Bioshock's shortcomings

There are a lot of appreciation threads, how about a disappreciation thread? Bioshock wasn't some game that Zeus made and then gave to the masses via golden chariot. Project Icarus will probably be like that... oh wait.

My point is there's no use in feedback if it's all just 'Best game evar!', even if I'm the only one to post something in this thread at least someone out there will remember that there's always room for improvement

I only played the game once because I saw no reason to play it again. With the inventory system you got every weapon and every plasmid on your first run of the game. If I had been evil it would've only been a difference of about 50 adam, and the amazing variety of 2 different endings (the third one doesn't even count) didn't persuade me to play through the game again.

Hacking was a joke, and what kind of safe lets you 'buy it out'? The last boss was easy as hell, I don't know if it was rushed, you guys just got lazy, or you just had to dumb it down like every other aspect of the game.

/rant

Easily Bioshock's primary shortcoming was the shooting. It was a very capable shooter but i personally thought every gun felt "soft", and reverted constantly to the wrench+plasmids. Aiming was loose, enemy hit reactions didn't feel genuine, and in general shooting was just not what the game did well.

Secondly, i felt the game chickened out by making the little sisters appear alien. The moral choice was never difficult, and i never felt bad for harvesting. Who cares about these fucked up big headed zombie monster children with creepy warped voices? I remember being hugely disappointed because of how the sisters were portrayed in early footage and trailers, and when it boiled down to a binary choice with little real sense of consequence on either side.. Bummer.
Had they been identifiably human, sickly, Oliver Twist-ian underclass children or something, then we'd be talking moral trauma.

No sharks with lasers!

discoslinky said:
No sharks with lasers!

Hmmm....

Initially the Vita-Chamber system was a bit too easy to abuse, but that has since been fixed so I won't mention that.

I'd say that the lack of a way to check your current equipped plasmids and what you're carrying was quite weird for me. A proper inventory system would have been quite nice, that way you could tell what you actually had and you could choose when to use perishable items. It wouldn't have really taken from the immersion of the game since there were already a lot of inventory like screens and it would have made the player's planing to certain situations more precise etc...

The hacking game's difficulty was a bit odd for me. It started out super easy, became super hard and then became super easy again. I think it should have scaled a bit better and hacking tools should have been made a bit harder to use. Whether this be to make it you actually have to do something to use them or whatever...

That is linked to another difficulty related point; money and ammo for the majority of the game IMO were quite easy to come across. There weren't really any big items you could save up for to justify collecting money and items (selling things would have been cool ) so you usually ended up with the ability to just purchase to find whatever you needed to. It might have been good actually if more items could only have been accessed only via U-Invent machines... Though that would become frustrating without a proper inventory system.

I also found that the game gave you access to all of these crazy powers, weapons and abilities and many ways to combine them, yet the game never really put you in a situation where you were encouraged to do so. When I first had that "shock Splicers in water" message, I thought as the game progressed it would reward you for coming up with complex traps etc... but most of the time, even in Big Daddy fights, things really fell into a sort of "unload everything you got 'til it drops" type of thing. I'm not sure how I'd try and fix this issue as it's probably come down to the design of indivdual action pieces, but it is something that would have raised the gameplay experience in general greatly I think.

The Little Sister Big Daddy combo worked well mostly, but the morality did feel a little light the more time you did it, especially after you knew you got nearly as much Adam for consistently saving the Little Sisters (that and Adam not being as vital as Atlas first suggested). I think a bit more of a greyness could have been introduced, or even an incentive that was more linked to the story. It almost seemed that the incentive of saving the Little Sister was story related and the incentive to harvest them was gameplay related. Giving incentive on both fronts more heavily probably would have made the decision harder and bringing into view the point of whether the player would be willing to kill a little girl for whatever the reward was.

There are a few other things, but I don't feel like typing more right now. Though looking back on what I just wrote, I haven't exactly conveyed what I'm thinking correctly, so if you're confused, just ask on what exactly specifically doesn't make sense in terms of my reasoning etc...

The final boss was disappointing, but my biggest gripe is probably the texture pop-ins and the occasional freezing or slow down. And yeah hacking was pretty annoying and could be easily avoided, especially later in the game.
I also hate that Andrew Ryan isn't in the third act of the game, so the third act is weaker than the first and second.

I bought Bioshock via Steam during one of their "insanely low price" deals. I figured, I've been interested, it's only five bucks today, why not? So I plunk down my hard-earned cash (such as it was) and installed.

Only to find out that my gently-aged computer can't run it. At all. Why? Because they require cards that have a higher shader model version than I have. Everything else -- my processor, RAM, video memory, everything -- is equal to or above what the game wants.

So I do some poking around, and find that there's a set of fan-made 'hacks' that redo the lighting effects to allow for older cards to work. Awesome! So I figure out which version I need for my card, get that, drop it in place, and start up. The end result: the game runs, but everything that is darkened is extremely black -- like, black enough to where it might as well not exist. Changing gamma settings doesn't help; if it's dark, it's very dark.

Okay, I think, I'll deal with that. It's only really an issue at the very start, until I move enough to get the lights to come on.

I manage to work my way around to my first fight with a Big Daddy, and I run into another problem: lag. Not the sort where the framerate drops to the teens, or the game halts altogether. No, this is a lag between my input devices and the program itself. When there's a lot going on, there's about a half-second gap between my doing something -- moving the mouse, pressing (or releasing) a movement key, whatever -- and it actually happening.

To simulate this, next time you play, force yourself to wait for as long as it takes you to say "okay" every time you want to do something. More specifically, put yourself in front of an enraged Big Daddy and do this.

Okay, okay, I know. Get a newer video card. I plan on doing so once I can afford it. (I've been holding off because the whole system needs renovation.) But when I saw Bioshock on other people's computers and on the Xbox, I couldn't help but wonder where the extra effects were that required the newer cards. I really didn't see anything that my existing card shouldn't've been able to handle.

Rant's over. I'll be gleefully reinstalling the game once my system's gotten an upgrade.

The final boss took me somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10 minutes. I died twice I think in that time frame . Kind of a let down when I invested so many hours to get there, and ultimately It felt like some of the Big Daddy fights were more challenging.

Building on Axident's point, I also wish BS had done more to play up the RPG elements of the game (Inventory systems, shops to re-sell weapons & plasmids, etc.) But that's a pretty small complaint.

Would have enjoyed a better final boss fight, and mabye a bit more clarity on certain plot twists. And a few more character sprites wouldn't have hurt.

@ armchair

Yeah, Andrew and Sander being the only people that had their own character models was....pretty upsetting. Idk, kinda detracted from the wonderful atmosphere Irrational created.

Mother Goose had one.

But I agree, more actual character interaction like in Half-Life would have helped at a few points IMO.