Bioshocker
Bioshock is one of my all-time favorite games and possibly even the best game of the current generation. Ohhhhh, controversial. Or not. There aren't the superlatives to fully describe the environment and setting 2K puts us in. From the moment the diving bell revealed Rapture for the first time, to the the moment Andrew Ryan is interrupted from his game of golf, from that first time we have to look within ourselves before making that Little Sister decision, to putting on the Big Daddy outfit, every moment is pure gaming gold.
So when the latest GamesTM popped through my door with a Bioshock 2 cover, I couldn't have been happier. I pored over the twelve pages to glean any new information and it all sounded brilliant. You play as the first and only sentinent Big Daddy in a Rapture which has settled into a fully realised ecosystem some ten years after the first game played out. Splicers have become the top of the food tree in an effort to survive the trecherous underwater city. And we have rumours of a Big Sister - one of the girls who had been rescued at the end of the first game but felt her heart tug to go back.
But one thing was announced which frightens me... multiplayer. I'm sure most of you out there are very excited about exploring Rapture with other players but I don't believe you have properly thought it through. Whilst Bioshock was a superb game from start to finish, what lifted it above the chaff was that amazingly well crafted story and the way it was experienced through gameplay. Bioshock was an experience, not just a platform for manoeuvering from area to area and killing things. If the sequel does not have a driving narrative from the moment we first have control of our character until the end credits roll, the game will always be the poor relative of its ancestor.
How on Earth could 2K integrate the story of a deathmatch with you and seven mates running around and killing one another into the bigger picture of your underwater prison? Sure, you could argue that cooperative play might be the way ahead but stop and imagine playing the original with someone else. What if someone else picks up and listens to the tape? Or you are in a different area as some piece of the story unfolds in front of your comrades eyes? Ignoring difficulty, number of splicers, frequency of pick-ups or anything else about the gameplay mechanics, you are fundamentally changing the way you experience the game and the story. And this is exactly what made Bioshock great.
You can get away with this in a game such as Call of Duty 4, where despite there being an excellent story throughout the single player campaign, it was still essentially tacked on and hardly integral to the way the game played out. Multiplayer had no direct impact on how you viewed the single player aspects of CoD.
Yes, I played Bioshock and wondered what multiplayer would be like. And yes, it was something which sounded fantastic initially. But after ruminating over it a long time, I think 2K's magnum opus may be one of the rare beasts which, if not ruined, may be damaged with the introduction of other people. I hope I am proven wrong.
