"somebody up the food chain from me" implies a suit on the executive level of 2K.

Which yet again proves that executives should have absolutely no say in game development policies.

I'm in agreement with you, Luke. Last third of the game did become tedious.

The multiple endings was slightly disappointing to me, but since I was good the entire time, the ending was much more satisfying to me than I'm guessing it was to people who flip flopped and got the bad one.

Levine Almighty is so nice. He needs to be king of the game developers.

Has there ever been an example of exectutive meddling that turned out good?

I'm not trying to be a smartass here, I'm genuinely wondering if the suits have ever changed things for the better. You hear so much about how they do bad, have they done good?

The whole "Becoming a ****spoiler**** " to get through doors part was incredibly stupid in my opinion. That said, I rather liked the ending cinematic, even if the "You can be Hitler or Jesus, nothing in between" thing was annoying.

The ending was pretty bad. Glad Levine was so cool about it, though.

I still don't have my box to send my figure back. Bunch a junk.

shrug, i liked the endings to bioshock, im not sure what people were expecting.

Suits have no place in the gaming industry.

Asides to watch the money.

Once they start opening their shitfilled mouthes and chip in to the production process, things go sour fast.

EDGE points this out exactly, the games looses its amazing intro feel by the last part of the adventure... and now we know why.

Reminds me of what bugged me most about Fable. You could be the most evil guy in the universe, or the biggest saint the world has seen...and the good/bad ending is entirely determined by one final decision.

The endings didn't bother me, per se, but relative to the rest of the game, they weren't that fantastic. Granted, the rest of the game was a little too awesome to fairly compare, but it would be nice to see, perhaps in sequels, the game play out more appropriately to justify the choiced you have made for the past X hours.

Franchise. Phooey. Do something new, if you're so creative.

I still wish there was a bit more to the plasmids though. Since just fire, electricity and ice was a bit boring. D: But I guess we can wait for Bioshock 2 if they do make it.

I rarely used the plasmids later on cept for the shock one for its stun ability, just due to how little damage they did.

I still think that Mr. Ryan looks like an evil walt disney. :o

*choices

@TRT-X:

That's one of the things about Mass Effect that I'm excited about. Doing something good doesn't erase the blunt actions you've taken in the pass. Rather than having one bar that raises and decends between red and blue, you have two separate bars that keep track of both aspects of your character.

You can't undo killing and orphan by saving a kitten from a tree, so to speak. And vice versa. That's the best way to go for games with moral decisions, methinks.

See, the problem is that despite how everyone felt a bit 'meh' about the endings, it still rated incredibly well and sold a bunch.

Ergo, the suits would probably feel justified in interfering. This pisses me off.

@Witzbold: walt disney is evil

@TRT-X:

Well if you harvest even on little sister you get the bad ending.

I don't even know what the bad ending is though. It's very rare that i play through a game more than once.

Chrono Trigger ftw. May not have a million endings, but it had like 11, most of them were pretty good too.

@Witzbold:

Just fire, electricity, and ice?

BEES!

Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't ever get tired of shooting out bees...

Quite personally as much as I enjoyed the Bioshock story, its not a game that Id play through again though. Since there isnt too much to really experiment with that wont lead to getting yourself killed due to lack of damage with the plasmids. :/

Though I have seen some insane vids of people kicking ass on hardmode.

Ken Levine Face Says: A yo, you gonna use dat razor?

@Heliophage: The bees were so weak though, and even the lv 3 one didnt feel that much different from the lv 1. Also you had to be pretty spot on to hit peeps with it. I kinda wished they made it so that they just pretty much pwn anyone around you at the max level.

The effect of the bees on the arm model is fucking sweet though!

Also in the game one thing that I was a little disappointed with was the lack of variation with the enemies. Later on it was more like they replaced different monsters with just stronger versions of old ones with more HP. Would have been nice to see more mutated folk, and watch weaker ones run in fear from stronger ones.

SPOILERS AHEAD... but then, why are you reading this article if you haven't finished it? :-)

Bioshock was broken up into basically 3 acts -- the first ending with the submarine, the second with your encounter with Ryan, and the third going to the end. In my opinion, these first two acts were incredible from a storytelling perspective. I felt fear, paranoia, betrayal, and helplessness. The end of the second act was one of the most amazing sequences I've ever seen in a game. Without really spoiling anything, I found the inability to act during that scene drew me into the character's state of mind in a way I've never seen before. I actually stayed up for a while pondering the implication of what I had learned and seen, and impressed with how they subverted your expectation of videogame conventions.

So it was quite a letdown when all the philosophical questions posed by the second act's major revelations were dropped entirely in favor of a "revenge" motif culminating in a doom-esque boss battle. All the questions of free will and fate were left behind. I had high hopes when you were forced to turn yourself into a big daddy (despite it making no sense plotwise -- the little sisters were already on your side if you were nice to them) because the audio diaries made it sound like you would essentially lose your humanity in the process. Oh, guess what? Nevermind, we're not following up on that. (Figures Levine also never realized players might feel sympathy for the big daddies, despite the fact that he wrote all this material about how they were human, too, and how horrifying the transformation was). The "helmet" effect even disappears during the final battle.

Fontaine's plan also makes little sense in retrospect.

Sigh. Great game, immersive, beautiful, ambitious. It succeeds at so much, it's disappointing that it fails to cultivate the narrative seeds it plants.

Also, I just figured it out: he looks like Luke Wilson.

@Witzbold: Evil disney? You too huh? :D The Plasmids were very hit and miss. The presentation of that game was the star of the game, and right after you get to the 'big office' the game spins down hill. It is the rules and gameplay only not as shiney, not the same experience..

-spoiler- the part where you become a big daddy has some room and I thought it was going involved in the ending (or atleast, the final boss.... ) But the game failed in the black or white ending.

-more spoilers- First time I played the game. I 'ate' every girl I could. At the end, towards the orphanage, I felt something. As a person and a character. I save every girl from that point on til the end.

My ending? Not of redemption that -I- felt. I get the bad ending where I eat more girls and take over the world. Anyone else feel cheated or do similar?

He needs to worry about the unreasonable copy protection they place on the game before changing the game itself.

@Witzbold:

"Suits have no place in the gaming industry."

DAMN STRAIGHT.

Yeah, I am glad I rented this also on launch day because I got naturally bored half way though it, lost interest, and took it back. Despite the developer walkthrough video months before it came out stating they were trying to make a FPS that wasn't cliche to the genre - it ended up just being a beautiful cliche in the end no matter how you spun the unique selling point. Chalk me up as one of those old farts who are exhausted of these types of games.

@Moonshadow101:
I actually liked it myself. It put you in the shoes of the poor dudes you've been splattering all over the floor for the last 15 hours.

@catapult37:

I couldn't have said it better myself. I couldn't have said it as well myself either. >.<

@catapult37: Nail meets head said 4 minutes ahead of me.

Bioshock is one of those games that makes you feel something. Yet the ending makes you feel the binary, Your an evil bastard, or a saving saint. And if you don't fall into either of those roles (which I can assure you, feeling are as gray as Taylor Hicks's hair) tough

@catapult37:

Excellent post. If it weren't so ripe with spoilers, I'd say it was a shoe in for comments of the week.

@Kai_: Maybe they want to revisit the world they worked so hard on, especially since the full vision of the game wasn't reached?

On a higher level (execs) it's motivated by cash, but can you really just call the creativity of the staff into question because they're making a sequel?

I thought the "good" ending was great. I really don't know know nor have see a great game come off with a spectacular ending. Seems this generation of gamers or perhaps just "bloggers" themselves are too selfish with "innovative endings."

I liked the good ending to Bioshock. It was actually a very touching moment, in my opinion. I agree that the gameplay after you confront Ryan up until the end itself is the weakest part of the game.

@Heliophage: Don't forget telekenesis.. I loved being able to rip their headwear off from afar and then fling it back at their weak point for massive damage. Ok, maybe not massive damage, but still.

@chimp_o_death: Except... it doesn't. You get a little circular window to look through, that's it. And at some point during the ending, the whole thing undoes itself. If they wanted to do it, they should have committed to it, rather than just have it half-in.

BEST FPS STORY EVER. But the binary choices made it lose steam. All I can compare it too was Deus Ex where you have major branching paths which all greatly affect the story. I wished it went there but Levine is great to point out that this "choice" half-assed is more than a bit insulting for such a compelling exerience.

I personnally like multiple endings in a game especially more along the lines of ok here is the ending and here is the extra ending for doing well. It is really hard to do perfect alternate endings like they were shooting for with good and evil(I think a moderate ending would have been nice if it was included) of course it would have been easier if the ending didn't try to shoot so far past the game. Though there are possibilities Marvel Ultimate Alliance did it a little by stringing video for particular choices and accomplishments made.

I'll have to disagree slightly and say that (SPOILERS AHOY)
the weakest part of the game was after you regain control of your Plasmids. The sections where you have a random Plasmid and Fontaine is docking you health are brilliant. It's the section just after that where you are making your way to Fontaine where the game gets away from itself. Becoming a Big Daddy was a step in the right direction, but a bit too late for it to matter. Especially with the somewhat lame boss fight.

Other than that I really enjoyed the altruistic ending. It seemed fitting. Heven't had a chance to see the selfish one though.

Well that's good, because the "moral" choice between saving and harvesting was pretty bloody watered down when push came to shove.

Who cares, I liked the game. There's no way I'm going to rag on it now.

@Gutzman: Then dont expect the industry to improve if thats your stance with all games.

Designers need to do the exact same thing. After making something, find out whats wrong with it and improve from there.

Regarding actions in your game affecting things later...I think Metal Gear Solid 3 had one of the better examples of this in recent memory.

Remember that boss battle where it was just Snake moving down a canal being hounded psychologically and haunted by the ghosts of anyone he'd ever killed in the game? That part could be really crappy or really easy depending on how many people you'd murdered on your way up to that point.

I think that's the analog that Levine is talking about.

@turkeyfunk: Considering I managed to somehow kill 700 people during my game play, yes I have no idea how I did that either besides having fun just shooting everyone and everything I saw that part of the game was HELL for me to get through. Granted by the time I reached there I must have killed at least 500.

Oh and for the record, in theory, they do have 3 endings. The good, the bad (pure evil) and the sad (evil and good) The only difference between bad and sad is the doctor's voice

For all this talk of "the suits ruin everything", I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that you never hear about the changes that the suits forced on games that made them better. And don't fool yourself into believing that sort of situation doesn't exist, either.

There are many, many games that would have been great had they only made some minor change or removed some annoying system that the lead developer had a deep love for. Instead, those games were released with the artistic integrity we always speak so highly of, but remained terminally flawed.

I do agree in general, though that allowing artists to create art unencumbered by any form of censorship is a good thing. Sometimes, however, a little criticism goes a very long way.

@Sugoi: From what Ive seen while being in the industry, suits usually just fuck everything up. With their own little skewed views on what they "assume" gamers want. Or more like allow their own little personal opinions cloud the judgement of something that would help make a game great.

With developers, Im not saying blame doesnt fall upon them, since Ive seen some pretty stupid ones too. But balance must be taken with development also to not make a game so much that you want to play, but something that the fans will want to play.

Game designers have done what they are for years / have degrees in what they do for a reason and not to be told what to do by pencil pushing tits who are just trying to figure out how to turn the fastest buck.

When you get the suits sticking their dirty little fingers where it doesnt belong, project schedules get fucked up and work just starts to get messy when things need to be "doctored" to meet the needs of the man in the golden chair.

Let the people who know what the fuck they are doing do their jobs.