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| images c/o MobyGames (PC) |
Let's start from the beginning. While System Shock 2 had a bit of a moment recently with a full-scale remaster by Night Dive, for many years (decades, really) it wallowed in relative obscurity, a cult classic of sci-fi horror limited to PC, difficult to find, unavailable on digital distribution platforms until 2013, in large part due to an absolute rat's nest of rights issues that needed to be sorted out. (I suspect the collapse of Looking Glass Studios, one of the game's co-developers, also had something to do with it.) System Shock 2 told the story of a lone agent trapped on a starship far from Earth, the crew killed or converted by mysterious wormlike aliens discovered on a distant planet, with only the murderous AI, SHODAN, for company. The game played out like a hybrid of RPG and survival horror, played in first person, with powers and abilities you could grow over the course of the game to deal with ever-greater threats. You had to make choices about what specialties you wanted to take; those choices translated into your playstyle. Aside from being scary as hell, it shared a lot of DNA with Deus Ex, developed concurrently by Ion Storm and released the following year.
Unlike Looking Glass, co-developer Irrational Games had weathered the financial woes that afflicted much of the game industry around the turn of the millennium, and following the success of SWAT 4, turned their eye towards making a spiritual follow-up to System Shock 2. It had to be a spiritual sequel, rather than a direct one, because of the rights debacle; nevertheless, early in development, there were a lot of similarities. I remember seeing concept art of a vast underground bunker, with monstrous World War II-era experiments lurking the corridors. These days, the concept seems hokey and overdone, so it's probably for the best that they scrapped it.
What Irrational eventually went with turned out to be quite unique: a sprawling underwater city, looking like New York City or Chicago in the 1940s, governed by the principles of laissez-faire capitalism, called Rapture and founded by Andrew Ryan, a wealthy, eccentric industrialist with radical right-libertarian politics who saw both the United States and the Soviet Union as threats to humanity, and "took a third option," as the TV Tropes kids used to say. (Do they still say that?) The player enters this fantastic urban paradise at a pretty bad time to do so, as the city is currently in the midst of a civil war between Ryan loyalists and people who think they weren't given a fair hand. The city is also swarming with "splicers," people addicted to (and mutated by) the gene-splicing capabilities of ADAM, a substance discovered in sea slugs that, with a little bit of mad science, can give people all kinds of fantastic powers. (Being able to set someone on fire with your mind is definitely not going to bring stability to a society whose entire animating philosophy boils down to "got mine, fuck you," but by this point it's too late to stop it.)
Irrational marketed this game two different ways, to two different groups of people. To a certain set of old-head PC gamers, they sold it as the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. To everyone else, they focused instead on the setting and story, with Ryan himself being an obvious analogue to philosopher and sociopath Ayn Rand, and the narrative being a critique of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Ultimately, audiences went bananas for it, with pretty consistent 9/10 or 10/10 ratings from critics. But the old heads were by and large not impressed.
I said in my BioShock Infinite review that there's no real value in getting into a point-by-point comparison of System Shock 2 and BioShock, but even with that acknowledgment, the fact remains: BioShock is just plain less deep. This is not a value judgment; ultimately, System Shock 2 and BioShock had different priorities. But comparing them is nevertheless inevitable because BioShock's design owes so much to System Shock 2.
On a superficial level, BioShock is a lot like System Shock 2. It shares a lot of the same structure, with the game being divided up into different areas with their own themes. You can generally move back and forth between areas, though there's less reason to do so in BioShock. Aside from conventional weapons (which you can modify) you also have access to powers, which make use of a separate pool (PSI points in System Shock 2, EVE in BioShock, both being analogous to mana in fantasy games and in BioShock's case is even blue.) Both games feature the player moving through a dangerous disaster zone (an overrun spaceship in one, a failed utopia in the other) while a voice on the radio gives you instructions, in BioShock's case a man named Atlas, a resistance leader who promises to guide you to safety. The story is told largely through audio logs left behind by the former inhabitants, sometimes to almost silly extremes in both cases. You even visit a medical area as the first "proper" explorable zone in both games.
BioShock is less interested in questions of choice, however. Or perhaps it's more fair to say that BioShock is about the illusion of choice, and deliberately so. While the level design is frequently twisty, with lots of hidden areas and opportunities to backtrack to get into places you couldn't before, the RPG-style stat and skill development of System Shock 2 simply is not a thing here. Rather than choosing a class and making hard decisions about skill trees, BioShock's philosophy seems to be that you can do whatever you want, provided you have the ADAM for it. It's curiously in line with the game's themes of hubris and capital; as a character puts it, having the ADAM makes you the guv'nor.
Your powers in this game are called plasmids; in addition to the kind that give you powers to throw fireballs or summon swarms of angry bees, there are three other categories of plasmids, called tonics that do everything from help you fight better to help you "hack" things ("hacking" in this case being manually adjusting a machine's internals in a variation on the classic puzzle game Pipe Dream.) While some plasmids can be found laying around, most of them must be purchased with ADAM from a Gatherer's Garden vending machine. ADAM functions as the game's secondary currency; you'll also have access to Rapture Dollars, which you can use to make purchases at more generic vending machines (or "buy out" vending machines and certain security apparatuses.) ADAM is difficult to come by, which brings us to the game's most famous (or infamous) mechanic: the Little Sisters.
As I mentioned, the Little Sisters are just little girls who have had these weird mutant sea slugs implanted in them; they go around gathering ADAM from corpses, which they then ingest, which the sea slugs then use to generate more ADAM, thereby ensuring a consistent supply to meet demand. (Morbid, ain't it?) Splicers, being the raving, half-feral ADAM addicts that they are, are the primary threat to the Little Sisters, and so the powers-that-be have provided them bodyguards in the form of Big Daddies, hulking, inhuman things locked into diving suits, who will defend the Sisters with unparalleled ferocity. You want the ADAM? You gotta go through the Daddies. Do that, and you're faced with an apparent moral choice: harvest the Sister for her ADAM (which kills the kid) or rescue her, which nets you less ADAM in the short term but do it often enough and they'll pay back the favor by leaving you gifts of ADAM (and rare goodies) at one of the Gatherer's Garden machines. The actual difference in ADAM totals between the two methods is fairly insubstantial in both the short and long term: a little under 300 ADAM (out of an absolute maximum of 3360, not counting glitches.) If plasmids cost more, or there were more useful ones, this would be a bigger difference, even accounting for the fact that the girls will gift you unique tonics. As it is, however, it puts a big dent in any claim to a meaningful moral choice.
It's that very illusion of a moral choice that is probably BioShock's most lasting legacy. Clint Hocking, at the time a bigwig at Ubisoft Montreal, famously wrote a blog post criticizing a supposed disconnect between the internal morality of BioShock's narrative and what the game seems to want you to do. As Hocking put it:
In the game’s mechanics, I am offered the freedom to choose to adopt an Objectivist approach, but I also have the freedom to reject that approach and to rescue the Little Sisters, even though it is not in my own (net) best interest to do so.... Yet in the game’s fiction on the other hand, I do not have that freedom to choose between helping Atlas or not. Under the ludic contract, if I accept to adopt an Objectivist approach, I can harvest Little Sisters. If I reject that approach, I can rescue them. Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan, and if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach – well too bad… I can stop playing the game, but that’s about it.
Yeah, the rest of the post is about as stupid as that or worse. When "ludonarrative dissonance" was first being bandied about as the Hot New Term in Gaming Criticism I was repulsed by it for being, quite frankly, up its own ass. Over the years I've come around to its utility, but there's an irony in that the term doesn't even meaningfully relate to the actual criticism Hocking was trying to make: I'd skimmed the blog post back in the day but dropped it mostly because I have an aversion both to people dumping on things I like and also people churning out a lot of five-dollar words trying to sound smart; all these years I'd assumed that Hocking's complaint revolved around the Little Sisters, especially given that Irrational were, quite frankly, cowardly in how they handled it. Instead, it's that the game has Objectivist mechanics but pitted you against the Objectivist. I'm not sure what kind of game he expected to be playing, but even Deus Ex, one of the most famous examples of emphasis on player choice, didn't let you side with UNATCO.
"Ludonarrative dissonance" better describes the moral disconnect of Grand Theft Auto IV, where the protagonist is a conflicted war veteran in an open world where you can engage in car chases and mass murder. BioShock's core theme is conversely the illusion of choice (in life or in the game,) which is most embodied in the now-famous scene where Ryan uses trigger phrases to goad the player character, who has been under mind control the whole time, into killing him. "A man chooses," he says, "a slave obeys." And we have no choice but to obey, and we've been doing it this whole time. Hocking took personal affront to this, finding it to be an insult to the player (and therefore unforgivable.) This, then, is the origin of "ludonarrative dissonance:" yet another bruised male ego, pissed off that a game had something to say about how a linear narrative shapes player choices in a way that didn't suck his dick. It reminded me far too much of the old Through The Looking Glass forum, a place I am no longer at for reasons that are unimportant to this review but was (and remains) suffuse with some real blowhards, just a bunch of guys making noise desperately hoping they sound smart. Alas, that's pretty much every gaming forum, eh?
I don't think BioShock is a perfect game. When I was younger, I preferred System Shock 2 for its depth. These days I don't care so much about that so long as a game achieves what it actually sets out to do, which BioShock certainly does. While there's a certain emptiness to its level design in some places, I appreciate its emphasis on exploration, with the curious player being rewarded with goodies, sometimes really nice ones. The sound design is also really good, especially if you can get EAX working. But the gameplay is sometimes frustrating; having to swap between guns and plasmids is really annoying (thankfully fixed for BioShock 2 and Infinite.) Even if you keep up with your research (done by taking pictures of enemies, graded mostly based on shot composition with extra points for action shots and multiple subjects) enemies gradually become damage sponges that are difficult to take down. Hacking is a chore, and if you're like me and like to have a lot of support, you'll be hacking everything in sight: cameras, automatic turrets, even health dispensers which will kill splicers once you've hacked them. All in all, while there's a lot of things that have aged well, there's some things that haven't. No surprise there.
But then there's the engine. I'm going to be honest: if you thought Thief: Deadly Shadows and its absolutely awful Flesh Engine was the worst that Unreal Engine 2 could offer, allow me to introduce you to BioShock. So much about the game is not only broken in 2026, but it's been broken since 2007. Multiple times the game ate my settings upon crashing. I had to physically disconnect my second monitor to adjust video settings (and my changes would go away if I plugged it back in.) (It got easier when I learned I could just manually disable the monitor with Windows+P, but it's still annoying that I had to do it at all.) Despite running at 60 fps, most in-game physics ran at 30. Sound is generally pretty broken because the max number of sound channels is kept artificially low, necessitating a trip into the config files. There's more, but you get the gist. It's bad. Making things worse is that BioShock did get a remaster some years back that not only didn't fix a lot of these problems, but added more, on top of unnecessary aesthetic changes. It's definitely one of the worst remasters out there, though the upcoming Deus Ex remaster isn't exactly promising... nevertheless, as far as I can tell, at least on PC you can still get the original version of the game if you buy the Remaster. And if you're stuck with the remaster, well, you could always try the War in Rapture overhaul, which among other things fixes the busted enemy AI (yes, they broke the AI for the remaster. Told you it was bad.)
I still like BioShock. I think I like it a little more now, even, but in different ways than I did back when the game was new. At the time it was a rare gem, a much needed aesthetically-interesting blockbuster at a time when everything was taking on a brown filter in the name of realism. It's a lot of fun running around Rapture, which aesthetically is somewhere between a promise of the future as embodied by art deco, and the world's creepiest dead mall. Between BioShock and the revival of Fallout, we can probably point to those two franchises as kicking off a nostalgia for mid-century stylings and music (though we seem to have adopted the mid-century politics, too.) These days, while it's obvious that the criticisms of Objectivism are a bit shallow (and take a backseat to the larger narrative of what it means to have choice) it's still a very forward-thinking story at a time when most of your options for stories in video games were "generic hero's journey" or "generic Bush-era politics" (or both.) It's a good game that I think has been hamstrung pretty much from the beginning by a bad engine and some questionable design decisions.
So here we are at the end, and the question must be answered: is BioShock an immersive sim? I think it is, but it manages this in spite of itself. The important thing to remember is that "immersive sim" is not a genre; some gatekeepers will insist on applying to every game a lengthy criteria that, curiously, excludes the games most credited with creating the concept: Ultima Underworld and the original System Shock. BioShock isn't different from System Shock 1 or 2 in any way that matters, but at the same time, it's not totally the same game either. That's the thing about immersive sims: none of these games are really like each other except when they are. We may not have real choice in BioShock, but we have a choice here: we can engage with a game on its own merits and draw our own conclusions, or we can be fucking weird about it and ask why Mario can't simply talk to the Goombas.
Which do you choose?
-june❤
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