It goes without saying that 2K’s Bioshock is one obra maestra, a true example of gaming as a serious artform. With its impressively detailed landscapes deep beneath sunken oceans, and its challenging, political narrative, Bioshock has no doubt influenced much of the modern gaming space today.
But as much of a titan as Bioshock is in the industry, acclaimed with mostly well-deserved praise, I think it is important for us too to evoke critical discussions about its art, especially for a game that entices its players to do the same for their society. Nothing can ever be perfect, but I feel that Bioshock misses the mark on certain aspects that people don’t often discuss, whether it be a small gripe that I had built going through the game, or an issue with its narrative that is etched deep within its fabric.
As for me, I have just finished Bioshock a few days ago as of writing this critique, and so much of the game rings loud in my memory. I say this to contextualize myself as a player in the modern age approaching Bioshock nearly two decades after its initial release. Many of what is stated here may feel obvious or redundant in hindsight, but gaming has changed dramatically since then, and there is a nonzero possibility that my criticisms here may have simply been a reflection of the game’s age or, indeed, its concurrent landscape.
Bioshock is Not Really an Immersive Sim
Commonly lauded as “the game that brought immersive sims to the forefront”, Bioshock was quite a surprising experience for me, because while the interplay between its vast amount of mechanics and gameplay systems did create for a wholly engaging playthrough, I personally don’t believe it to be an immersive sim, at least as a whole.
I believe there to be two main components for an immersive sim to be, well, immersive: microfreedom, and, quite importantly, macrofreedom. Bioshock nails microfreedom with a sledgehammer, giving the player plenty of tools and options to approach its various obstacles (sometimes too plenty, I’ll get into that). Throughout the game, the player is given a myriad of weapons and the game’s genetic modifications, namely plasmids and tonics, allowing them to traverse the grounds of Rapture in their own way.
However, Bioshock severely lacks the second core component of what makes an immersive sim — macrofreedom. Selecting whether or not to use the pistol or the machine gun to kill an enemy is microfreedom, but at the end of the day, your hand is always dealt the same cards: you either kill or die trying. But know that this is not a matter of Bioshock lacking “alternative ways” to play. No, the issue is fundamental to Bioshock, indented within its linear style. In Deus Ex, for instance, you may have the option to go into the terrorists’ base guns blazing, or crawl into vents and kill their leader from behind, or hack into their system to disable detection, or pay someone to give you critical information on your mission. You could even choose to spare the big guy in many cases, that much is up to you. By contrast, your finish line in Bioshock remains the same even in the face of its wide microfreedoms — there is always one quest; there is always one goal. The game may present different orders of operations with small differences in how you perform said operations, but they remain the same, all the time.
I’d willingly admit that this is not so much a criticism to Bioshock more than it is a criticism to how the game is viewed by the public. It is commonly regarded as something it really isn’t, though the game’s linearity is not entirely to its detriment, far from. In fact, I’d argue that the way the game mixes and matches the usual linear style in FPS with tropes of immersive sims comprises a large part of Bioshock’s appeal. It has many of the outer workings of an immersive sim, satisfying those looking for emergent and free systems, while still being familiar enough for the rest of the FPS playerbase which likely contributed a good deal towards its success. However, this confusion of genres confuses player expectations. There’s a reason the 2K team are so keen on calling Bioshock an “FPS/RPG hybrid” and not an immersive sim, because naming it such holds it to a much higher bar than it necessitates, which can very realistically sour the experience of an incoming player, and it certainly did so for me.
Beyond a mere confusion of genres, the game’s linearity does not only mess with the player’s expectations towards the game, but it also presents a disconnect between the game’s narrative and its gameplay systems, particularly for what the story is about.
Ludonarrative Dissonance from Linearity
WARNING: THIS SECTION CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BIOSHOCK.
In his similar critique of the game entitled Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock, Clint Hocking described the disconnect that he felt were present between the game’s narrative and its gameplay mechanisms, and while his particular examples may have been — in my opinion — misguided, his point stands quite tall. There really is a disparity in these two elements of the game, though it is not found in the moral choice of harvesting or saving Little Sisters, that much merely serves to reflect the player’s morality, albeit in a bit of a shallow, binary way, but the ludonarrative dissonance he speaks of actually persists in the lack of choice the game gives, even in situations it really should.
The particular point of the game I’m referring to here is after the twist with Ryan and Atlas, where it is revealed to the player that they are but a mere puppet created by Atlas designed to take down Ryan in a last-ditch effort. Atlas, who we now know to be Ryan’s rival Frank Fontaine, has been pulling our strings the whole time, using various code phrases the player could have never expected. I’m not here to argue about this twist; it’s a fantastic subversion of expectations that helped set apart Bioshock from all of its competitors by giving that “Wow!” factor. Furthermore, it sheds a new light to Bioshock’s linear nature, as much of its design suddenly makes sense when you consider the fact that we’re being told what to do, and we, a slave, have no choice but to obey. Indeed, this twist forces the player to recontextualize the very common trope of “quests” in games and how this song and dance between the player and the game commences. Regardless of how this twist made you feel, whether amazed, confused, or outright betrayed, it’s a fantastic plot point that I don’t have qualms with.
What I do have qualms with is the consequence of this twist, or rather, the lack thereof, because immediately proceeding Ryan’s demise, the player is once again told to free themselves from Fontaine’s mind control. After doing so, the player is once again told to destroy Fontaine’s reign. See the problem? The player is still being told what to do. Going back to the aforementioned idea of there being one and only one finish line, Bioshock doesn’t give you a choice in the matter, even after you’ve become aware of your situation, or, hell, even after you’ve supposedly “freed” yourself from it. What could have been a boundary-pushing twist that dismantles the subject of linear gaming design and exemplifies immense awareness of the medium, was instead just a mere visage of that self-awareness, a mere taste of what could have been, as the game chooses to go back to its regular, linear programming.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point is that after knowing Fontaine had been controlling his mind the whole time, Jack, the main character, feels as if he has no choice but to destroy his creator, and while this personal motivation could make sense in theory, it’s not necessarily the narrative Bioshock attempts to outwardly convey.
It’s fascinating, then, that the only real choice the player has that significantly affects their fate is one that they’ve been given since the beginning: the choice of harvesting or saving the Little Sisters, but the existence of this choice from the beginning only serves to complicate the message of the game further. Fontaine quite literally tells you to harvest the first Little Sister you meet, but out of all the things he tells you to do, this is the one you’re free to disobey? Why not any of the others?
On one hand, the game presents our following of Atlas’ orders as an act of mutual benefit, but that we are still free to make these choices for ourselves — that is what the gameplay dictates. Yet, on the other hand, we are being mind controlled into doing exactly what Atlas states, explaining the linear nature of the game — this is what the narrative dictates. It’s not hard to see that these two elements are simply at odds with each other, especially given that, narratively, this concept is dismantled by our freedom from Fontaine’s control, but ludologically, it makes zero impact. It feels even more like a slap to the face knowing that, after the final battle, Little Sisters still come out to drain Fontaine’s power, regardless of your choice to harvest or save them. Until the end, when it’s already been given the best opportunity to allow free choice, Bioshock. is still. linear.
How Plenty is Too Plenty?
Since we’re already discussing the finale of the game, let’s inspect its final boss more closely: Fontaine’s lair, the place that your whole journey has been building up to. Many of your tools will likely come in handy for this, so stock up and get ready to blast him with all you’ve got! Or… you know… throw three to four barrels at him (in which the room has dozens of, by the way), killing Fontaine immediately. So much for “a myriad of weapons”, right? Oh, and if you don’t have Telekinesis equipped, worry not as you can use your various elemental plasmids to counter his everchanging elemental type! Or… you know… shoot him with a full load of Machine Gun ammo, and he’ll go down in a few magazines.
Bioshock’s final boss greatly exemplifies one of this game’s biggest problems — one that I see many mention when criticizing it, in that it is way too easy. This is due in large part to the game giving you far too many resources for you to ever realistically run out. It attempts to compensate for this by bloating enemy health bars, especially in Hard mode, but this only ever ends up making your weapons feel weak when you really should feel much stronger in the late game. User “fineartfilms” says it best in their comment beneath the aforementioned Clint Hocking article, stating that “the game did not feel very difficult, but at the same time I never felt like I was playing it ‘well’.”
More options doesn’t translate to a better game, especially when those options have no complexity; no risk and reward factor. Choosing one weapon or another should ideally have advantages and consequences which would give it a much needed extra layer of thinking complexity, but as it stands, Bioshock‘s weapons are largely interchangeable, and due to their sheer quantity, many of them just feel like novelty items more than anything else, especially when you factor in the fact that the game hardly encourages the use of these various items, if at all. I don’t recall a single portion of the game that required me to use Insect Swarm, or Cyclone Pad, or Wrench Lurker, so why use them, right?
This issue, and in fact all of the issues I’ve mentioned so far in this article, stems largely from the game’s attempt to streamline itself to appeal to player demands. It was the right move; it did lead to Bioshock’s large success, but it also had the side effect of “overcompensation”: of making the player’s choices feel unimportant in the end. It comes back to my previous point about the game “insulting the player” by spoonfeeding them. In the noble pursuit of accessibility, Bioshock ironically made players feel less capable than they really should be.
Like many others, this problem actually stems from the hectic and drastic changes that occurred throughout Bioshock’s creation, and ultimately, the shift from an open “immersive sim”-like to a focused, linear FPS in the midst of its development. I HIGHLY recommend reading Bioshock’s project lead Alyssa Finley’s article on Game Developer about what went right and, more importantly, what went wrong during the game’s development. I especially recommend this read for aspiring game developers looking to understand the inner workings of the development process and where exactly they could fail.
Conclusion
Before I end, I would like to say that this piece is not a review. If it were, this would be a lot shinier, and a whole heck of a lot more positive.
From the way I see it, there’s two types of hating. Many people can hate something with the intent of dragging the whole down. Some, though, hate parts of something with the intent of pushing the whole further beyond. I belong in that latter space, as I make these criticisms with the intent of pushing Bioshock, or the gaming industry as a whole, to the state of perfection it can and has very nearly achieved. I offer these criticisms not because I hate Bioshock, but because I love the game so much. It is in these kinds of discussions that we really open our eyes to different perspectives and achieve great things, as uncomfortable as these discussions may be.
In a gaming era that is far too filled with absent-minded discussions and social media noise, critiques such as these serve an important role of pushing the craft forward. Besides, would you not want to see the thing you love be the best it can be?
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