Bioshock - AKA System Shock 2!

[WitchCraft]

E3 06: BioShock Gameplay Demo Impressions
After what's seemed like eons, we finally got a chance to see the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 in action. Fans of that game won't want to miss this.

LOS ANGELES--As enormous fans of the open-ended gameplay and unsurpassed atmosphere of the 1999 Irrational first-person RPG System Shock 2, we were floored to finally see Irrational's next game, BioShock, in action. Irrational's Ken Levine was kind enough to give us our first look at the game itself at E3 today, and we were frankly thrilled to find that the dynamic gameplay possibilities and outright creepiness of Shock 2 will almost certainly be equaled (if not surpassed) in BioShock. In short, if you liked Shock 2, you're going to love this.

The demo began with the player character having recently entered Rapture, the failed experimental utopia-under-the-sea where the game takes place. This stratified society of haves and have-nots has been overtaken by a host of horrible, genetically modified creatures, and even the city's technical systems have begun to break down. The sea has thus started to "reclaim" Rapture, as Levine put it, with water pouring through cracks in the outer shell, security systems going haywire, and everything falling into general disrepair.

Immediately after beginning the demo, the player encountered a "big daddy," one of those burly diving-suited guys you've seen in recent BioShock screenshots. Turns out these guys are the protectors of the "little sisters," which look like little girls from a distance but are clearly something much more sinister when viewed up close, what with their greenish, pallid complexions and grotesquely enlarged eyes. Interestingly, neither of these enemies bothered to attack the player when he stood still and watched, and the daddy only assumed a threatening posture when he approached, without actually attacking. Already we were impressed with the variety of enemy behavior beyond a simple "see player, attack" routine.

Anyway, these little sisters work as harvesters, roaming around Rapture and extracting Adam with oversized syringes from any human corpses they find. What do they do with this Adam once they've harvested it? Why, they ingest it and store it in their bellies, of course. Utterly revolting, that, and it merely added to the unpleasant atmosphere that the demo did an impressive job of building as it went.

But let's back up a second. What is this Adam stuff? As it turns out, Rapture's descent into ruin was brought about by (we're guessing) the discovery of a genetic compound of some kind called Adam that can modify biological organisms in new and potentially beneficial ways. But everybody knows you can't gamble with Mother Nature and win, and it looks like once the citizens started messing with their genetics, they lost in a big way. The result is this crumbling undersea metropolis, which is rife with mutated monstrosities and automated, malfunctioning mechanical defenses.

Oh yeah, did we mention those security systems? The mechanized gun turrets, hovering security drones, and wall-mounted cameras? What surprised us most during our demo was exactly how well Irrational has managed to map the gameplay concepts of System Shock 2 onto this totally different, totally unique and original new setting. Levine says the team basically wants to give the player far more to do than he or she can handle in terms of abilities, paths, and general options for tackling a given situation. Thus BioShock holds the same promise of open-ended scenarios that can play out in surprising and delightfully random ways based on how you choose to make use of your myriad available tools.

The free-form character building seen in Shock 2 will also make its return here. But where Shock 2 had nanotech-enabled skill upgrades for your futuristic soldier, in BioShock you'll gain "plasmids," which are biological augmentations that function in essentially the same way. Your plasmids will be interchangeable, so you can run with a few powers for a while, then swap some of them out and try others at the next opportunity. Those opportunities will come, at least in part, when you find one of the cheekily named "Plasmi-Quik" machines mounted on Rapture's walls, evidence of the highly capitalistic society which are accompanied by sickeningly cheerful branding that must have been used to sell the plasmid lifestyle to the city's inhabitants before their downfall.

[WitchCraft]

So about the security systems. Much like Shock 2's Von Braun, Rapture is full of security cameras, turrets, and drones that will ruin your day real quick if you set them off, and as in the previous game, you can hack these defenses with the proper skills to turn them to your own use, or simply destroy them if you have the right weapons and ammo types. We saw another instance where the player needed to access a door across a large room, with both a daddy-and-sister pair and a splicer (another genetically perverted enemy, the third pillar of Rapture's horrid hierarchy) blocking the way.

As one of many possible solutions, the player used an aggressor-scent plasmid on the big daddy, causing the splicer to regard it as a foe and attack it immediately. The player then ran past into the room, and the sounds of battle raged outside for a good ten seconds before a couple of very loud bangs decisively ended the conflict. Levine noted that in past demos, that fight had generally ended very quickly, and if you can't even predict the results of taking the same set of actions repeatedly, who knows how many possible scenarios you'll run into in this game.

Speaking of those splicers, they were the only overtly aggressive enemies we saw in the demo, and they look like lithe human females who just aren't quite right. But we couldn't quite put our finger on why. Maybe it was the fact that the first one we saw immediately jumped up and started crawling across the ceiling when she tried to attack, or the horrible shrieks they all made while they were after the player. Levine pointed out that the enemies in the game, which are all products of Adam, have access to the same set of weaponry you do, which means that potentially no two enemies you face will ever have exactly the same armament.

Rapture itself has a stylistically cohesive, '20s Art Deco look to its architecture, the effect of which is all the more convincing when you factor in the presence of period-style posters and pop art adorning the walls, and even cultural touchstones like Jack Lawrence's "If I Didn't Care" piping over the loudspeakers of the deserted, ravaged record store. And the atmosphere of the game is oppressively creepy, with all those genetic mutants uttering appropriately troubling sounds and even disturbing audio logs of the departed citizenry of Rapture littering the rubble of the city. Not to repeat ourselves, but Irrational really seems to have taken absolutely all of the distinctive elements of Shock 2 and transplanted them into this undersea setting, which is one of the most original settings for a game we've seen in a long time.

It doesn't hurt that the game looks gorgeous running on the Unreal Engine 3, which Irrational has heavily modified and is using to include water volumes, HDR-enabled specular highlights, realistically weighted bodies that float in standing water, and more. We actually saw the game running on the Xbox 360, which was running smoothly in high-def, and which looks like it will feature a console-oriented interface whereby actions like item collection are mapped directly to face buttons on the controller. The PC version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion recently took fire for maintaining a similarly console-style UI, so we hope BioShock on the PC will avoid the same pitfall by including more mouse-and-keyboard-oriented interface hooks.

At the risk of hyperbolizing, or sounding like the fanboys we are, or whatever, BioShock is basically everything we hoped it would be, given its lineage. The game looks to capture and improve upon all the gameplay elements that made System Shock 2 so compelling, and it looks and sounds great (and unsettling) doing it. Just as exciting was Levine's description of the game as being all about choice--not just choice of gameplay, but choice of morality, as you'll be faced with difficult and ambiguous choices minute to minute. We're awaiting further details on BioShock with unfettered zeal, and we'll bring them to you as soon as we get them. Stay tuned.

-GameSpot

[WitchCraft]

Screenshots

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[ViperE]

Looks really good.. but all those games seem so much alike... that, Half-Life 2...
It's like a combination of Half-Life and Deus Ex's rpg system, I guess...

I remember I didn't get really far in System Shock 2, but I want to play it again...
It was good for its time.

[Trouble]

Never really enjoyed SS2. it was just to vauge at the start to really suck me in.... and I kept getting killed by those damn sentry guns!

This however, looks sexy.

[Lowie]

Looks really good.. but all those games seem so much alike... that, Half-Life 2...
It's like a combination of Half-Life and Deus Ex's rpg system, I guess...

Don't. Bring. HL. Into. This.

>=(

Otherwise, screen shots look Hot.

[Trouble]

Half Life sucked lowie, worst.game.ever.


 

[WitchCraft]

I was a big fan of system shock. This new version looks amazingly cool.

[Lowie]

Half Life sucked lowie, worst.game.ever.


 

It's true :*(

[Uncle Nasty]

Phew! anyone visited the official site and downloaded the 300mb trailer? This game.....Uncle Nasty craves it now.


Constant craving.












edit : Oh and its aka system shock 3 not 2.


Jesus.

[Uncle Nasty]

New stuff

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/C5yUcQIaDkE&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/C5yUcQIaDkE&rel=1</a>


FTW!

[Atebash]

SS2... I loved the game but I gave up on it after a while. I was out of ammo, low on health and had a baaad save game

[Access]

SS2... I loved the game but I gave up on it after a while. I was out of ammo, low on health and had a baaad save game

SS2 was mostly made by an Australian mob, so blame us.

Although I really enjoyed it and couldnt enjoy Doom III mainly because it was similar in many ways to SS2, except really really simple and lame.

[Uncle Nasty]

I was out of ammo, low on health

On account of sucking!

[Uncle Nasty]

This game. Get it. Get it now.


JUST GET.IT!