Bioshock... Warning, here be spoilers!

HarlequiN

So, I just finished the game for the second time, and have now seen both endings. Both of them were a bit of a let down to be honest, but I might have appreciated them more without having to play through the amazingly generic final boss battle before seeing them. Given the strength of the rest of the game the final battle (and the level prior to it "Proving Grounds") really threw all the smart gameplay away and degenrated to a very bland and predictable empty-all-your-ammo-as-fast-as-you-can-into-the-big-hulking-boss-athon. Sad really.

Anyway, enough about the uninspired endings. One question for you - is Ryan still alive and kicking and off creating a new city for the sequel to be set in ?

Discuss.

Rwolf

I thought he was dead, I mean he has a chunk of a 9 iron in his head... Although nothing like a dose of adam couldn't fix?

Ghostscape

In the game it is mentioned that the vita chambers and bathyspheres only work with people with Ryan's DNA. You're his genetically altered son and are doing fine with them.

Furthermore, there is a deactivated vita chamber, the only deactivated vita chamber in the game, right outside his office. Seeing as how you regenerate at the nearest vita chamber, I think it certainly points to the idea that he had planned the confrontation and had set it up so that he would regenerate at a vita chamber away from his office.

Alternatively, you could say that he deactivated the one nearest him to keep him from regenerating (it does not take him to one further away, but merely fails to regenerate him at the closest one) and that he was choosing to die to illustrate the choice of man, etc etc.

Honestly, it's left open enough that it could go either way. I think bringing him back cheapens his death considerably, but on the other hand he is one of the more charismatic characters in the game and I would like him to live - I'm rooting for him but objectively feel the storytelling is weakened by bringing him back.

Am I making sense? I need to go home and get some sleep.

JordanW

I thought it was a fun game and to be honest the part where you find out the "twist" with Ryan felt like more of an "ending" to me than actually killing fontain.

j_bradford

Yeah just to touch on what you said about the final battle with Fontain, I agree it was a major let down. I was hoping for something that was akin to when you found Ryan; creepy, and thought out more.

With that said, Ryan surviving and a sequel to the game doesn't make sense to me. You either accepted or denied the key to the city and it showed the next 40+ years of your life in one of the endings. I'd rather see 2k take their gameplay mechanics and storytelling techniques to a new, unique game world.

Striff

I agree, the ending was a major major letdown. The rest of the game was great, but wow, how can you make such a great game and give it a crap ending like that?

greenj2

I was blown away by the Bioshock television commercial, so an ending cinematic consisting of around a minute of sappy narrative over closeups of aging hands was a major letdown.

The "evil" ending was only slightly more interesting but equally hurried and vague. I would have liked to know a lot more about the fate of the player character and Rapture itself.

The Ryan twist was awesome. Really cleaver stuff linking the "would you kindly?" mind control with the drip-fed, objective based gameplay of an FPS.

Oh yeah, generic boss dude at the end was total balls. Especially after chasing Fontaine earlier and seeing him as a regular (spliced) human. So while you were transforming yourself into a big daddy, he transformed himself into a 5 meter tall bronze sculpture? Pretty impressive for a mobster/grifter. Bah.

Motz

<gripe>

The good ending isn't possible in my eyes. You become a big daddy, and have your vocal chords ripped out and altered by that machine. How the hell are you going to live that long to lead a normal life? Not to mention you juice up with plasmids nearly 10 times the amount splicers seem to. Both endings were ridiculous. The last fight was ridiculous, and the twist was fairly obvious. Having the guy ask you to kill him was just plain odd.

I was hoping it would be more about the origin of the slugs and such, not some gang mob fight that had nothing to do with being in rapture. Could have happened anywhere. No outside ocean floor walks, you can't use the big daddy gun, and the helmet obstructed the view so bad it was difficult to play if you got that part first. Pictures of Kraken in several offices and you don't fight that, or anything remotely interesting. You never see what a big daddy really is. It's assumed it's just a human, but why would an adult human volunteer to be turned into a monster. Same goes for little sisters, Id kill anyone who tried to take my daughter, yet all these recordings lying around are about how people just let them take the girls.

The last boss fight was also a giant plot hole. If all it took to remove adam was picking up a little sisters gun and sucking it out of people, why the hell would you ever even need to choose to kill one. Just take the adam for yourself from the dead bodies?

And lastly. Little sisters help you after Ryan makes you kill him. They just help you as yourself. Why would you need to dress up as a big daddy in the end to get one to help you? The little sisters at that part are human, not slug infested yet. you couldn't maybe... ask one? Or have the female doctor get them to open the door?

Suspension of belief was nil.

</end gripe>

bounchfx

"Id kill anyone who tried to take my daughter, yet all these recordings lying around are about how people just let them take the girls."

the girls were orphans, I believe.

"Little sisters help you after Ryan makes you kill him. They just help you as yourself. Why would you need to dress up as a big daddy in the end to get one to help you?"

excellent question.

NeoShroomish

I'm pretty sure it's because only the possessed ones can open the doors, so you have to lure them out and trick them into opening the doors for you.

I quite liked both endings myself, I got the bad one first and then replayed it for the good one. IThe escort mission was pretty pointless though, something the game could've done without.

Motz

[ QUOTE ]
I'm pretty sure it's because only the possessed ones can open the doors, so you have to lure them out and trick them into opening the doors for you.

[/ QUOTE ]

Look at the ones you escort, they are not possessed. It's a training grounds for them. They haven't been altered yet supposedly. Hence why they can be killed.

Another good point.. why the hell would another big daddy attack you while escorting the girl? You practically alter yourself to smell horrid for the rest of your life etc and become one. Only job he could get in the good ending would probably be a trash man : /

coldwolf

I only played the demo and not I'm not going to buy the game, but I'm just wondering about the plot. Some friends of mine said there's some seriously heavy religious undertones throughout the game (so much so that they're not really undertones after a little bit). True?

Motz

Uh.. not at all. There may be one guy pinned up on a wall similar to being crucified, but there is zero religion in the game. not even a single church in rapture. There is one tiny mention of why Rapture was built, and part of it mentions how each body of government/religion takes what man sews. It says something like who the fruits of labor belong to, and for America its the poor, religion says it goes to god and communism goes to everybody.

But yeah.. your friend is looking into things that don't exist. I'm Shintoist and my wife is Roman Catholic, we've both played it twice, and never caught any of it.

greenj2

There is plenty of anti-religious content in some areas the game. That guy Motz mentioned was crucified presumably for trying to smuggle bibles into Rapture. In that level there are crates and crates of bibles and crucifix's marked as seized illegal contraband.

Though the game itself doesn't advocate anti-religious sentiment. Those few instances where it occurs are completely in context with the story and philosophy of Rapture, a city that prides itself on being god and government free. There's also comparatively far more anti-government content laced throughout the game overall.

I wouldn't imagine a religious person would be offended while playing this and if they were I'd put it down to them being way too uptight. My two cents anyway.

Hito

[ QUOTE ]
the girls were orphans, I believe.

[/ QUOTE ]

not always at least, maybe some of them were. There's a line of audio diaries describing a mother looking for her lost daughter and finding out later that her daughter has been turned into a little sister. I think a fair number if not a majority of the little girls were given up by parents who thought the becoming a little sister meant going to school. There was an audio diary that sounded like an advertisement for girls to join the little sisters, as if it was girl scouts.

Hito

where is the point of no return to see the 2nd ending?

Campaignjunkie

Point of no return for the "evil" ending: If you harvest a single little sister, I think. Pretty lame. I thought the ending was a bug, the first time I saw it - it was so abrupt and seemed like it had little / nothing to do with how I actually played.

Hito

so if you harvest any little sisters you get the evil ending, if you don't, you get the other ending... Okay.

Joao Sapiro

thats a bit hasselhof...

Steve Schulze

With reagrds to the Little Sisters, Little Wonders is advertised as a respected girls boarding school. You can often hear an audio advertisement for it when you're standing near a Gatherers Garden. The children weren't taken away from their parents, they were handed off to Ryans cronies without a struggle.

As for harvesting, I believe you get one chance, after which Tenenbaum presumably chews you out. Any more infanticide results in the bad ending.

Some interesting points about flaws in the story line brought up in the this thread. I think I was happier not considering them =/

Armanguy

Anyone see this guy in bioshock?

Uly

That's the Slowpro. (Slow Protector Fucked Up Melee.) He was referenced to in a few earlier interviews, and got cut from the game in order to polish the two further developed big daddy types. Had some crazy artillery on him, and as the name suggested, a fucked up melee attack.

There's actually another variant that got cut, a different version of the bouncer.

Gmanx

I was disapointed that the big daddies were just 'guys'. I wanted them to be something more mysterious.

In the storyline, there are hints at them being sea-based creatures - the noise they make is very whale-like, and some of the concepts (in the 'art of pdf') showed them having tentacles and such.

All through the game I was thinking "Why do they need diving suits, unless it's to keep the water IN??". It would have been a lot cooler to discover some kind of genetic training facility where they bred squid (or whatever) to protect the little sisters, enveloped in a water-filled diving suit.

I'm sure there were elements like that in the storyline that got cut pretty late, all the signs are there (it seems to me).

lio

[ QUOTE ]
So, I just finished the game for the second time, and have now seen both endings.

[/ QUOTE ]

there are three endings actually... even though the 3rd is the same video as the evil ending just with a slightly different voice over... when i finished bioshock i got the evil ending (well, one of the two evil ones anyways) but didn't bother to play through the entire game again to see the other ones - i just watched the bink videos from the 'BinkMovies' directory:
-HarvestedGatherers.bik
-KilledGatherers.bik
-SavedGatherers.bik

it was a good game but i think they missed a lot of chances... they could have done so much more with all the plasmids and the character development... i like that you have to make choices throughout the game but then they don't really matter all that much.
at times the game is brilliant but then there are lots of moments where it is just an average shooter that makes you go here and there to collect stuff and bring it somewhere else - which isn't even a challenge because you've got the big arrow pointing in the right direction so you don't even have to search.
if it wouldn't look that great i'm sure it would have made far less of an impact.

flaagan

[ QUOTE ]
Really cleaver stuff linking the "would you kindly?" mind control with the drip-fed, objective based gameplay of an FPS.

[/ QUOTE ]

The only 'fly in the ointment' for that whole thing is... you're actions don't change after you've been unhitched from Ryan's 'mind control'. There's not a complete sense of purpose, just the gal telling you to what to do and Ryan telling you what not to do... so your superiors have just moved up a step in the food chain and you're still stuck at the bottom.

That gripe aside, loved the game.