BioShock 2: First Impressions

BioShock 2 was extremely cheap on Steam a couple weeks ago, so I bought it, and now that I’m done with Mass Effect 2, I installed it. After a couple hours spent downloading it, I managed to play for about an hour before sloppy design made me want to call it quits, and a crash sealed the deal.

In that hour, I learned enough to decide that it’ll probably take me being extremely bored before giving Bioshock 2 another chance, which is really too bad considering how much I enjoyed Bioshock 1.

DRM
I hope there’s a very special circle in Hell reserved for the people who think restrictive DRM is a good idea. I expect them to share this ring with the people who write McDonald’s radio commercials and time out the ads on Pandora, since I hate all those people equally. I can understand that you want to make sure the only people playing your game are playing it legitimately, but there have to be ways to do this that don’t make us want to just give up and play the Indy demos that we were downloading while waiting for the big AAA title to download as well.

I fail to see why a game that I purchased through Steam should require me to trial-and-error my way into logging into an Xbox LIVE account that I haven’t used since I finally gave up on Halo 3 and XBL in general way back in ’08. I fail to see why this service, previously foreign to my computer should be compiled on top of a similar service, just to satisfy the DRM of one game. I cannot fathom why I cannot play a game I legitimately purchased without updating a redundant service that I had hitherto ignored for over two years, and restarting the game updating.

I also fail to see why I should have to enter my CD key multiple times before being able to play my legitimately purchased game. I fail to see why the second time I had to enter it involved quite possibly the least-intuitive CD-key entering interface I have ever used. It boggles my mind that I should have Games for Windows LIVE asking me to enter the CD Key while I [Shift]+[Tab] to bring it up in Steam, and don’t even get the courtesy of a Copy+Paste operation on my second time inputting said CD Key.

Amusing side-note, since Steam tracks the time you spend playing each game, and since the Games For Windows LIVE update made me restart the game, I got a nice opportunity to notice that Steam had recorded me playing 13 minutes of Bioshock 2, all of which were spent trying to convince the DRM to just let me play the gorram game. 13 minutes played without a single second of gameplay…

Controls
What is it with PC games and deciding to just slap in whatever keybinds they want? Mass Effect 2 did it, and now Bioshock 2 is doing it (also, I’m pretty sure Bioshock 1 did it too). I’m glad we can all agree on WASD, but why are things like Use and Crouch not universal among PC shooters? All it does is add “make the keybinds normal” as another step between installing the game and playing it, and with all this DRM, there’s enough extra steps in that interim anyways.

What is it that’s so hard to understand here? [E] is Use, and if it isn’t, it will be as soon as most players get into the Options menu. C is even less intuitive of a Crouch button than the MacBook [CTRL] Key, and that’s saying something. I could be wrong and only remembering my keybinds that made sense to me, but I know when I played Bioshock 1, either 2K or I had decided, rightly so, that [F] was First Aid, [V] was Hack, and [T] was Listen to Journal, but apparently the team for Bioshock 2 disagreed; hence, none of the key assignments make any sense.

Menufail
Maybe it was just a glitch, but when I hit escape to bring up the menu because I realized I had missed an option somewhere that needed fixing, I could not escape the pause menu. I hit [Escape] to pause, did my fiddling about, and when I hit [Escape] again, I got the “Are you Sure you Want to Quit?” dialogue. I hope this was just a glitch, because if it wasn’t, it would further confirm my fears that the Bioshock 2 team missed the day of Game-creation school where they learned about intuitive design. Regardless of the reason, because of this menu issue, I was forced to either quit 30 minutes into the game, or start over from the beginning.

The Opening Cutscene
Now, I don’t mean to sound like the snobby type who demands the removal of any and all cutscenes just because, but I strongly feel the opening cutscene, once I finally managed to start a new game, would have been a much more interesting experience as a playable sequence rather than a cutscene.

For one, everything that happened in the cutscene is something I could, presumably, do, and presumably would do later on. The cutscene version of my dude got to protect his Little Sister; he got to kill dudes; he got to look around Rapture. If you’re not sure whether something that’s happening should be a cutscene or gameplay, here’s a good rule of thumb: If I can do it in gameplay, it should be gameplay. If I can’t do it in gameplay, it can be a cutscene. For example, Bioshock does not have mechanics for me to have a meaningful conversation with a character; that can certainly be a cutscene. It has mechanics for me to walk around and jam a giant drill bit into people’s faces, so that’s probably better served by being gameplay.

As an aside, there’s no reason that it could not have been a series of short, quick cutscenes broken up by gameplay. If there’s no mechanics for that “jump down and stomp on the guy’s head” part, then I would have had no issue with that being a cutscene immediately followed by me resuming control for the actual fight, and then having control taken away from me when the guy hit me with the green blob attack that knocked me out for 10 years or however that was supposed to work. The point is, the best storytelling in games involves the player as much as possible, not merely as an observer, but as an active participant.

Secondly, using the opening sequence as tutorial could have freed up some time after I woke up from my ten-year coma (the one that happened in the game, not the one that happened while I was trying to fight through DRM…), to allow me to jump right into the main plot. If you had taught me how to walk 10 years ago, you wouldn’t have to teach it to me in the present, and the same would be true of the Use key, for opening doors or pounding on vents to get your Little Sister to come out; combat, using the Drill and Plasmids against the Splicers; and maybe even some more complicated moving mechanics like Jumping and Crouching. Instead, I have to watch helplessly as I run around like a badass and then get Metroided out of all my cool abilities and get taught how to do everything again in little baby-steps.

That’s about it. The game crapped out on me and wouldn’t let me out of the menu before I could get into any really juicy details like whether the plot feels like a worthwhile addition to the Bioshock mythos or whether the Vita-Chambers make the game as stupidly easy the second time around or whether it’s just a theory of mine that needs to come out every time someone goes “Why t3h prototype r0x0rs but t3h real 1s sux0rs?????111″ that a prototype can be a superior product to the ready-for-market product if the designers decided the version with all the bells and whistles like intelligence and ability to move beyond a slow plod made the product to expensive for Dr. Tenenbaum’s budget, and thus corners were cut. Only time will tell how I end up feeling about this and many other issues…