Bioshock proves weakly balanced as a shooter, with more than half the weapons being really shakey partly due to the circumstances of the level design and partly due to questions of practicality the players should be mindful of while they try to keep their minds off how neat a screaming stream of molten electricity is. Practicality issues are part of any well-defined first-person shooter--players need to recognize that the BFG 9000 simply isn't necessary for every fight--but this game lacks any sort of visible progression in terms of the firearms' power, instead presenting options that seem like they're meant to be equivalent to one another in terms of power but differ from one another in terms of purpose. Luckily the weapons don't have to be perfectly balanced as Bioshock is single-player only.

Plasmids

Arguably the centerpiece of the game, plasmids tend to do little in the way of direct damage, clearly not meant to replace guns but instead offer interesting and dynamic effects that make them a fantastic tool for manipulating the AI. Effects range from direct attacks such as lighting enemies on fire with the snap of a finger and stunning them with lightning bolts to more indirect effects such as forcing them to fight one another, inducing panic with swarms of bees, and hypnotizing Big Daddies and making them fight the other enemies. Many of them have effects that can be magnified with elements of the environment. For instance the lightning can electrify an entire pool of water, stunning every enemy standing in it, or a burst of fire can light puddles of gasoline.

In general the AI will respond appropriately to whatever effect a plasmid invokes, panicking and diving into water when lit on fire, for example. This means the player can predict the enemies' responses to the plasmids' use intuitively and develop strategies accordingly. One simple strategy, for instance, is to light as many enemies as possible on fire, then shock a pool of water as they leap in to try and put themselves out, then spray them to death with a machinegun.

One more important distinction about plasmids is that they function off a substance called EVE, which acts like mana or MP would in any other game. The player's EVE can be restored with EVE hypos, which are carried alongside medical kits. EVE differs from ammunition in that all plasmids share the same source of power and therefore they are meant to be used much more sparingly and reward creative thinking over brute force. The environmental factors that magnify them therefore act as a subtle way of rewarding players for trying to do the most possible damage with a single plasmid. They're also able to effect other elements of the game in bizarre but intuitive ways, such as how players may use electrify to send an EMP through a machine and stun it for easy hacking. It's one of the many economic trade-offs players are able to make, effectively sacrificing EVE for an easier hack job rather than money or time.

The unfortunate circumstances through which the player explores Rapture--moving through unknown corridors and rooms and getting ambushed by mobs of enemies--renders some plasmids more useful than others. In general the most direct effects, like Incinerate, Electrify, and Freeze, tend to be applicable to more situations than more manipulative but less direct effects such as Enrage and Security Bulls-Eye, which cause enemies to fight each other and pegs them for termination by Rapture's security system. The trouble is that plasmids like those have to be used carefully in situations where players can observe an immediate advantage; IE they have to be able to sneak up on enemies, which almost never happens because enemies in this game tend to already be attacking by the time players notice them. It's a pity that there aren't more scenarios that call for careful consideration or planning in this game, but to its credit the plasmids all at least work well and the AI's reactions to them at least spark the potential for creativity.

Big Daddies, Little Sisters

The means through which players obtain plasmids is a substance called Adam, which can be obtained only by finding the Little Sisters; otherwise harmless NPCs that are guarded by Big Daddies, which are the biggest, strongest, most formidable enemies in the game. They're powerful, equipped with heavy drills and rivet guns; they're durable, covered in metal diving suits; and they're surprisingly fast, relentlessly charging head-on when provoked. Before any Adam can be obtained from a Little Sister the Big Daddy guarding her must be destroyed. Such confrontations require a great deal of preperation as players must insure they have enough ammo, medical kits, and EVE to survive and work out a good strategy to minimize any damage taken from them. The only way to defeat a Big Daddy is through this kind of preparation; they shake off almost all plasmids and absorb damage as if guns are pea shooters, and regardless of one's strength with a wrench their imposing appearance and overwhelming physical strength makes them highly undesirable opponents to engage in melee. This makes the obtainment of a Little Sister a landmark achievement in this game and draws significant attention to the game's advancement system, discussed below.

While otherwise docile and ponderous Big Daddies are extremely protective and will attack without hesitation if the player strays near a Little Sister too long--or, for that matter, if any of the other enemies stray near a Little Sister too long. The damage they do is negligible and the Big Daddy will invariably kill all of them, but they are at least a helpful distraction and this presents a few interesting opportunities to exploit the AI.

Once players defeat the Big Daddy guarding a Little Sister the player has the choice of either harvesting or saving her. Harvesting Little Sisters kills them, netting more Adam immediately, while saving them nets a smaller payoff but promises a much greater reward in the long run: every three Little Sisters saved is rewarded with a teddy bear full of items, including a vial of 200 additional Adam and usually a "Hypnotize Big Daddy" plasmid upgrade, which will allow players to take control of any Big Daddies they find and use them as personal bodyguards for a short period of time.

Advancement: Tonics, Research, Upgrades

Every level has three Little Sisters in it; once they are all harvested or saved, the Big Daddies will continue wandering aimlessly and respawning randomly when the player isn't looking, as do all enemies in Bioshock. Meanwhile the player will have plenty of Adam with which to buy new Plasmids, health and EVE upgrades, and gene tonics at the Gatherer's Garden, a special vending machine of which one is always present in each level. Plasmids I've already explained, but gene tonics are the primary device through which players build their character. They come in three varieties: engineering, physical, and combat, and players can equip up to five in each category.

Engineering tonics primarily deal with the hacking minigame detailed below and will decrease overall difficulty, remove alarms and overload tiles, slow down the game, or selectively decrease the difficulty of different kinds of machines.

Combat tonics specifically change the way players fight, providing bonuses to attack and defense for the "elemental" plasmids like electrify and incinerate, additional armor, an electric eel-like shock effect that damages enemies that touch the player, considerable bonuses to damage with the wrench, and bonuses to using the camera to research enemies, which I've detailed below.

Physical tonics add different bonuses to different activities such boosting the effects of food that the player might find laying around, adding a health or EVE bonus to successful wrench hits or hack jobs, bonuses to using medical kits, the ability to evade security alerts faster, and more.

All together they allow players to build and maintain a unique play style emphasizing their favorite aspects of the game. If they expect to do a lot of hacking they can make it so that hacking restores health and so that it's incredibly easy across the board. If they enjoy using plasmids frequently they can choose to make medical kits and other activities restore EVE, buy a lot of EVE gauge expansions, and boost their favorite elemental plasmid's power significantly. It's a very flexible upgrade system that provides enough room to build a strong style based around the many ways players can interact with the game but rewards strategic selectivity by limiting the number that players can purchase as there are only so many Little Sisters and therefore there is only so much Adam in the game. While the player never stops finding money, ADAM is truly a limited resource, which is appropriate as the developers could only put so many plasmids in the game. This system is also notable as it offers the flexibility in play style without superceding any of the game's major elements. For example no tonic makes plasmids capable of taking the place of guns or boosts the effectiveness of one gun over another (apart from the wrench). They simply either take that which the player enjoys and complement it or else supplement the player's weaknesses.

Another way players can improve themselves and customize their play style is in the weapon upgrade stations, which I mentioned briefly. There are exactly enough upgrade stations hidden throughout the game to allow players to upgrade every gun twice. Some are more well-hidden than others. The gun upgrades don't deal directly in raw damage so much as make subtle adjustments that improve guns' performance, such as reducing the machinegun's recoil, reducing the chemical thrower's ammo consumption per second, or narrowing the shotgun's spread. In addition to being another way players can compliment their play styles this is an extremely effective means of upgrading weaponry as these kinds of effects are much more practical than simply a raw damage increase. Such a damage adjustment would change the guns' balance dramatically every time it were purchased, causing one weapon to supercede another directly (it's a machinegun with the power of a shotgun in every shot--so why use a shotgun?). It would also have less of an impact in the long run as the enemies' durability would eventually compensate for the upgrades and players would stop noticing their effects partway through the game. By employing more subtle practical adjustments like recoil compensation the guns' efficiency increases rather than their power, which players will always notice as they aren't forced to buy themselves as much ammo.

Research is the third means by which players may build their character in Bioshock. The one "weapon" I never discussed was the camera, which can be used to take pictures of enemies. The more of the enemy that's in frame, the more active the enemy is at the time the picture is taken, and the more enemies that are in the frame at a time, the higher the grade the photograph gets and the more the research bar fills for that type of enemy. Every time the bar fills players receive a bonus to fighting that enemy--usually a 10-20% damage bonus--and sometimes an additional reward such as a new gene tonic. This doesn't seem like a major, essential element of the game so much as a consolation prize. If players can't find Little Sisters--very possible as the Big Daddies also have to find them--or can't figure out how to progress to the next area of the game they can use this option to force themselves forward at the price of a little in-battle risk. It's also the only way that players can directly improve damage and compensate for the ever-increasing fortitude of enemies. Since the damage increase applies accross all weapons on a per-enemy basis rather than per weapon it's a way of relieving the increasing difficulty of the game without shifting the balance between any particular element as long as players are willing to participate. On a subliminal level this aspect of the game familiarizes players with the enemies by offering this kind of reward in exchange.

Hacking

Bioshock contains a variety of machines including security cameras, probes, and turrets as well as vending machines, medical stations, and safes containing items and money. The player can hack these devices by either by playing the hacking minigame or using an auto-hack tool or doing a buy-out, feeding the machine cash in return for a successful hack. The minigame is Bioshock's own adaptation of the casual game Pipe Dream, featuring a grid with a series of pipe pieces that the player must connect from one end of the board to another while liquid slowly travels through them. If the liquid reaches something that's not the end the machine short circuits and damages the player. There are also alarm tiles, which will trigger a security alert and send drones to attack the player if the liquid touches them, and overload tiles, which will shock players to within an inch of their life. If the liquid reaches the end it's a successful hack. Electrifying or freezing these devices makes hacking them easier, stunning otherwise hostile devices or slowing the liquid's flow with ice.

Successfully hacking a machine will always turn a benefit to the player. In the most simplistic cases safes will open and yield their items and vending machines will give the player discounts. Security devices will switch sides, changing their lights from red to green. Cameras will bulls-eye enemies instead of players, drones will follow the player and hunt down enemies, and guns will fire on anything that moves except the player. The medical stations will give a small discount, but it will also spray enemies who try to use them with poison gas.

In general the purpose of the hacking option is to provide relief--whether it's in the form of a discount, another gun in the room, a few more items, or in the form of a few moments of peace in the middle of a heated firefight as the game pauses and segues into the mini-game when the player hacks a machine. It can also be thought of as an alternative form of controlling the environment--as opposed to the organic Plasmids--as well as a way of tracking progress as green lights provide bread crumbs for where players have been. In a way the fact that players can actively assume control of elements of the environment makes areas of otherwise nondescript art deco rubble a lot more memorable. It makes the city feel alive in spite of its decayed state.

Ingame Economy

Players are able to pick up money and spend it at one of two types of vending machines: "The Circus of Value," which sells general items like med kits, food, EVE hypos, and auto-hack tools, or "El Ammo Bandito," which sells ammunition. This is fairly straightforward. Money is contained in safes or found on corpses in varying amounts depending on the difficulty of the enemy killed and gets traded for goods. The cost of items can be brougth down with a successful hack job, but they never come free unless also found laying around. The reason money exists is to give players a certain degree of control over what it is they acquire. It's one thing for the game to release a controlled stream of ammo and health kits, but it's another for players to get items based on need or desire. With as many variables as Bioshock has in its gameplay, including different weapons, different ammunition types for the different weapons, the plasmids, and hacking, the currency exchange system is definitely necessary, if a bit implausible as no one in this cataclysmically ruined city is around to collect money from these machines. But that's not a gameplay issue.

What is a gameplay issue is the addendum to this system: the invention system. Invention machines appear halfway through the game along with a series of bits of junk that take the place of ordinary loot. Where players might previously have found medical kits and ammo they now find rubber tubes, glue, and empty syringes. These are then taken to the invention machines and exchanged in varying combinations and quantities for useful items. This is the element of Bioshock that just plain does not work. It's redundant, overlapping directly with the ordinary vending machines and the currency. Its purpose is clearly to provide a more controlled form of acquiring items from the player's side, but that's what the rest of the economic system already does, and it does it more effectively, providing a simple, credit-based exchange system. The invention system uses a convoluted exchange of random bits of junk players don't and are never made to care about as the random bits of junk don't map onto any logical system players could think of. Some elements--like empty shells or empty syringes--map onto very obvious exchanges, but for every single logical element contained in an item's recipe there's two more that don't make any sense. A set of 6 antipersonnell rounds for the revolver translates to 3 shell casings, for instance, but also involves 2 rubber tubes and a screw. Even less intuitively, somehow distilled water, kerosine, and a brass tube translate into a pair of heat-seeking RPGs. The same brass tube makes an excellent hack tool when combined with the same rubber hoses used to make the 6 bullets and a set of batteries. All this really ends up doing is making players keep track of five or six different arbitrary currencies that exhchange unevenly between items. The only purpose this could possibly serve is to artificially make the game more difficult by taking ordinary loot at the halfway point in the game and chopping it up into constituent parts, which players require comparatively large amounts of in order to get useful items and therefore slows the acquisition of them. While I don't doubt that some effort was made in making the exchange itself balanced I do doubt that it was necessary. It seems like just an unwelcome middleman between players and random loot where the simpler currency system seems like a simple and logical way for players to get what they need. This discrepancy is exaserbated by the fact that the invention system does only appear halfway through the game. It's exactly that sudden. One moment players are finding items normally, the next they bring down a Big Daddy and instead of receiving an EVE hypo and some money they get some rubber tubing. Instead of rewarding players with new items it surplants the normal ones that have been found up until this point with increasing amounts of junk, which is simply dissatisfying. It's like punishing players for getting farther in the game. It certainly isn't enough to turn players off once they've reached this point, but it does affect players' enjoyment adversely by forcing them to jump through a few extra hoops to get a box of ammo that they could have found in the trash in an earlier level.

Conclusion

Bioshock presents for the most part a solid big picture experience, with a variety of ways of approaching problems and enough room in the advancement system to experiment with play styles based around each of them. Unfortunately the multitudes of systems suffer from a few problems each and tend to have more of them the more the rest of the game is taken into account. Three of six guns are excessive. Two of them aren't practical given the level design and enemy behavior. Four of them are barely necessary or even meaningful if players make smart use of plasmids. All of them are displaced heavily by the wrench given a particular set of plasmids and tonics. The ammo types are mostly unnecessary and in the cases that they are meaningful, such as the case of the grenade launcher and chemical thrower, they could have been surplanted by an alternate fire button that switched between them while having other, more useful functions in other weapons. The research camera, though a challenge to use in the midst of a heated fight, never doesn't merit significant benefits and therefore isn't interesting to use; enemies may as well not have grown more endurance over time. The only fudge factor is in if players choose to ignore the research camera completely, so it's a factor that punishes when ignored but only maintains equalization between player and enemies when paid attention to. Hacking, likewise, never doesn't merit significant benefits when successfully performed, although luckily there is a risk factor here since a poorly prepared player can become overwhelmed by a difficult hack job at later stages, and the tonic system does at least force players to make tradeoffs in this area, making it more interesting. The plasmids are in fact lopsidedly balanced due to oversights in the AI and level design, which place heavy emphasis and great reward on the most direct plasmids and tend to make others inviable options; it says an awful lot, in fact, that the final boss features both puddles of gasoline and pools of water but no provisions for most of the other plasmids. The economic system is functional but the convoluted invention system serves only as a nuisance that feels tacked-on about halfway through the game and seems less like a neat activity for players to participate in, as most "crafting" systems in games tend to be, and more like a way of diluting the amount of items players find, becoming a punishment for playing longer. The only element free from too much blame is the one that ties all of these disparate parts together: the tonic and upgrade system, which makes players mindful of the way they participate in Bioshock and allows them to make slight changes to the other elements' behavior to suit their style and does so without causing any of them to become superceded by one another, clearly preserving the roles that they each serve.

And they are meaningful elements, gameplay-wise. Guns serve as the necessary workhorse as they do in any shooter; Plasmids are environmental and AI manipulation tools that serve more strategic purposes; hacking is an option that provides potential relief to players who need it in intense situations and allows them to control the environment in a more long-term sense; the tonic system is a playstyle-builder that makes tweaks to the rules of each of these; the camera/research system is there to provide a steady advancement as opposed to the bursts of advancement granted by the tonic system and Adam-based uprgades; and the ingame economy is there to give players a little room to choose what they need to get as opposed to what random items the game decides to leave laying around. For all the clumsiness in execution that they each face individually, collectively they add up to a surprisingly cohesive and strong exeperience, providing a somewhat more cerebral shooter than most without being too overwhelming, but it isn't a perfect experience. The optimal strategy already inherent in this game is that players who do everything--pay attention to every single one of these elements by using the lightning plasmid whenever they see a puddle of water, hacking every machine they come across without exception, taking a photo of every single enemy they see, et cetera--are at an overwhelming advantage. For Bioshock this isn't inappropriate. The idea of using one's resources to his or her fullest is fitting of Rapture and its story and makes a fine premise for a game; after all, one of the hallmarks of digital gaming is that one's success at a game can be gauged by ease of completion rather than the act of completion itself. The clumsy execution of each element's sub-elements--misbalances between guns and plasmids and the overwhelming advantage to hacking every machine in the game--makes for an even more pronounced optimal strategy, wherein players are rewarded inordinately for using the most basic guns, the most direct plasmids, and for taking gene tonics that raise hacking ability and similar attributes across the board when possible as opposed to specializing. The gameplay choices become less and less meaningful or interesting the more players approach this optimal play strategy, which is one of Bioshock's greatest weaknesses. This won't stop people from enjoying the game but it will limit replay value substantially.

Potential Improvements

  1. Level Design Flow

    This is the element of Bioshock that could stand the most improvement. In the developer podcast from 2K Games the designers professed their desire to keep emergent gameplay--the idea of finding solutions to problems that the developers didn't think of--to a minimum, and to this end they tried to control what drew players' attention very carefully. Strong emergent gameplay is what Bioshock would positively thrive on, though. It has so many problem-solving tools that players have a lot of potential for creativity, but the control excersized over the level design limits it a great deal by narrowing any situation down to two or three extremely clear-cut answers, one of which is perfect. Mixing choice, creativity, and problem-solving with highly controlled design is a no-no, in the best case creating an illusion of creative problem-solving and in the worst case being frustratingly stunting. Past this there's a few more nitpicky problems that I've already mentioned, like the level design precluding the crossbow and grenade launcher from being more useful, but the intentional disdain for emergence is the fallacy that needs to be corrected the most.

  2. Enemy Design

    A lot of the other problems fall on the enemy design. The AI programming itself is masterful, and the most basic enemies are elegantly simple in their crudeness. The developers of Bioshock really knew when they didn't have to push themselves too hard to make something good. But a few extra efforts here and there might have made for an even richer experience. As it stands the levels were made based around the enemies but it would've been helpful, at least in a few situations, for some of the enemies to have been built around the level design instead. Snipers or gunmen that make use of cover--even in the most simplistic sense--might have challenged players to make better use of the grenade launcher or crossbow; as it was too many of the enemies, even long-distance ones, were as direct as the imps from Doom. It might have even been nice to see some designed to challenge players' abilities in aspects of the game other than plasmids and guns. A hacker-type enemy that sneaks around and undoes hack jobs might have been interesting to deal with, for example; as it is players face no opposition on that front other than the inherent challenges in hacking the machinery itself. With as many options as existed for solving problems in Bioshock there should have been a variety of enemies that challenged players to use those options--if at the very least to make them think, "boy, I wish I had the plasmid that shot bees with me right now!" In particular it would have been a good idea to have some machine-type enemies--sentry guards and the like patrolling the corridors--to make security bulls-eye in particular more attractive. A moving camera with security alert ability and guns attached to it would have been a good step up from a stationary camera for this purpose. In general, though, a couple more enemy types would have been helpful in establishing more usefulness for more ignored sub-elements of the game.

  3. Weapon Tweaks

    A few changes in level and enemy design would make a lot of the weapons more significant, but this doesn't completely absolve them. First, the alternate ammo types are a little excessive, even redundant in most cases, and become a nuisance to fiddle with rather than a positive boon when it comes to switching between them in the middle of a fight. They either need to be tweaked in order to be more convenient, lost entirely, or tweaked to become more significant across the board. The simplistic antipersonnell-normal-armor piercing relationship just doesn't cut it, and a lot of people would just as soon ignore the other two kinds of ammo in favor of normal rounds that kill everything the same. Second, the weapons and ammo types that overlap with plasmids--like the chemical thrower and the electric or incendiary rounds in some of the other weapons--should not be there. The purpose is to give players alternatives to using the equivalent plasmids, but it makes the choice of using or not using those plasmids less interesting if there are viable alternatives. Sacrifice is part of any decently exhilerating game. The chemical thrower may be cool, but maybe it would be better if it weren't present altogether. Otherwise I'd make players store weapons in a bank the same way they do plasmids, limiting them to three at a time and forcing them to choose between the versatile basics and the odder plasmid-substitution type weapons.

  4. Add Some Stuff That Isn't Trying to Kill You

    Rapture seriously needs to chill out. Everything without exception is trying to kill you. The goal of the splicers was to try and make the game's enemies sympathetically crazy but they come off as absolute monsters more than anything else, exhibiting the mindless, homicidal tendencies of the zombies that we've been fighting since Doom 3--except the zombies are more sympathetic! Not only are the splicers psychotically aggressive, they look hideous as a result of the deficiencies in the shaders of the modified Unreal 2.5 engine that Bioshock uses, looking like mangled plastic manakins rather than people made of flesh and blood. Talk about taking a stroll through the uncanny valley. Even the rescued Little Sisters look creepy and hideous, and they come off as a banal cliche rather than as being genuinely likeable. Rapture really needs something sympathetic to it besides the innocent dead people laying here and there and the tragic recordings to make it come to life, and it needs something to tone back the pacing a bit as well. An NPC here or there representing this resistance that Atlas is apparently supposed to lead would be really nice to see, or else it would be interesting to see some people who are clearly out of their minds but not homicidally so. As it stands the closest we get to that is the morbid and sadistic Sander Cohen, who is quite helpful if players indulge his "eccentricities" and don't kill him, but the way he treats the player is like a cat forcing a mouse through a maze rather than like a friendly presence. The reason I advocate some set of sympathetic characters so strongly is that first without them there isn't any context within which to make a moral decision in this game, which takes the bite out of the "to harvest or not to harvest" dynamic of the little sisters. If you want players to think about how human or monstrous they are, they need to be surrounded with monsters and humans, otherwise it isn't clear what the differences is. Second, sometimes it's nice to slow the game down. Bioshock is constantly throwing things in your face, and it gets alienating and frustrating after a while. When you get down to it, though, those hacked turrets just don't make very good company.

  5. STOP WITH THE FETCH-QUESTS

    This is a much more subjective criticism of Bioshock, but it's one that's repeated quite a lot. Many of the goals in the game are presented as fetch-quests. You're given a place to go, you go there, and then you find out that you can't get through it without doing something else or collecting a thing or being completely re-rooted.

    To illustrate my point, I present the flow of the entire game. You're about to head to the docks to meet up with Atlas, but an alarm suddenly triggers out of nowhere and you're sealed off, forced to go through the medical pavillion. You go there, you're about to head through a door to a bathysphere that'll take you to the fisheries, but then another gate slams shut and you have to hunt down and kill a guy for a key. You make your way through the fisheries, but then some guy won't let you pass until you bring him some photographs of a few enemies--of which only three are present in the whole level, so you're forced to hunt for them in every corner of the fisheries. After that you meet up with Atlas, but the sub set to go to the surface gets blown up so you head on your way to kill Andrew Ryan. You go through a forest, but then Andrew Ryan triggers a release of poison gasses that kills the forest off and you're forced to find a bunch of obscure items that appear nowhere else in the game scattered all over the park and the marketplace so that you can mix together a compound that'll save the trees, keep the oxygen flowing through Rapture, and not die. You're about to head to Ryan's area, but then some guy named Sander Cohen randomly hijacks your radio frequency and your bathysphere and makes you run a few errands for him and kill off his old subordinates which--you guessed it--are hiding at the far corners of the level. You finally arrive at Ryan's power plant, but you need to assemble a bomb with more obscure items seen nowhere else in the game and scattered to the far corners of the level. But first you need to find out that you can make a bomb. After that you go and kill Ryan, but then Atlas double-crosses you and tries to kill you with some brainwashing mumbo-jumbo. You're saved, but Atlas triggers a state of slow cardiac arrest and you have to find a cure for his brainwashing so that your heart pumps normally again. You're saved again, but then your plasmids start going nuts as a side effect of the cure and you need to find a cure for that. You go to kill Atlas, but he seals himself off in the Big Daddy training facility and you have to spend some time making yourself into a Big Daddy to go after him by--you guessed it--finding a bunch of obscure items scattered to the far corners of the level. You enter the training grounds, but you have to complete a bunch of trials before you can fight Atlas--which involve protecting a helpless Little Sister as she undergoes a series of brainwashed drills.

    A complication or fetch-quest is a decent way to structure a level to be a little less linear than usual, but Bioshock takes it overboard by hampering the player with one major setback after another. Nothing is EVER direct. It's the Tantalus's Torment of gaming, with the game dangling a resolution farther and farther out of reach no matter how hard players try to grasp at it. This structure effectively makes them feel like they're being jerked around and like they're completely out-of-control, which isn't all that unreasonable given the circumstances of the story, but at this point there's so many setbacks and fetch quests that it's downright suspicious. It feels less like you're in the role of a stranger in a strange world and more like you're running errands for a bunch of insensitive jerks who can't just let you play your game. The level flow and structure itself has few problems, but the presentation needs to be cleaner, more clear-cut, and most importantly it has to make players feel like they're more in control--at least a little bit. In short, it wouldn't kill the developers if at least one conflict had a straightforward resolution in this game so that players could feel a little more gratification from time to time. The lack fo satisfaction brought on by the constant frustrations combined with the anticlimax of Bioshock's ending makes for an extremely bleak attitude by the time players complete the game, which doesn't work in its favor.

Story

The player controls a man known only as "Jack," as the label on a gift held by the player's character in the opening cutscene tells us, on a plane presumably heading home until it suddenly spirals into the ocean and crashes, leaving Jack as the sole survivor. He's able to swim his way through the wreckage to a mysterious lighthouse. As he goes inside he's greeted by the image of a man named Andrew Ryan immortalized in bronze, followed by a mysterious bathysphere. With nowhere to go except inside or back out into the ocean he enters and is taken down to the city of Rapture. As the bathysphere sinks players are treated to an overview of the city narrated by Andrew Ryan himself, who invites us to make Rapture our city.

Andrew Ryan's introduction is the player's "birth" into the game; the very first thing he or she sees and hears on entering the city is Ryan. You know that with a giant bronze statue, a photograph, and a long but delightfully grandiose monologue introducing you to the game's setting that Ryan is going to be more than just a tour guide on this little sightseeing trip. Is he friend or foe? That's another question, but already the player is privvy to the fact that Ryan has the mother of all god complexes, having spat in the face of the world, built a city on the bottom of the ocean--in the 1930's, no less--and proudly posted on the entryways to Rapture, "All Great Things Flow Into The City." His presence therefore carries a great deal of tension and will continue to do so throughout the story. As an aside his introduction also sets up the pattern through which the player will come to know the people of Rapture, first hearing about them well before seeing them. While few other characters ever carry quite the tension that Ryan does it's an effective device for establishing a sense of anticipation or dread in the player and never ceases to give us the sense that we know these people by the time we meet them.

Not long after entering the city Jack is accosted by the first splicer he sees, which sabotages the bathysphere and prevents escape, trapping him in Rapture. "Would you kindly pick up that portable radio?" a calm, kindly Irishman asks. This is the voice of Atlas. Presenting a friendly face and a friendly voice in the otherwise cold, dark ruins of Rapture the player has little choice but to trust him as he presents Jack--who would otherwise be a scrambling, panicked wreck at this point--with his goals throughout the game. Atlas's introduction is a rare reversal of Ryan's, where he is met personally (in a way) before we find out who he is. Posters everywhere and security messages inform us that Atlas leads some sort of resistance movement. "Who is Atlas?" the propeganda asks. The player is sure he or she knows already, for we are soon told by Atlas that he has a wife and child waiting for him at the docks and that he's preparing to make a break for the surface--and that Jack is his only hope for making it. The simple yet sympathetic nature of his plea (coupled with appropriately and deceptively soulful music) in a world built by a megalomaniac and crawling with mutant madmen causes the player to trust him completely and want to help him. The mystery of how such a grand utopia came to be crawling with mutant madmen and in such a state of chaos and ruin in the first place sparks a natural sense of curiosity, which pulls the player deeper into the rabbit hole of this dark wonderland. The difference between this story and Alice's, though, is that Alice at least knew who was the White Rabbit and who was the Chesire Cat.

Within minutes the player is introduced to Plasmids, the game's main draw, Rapture's greatest achievement, and ultimately, in true tragic tradition, the source of the city's downfall. Jack finds himself forced to inject himself with a lightning plasmid in order to proceed. Once Jack recovers from a black-out after the initial shock of his transformation the player is given a taste of the great power these deadly mutations hold, armed now with a wrench and a fistful of lightning and suddenly beginning to transcend the limits of an ordinary human. As the game goes on more plasmids are collected and more command over the elements and the environment is given to the player. In a way this brings the player more to the perspective of Ryan and the other geniuses that saw what wonders the efforts of humankind could bring; that saw themselves as potentially becoming gods.

Not too long after this Jack has his first encounter with creatures called Little Sisters and their guardians, the Big Daddies; lumbering behmoths, heavily spliced and equipped with armored diving suits and massive implements of destruction such as giant rivet guns and deep-sea drills, and the most formidable adversaries in Rapture. The Little Sisters, once innocent young girls, now carry symbiotic slugs that produce Adam, a substance the human body needs in order to use more plasmids. Now twisted shadows of their former selves, the Little Sisters collect residual Adam from the corpses of Rapture's citizens. Along with the Little Sisters we meet Dr. Tenenbaum, the researcher responsible for their current state, who wishes to save them and urges Jack to rescue them while Atlas tells him to ignore her and urges him to harvest the slugs from their bodies in order to obtain the Adam necessary to survive in Rapture.

From here on out the story is related to the player in the form of audio recordings left behind by Rapture's citizens and scattered here and there, encounters with the voice of Ryan, and contacts with Atlas. The latter two fill out the current story that is unfolding while the rest serves as flashbacks, taking the player back to as far back as when Rapture still thrived and as recent as the point of its collapse. Thus we see a key innovation of first-person gaming as Bioshock is able to tell two stories simultaneously in a way that film can not without interrupting pacing and that a novel would be hard-pressed to imitate without confusing readers. Frequently we're informed of what something used to be or of a metamorphosis in process as we look upon the end result as with the early encounter with Dr. Steinman in the medical wing of Rapture. As the player progresses through the medical wing in an effort to make his or her way to the docks we learn that with Plasmids incredible feats of medical science were made possible and that the ingenius but eccentric Dr. Steinman was able to make virtually everyone in Rapture perfectly picturesque. Having perfected beauty in the traditional sense, though, the Doctor was left with nothing else to do and explored "alternative" forms of beauty, relating his work to painting and the next step in the evolution of plastic surgery to the development of abstract art. What this means is that he's been hideously butchering his patients and is likely the one responsible for turning everyone into the sub-human wrecks that the player now sees. As a result the player enters his laboratory with a considerable sense of tension, which mounts to its peak as the good doctor notices Jack and pulls a machinegun, blasting out the glass of the observation room and opening with the game's first boss battle. The duality of Bioshock's story is highlighted no place better than here as the medical wing's two stories--both that of the player moving through it and of its grizzly history--both come to an end in Dr. Steinman's lab.

Much of the rest of the story follows this pattern, with the player drawing closer and closer to Ryan the whole time as he continually makes efforts to kill both Jack and Atlas and ultimately destroys the bathysphere intended for the escape--along with Atlas's family, changing the story's direction from escaping Rapture to helping Atlas take revenge by killing Andrew Ryan. In the meantime we learn more about Rapture's history and see that its downfall wasn't all cut-and-dry. A criminal mastermind named Frank Fontaine is established as Ryan's archnemesis--and then quickly established as a corpse, with Atlas informing us that he's been dead for months. The deeper Jack travels into Rapture, the more clear it becomes that Fontaine was more responsible for Rapture's crash than Ryan was, having taken advantage of the lower classes' desparation and raised a personal army of splicers to challenge Ryan's supremacy. In a way this can be thought to reflect the war between heaven and hell, with Ryan representing God and Fontaine being Satan, luring Ryan's followers away with promises of wealth and power in the form of Adam, a substance needed both by the splicers and by the player in order to obtain more plasmids; a direct metaphor for the forbidden apple in the Book of Genesis. In perhaps an ironic reference to the book of Revelation Fontaine masquerades as a savior by smuggling contraband into the city--in the form of Bibles, which were outlawed by Ryan out of disdain for organized religion--or perhaps as an allusion to one of the ten commandments, "thou shalt not put any strange gods before me." With the key plasmid-related substances beng named Adam and EVE, the city being called Rapture, and Andrew Ryan having a god complex, this relationship isn't a stretch in the slightest.

Continuing in the biblical tradition of the antichrist Fontaine is revealed to be alive and well in spite of reports of his death--including one direct report from Officer McDonaugh of Rapture's police force. We can think of this as an allusion to the six-headed beast with a fatal wound. Just as the beast was said to have presented a deceptively kind face and lured God's children away from him so did Fontaine as he has been masquerading as Atlas this whole time, the sympathetic story about his family and the kindly Irish accent both being a farce by the Chicago mobster. What's more Jack is revealed to be Ryan's son--God's child in the most literal sense--stolen away by Fontaine, brainwashed by Dr. Suchong, Ryan's top researcher, and sent topside by Fontaine to return as his ace in the hole against Ryan. It is revealed here by Andrew Ryan himself as the player finally meets him face-to-face that the phrase "would you kindly," often spoken by Atlas, is the key phrase that makes Jack, without hesitation or fail, obey any command spoken. Ryan commands the player to kill him, choking through a broken face, "a man chooses, a slave obeys" as Jack involuntarily beats him to death with his own golf club.

This isn't the first time the player hears "a man chooses, a slave obeys." Ryan speaks this early in the game, not long after the player's first radio encounter with him. I want to draw attention to this because never at any point does the player choose anything for himself but what weapons he or she upgrades and what plasmids he or she wants to get. Goals are always set by some other party in the narrative; first by Atlas in the former half of the story, and then by Dr. Tenenbaum in the latter half as Jack works to fight Fontaine's brainwashing and save himself. What from is an interesting question. Could it be Hell? Is this a battle for Jack's soul? How can it be if Jack is a growth-accelerated amnesiac with completely false memories? On one hand the revelation of Jack as the son of Ryan is powerful and with surprising subtlety informs the player that he was the son of God all along but on the other his complete lack of identity means that he may as well be a robot that Fontaine built. Jack represents something strong but isn't very strong in and of himself and isn't so much a character as a periferal of the characters. Though this is most certainly appropriate of the way the story is structured and makes a strong statement on the nature of the typical "blank slate" hero of first-person shooters it cheapens the player's role in the game greatly. In an odd way this compliments the emotion of Fontaine's betrayal and helps motivate the player to hunt him down and kill him out of jealousy. Even so the player is still obeying commands and directions from Tenenbaum--still a slave but with a different master. In a way it was preferable to be working with Atlas as at least his imagined friendship gave the player some feeling of being an equal. With Tenenbaum on the radio the player is a rat in a maze and now knows it.

For the final fourth of the game Jack struggles to find the concoctions that will break Fontaine's mind control completely, then to pursue Fontaine and kill him, transforming himself into a Big Daddy in order to obtain the security clearance necessary, then engaging Fontaine--now transformed into a visage of the Greek god Atlas and armed with super-plasmids--in a duel, which ends with Fontaine being stabbed to death by all of the Little Sisters via their Adam collection syringes. One of them then presents the player with the key to Rapture. Depending on if the player harvested any Little Sisters or not, the ending, narrated by Tenenbaum, either shows Jack becoming the Little Sisters' saviors and living out the rest of his life on the surface watching them grow into women and dying with them all at his bedside after living to a ripe old age, or else grabbing one of them presumably to violate her, then attacking a nuclear submarine on the surface with an army of splicers and presumably attempting to take over the world.

Let's just think about that for a moment.

First, this ending is very inconsistent with a lot of the narrative elements of the opening, which started with a narration from Jack himself ("Son, you're special. You were born to do great things.") and ended on Andrew Ryan inviting players to make Rapture their city. Instead the ending takes us out of Rapture and, instead of completing the very open-ended thought that Jack was having when his plane crashed, presents us with Tenenbaum's interpretation of him.

Second, If the battle for Rapture is a microcosm for the battle between Heaven and Hell and Rapture's citizens--the Splicers--are humans who have been swayed away from the light by Satan, where does the rest of the world come into this? Is the surface supposed to be Heaven? Does that make normal people angels and Rapture's super-powered genius citizens normal people? If this story is some sort of allusion to Paradise Lost, why then is the part that arguably should represent "Paradise Found Again," the atonement of mankind and the part of Revelation where there is established a golden kingdom after the reign of Satan, completely brushed aside? Is the surface the golden kingdom? The one really good question in all of this that players should be asking themselves is whether or not Rapture was ever truly a paradise or if it was a false paradise--whether Andrew Ryan truly was God or whether he was a pretender the whole time, but the game loops the player back to Rapture by informing us that Jack was Ryan's son the whole time and had always been from Rapture, making the outside world almost completely irrelevant and setting the player up for a major emotional investment in Rapture's ultimate fate, which is never revealed. We don't even find out what happened to Tenenbaum, who was the only other survivor.

Meanwhile these endings completely destroy any notion the player might have that Jack might be able to control his own destiny after destroying his controllers and tormenters, with Tenenbaum's narrative implying that she controls it for him as she decides between one of two completely polarized endings based on a matter of exactly one harvested Little Sister out of dozens. The player might not have even had it in mind that Jack was doing anything wrong as Little Sisters are, even in their non-possessed forms, quite monstrous. Many players report that they harvested them at first but changed their colors partway through the game in order to atone for their sins--as I did--and expected the game to reflect such only to be branded perfectly evil in spite of having distinct feelings of guilt and remorse.

Given that the whole point of a first-person blank-slate character in a game is for the player to be able to imprint his or her own emotions and thoughts on the character no truly meaningful conclusion can be drawn from this ending as it denies players their ability to interpret Jack for themselves. If we don't accept this notion it could be implied that this is either A: a commentary on the dogmatic "black-and-white" point of view of religion, wherein a single sin can damn a person's soul to Hell, or B: an ironic and subversive commentary on first-person narrative and choice in games, which is consistent with the themes of choice--or lack thereof--throughout the game. As it stands, though, the endings are both so unsatisfying to such a vast majority of players that it's difficult to accept them as well as the moral issues that the gameplay emphasizes as anything other than something the developers added at the very last minute. Such a simplistic qualifier for either ending in an otherwise very complex narrative and a very complex game would definitely be consistent with a little bit of last-minute programming.

Conclusion

Bioshock has a truly engaging plot to start out with but suffers from inconsistency in its themes. Within a ten hour span it moves from humanity, the transcendence of it, and the loss of it to a neo-biblical Paradise Lost, then ends with no nod or true resolution to either of those ideas, opting for an easy way out by using the Little Sisters as a moral crutch. When I first heard about Bioshock I imagined that the game would be playable the whole way through without plasmids, if more challenging, and that the use of them would open up new paths for players but ultimately cause them to compromise Jack's humanity, turning him into one of the monsters that he's fighting. Instead he ultimately has to become a monster but the good ending shows no acknowledgement of it. Personally I think that if this question of how much of his humanity the player is willing to trade to beat the game would have been a much stronger story element and that it would have been more consistent with the game's themes as well as its mechanics and would have presented a much more powerful presentation.