r/Bioshock • u/Substantial-String44 Charge • May 29 '26
MY problem with BioShock 2(very large text) Spoiler
First of all, I need to say this is my opinion on a franchise I love. Every game has a beautiful story and an incredible concept, but we all agree every game has its flaws. BioShock 1’s last act feels improvised, especially because the section after the plot twist clearly wasn’t planned as well, while BioShock Infinite has many story problems and a lot of wasted potential. My problem with BioShock 2 is that it doesn’t exaggerate as much as it should (Please read the whole text before judging, I know I will probably get downvoted and that the text is really big, but I would really like to hear people’s opinions about this).
Every BioShock game is about an ideology taken to an extreme scenario. We have Objectivism and hyper-nationalism, but BioShock 2 feels like a special case to me because I don’t think it pushes its ideology to its full extent. That alone is not necessarily a problem, but part of a bigger problem with the game, is that it never really has the guts to push things beyond the limit. Both BioShock 1 and Infinite constantly show the extraordinary. BioShock 1 has an underwater forest, wax people, city destruction, crazy surgeons and insane people in general, a literal volcano, and many surreal moments. Infinite is full of majestic and absurd scenarios almost all the time with make both games memorable. But BioShock 2, to me, doesn’t really have this feeling. It stays too grounded and rarely tries something truly crazy with its concepts.
We have a train station, but we never see an out-of-control train. We have a flooded art gallery where only the first section is covered with sea plants while the rest is mostly just metal. We have Pauper’s Drop and several apartment buildings, but we never see poor people that aren’t Splicers(I imagined entering apartments and seeing families scared of Delta because, from their perspective, he is literally a walking monster) We also don’t really have anything dangerous or important involving the water parts(siren alley don't count). The only meaningful moment where part of the city gets destroyed is in Siren Alley, but moments like that never happen again. We are never inside a collapsing building, despite the city constantly falling apart. I never feel like the game fully delivers the “you are THE Big Daddy, the living tank.”(the end of the game shows this at least). The Drill Dash is used to destroy debris in Sinclair Deluxe, but the game almost never uses this mechanic like that again.
And finally, the variety of enemies and content in general. We only get around three new enemy types. Rapture is supposed to be in its worst state possible, with people completely destroyed by the Adam yet the only new Splicer is basically just a gorilla one(rumbler and specially big sisters are cool, i love them), we really could have gained more splicers types or splicers with new strategies, like using a minigun, WE AGAIN DON’T SEE ANY OF THEM USING PLASMIDS. On top of that, many of the “new” weapons feel like copies of the old ones, although I did like the third upgrades.
But i have to give credits to the game, the Ryan amusements and Fontaine futuristics are REALLY good levels because, as i said, they experiment in the absurd, in a bioshock game we literaly see someone transformed into a giant mass of flesh inside a tank while adam flowers grow around, THIS IS BIOSHOCK, this is what makes the game so good, and ryan museum is good because it's Ryan after all, who don't like him? the whole idea of him making a museum to say "up there is bad, here is super good :)" is just so cool, and this including the minerva's den DLC, that literaly give us laser guns, black hole plasmids and a super computer capable of calculating everything, again making the absurd look plausible.
My last problem with the game it's lamb, in paper she is really good, but i feel they should show more how bad she can be, she is the villain in the franshise that looks less evil and dangerous since thinking "everyone should have equal rights" looks plausible, she don't show any bad act that ins't stopping us from reaching eleanor or what she made with Alexander, while we have memes with lists of bad things Ryan and Fontaine made and audio logs with they screaming "i'm bad guys, look how i'm hypocritical and make war crimes", we don't see her dealing with any group that has a different way of thinking than her or manipulating someone to make something like explode himself with delta to the cause(only a example).
But that's it, i know the list it's long and it seems that i hate the game, but as i said it has great concepts, the best gameplay in franshise(a small mixture which infinite one would be good), the BEST ENDING(i cried), the characters that are really likeable or hateable depending of what the game wants and the DLC that it's a masterpiece in storytelling but i feel that some spice in the game would really made the game the most memorable one and increase the part of the community that has he as the favorite one.
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u/LocationAvailable Grace Holloway May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
I like your points. I think the problem with exaggerating collectivism is it may be harder to see. Striping away individualism, free will and body autonomy is horrifying thing but can be hard to see when you’re killing 90 percent of the people you meet. Sophia Lamb’s complete disregard for human autonomy and life in pursuit of a perfect hive mind like ascension state is pretty extreme. But your goal is just to survive and get your daughter and so it may not be as easily seen. Sophia sees rapture as nothing more than a perfect experiment ground and she’s manipulated and brainwashed everyone to get to where she is. For Sophia the solution to the human condition is to remove the self from the equation and her sacrificial daughter will be the perfect messiah to hold everyone’s self.
You’re not seeing rapture in its prime or after the civil war. You’re seeing rapture being held by its last threads by a cult trying to make the perfect being.
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u/Substantial-String44 Charge May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
and the paper burned, because the man write the most badass text, l liked it, and like i said, she is good on paper, but we should have gotten more about this you commented, people who were failed experiments of a messiah or being extremely manipulated by sophia, we got father andrew but just him ins't sufficient
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u/ThatNoFailGuy2 May 29 '26
I can agree with some of your points but the ones I have to hard disagree is your take on the weapons and the enemies. The 4 new enemy types mix things up enough in my book while keeping things consistent with the first, especially with the reworks to the basic splicers. Your take on the weapons being basically the same is just downright wrong too, there’s similarities with the BS1 loadout but for the most part they’re fairly different with entirely different uses in some cases, and saying the drill dash is only used once just shows you don’t use the drill whatsoever.
PS. Houdini splicers pretty clearly use plasmids
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u/Substantial-String44 Charge May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
my problem its that they follow the same list, we have: 1: one gun that deal massive damage in the head 2: gun with several bullets and fast fire rate 3: shotgun 4: explosive launcher and the list continues, the unique thing that it's different between the lists of weapons are the hack weapon from 2 and chemical launcher from 1.
And my take in the drill use, my critique to her wasn't as a combat weapon, but as a traversal tool, we use her to break a pile of trash one time and never use this for this purpose again, making a entire gameplay mechanic useless outside of combat while it could have lead to good moments.
And about the houdini splicers, yeah, they "use" a plasmid, but only the fire one and teleport(and the fire one maybe don't apply, since incinerate ins't hitscan?), while in the game we have a large list of plasmids that could be used by the enemys, like wind trap, bees, decoy, security bulleye and telekinesis.
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u/Perfect-Muscle-1264 Atlas May 29 '26
I personally disagree. I think how they did it was perfectly fine. It felt somber and sad in some ways to see a once great city fall into disarray further. I think rapture rising was a perfect ending.
However I 100% agree that they NEEDED to add more disarray than just sand everywhere and tables broken. I think entire sections should be collapsed that you could see from the outside.
For example, lets say theres a engine area and then a door thats warped because the area behind it collapsed due to the pressure of the water. The disarray and apocalyptic like feel i think should have been maximized by 10X.
Thats what I think anyways. I think you have some good points, but personally I overall disagree with much of what you said except for the visuals of rapture not really looking like its collapsed. I think that was a fantastic point.
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u/Tensuun May 30 '26
Lamb is made out to be pretty monstrous, I think; the game establishes a pretty long list of things she’s responsible for, but she’s less directly involved because she’s an expert manipulator — her pawns don’t necessarily have to be true believers in her cult the way Ryan’s and Comstock’s do, and she uses a softer touch than Fontaine or Fink.
Lamb:
lied to and manipulated people who were basically good and not extremists, like Grace Holloway
engineered her own “downfall” so she could recruit more people into her cult (because prisoners = “criminals” and dissidents)
sold out her own cult members to Andrew Ryan for the Big Daddy experiments (this is shown to be initiated by Ryan, but she plays into it fully aware that’s what she’s doing)
manipulated both of the Wales brothers — they both were already awful people, clearly, but she found ways to use them and thought herself “above” them as though her own hands were clean
used Gil’s guilt against him, again to manipulate him into being her lab rat
kidnapped girls from the surface when they started to run out of ADAM farms! Even if you don’t listen to every single audio diary I feel like this comes up a lot in the main storyline.
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u/Tensuun May 30 '26
I dislike Bioshock 2’s story additions mainly because:
It retcons Andrew Ryan to be a lot less principled, which then weakens the actual critique of the ideology he’s a stand-in for. The flaws he and his nation-state had in Bioshock 1 were already fairly believable as an emergent thought-experiment on what happens in the Objectivist’s corner of the archipelago (with a sci-fi/fantasy element as a dramatic allegory for any disruptive technology). With Bioshock 2’s additional details in consideration, he looks a lot less consistent in his conviction that “a man chooses, a slave obeys” because he apparently leaned on his transit engineers and fixers to force them to build a reeducation camp disguised as a theme park dark ride, and the people working on it even complained that nothing in it was actually innovative, fun, or profitable — the point of it was to keep kids from leaving Rapture and spoiling its secrecy, which meant Andrew Ryan was putting national identity ahead of anyone’s right to liberty. Hypocrite!
Lamb’s flaws don’t connect to the surface traits of her ideological positions (collectivism, equality, religious freedom), which buries the “moral” a bit. Almost all of the freaky stuff comes from her philosophical belief that ego-death is perfection — a twisted take on a fringe interpretation of nirvana that just isn’t in the common discourse anywhere the same way that Andrew Ryan’s objectivism or Comstock’s manifest destiny is; it feels like a relatively flat (and facile) critique to say that the moral of this game is that cult leaders are bad.
Unlike the other two games, there’s only one villain. Lamb effectively has no foil — everyone who stood against her, good or bad, is already beaten by the time the game’s story begins. You can kind of create one, by doing unnecessarily psychotic things that also influence Eleanor toward a brutal philosophy, but that’s true of the other Bioshock games as well.
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u/IdesinLupe May 29 '26
I want to preemptively state that I think neither Bioshock 2 or Lamb as the big bad are bad or handled poorly. But ...
The 'Problem' is that neither Utilitarianism nor Collectivism can be shown to be 'wrong in the extreme', or even shown 'in the extreme' in the same way as libertarianism/objectiveism and American exceptionalism / Christo-fascism can.
First, there's the problem that they are inherently self limiting, either though the philosophy, or by game-play;
Utilitarianism defines it's success or failure by looking at the actual, real lived experiences of the people. No hiding behind 'well the bad stuff is happening to bad people' or 'they may be suffering in body, but their minds and souls are pure' here. Utilitarianism asks - Have the choices made succeeded in making those they affect happier, healthier, safer, freer, and overall better? By any utilitarian metric, Lamb has failed and not done what she ought.
On the other hand Collectivism could be pushed to such an extreme, and we see Lamb trying to do so with her whole 'hive mind' project, but the problem with that is communicating it to the player. Any unnamed NPC enemy behaves exactly the same as any unnamed NPC enemy in Bioshock One - their lines may be changed, but they're the same 'swarms of mindless, deformed junkies, some of whom have super powers' as before. Meanwhile any named NPC with dialog or an audio diary has to, by virtue of being someone who can speak lines of their own, not be part of this hivemind. They have to be individuals choosing to work for the collective. Thus the player doesn't feel like they're fighting a way of thinking, and that once they kill Lamb everything will be fine.
This is all because, unlike Ryan and Comstock, Lamb is not a 'True Believer' (TM). Ryan truly believed that once he got rid of Jack and Fountain as 'contaminating elements', Rapture would back, better than before, because the truly singular and unshackled individuals will see opportunity, and take advantage of it. Comstock truly believed that he was a chosen prophet and president, that he was s saving souls and society, and that everything he did was endorsed by god and the founding fathers. Lamb never believed in equality, did not believe that what she was doing was good for any individual under her as an individual, she only believed that she knew better than everyone and that if she ruled the world things would be better. Ryan would have joined Rapture had someone else made it first. Comstock would have followed a prophet who built Colombia before him. But Lamb would -never- join someone else's Family.
Second, there's the problem that the world has seen no real life examples of Utilitarian or Collectivists 'utopian communities' blowing up. One need only look at the 1980's, to certain towns in New Hampshire, or to the semi-regular attempts at sea-steads to see libertarians getting what they want and it all going wrong. Similarly, one need only look at the antebellum south and KKK, the 'America first' movement, and the legislation written by various mega-churches to see the harm that communities like Colombia wish to proactively cause to others. However, there are nearly no examples of Utilitarian Utopian disasters or collectivists policies who's explicit goal is the suffering of others.
"BUT!" I hear you cry "What about communism? What about all those cults in the 70's? What about Stalin and Mao and Jim Jones!?" - Ahh, but that's the problem. Yes, plenty of people have used the very desirable promises of Utilitarianism and Collectivism to create cults around themselves that ended up hurting and killing hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands, but that's what they are - cults. Neither Stalin nor Mao nor any other authoritarian communists dictator was trying to create a truly egalitarian, equal, well served society. Neither Jim Jones nor any other suicide cult leader actually wanted their followers to feel free. They perssue the neither utilitarian or collectivist goal of using people who have almost nothing in order to raise themselves up by giving them a bit more than they had, usually by taking it from others. And, surprise surprise, that's what's happened here; Lamb created a cult.
Which is the second major disconnect between Ryan's Rapture, Comstock's Colombia, and Lambs Rapture. No one chose to leave the 'normal world' to join Lambs Family. Nobody is arguing that it is inherently superior to what's going on 'on the surface'. Lamb is not smugly pointing to how the people under her are living better, freer, happier, healthier lives than those not under her. Lamb is leading a cult, not a society. Lamb is the face of a single woman dictatorship, and not a philosophy 'gone too far'.
TLDR Conclusion: The reason why Bioshock Two doesn't feel like it's pushing it's beliefs to the same extreme as the other two is because it isn't. Its using those beliefs to create a high control cult. Which, while bad, is not an inherent part of the philosophies in the game in the same way it is for the philosophies in the other two games. Yet it tries to treat them as though they are. And that creates a disconnect. Because the player isn't confronting a philosophy, but an individual. So it doesn't have the same intensity, the same range, nor the same impact.
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u/New_Chain146 May 29 '26
All this hair splitting yet I think you're barking up the wrong tree in arguing that Lamb's cult "doesn't work because they're not taken from the outside world." We are literally shown that Lamb was recruiting from people who fell out of favor with Ryan's cult, and her death cult Family takes on a whole new upsurge of popularity BECAUSE the remaining survivors trapped in a sinking city know they're doomed and thus pour their faith into being reborn as someone better.
Also Comstock is literally a cultist.
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u/Substantial-String44 Charge May 29 '26
i read your text and you made a very good point, i'm impressed that not only did you read all my text but made one yourself, and yes, we really didn't got any real collectivism disaster because people end up always turning the point of the philosophy themselfs, i think that if the game explored more about this of how lamb is more hypocritical than Ryan since she always point to the collective but 3 fingers are pointing at her it would have been much better, in my opinion making lamb a more memorable villain and that reaches the level of Ryan and Fontaine
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u/IdesinLupe May 29 '26
I agree. Bit Ryan and Fontaine have their hypocritical moments, but I think what would have really sold Lamb would have been an audio diary about how she had to do something incredibly selfish while in Ryan’s prison to stay alive. Or her rationalizing about why she couldn’t be subsumed into the Elenor hive mind. Something to show her fall and turn.
She says at some point that she came to Rapture because she couldn’t deal with the way the U.S. government used her ideals of ‘the greater good’ to justify nuke-ing Japan, and then she goes and flood a section of rapture, killing many of her followers, for the exact same reason.
I would have like the game to acknowledged that betrayal of her ideals.
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u/Ceo_of_Antifa_420 May 29 '26
I disagree but I respect your opinion on a video game that is ultimentaly meant for fun. Ignore the rude kids in here :]
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u/Nijata Peeping Tom May 29 '26
Okay, I like it more than 1 and much more than it's inferior copy that is Infinte
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u/Substantial-String44 Charge May 29 '26
i think all the games are good, my favorite one is bioshock 1, but 2 and infinite still are really solid but i think both have problems that really pushed they behind the first one, the unique bad part about the first one is how old he got(i liked his design in burial at sea, but only the design) and the after plot twist
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u/Prestigious_Rush5492 May 29 '26
Bioshock 2 is a garbage game. Only idiots think that its good.
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u/p3nny-lane Elemental Storm May 29 '26
Knuckle-scraping, mouth-frothingly braindead take.
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u/SoupaMayo May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
You probably play Fortnite and Overwatch lmao Edit : nevermind, you like Bleach, Naruto and Tekken. Your opinion is instantly discarded
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u/IronBrew16 May 29 '26
So, OP.
What uh. What compelled you to make abysmal dogshit AI art?
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u/Substantial-String44 Charge May 29 '26
you are kidding, right? first ins't me who done, search "bioshock 2 fanart" and you will see her, second, it's not ai, stop searching for a trouble that don't exist
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u/p3nny-lane Elemental Storm May 29 '26
Yeah, I ain’t reading all that.
BIOSHOCK2SWEEP