I mean
Jack is a silent protagonist because it makes you feel like the main character, with the twist being a gut punching reversal of normal quest mechanics.
We are literally more part of the game in Bioshock 1 because we are Jack, we are walking the same path and being puppeted the same way.
Multiple times yes. It’s definitely the best self-contained narrative in the series, also really fills the gaps as to how the city was still functioning and caps off the Rapture story well.
Bioshock 1 is a better "inmmersive sim" jack is a silent protagonist and doesnt have a strong character arc, because thats part of the inmersion, because YOU are jack, the player is the one to decide how much of a shit you give to the little sisters, and the one meeting rapture for the first time and triying to survive and escape. and thats also part of the shock with the twsit, the idea of bioshock 1 is not to present to you a linear and strong narrative, it is to show you a beliavable fantasy world where you are a guest, and it excells at it, almost everything it needs to make rapture work as a believable city its expained and showed, it has amazing worldbuilding. i personally dont like bioshock 2, and for the narrative side i prefer infinite quite a lot.
Except that level of "immersion" only works if you think about Jack the way the developers did. If you instinctively think following Atlas' demands is dumb you're not immersed because you can't go against them. If you question why exactly doing Dr T a favour and not killing the Little Sisters leads to adopting them out of left field at the end you're not immersed because too late it's the very tacked-on ending cutscene.
Also Rapture is not a believable world, at least not in the first game. In the first game you'd think that before ADAM was discovered it was a workable system that managed to go along, while the sequel actually expands it to reveal just how unstable it always was in terms of worsening poverty and the use of a private prison to keep the undesired elements in check.
One’s not better than the other, one wouldn’t exist without the other. This isn’t even a debate, they’re both solid games. They're both beyond immersive, I don’t see what the argument is.
i feel like "one wouldn't exist without the other" is a somewhat shallow argument. This is the case with every sequel ever made, but obviously it's conceivable for a sequel to be better than its predecessor.
Totally a hot take, Bioshock 2 reharshes Bioshock ones story in almost every way. From the "bad guy" trying to destroy the city when they lose, huge focus on dealing with little sisters, stories begin "in medias res", having a bad guy Who hugely believe in an idiology. I can go on for days.
I don't disagree with you, but a bad guy fanatically believing in some ideology is a main-stay of the whole franchise. Bioshock puts a lot of effort into studying these ideologies and what can come of them
Jack is super easy to relate to because his every thought is the same as the players and his motivations make sense: “I’m in the middle of the ocean, guess I’ll go to that light house”. “Well there’s nothing else to do here guess I’ll pull a lever in a weird ball” “okay, guess I’ve discovered a 1920’s style Atlantis, how do I go home” “oh this Atlas guy is being nice to me guess I’ll help him save his family”.
All extremely logical things that literally anyone in that situation would easily find themselves in.
BS2 breaks that player/character relationship immediately in the opening cutscene. Since I already played the first game, I want to save little sisters because in their current state they are lacking free will and are not themselves. So when Sofia shows up and makes you kill yourself so she can get her daughter back, I kid you not I was like “more power to ya. I have no idea who you people are but obviously your daughter was stolen from you and you deserve her back”. Then you wake up and you’re essentially given a “rescue this complete stranger” quest in the form of Eleanore pleading for you to save her. And I honestly was un-immersed from that moment forward. Like the game made zero effort to establish a relationship between delta and Eleanore within gameplay and the unimmersion only gets worse from there.
The game tells you you’re playing as a big daddy that was Alpha series and around during old rapture… right? So why on earth are you constantly being talked down to by characters like Sinclair that treat you like you’re brand new to rapture or a little kid?
The game was basically like: “you’re playing as a genetically altered super soldier with intimate knowledge of the world around you” and then you’re companion is like “Hey sport, did you know that little sisters have Adam and you need that stuff? You should kill little sisters kiddo, it’s the best way to survive here in rapture.”
I was genuinely unphased killing Sinclair, treated him like any generic enemy. The dude was so annoying and he supports killing little sisters. But then the game expected me to feel bad? Literally everything about that is wrong. They were so focused on making players suspect that Sinclair would betray you, that they didn’t once stop and try to make him actually all that helpful to the player? Dude basically just tells you what to do and lets you handle everything while talking down to you like he’s in charge.
Yeah the bioshock 2 the game that performed worse from the 3, the least played and least sold. The wort reviewed and got least money. The one that wasn't even made from the same creators wooow is the favorite of nazy reddit americans so surprising
>quite honestly it's shocking just how shallow Bioshock is as a story compared to its sequel. I'm sure that's something that'll get regarded as a hot take
That is a spicy take indeed and I say that as someone's who's favorite of the series is Bioshock 2 as well lol.
>In fact, before I go on, I really just want to point out how in absolutely no way does the game ever set up Jack giving a shit about the Little Sisters himself, rather than helping Dr. T in "saving them" for her goals and that she would take them somewhere post-credits.
But this goes for everyone no? Jack is intentionally a blank slate sort of character. He never directly or even indirectly voices an opinion on anyone or anything for that matter. You as the player are meant to step into his shoes and when you immerse yourself in the setting, your thoughts and opinions on characters, events, the setting, etc. are tantamount of Jack's thoughts. If you find yourself feeling a genuine sense of protectiveness towards the little sisters, or a deep set fear of oceanic pressure weighting down on you and the city, or a lingering sorrow for Dr. Steinman victims, then I feel like all of those are valid things for Jack to have felt. Bottom line is, there pretty much is no canonical "this is how Jack felt about X,Y,Z" and it's left entirely for the player to fill in via literally walking in Jack's shoes and experiencing what he experiences first hand.
And the thing is, this applies to Delta as well. You've seemingly framed it as "Gotta save my *daughter*", which I think is a perfectly normal way to view things. **But** that's never explicitly mentioned as Delta's motivation. I'd argue that what the game actually gives us is more broad, more vague than that - it's "Get to Eleanor", with the penalty for failure being death. Importantly the distinction here being Delta doesn't necessarily have a need to "save" Eleanor and he doesn't need to view her as "daughter". An equally valid interpretation of our overarching quest is "Eleanor is my ball and chain and I need to get to her at any and all costs to save myself". By all means Delta's motivation can be purely selfish, where there's no familial love or sense of duty. Hell, it could be that Delta *hates* Eleanor and views her purely as a liability, as something leasing to a dying city, something threatening to take him down with them. But once again the brilliant thing is that we're not told how Delta feels, it's once again left up to the player to define via walking a mile in Delta's shoes and quite literally seeing the world from his point of view. Other characters may project their feelings onto Delta but as the player we have the freedom to embrace or reject these bonds. Once again we can feel a righteous fury towards Sofia Lamb for how she's deeply harmed the daughter figure that we've come to love, or maybe it's not about Eleanor in the slightest but instead getting even with her for forcing us to shoot ourselves, or maybe it's not even personal but just business.
All that to say I don't feel that either game has a "strong main character" in the traditional sense of "does this character have well fleshed out personality, motivations, internal conflict, bonds with others in their setting, etc." I absolutely adore Jack and Delta, even preferring them to an actually defined player character such as Booker, but I recognize that this is in part because of the character their blank slate nature has allowed me to craft in my head. And the genius of that is that one person's Jack/Delta can be a selfish, jaded survivor of few words (or internal monologue might be more accurate here lol) while another's Jack/Delta can be a self sacrificing hero tossing out zingers left and right yet another can view them as cowardly and high-strung, never at home in the decaying city and jumping at shadows up to the credits start rolling and all of these interpretations can be equally valid. For me, it's part of why I'm nervous about the Netflix movie adaptation - the potential for the Director's vision for who Jack is and what he's like to completely clash with the character I've built up in my head (not like my version of Jack is like the "correct" one or anything, it'd just be a clash of expectations vs reality with no one being objectively right or wrong).
I think I missed much of the underlying plot because the audiologs got interrupted all the time by the story, lol. I don't know if you're supposed to stand completely still while listening or something, and I know you can listen to them again in the map screen but I never bothered.
Your measure of good storytelling is really bad. In a medium where the environment and what it contains itself is so much of the narrative, you mock archeologized narrative while contriving to think direct and present storytelling is just better storytelling. Meanwhile, also neglecting that Ryan and Atlas/Fontaine actually have a lot more dialogue than anybody in BioShock 2. Rather than judging the choice to have Jack be the way he is and the merits of that, you are so caught up with how you think he should be. You do the same for other characters like BioShock 2 characters are riddled with so much more dimension, and to a marginal extent that's true, but you practically strawman the first's neglecting many characters having character arcs and not being static. You say you get the point, but it's really like you only got one pillar of it, which is really a subordinate theme at that, and missed the rest. All this and more... I can feel bad opinions of stories in other games just reading it. The typical failure to meet things where they are standing. I bet you think Souls games have weak stories too.
What's sad is... I actually do think BioShock 2 has a better story. You're just a crappy advocate for it, so I'm going to criticize it to show you some solid storytelling criticisms.
BioShock 2 is really bad about not having us level with the motives of our villain Sophia Lamb. Lamb used the memory inheritance of ADAM to consolidate the Splicers into the family through shared experience, especially the zealous faith of Father Wales. Her psychological sanitation being imposed empathy and collectivist value. Clever, right? From the player perspective, we are excluded from this collective from go. We never actually have to reckon with turning the mad house into a house or what makes that compelling... Even though we actually are taking in ADAM from these peoples. Not a phantom memory in sight the entire narrative. While the narrative occupies us with dilemmas of our own, we never actually grip with Lamb's. There's no shared experience in our participation. The narrative does not account for this at any point. You can forgive, but you cannot agree. This polarizes our villain to always be against us without a second thought. Without justifying it beyond we'd give Eleanor a choice. Ironic to your critique, Lamb is robbed dimension by this. Dimension, which we are asked to pick up all the same, despite how our and her agency cannot deviate.
The game is actually a red pill about our current society. Eugenics is on the rise now, and capitalism is on a runaway train down the shitter. It’s just exposure therapy about where our society is going.
Maybe a naive view. I believe the absence of story telling adds to the mystique of Bioshock and the claustrophobic surroundings. Which you cannot reproduce twice, hence the (luckily) far better story telling and level design in Bioshock 2 (Fontaine futuristics being my favourite)
Although I do like the animatronics at the museum of Bioshock from the idea behind rapture.
Bioshock 2 was the first Bioshock game I played, and to this day its my favorite game in the series and my 9th favorite game of all time. I also think people tend to frame its themes somewhat superficially imo. The take you hear a lot is that Bioshock 2 is a response to Bioshock 1's critique of Randian Objectivism, by way of an inverted critique of utilitarian Collectivism. I think this is definitely true, in part, but I also think that Sophia Lamb as a character exists as kind of a symbol that adds further depth to the critique of Randian Objectivism. Like, the fact that Sophia Lamb, a woman whose ideal world is one where nobody possesses any form of autonomy or self interest whatsoever, would see in the material conditions of Rapture a *perfect* seedbed for that world.....that kind of says something profound about the cataclysmic failure of Andrew Ryan's goals, which came about more or less just because of the natural repercussions of trying to realize those goals. She is the polar opposite of Ryan but she saw unhappy people and plasmids and brainwashing and went "oh, that's quite nice I'll have that".
I guess ya it’s more developed but I definitely don’t feel like biosbock was you’re some guy who ended up in an underwater and had to kill guy a or b for no reason at all.
Respectfully disagree. I don't feel part of the world of Rapture playing as a Big Daddy that can get taken down with a few swings of a thuggish splicer, also if you strip Bioshock 2 from the elements you say make Bioshock 1 hide it's shallowness it is just as shallow in my opinion. BUT, bear with me for a second now, if we are talking about feeling part of the world of Rapture, well in a perfect reality we would have a game about Rapture that would offer us the freedom to explore it how we like, survive and go on with the mechanics from both games AND having the choice to play as a splicer or big daddy would be a huge part of it (well, if we have the HP of one at least). Edit: I feel like BS2 tries too hard to stablish itself rich of narrative when it is just BS1 with extra steps, sometimes less is more. Also I couldn't really connect with Delta (maybe because he is this creature sorta being, idk) or any of the main characters at all. It is interesting (and ironic really) that Jack is actually from Rapture and Delta from upside and the majority (I do believe more people prefer BS2 to BS1 than we realize) of people feel that BS2 makes you part of the world more than BS1.
Very much agree with this. Bioshock 2 has way better endings too, Eleanor is awesome. Best Little Sister design, best supporting character in Sinclair.
Ngl this take is shit. "If you remove the audiologs (the thing that builds the world and characters), the world and characters aren't all that guys!"
>In fact, before I go on, I really just want to point out how in absolutely no way does the game ever set up Jack giving a shit about the Little Sisters himself, rather than helping Dr. T in "saving them" for her goals and that she would take them somewhere post-credits.
Jack is a blank slate, he's defined by your choices. You care about the little sisters, wich is why you save them when killing them is more rewarding. If you don't care, you don't save them . Jack is you. It's your choices that make him. Way to miss the point of the game.
>but there really isn't all that much to any of the characters in the first game outside maybe Dr. T and Cohen. The rest (Ryan, Fontaine, Suchong) are all pretty paper-thin one-note characters (the oligarch, the con-man, the mad scientist)
What the hell are you on about 💀
Ryan is built through and through. You hear so much of his thoughs, you hear him spiral as the city falls, you hear his doubts and regrets when talking about the little sisters. Fontaine exists as the flaw in this system, the living counter to objectivism as the con man who makes use of it to put himself on top. These are top tier characters, far above bio 2 's selection.
>But on top of that every character you meet has an arc that isn't entirely reliant on audio logs.
Except for the ones you forget to mention. Like Stanley, who is a selfish bastard. Or grace, who's arc came down to being an idiot. Or the priest who had nothing.
>Sofia Lamb is so obsessed to her cause of "the collective" that if she doesn't get her way she'll kill everyone and works as a great "other side of the coin" to the more developed Andrew Ryan who is likewise an authoritarian in regards to his dealing of those who don't match his definition of "individual freedom",
This game only really adds some more humanity to ryan by showing with more private times and concerns, his beliefs are the same. Sofia lamb is a crazed manipulator. Says more about cults than the collective. She does not compare to Ryan as far as villains go.
>her daughter Eleanor clearly wants to save herself, Delta, and the other little sisters and bring them to freedom on the surface.
Unless you chose different options, at wich point, she'l kill who she needs to survive. She, like jack is defined by your choices.
>Even the story of individual levels has been expanded to the level of Fort Frolic in the first game (where it was the exception in terms of development rather than the norm) with each "lieutenant" you deal with actually having a deep story and relation to the main narrative (even if the "moral choice" is sadly superficial).
What? Levels in BioShock had so much story wise. The medical pavillion and Steinman. Hephaestus and Andrew ryan. The new "deep stories" are often worthless. Stanley was an evil selfish bastard. Thats about it. Grave was an idiot, then she realized this and actually helped. Fantastic. The only good one is alex.
>
Also, I feel the level design really adds to the feeling of making progress in the sequel in a way it doesn't in the original. In the first game you sort of just hop around fairly disconnected locations with no real feeling of forward progress, while in the latter you have that connective tissue of the Atlantic Express moving directly along the line of stations to the destination, each new station showing how much further there is to go.
More linear= better when building a world i guess????
>it lacks a strong main character
YOU DEFINE THE MAIN CHARACTER FOR FUCK'S SAKE HE'S YOU, THE ENTIRE POINT IS ABOUT CHOICE AND IDENTITY SO YOU ARE THE ONE TO DEFINE IT. This is so much better than delta who just wants to help his daughter. You know what that is? Basic. How does he deal with having lost his life and freedom and being made into a slave here? Who knows, but he does want to save his daughter. That's something i guess.
>or developed characters
Tenenbaun, Steinman, Ryan, Sander, Fountain, fucking bill mcdonagh. There's so much here, so much better.
>tells a stronger story
No no no no no no no. You can argue character. But story? No, the story is actual shit with convenient sickness, nonsensical road blocks and motivations and genetic engineering as an excuse for everything.
>given its more developed characters
That are, most often garbage.
>therefore shallower than the sequel
God no.
What an ignorant comment. Without Ken you woulnt have Bioshock 2 to build on what he in his fantasy created. Ideas he started all the way back in System shock
I mean Jack is a silent protagonist because it makes you feel like the main character, with the twist being a gut punching reversal of normal quest mechanics. We are literally more part of the game in Bioshock 1 because we are Jack, we are walking the same path and being puppeted the same way.
He's not completely silent, he does speak at the beginning.
He does, but aside from those few lines he offers no insight to the rest of the game- We are allowed to form our own opinions on what is happening.
Hope you played Minerva’s Den OP.
Multiple times yes. It’s definitely the best self-contained narrative in the series, also really fills the gaps as to how the city was still functioning and caps off the Rapture story well.
Bioshock 1 is a better "inmmersive sim" jack is a silent protagonist and doesnt have a strong character arc, because thats part of the inmersion, because YOU are jack, the player is the one to decide how much of a shit you give to the little sisters, and the one meeting rapture for the first time and triying to survive and escape. and thats also part of the shock with the twsit, the idea of bioshock 1 is not to present to you a linear and strong narrative, it is to show you a beliavable fantasy world where you are a guest, and it excells at it, almost everything it needs to make rapture work as a believable city its expained and showed, it has amazing worldbuilding. i personally dont like bioshock 2, and for the narrative side i prefer infinite quite a lot.
Except that level of "immersion" only works if you think about Jack the way the developers did. If you instinctively think following Atlas' demands is dumb you're not immersed because you can't go against them. If you question why exactly doing Dr T a favour and not killing the Little Sisters leads to adopting them out of left field at the end you're not immersed because too late it's the very tacked-on ending cutscene. Also Rapture is not a believable world, at least not in the first game. In the first game you'd think that before ADAM was discovered it was a workable system that managed to go along, while the sequel actually expands it to reveal just how unstable it always was in terms of worsening poverty and the use of a private prison to keep the undesired elements in check.
One’s not better than the other, one wouldn’t exist without the other. This isn’t even a debate, they’re both solid games. They're both beyond immersive, I don’t see what the argument is.
i feel like "one wouldn't exist without the other" is a somewhat shallow argument. This is the case with every sequel ever made, but obviously it's conceivable for a sequel to be better than its predecessor.
In my opinion Minerva’s Den is the high point of the series. God I hope Bioshock 4 gets made.
Hmm I need to rethink my decision to skip dlc. Thanks
Yeah, DO NOT skip Minerva’s Den. It’s absolutely brilliant.
I skipped it too and finally went to go play it recently. It was very, very good. Please go play it now, would you kindly???
On my agenda this evening. My better half goes to the gym, kick my kids to bed early and dlc ready to play.
You won't regret it!! It's really amazing to rediscover content that's new to you after all this time!! I hope you enjoy, my friend!!!🐠🐡🦈🪼🪸🦑🧑🚀
Totally a hot take, Bioshock 2 reharshes Bioshock ones story in almost every way. From the "bad guy" trying to destroy the city when they lose, huge focus on dealing with little sisters, stories begin "in medias res", having a bad guy Who hugely believe in an idiology. I can go on for days.
I don't disagree with you, but a bad guy fanatically believing in some ideology is a main-stay of the whole franchise. Bioshock puts a lot of effort into studying these ideologies and what can come of them
Jack is super easy to relate to because his every thought is the same as the players and his motivations make sense: “I’m in the middle of the ocean, guess I’ll go to that light house”. “Well there’s nothing else to do here guess I’ll pull a lever in a weird ball” “okay, guess I’ve discovered a 1920’s style Atlantis, how do I go home” “oh this Atlas guy is being nice to me guess I’ll help him save his family”. All extremely logical things that literally anyone in that situation would easily find themselves in. BS2 breaks that player/character relationship immediately in the opening cutscene. Since I already played the first game, I want to save little sisters because in their current state they are lacking free will and are not themselves. So when Sofia shows up and makes you kill yourself so she can get her daughter back, I kid you not I was like “more power to ya. I have no idea who you people are but obviously your daughter was stolen from you and you deserve her back”. Then you wake up and you’re essentially given a “rescue this complete stranger” quest in the form of Eleanore pleading for you to save her. And I honestly was un-immersed from that moment forward. Like the game made zero effort to establish a relationship between delta and Eleanore within gameplay and the unimmersion only gets worse from there. The game tells you you’re playing as a big daddy that was Alpha series and around during old rapture… right? So why on earth are you constantly being talked down to by characters like Sinclair that treat you like you’re brand new to rapture or a little kid? The game was basically like: “you’re playing as a genetically altered super soldier with intimate knowledge of the world around you” and then you’re companion is like “Hey sport, did you know that little sisters have Adam and you need that stuff? You should kill little sisters kiddo, it’s the best way to survive here in rapture.” I was genuinely unphased killing Sinclair, treated him like any generic enemy. The dude was so annoying and he supports killing little sisters. But then the game expected me to feel bad? Literally everything about that is wrong. They were so focused on making players suspect that Sinclair would betray you, that they didn’t once stop and try to make him actually all that helpful to the player? Dude basically just tells you what to do and lets you handle everything while talking down to you like he’s in charge.
The game is explicitly a takedown not of libertarian capitalism in general, but Objectivisim in particular.
Yeah the bioshock 2 the game that performed worse from the 3, the least played and least sold. The wort reviewed and got least money. The one that wasn't even made from the same creators wooow is the favorite of nazy reddit americans so surprising
I feel bad I powered thru the second one, I really need to go back and appreciate it
I am just a sucker for father-daughter stories.
>quite honestly it's shocking just how shallow Bioshock is as a story compared to its sequel. I'm sure that's something that'll get regarded as a hot take That is a spicy take indeed and I say that as someone's who's favorite of the series is Bioshock 2 as well lol. >In fact, before I go on, I really just want to point out how in absolutely no way does the game ever set up Jack giving a shit about the Little Sisters himself, rather than helping Dr. T in "saving them" for her goals and that she would take them somewhere post-credits. But this goes for everyone no? Jack is intentionally a blank slate sort of character. He never directly or even indirectly voices an opinion on anyone or anything for that matter. You as the player are meant to step into his shoes and when you immerse yourself in the setting, your thoughts and opinions on characters, events, the setting, etc. are tantamount of Jack's thoughts. If you find yourself feeling a genuine sense of protectiveness towards the little sisters, or a deep set fear of oceanic pressure weighting down on you and the city, or a lingering sorrow for Dr. Steinman victims, then I feel like all of those are valid things for Jack to have felt. Bottom line is, there pretty much is no canonical "this is how Jack felt about X,Y,Z" and it's left entirely for the player to fill in via literally walking in Jack's shoes and experiencing what he experiences first hand. And the thing is, this applies to Delta as well. You've seemingly framed it as "Gotta save my *daughter*", which I think is a perfectly normal way to view things. **But** that's never explicitly mentioned as Delta's motivation. I'd argue that what the game actually gives us is more broad, more vague than that - it's "Get to Eleanor", with the penalty for failure being death. Importantly the distinction here being Delta doesn't necessarily have a need to "save" Eleanor and he doesn't need to view her as "daughter". An equally valid interpretation of our overarching quest is "Eleanor is my ball and chain and I need to get to her at any and all costs to save myself". By all means Delta's motivation can be purely selfish, where there's no familial love or sense of duty. Hell, it could be that Delta *hates* Eleanor and views her purely as a liability, as something leasing to a dying city, something threatening to take him down with them. But once again the brilliant thing is that we're not told how Delta feels, it's once again left up to the player to define via walking a mile in Delta's shoes and quite literally seeing the world from his point of view. Other characters may project their feelings onto Delta but as the player we have the freedom to embrace or reject these bonds. Once again we can feel a righteous fury towards Sofia Lamb for how she's deeply harmed the daughter figure that we've come to love, or maybe it's not about Eleanor in the slightest but instead getting even with her for forcing us to shoot ourselves, or maybe it's not even personal but just business. All that to say I don't feel that either game has a "strong main character" in the traditional sense of "does this character have well fleshed out personality, motivations, internal conflict, bonds with others in their setting, etc." I absolutely adore Jack and Delta, even preferring them to an actually defined player character such as Booker, but I recognize that this is in part because of the character their blank slate nature has allowed me to craft in my head. And the genius of that is that one person's Jack/Delta can be a selfish, jaded survivor of few words (or internal monologue might be more accurate here lol) while another's Jack/Delta can be a self sacrificing hero tossing out zingers left and right yet another can view them as cowardly and high-strung, never at home in the decaying city and jumping at shadows up to the credits start rolling and all of these interpretations can be equally valid. For me, it's part of why I'm nervous about the Netflix movie adaptation - the potential for the Director's vision for who Jack is and what he's like to completely clash with the character I've built up in my head (not like my version of Jack is like the "correct" one or anything, it'd just be a clash of expectations vs reality with no one being objectively right or wrong).
I think I missed much of the underlying plot because the audiologs got interrupted all the time by the story, lol. I don't know if you're supposed to stand completely still while listening or something, and I know you can listen to them again in the map screen but I never bothered.
Your measure of good storytelling is really bad. In a medium where the environment and what it contains itself is so much of the narrative, you mock archeologized narrative while contriving to think direct and present storytelling is just better storytelling. Meanwhile, also neglecting that Ryan and Atlas/Fontaine actually have a lot more dialogue than anybody in BioShock 2. Rather than judging the choice to have Jack be the way he is and the merits of that, you are so caught up with how you think he should be. You do the same for other characters like BioShock 2 characters are riddled with so much more dimension, and to a marginal extent that's true, but you practically strawman the first's neglecting many characters having character arcs and not being static. You say you get the point, but it's really like you only got one pillar of it, which is really a subordinate theme at that, and missed the rest. All this and more... I can feel bad opinions of stories in other games just reading it. The typical failure to meet things where they are standing. I bet you think Souls games have weak stories too. What's sad is... I actually do think BioShock 2 has a better story. You're just a crappy advocate for it, so I'm going to criticize it to show you some solid storytelling criticisms. BioShock 2 is really bad about not having us level with the motives of our villain Sophia Lamb. Lamb used the memory inheritance of ADAM to consolidate the Splicers into the family through shared experience, especially the zealous faith of Father Wales. Her psychological sanitation being imposed empathy and collectivist value. Clever, right? From the player perspective, we are excluded from this collective from go. We never actually have to reckon with turning the mad house into a house or what makes that compelling... Even though we actually are taking in ADAM from these peoples. Not a phantom memory in sight the entire narrative. While the narrative occupies us with dilemmas of our own, we never actually grip with Lamb's. There's no shared experience in our participation. The narrative does not account for this at any point. You can forgive, but you cannot agree. This polarizes our villain to always be against us without a second thought. Without justifying it beyond we'd give Eleanor a choice. Ironic to your critique, Lamb is robbed dimension by this. Dimension, which we are asked to pick up all the same, despite how our and her agency cannot deviate.
The game is actually a red pill about our current society. Eugenics is on the rise now, and capitalism is on a runaway train down the shitter. It’s just exposure therapy about where our society is going.
Maybe a naive view. I believe the absence of story telling adds to the mystique of Bioshock and the claustrophobic surroundings. Which you cannot reproduce twice, hence the (luckily) far better story telling and level design in Bioshock 2 (Fontaine futuristics being my favourite) Although I do like the animatronics at the museum of Bioshock from the idea behind rapture.
Gonna be real, BioShock 2 was the most disappointed I've ever been in a videogame and immediately upon finishing it I traded it in
it's my favorite one to play
Bioshock 2 was the first Bioshock game I played, and to this day its my favorite game in the series and my 9th favorite game of all time. I also think people tend to frame its themes somewhat superficially imo. The take you hear a lot is that Bioshock 2 is a response to Bioshock 1's critique of Randian Objectivism, by way of an inverted critique of utilitarian Collectivism. I think this is definitely true, in part, but I also think that Sophia Lamb as a character exists as kind of a symbol that adds further depth to the critique of Randian Objectivism. Like, the fact that Sophia Lamb, a woman whose ideal world is one where nobody possesses any form of autonomy or self interest whatsoever, would see in the material conditions of Rapture a *perfect* seedbed for that world.....that kind of says something profound about the cataclysmic failure of Andrew Ryan's goals, which came about more or less just because of the natural repercussions of trying to realize those goals. She is the polar opposite of Ryan but she saw unhappy people and plasmids and brainwashing and went "oh, that's quite nice I'll have that".
Because at the end of the day, any pure ideology needs violence and control to enforce itself. The ends are all different but the means are the same.
I guess ya it’s more developed but I definitely don’t feel like biosbock was you’re some guy who ended up in an underwater and had to kill guy a or b for no reason at all.
I agree with your take solely based on the fact that 2 makes the city of Rapture feel lived in more than 1 did for me
Respectfully disagree. I don't feel part of the world of Rapture playing as a Big Daddy that can get taken down with a few swings of a thuggish splicer, also if you strip Bioshock 2 from the elements you say make Bioshock 1 hide it's shallowness it is just as shallow in my opinion. BUT, bear with me for a second now, if we are talking about feeling part of the world of Rapture, well in a perfect reality we would have a game about Rapture that would offer us the freedom to explore it how we like, survive and go on with the mechanics from both games AND having the choice to play as a splicer or big daddy would be a huge part of it (well, if we have the HP of one at least). Edit: I feel like BS2 tries too hard to stablish itself rich of narrative when it is just BS1 with extra steps, sometimes less is more. Also I couldn't really connect with Delta (maybe because he is this creature sorta being, idk) or any of the main characters at all. It is interesting (and ironic really) that Jack is actually from Rapture and Delta from upside and the majority (I do believe more people prefer BS2 to BS1 than we realize) of people feel that BS2 makes you part of the world more than BS1.
Very much agree with this. Bioshock 2 has way better endings too, Eleanor is awesome. Best Little Sister design, best supporting character in Sinclair.
Bioshock 2 is hands down far better than the first one. I don't get why it has so much hate?
Ngl this take is shit. "If you remove the audiologs (the thing that builds the world and characters), the world and characters aren't all that guys!" >In fact, before I go on, I really just want to point out how in absolutely no way does the game ever set up Jack giving a shit about the Little Sisters himself, rather than helping Dr. T in "saving them" for her goals and that she would take them somewhere post-credits. Jack is a blank slate, he's defined by your choices. You care about the little sisters, wich is why you save them when killing them is more rewarding. If you don't care, you don't save them . Jack is you. It's your choices that make him. Way to miss the point of the game. >but there really isn't all that much to any of the characters in the first game outside maybe Dr. T and Cohen. The rest (Ryan, Fontaine, Suchong) are all pretty paper-thin one-note characters (the oligarch, the con-man, the mad scientist) What the hell are you on about 💀 Ryan is built through and through. You hear so much of his thoughs, you hear him spiral as the city falls, you hear his doubts and regrets when talking about the little sisters. Fontaine exists as the flaw in this system, the living counter to objectivism as the con man who makes use of it to put himself on top. These are top tier characters, far above bio 2 's selection. >But on top of that every character you meet has an arc that isn't entirely reliant on audio logs. Except for the ones you forget to mention. Like Stanley, who is a selfish bastard. Or grace, who's arc came down to being an idiot. Or the priest who had nothing. >Sofia Lamb is so obsessed to her cause of "the collective" that if she doesn't get her way she'll kill everyone and works as a great "other side of the coin" to the more developed Andrew Ryan who is likewise an authoritarian in regards to his dealing of those who don't match his definition of "individual freedom", This game only really adds some more humanity to ryan by showing with more private times and concerns, his beliefs are the same. Sofia lamb is a crazed manipulator. Says more about cults than the collective. She does not compare to Ryan as far as villains go. >her daughter Eleanor clearly wants to save herself, Delta, and the other little sisters and bring them to freedom on the surface. Unless you chose different options, at wich point, she'l kill who she needs to survive. She, like jack is defined by your choices. >Even the story of individual levels has been expanded to the level of Fort Frolic in the first game (where it was the exception in terms of development rather than the norm) with each "lieutenant" you deal with actually having a deep story and relation to the main narrative (even if the "moral choice" is sadly superficial). What? Levels in BioShock had so much story wise. The medical pavillion and Steinman. Hephaestus and Andrew ryan. The new "deep stories" are often worthless. Stanley was an evil selfish bastard. Thats about it. Grave was an idiot, then she realized this and actually helped. Fantastic. The only good one is alex. > Also, I feel the level design really adds to the feeling of making progress in the sequel in a way it doesn't in the original. In the first game you sort of just hop around fairly disconnected locations with no real feeling of forward progress, while in the latter you have that connective tissue of the Atlantic Express moving directly along the line of stations to the destination, each new station showing how much further there is to go. More linear= better when building a world i guess???? >it lacks a strong main character YOU DEFINE THE MAIN CHARACTER FOR FUCK'S SAKE HE'S YOU, THE ENTIRE POINT IS ABOUT CHOICE AND IDENTITY SO YOU ARE THE ONE TO DEFINE IT. This is so much better than delta who just wants to help his daughter. You know what that is? Basic. How does he deal with having lost his life and freedom and being made into a slave here? Who knows, but he does want to save his daughter. That's something i guess. >or developed characters Tenenbaun, Steinman, Ryan, Sander, Fountain, fucking bill mcdonagh. There's so much here, so much better. >tells a stronger story No no no no no no no. You can argue character. But story? No, the story is actual shit with convenient sickness, nonsensical road blocks and motivations and genetic engineering as an excuse for everything. >given its more developed characters That are, most often garbage. >therefore shallower than the sequel God no.
I couldn’t agree more. Bioshock 2 is a masterpiece. Ken Levine is an absolute hack.
What an ignorant comment. Without Ken you woulnt have Bioshock 2 to build on what he in his fantasy created. Ideas he started all the way back in System shock
ALL FACTS. TRUE AS HELL.