In which I go on at some length about the things in Bioshock that frustrated me to the point that I gave up on finishing the game.

I’m doing this thing where I am trying to finish the games I buy.

I have a bad habit of buying games as talismans for leisure time, going into the store picking up three games that I’ll never really play. So my new policy is that before I can buy a new game for a system I have to finish the game I’m playing on that system.

Barring that, I have to admit that I’m not going to finish the one I’m playing.

My Xbox360 game since I got it back from repairs has been Bioshock. After a hiatus due to The Orange Box (PC), I picked it back up last night and played for a few hours. This morning, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to finish it.

This came as something as a surprise. I’ve been excited for Bioshock since I heard about it like two years ago. A spiritual sequel to my beloved System Shock 2? Set in an underwater art-deco steam punk world? YES PLEASE! I loved the game for the first bits but then it came apart for me. (Spoilers!)

The overall game is great and I’m glad that this style of FPS seems to be doing well in the marketplace. But so much of the later game felt so rushed or lazy to me.

Things started to go wrong when I came to the twist in the plot. See,
when they said that Bioshock was a spiritual successor to SS2, I didn’t expect that to mean that they’d use THE SAME PLOT TWIST. In both games, you are guided through the first half or so by a distant ally who communicates with you via radio. In both games they lead you to believe that someone is your enemy. In both games there is a climactic moment where you learn that THEY’RE REALLY SOMEONE ELSE and they’re your enemy after all (and maybe the other entity wasn’t such a bad guy after all? OR WERE THEY?!?). Oh and now there is a new voice actor.

Having an exact mirror of the twist from SS2 was a really disappointing blow and I don’t think I ever really recovered. From that moment on I became less and less willing to overlook the rest of the flaws in the game.

They followed this up with a sequence where your maximum health is being steadily drained due to a poison and you must search an area for the cure. The cure, it turns out, is locked behind a door with a combination lock that cannot be hacked open. You must search through a series of very similar apartments, one of which has the code written down somewhere I guess (I’ll never know because after 30 minutes of searching the same area over and over, I consulted a walkthrough for the door code).

For some reason these apartments are all populated with a small subset of the same enemies that you’ve been fighting all along, except that they have more health than ever. And the vending machines that have historically been widely available before are nowhere to be found.

The result of all this is that where before the game had been about careful resource management and there were a lot of choices for handling situations, the game suddenly became about running around (lest your health get fully drained), dying a lot (because there’s no way to buy health) respawning and fighting the same two enemy types over and over again.

After getting through that section, the cure restored my health. At this point they decided to take away my suite of plasmids (magic powers like telekenesis and pyrokenesis) and started assigning me a random power, one at a time for 30 second stretches apiece. So now, I’m moving around but every 30 seconds the screen goes blue and I have a random new power, many of which suck.

I struggled through this section (now with swearing!) and came to what appeared to be an extended chase sequence with enraged enemies between me and my quarry. I glanced at the walkthrough again, to see how far I was from the bitter end, saw the words “escort mission” and turned the console off.

Here are some lessons I have taken from my frustrations with an otherwise excellent game:

Design lesson 1: Know when to fuck with the player’s abilities.

The random assignment of Plasmids could have been a very cool idea if it had happened near the start of the game. It would have been a great way to give the player a taste of powers to come and given them something to aspire to. Instead, they did it at the end after I’ve already invested all my Adam (points) in one path or the other. By the end of the game, I have devoted many hours of game play to customizing my abilities so that they are fun for me. Why are you taking that away from me and giving me unfun crap?

Design lesson 2: Frantically rushing can be fun. Searching can be fun. Frantically searching is not fun at all.

The reason I chain my keys to my pants is that the experience of tearing apart your apartment when you are late for work is probably one of the most unfun experiences in the world. I’m not sure why the fine folks at Irrational thought it would make for good gameplay.

Design lesson 3: Beware complexity vs complication.

By the end of the game in Bioshock, you have 8 different weapons. Not counting the Wrench and Camera, each of them has 3 different ammo types which are, broadly speaking, anti-soft-things, anti-hard-things and general-purpose. Bioshock is a game of resource management so at any given time you’ll probably have a little bit of each type of ammo left in each weapon. This means that in the heat of combat, you are being asked to remember which of 18 different weapon + ammo configurations you should be using against one enemy or the other, and whether you have enough bullets left to do the job with that weapon.

Halo’s any-2-weapons or even Bioshock’s limited-Plasmids-active system is a much better way of handling this, giving the player lots of choice in the wider scheme of things (tinker with your loadout all you want between fights) while keeping the in-combat decisions down to a small and meaningful set of choices.

Design lesson 4: Make sure all styles are supported at all times.

After however many hours of methodically working my way through areas and hacking vending machines for sustenance, it was irritating as hell to find myself in a situation where moving slowly was explicitly punished and vending machines were nowhere to be found. This is a difficult line to dance on, because you want to switch things up for the player so that they don’t get bored. But the risk of saying “I know you were enjoying doing that but we’re doing THIS now” is that the player says “I don’t want to do that” and then they turn your game off.

In their defence, they stopped short of making me jump across giant chasms.

Design lesson 5: More is not different.

New enemy types are expensive in terms of resources. They take design and implementation and lots of tweaking to make them right. The alternative approach, taking the guys you have and giving them more health or damage is easier. It also risks making people bored. Even if it’s fun to shoot at a guy, shooting at that same guy for twice as long is very unlikely to be twice as fun. Familiarity breeds contempt.

I came to Bioshock with very high hopes and the first half of the game delivered. I just felt that in the end, the game design ran out of steam (har, har).