Years after System Shock 2, widely regarded as one of the scariest PC games in existence, developer Irrational Games and publisher 2K Games are bringing the series back into the gaming consciousness with the spiritual successor, Bioshock. This time around, the series is heading underwater in a large Atlantis of a city. According to the developers, the plot follows a mad billionaire who built an underwater city called Rapture to avoid the upcoming nuclear apocalypse. Initially, everyone who lived in this city was happy and carefree, but like all things of such nature, something went wrong. Now all that is left in Rapture are the primitively made weapons, genetic enhancers, and the residents who went insane from genetically enhancing their bodies too many times.
Our demo began with an introduction to Big Daddy, the creepy, hulking man in a large diving suit who wanders the halls looking for dead bodies. On first glance, you would have thought this hulking mass (who carried what appeared to be a spear gun) would have fired upon you on sight. But instead, the scuba suited warrior simply strolled on by and continued to search for bodies. This is because Irrational Games has tried to create a fully living, breathing, active environment all around the main character, a world that exists irregardless of the presence of the player, rather than giving the common sense that the entire world has been manufactured for the purposes of providing the player character’s narrative. Not everything in your environment is meant to harm you. There are autonomous elements and creatures that will go on about their business if you just avoid them. This leads to another big element of Bioshock: choice.
If you wanted to, you could choose to attack Big Daddy and he would be thoroughly pissed off and attack back. Or, you could watch and see something even more interesting. After Big Daddy stumbles upon a fresh corpse, he opens a hatch and out pops Little Sister. Little Sister is literally a little girl in a dress who rides around with Big Daddy. When a corpse is found, Little Sister wanders over to it, kneels down, touches it briefly, and then whips out a large needle-like weapon and begins stabbing the corpse. She’s harvesting Adam, an apparently invaluable resource. You want creepy? Try watching a little girl giggle with glee as she plunges her vicious instruments into a bloody body on the floor.
Don’t mess with Little Sister, though. If you try to wander over and steal her Adam, Big Daddy will get very protective. Little Sister will hide behind him and if you don’t retreat, he will make you retreat. But if you choose to leave them alone, then they’ll go on about their business and you’ll continually run into them later. Each corpse you leave in your wake is a potential source for their endless harvesting. This AI bond between the two characters has been given a great deal of attention by the developers, to the point where if the player is successful at killing either one of them, the other will actually kneel down beside the corpse and begin to weep. A lone gatherer (little sister) will be unable to access to the ducts that allow her to maneuver through the bowels of Rapture without being noticed by hostile entities, while a lone protector (big daddy) will spend most of its time hunting down the party responsible for the gatherer’s demise; such behaviors are only the tip of the iceberg as far as interactions players will witness between enemies, NPCs and their own character. There is seemingly no limit to the number of pairs of gatherers and protectors, so taking out members of one team won’t result in their absence from the rest of the game. Finding out where they come from, and what or whom they are harvesting genetic material for is one of the many mysteries players will have to unravel over the course of the game.
Once past the Big Daddy and Little Sister, we were taken into a bar and met one of the resident’s creative weapons built from primitive parts. Since Rapture was built in the 40s, technology was not that great. So, residents improvised. In this case, they made a turret out of an office chair and an old machine gun. As the Irrational developer who was demoing the game took cover behind the bar, bullets were spraying everywhere. The glasses on top of the bar shattered, causing liquid and glass to rain down over the camera in an amazing graphical display. Speaking of which, the graphics of the game are drop-dead gorgeous and it was quite possibly the best looking game of the show. Just look at the screens! That kind of detail was running at a smooth 60 fps and no slowdown was seen in our demo. The water, a visual theme throughout the game, was particularly impressive as it flowed, pooled and cascaded beautifully throughout the environment and around characters – all a wonderful by product of having programmers and artists solely dedicated to making the water look and feel real. While technically outstanding, the game’s art direction is what serves to truly distinguish it from the pack, as art deco environments lend themselves to wonderful usage of color and shadow, complemented by the mixture of new and old technology, and surreal sights.
Back to being trapped behind the bar, there were a couple of choices that could have been made. The developer could have tried taking out the turret, but it had some pretty tough armor on it. Instead, he decided to use a genetic enhancement to increase his speed so he could fly past without taking damage. Throughout the game, players will have access to tons of genetic enhancements that will truly allow for gameplay customization. You can only equip a few enhancements at a time and improve your skills in a few areas, so the player really has to choose how they want to play through the game.
Some other highlights of the demo included an introduction to the Splicers, another common enemy type. Splicers are Rapture’s resident women who went insane after too many genetic modifications. They are super powered and have blades that not only serve well to deal damage but also allow the twisted creatures to crawl over the walls and ceilings with startling speed. Furthermore, you won’t want to blast them with all the ammo you have because guns and ammo are rare. As you wander Rapture, you’ll find small cases of varying types of ammo and will have to conserve every bullet you find because you’ll never stumble upon a full ammo reserve. If you use your ammo efficiently, you should be fine. For example, use armor-piercing ammo on turrets and save the anti-personnel ammo for the humanoid enemies. On the Splicer, for example, the anti-personnel ammo did twice the damage of other ammo types. Of course, going for head-shots on organic enemies always helps to save bullets.
In addition to the abilities and augmentations that have a direct affect on their physical attributes and combat efficiency, players will also gain abilities that allow them to manipulate the complex AI ecology within the environment. For example, Rapture features an alarm system that sends out defensive machines such as hover drones in order to dispense with the intruder. For reasons that will be revealed over the course of the game, the security system is programmed specifically to attack you, the player, and not any of the other entities running around. However, players can trick the security system through cloaking an enemy with their ‘signature’, causing the security system to leave the player alone, attack the threat, and then immediately shut down once that threat has been eliminated. The player also has the option of hacking the hover drones sent after them, recruiting the device as a ‘pet’ that will follow them around and attack any hostile forces. When asked how many the player could have under their control at any given the time, the result was an amused ‘That’s a good question. We have no idea!’
Players can even manipulate the tight relationship between the petite gatherers and the hulking protectors, as certain pheromones will trick one or the other into thinking that the player is their partner. As such, players could have the protector rushing to their rescue, or have the gatherer lead them through the confusing inter-connected tunnels of Rapture.
Bioshock is not only shaping up to be a great game, it is also quite possibly the best game of show. If not best overall, it was by far the best behind closed doors title. Keep this one on the radar, because we may have a Game of the Year frontrunner here.
