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The game is set in , and follows Jack who discovers the underwater city of Rapture. Built by business magnate Andrew Ryan to be an isolated utopia, the discovery of ADAM, a genetic material which grants superhuman powers, initiated the city's turbulent decline. Jack attempts to escape, fighting ADAM-obsessed enemies and Big Daddies , while engaging with the few sane humans that remain and learning of Rapture's past.
The player, as Jack, can defeat foes in several ways by using weapons, utilizing plasmids that give unique powers, and by turning Rapture's defenses against them. Bioshock ' s concept was developed by Irrational's creative lead, Ken Levine , and incorporates ideas by 20th century dystopian and utopian thinkers such as Ayn Rand , George Orwell , and Aldous Huxley , as well as historical figures such as John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. The game includes elements of role-playing games , giving the player different approaches in engaging enemies such as by stealth , as well as moral choices of saving or killing characters. Additionally, the game and its biopunk theme borrow concepts from the survival horror genre, notably the Resident Evil series. Bioshock is considered a spiritual successor to the System Shock series, on which many of Irrational's team, including Levine, had worked previously. BioShock received universal acclaim and was particularly praised by critics for its narrative, themes, visual design, setting, and gameplay.
It is considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made and a demonstration of video games as an art form.
Bioshock was followed by two sequels, BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite , released in and , respectively. Ports of Bioshock were released for macOS and mobile following its console releases.
BioShock takes place in Rapture, [5] [6] a large underwater city planned and constructed in the s by individualist business magnate Andrew Ryan , who wanted to create a utopia for society's elite to flourish outside of government control and "petty morality". This philosophy resulted in remarkable advances in the arts and sciences, which included the discovery of "ADAM": a potent gene-altering substance which is created by a species of sea slug on the ocean floor. ADAM soon led to the creation of "Plasmids", mutagenic serums that grant users super-human powers like telekinesis and pyrokinesis.
To protect and isolate Rapture, Ryan outlawed any contact with the surface world. Together with doctors Brigid Tenenbaum and Yi Suchong, Fontaine would create his own company dedicated towards researching plasmids and gene tonics. Fontaine was then killed in a shootout with police, and Ryan took the opportunity to seize his assets, including control of the Little Sisters.
In the months that followed, a man amongst the poor named Atlas rose up and began a violent revolution against Ryan, with both sides using plasmid-enhanced humans known as "Splicers" to wage war on one another.
To protect the Little Sisters, Ryan created the "Big Daddies": genetically-enhanced humans surgically grafted into gigantic lumbering diving suits, designed to escort the sisters as they scavenged ADAM from dead bodies. The conflict turns Rapture into a war-torn crumbling dystopia , resulting in societal collapse, countless deaths, many Splicers becoming disfigured and insane from ADAM abuse, and the few sane survivors barricading themselves away from the chaos.
In , the protagonist, Jack, is a passenger on a plane that crashes in the Atlantic Ocean. Atlas requests Jack's help in stopping Ryan, directing him to a docked bathysphere where he says Ryan has trapped his family. Tenenbaum intervenes and insists Jack should spare them, providing him with a plasmid that can remove the sea slug from their bodies and free them of their brainwashing.
Infuriated, Atlas has Jack fight his way through various districts towards Ryan's lair, forcing Jack to contend with Ryan's deranged allies along the way: such as the mad surgical doctor J. Steinman, and insane artist and musician Sander Cohen. Eventually, Jack enters Ryan's office, where Ryan is casually playing golf and explains Jack's true origins. Through his dialogue and the evidence gathered up to this point, it is revealed that Jack is actually Ryan's illegitimate son, sold by Ryan's mistress as an embryo to Fontaine, who then had Tenenbaum and Suchong rapidly age Jack into adulthood and turned into an obedient assassin, capable of accessing any of Rapture's systems locked to Ryan's genetic code and thus ensure Fontaine's victory in the war.
Jack was then smuggled to the surface with false memories of a normal life, waiting to be called back to Rapture when needed. Ryan suddenly takes control of Jack's actions by asking "Would you kindly? Jack also realizes he was responsible for the plane crash, having read a letter onboard containing the same trigger phrase.
Ryan chooses to die by his own will, and compels Jack to beat him to death with a golf club. Atlas then reveals himself to be Fontaine, having faked his death and used "Atlas" as an alias to hide his identity, while providing a heroic figure for the poor people to rally behind for his own ends. With Ryan finally dead, Fontaine takes control of Ryan's systems and leaves Jack to be killed by hostile security drones. Jack is saved by Dr.
Tenenbaum and the Little Sisters that had been cured, and is helped to remove Fontaine's mental conditioning, including one that would have stopped Jack's heart. Jack pursues Fontaine to his lair, where he transforms himself into a blue-skinned humanoid creature by injecting himself with a large supply of ADAM. BioShock is a first-person shooter with role-playing game customization and stealth elements, and is similar to System Shock 2. The player takes the role of Jack as he is guided through Rapture towards various objectives.
The player collects multiple weapons and plasmids as they work their way through enemy forces. The player can switch between one active weapon and one active plasmid at any time, allowing them to find combination attacks that can be effective against certain enemies, such as first shocking a Splicer then striking them down with a wrench.
Weapons are limited by ammunition that the player collects; many weapons have secondary ammo types that can be used instead for additional benefits, such as bullets that inflict fire damage. The player can restore their health with medical packs found throughout Rapture. If the player's health reduces to zero, they will be regenerated at the last Vita-Chamber that they passed with limited amounts of health and EVE.
A patch for the game allows players to disable these Vita-Chambers, requiring players to restart a saved game if the character dies. The game provides several options for players to face challenges.
In addition to direct combat, the player can use plasmids to lure enemies into traps or to turn enemies against each other, or employ stealth tactics to avoid detection by hostiles including the security systems and turrets. The player collects money by exploring Rapture and from the bodies of defeated foes; this money can be used at vending machines to restock on ammunition, health and EVE, and other items; like security cameras, vending machines can also be hacked to reduce the costs of items from it.
The player can only have a limited number of plasmids and tonics active at any time, and can swap between the various plasmids and tonics at certain stations located throughout Rapture.
Levine had attempted to pitch a sequel to System Shock 2 to Electronic Arts , but the publisher rejected the idea based on the poor performance of the earlier game. At this point, Levine wanted to return to a game in the same style as System Shock 2 , a more free-form game with strong narrative.
In , the team had come up with a core gameplay mechanic idea based on three groups of forces; drones that would carry a desirable resource, protectors that would guard the drones, and harvesters that would attempt to take the resource from the drones; these would eventually bear out as the Little Sisters, Big Daddies, and Splicers in the final game, but at the time of the concept, there was no set theme.
They kidnap her and reprogram her, and it was a really dark person, and that was the [kind of] character that you were.
Over the decades, the genetic experiments within the labs had gradually formed themselves into an ecosystem centered on the three groups. These elements included the use of plasmids and EVE, the need to use stealth or other options to deal with automated security systems, direction through the environment from a non-player character relayed over a radio, and story elements delivered through audio recordings and "ghosts" of deceased characters.
While the gameplay with the reveal was similar to what resulted in the released version of BioShock , both design and story changed, consistent with what Levine says was then-Irrational Games' guiding principle of putting game design first. The game's lead level designer was Bill Gardner.
The team were particularly influenced by Resident Evil 4 , including its approach to the environments, combat, and tools, its game design and tactical elements, its "gameplay fuelled storytelling" and inventory system, and its opening village level in terms of how it "handled the sandbox nature of the combat" and in terms of "the environment".
He saw the uniqueness of the art deco styling of the building along with imagery around the building such as the statue of Atlas near it, and recognized that these were spaces that had not been experienced in the first-person shooter genre.
At this point in the development, the backdrop of Rapture had been fleshed out, but they had yet to come on how to represent the drones, protectors, and harvesters from their original game idea. The Big Daddy concept as the protector class was developed early in the process, but the team had yet to reach a satisfying design for the drones, having used several possible designs including bugs and dogs in wheelchairs.
The idea of using little girls came out of brainstorming, but was controversial and shocking within the team at first, recognizing that they could easily be killed and make the game more horrific in the style of Night Trap. This approach did not sit well with Levine, and 2K Games asserted that they would not ship a game "where the player gets punished for doing the right thing".
It sort of came very late and it was something that was requested by somebody up the food chain from me. Other elements came into the story design.
Levine had an interest in "stem cell research and the moral issues that go around [it]". The team had agreed that Jack's actions would be controlled by a key phrase but struggled with coming up with one that would not reveal Atlas' true nature. Levine happened upon "Would you kindly" after working on marketing materials for the game that asked the reader hypothetical questions such as "Would you kill people, even innocent people, to survive? Numerous tensions within the team and from publisher 2K Games continued during the development process.
According to LeBreton, Levine was distrustful of some of the more egotistical newer hires and was often arguing with them to enforce his vision of BioShock. One such case was an apparent Easter egg found in the remastered version in , where under certain conditions, the player can end up looking at an object with the description "Paul Hellquist did not do his Job".
Both Levine and Chris Kline, the game's lead programmer confirmed the message was a cheeky jab at Hellquist left as a debugging message; Kline and Hellquist were developing the systems to show descriptions of objects to players when looked at, and Hellquist offered to complete all the necessary descriptions in-game; to jokingly help prod Hellquist along, Kline put "Paul Hellquist did not do his Job" as the default message within the executable code.
While the code message was changed for the original release, the remastered version likely used a pre-final version of the BioShock code, according to Kline.
A critical playtest of the game occurred in January , where initial feedback from the players was mostly negative, including issues of the setting being too dark, having no idea where to go, and distrusting Atlas, who at the time was voiced in a southern drawl, described as a "lecherous Colonel Sanders".
At this point, BioShock did not have many cutscenes, as Levine was ideologically opposed to them. However, the following day, Levine and the lead group came up with a "cheap" way to correct this, by adding the initial cut scene within the plane and the subsequent plane crash, as this helped to set the time frame, place the player in the role of the character, and alluded to the "would you kindly" line later in the game.
In an interview in , Levine had come to recognize that BioShock reflected several Jewish themes, though this was not intentional. Levine, who considers himself culturally Jewish but does not follow Judaism , had grown up in New Jersey but spent much of his childhood time with his father who worked in Manhattan's Diamond District and visiting his grandparents in Queens , a neighborhood with a large proportion of Eastern European immigrants.
Thus, Levine was exposed to much of the Jewish culture that flourished in the area following World War II and understood some of the anxiety Jewish people faced. I think Jews are always going to feel a little bit like they don't belong wherever they are. There's always that 'what if we have to flee' mentality.
BioShock uses a heavily modified Unreal Engine 2. One significant improvement they added was improved water effects, given the nature of the game's setting, hiring a programmer and artist to focus on the water effects. BioShock contains both licensed music and an original score. The licensed music from the s, s, and s can be heard playing on phonograph throughout Rapture.
In total, 30 licensed songs can be heard throughout the game. He composed his pieces to blend with the chosen licensed music as to keep the same feel, while also trying to bring out something that was "eerie, frightening and at times beautiful" to mesh well with Rapture's environments. Available in MP3 format, the score—composed by Garry Schyman—contains 12 of the 22 tracks from the game.
An initial demo of the game was made available in August for Xbox and Microsoft Windows. The first patch for the Xbox version was released about two weeks after release to fix some of the game stability issues players had reported. In December , a common patch was released for both the Xbox and Windows version. The patch included additional content such as new Plasmids, new achievements for the Xbox version, and additional graphics settings to address some of the field-of-view issues identified by players.
See below. The patch also added in an option to disable the use of Vita-Chambers, a feature requested by players to make the game more challenging, as well as an achievement to complete the game at its hardest setting without using a Vita-Chamber. In an August interview, when asked about the possibility of a PlayStation 3 version of BioShock , Ken Levine had stated only that there was "no PS3 development going on" at the time; [65] however, on May 28, , 2K Games confirmed that a PlayStation 3 version of the game was in development by 2K Marin , and it was released on October 17, While there were no graphical improvements to the game over the original Xbox version, [67] the PlayStation 3 version offered the widescreen option called "horizontal plus", introduced via a patch on the version, while cutscene videos were of a much higher resolution than in the DVD version.
A demo version was released on the PlayStation Store on October 2, IG Fun recognized they would not be able to include the full storyline within a single mobile title, and so planned to split the title into three "episodes".
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