this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Completely missing the point. The libertarian fantasy utopia completely collapses from a lack of any market regulation. A con artist figures out how to game the society and make a ton of money by being a predatory business man, cornering the market on genetic mutations. The utopia's founder sees this and says it's against the rules to make a bunch of money, sinks the con artist's department store, then a civil war starts because there's a huge underclass that doesn't benefit from any of the utopian libertarian stuff.
I think the in game timeline from the city's founding to civil war is about 9 years. Rapture is shown as completely dysfunctional and I don't know how anyone would interpret it as anything other than a failure cooked up by an insane goofball.
If you've played the Dishonored games or Prey, they have a lot in common with BioShock. The setting, art design and music are the biggest draws imo, the actual gameplay isn't the best for what's mostly an FPS but the atmosphere is terrific. There's still a lot of memorable parts though, Fort Frolic is fantastic and Sander Cohen is a super compelling and fun level boss. I'm a weirdo that likes 2 a lot more than the original, but it has much better gameplay imo and the "defend the Little Sister" holdout sections let you get really creative with setting traps and using the whole sandbox. The Minerva's Den DLC for 2 is fantastic too.
BioShock Infinite's gameplay is pretty dumbed down, they made it a two weapon limit game with recharging shields (?) like Halo and half the weapons are like worse fighting game clone versions of the other faction's version. The story is wibbly wobbly timeline bullshit and the villain sucks imo, but the art direction and setting are cool, the skyline riding stuff is fun, and Elizabeth is a fun companion character. I'd say it's worth a playthrough but I never really wanted to revisit it and never played its DLC.
It's a pretty good game but it's very, very easy compared to the System Shocks. I'd say it's still pretty cool. Good ambiance and cool art direction. It holds up.
If you do play it though, be mindful that as an older game, it can crash frequently on newer PCs, and I don't think it has autosave.
The later games muddied the ideological waters because development was lead by an insufferably smug enlightened centrist prick, but the first game directly says "this Randroid fever dream failed. It failed before your character even showed up."
BioShock is like 90% nonsense, so it's not surprising that people misinterpret it. Like sure Rapture failed, but the actual reasons it failed are so completely nonsensical that I wouldn't consider it to really be a particularly effective anti-libertarian story