Hm, didn't know this, I skipped out on the sequel because I thought it was (at the time) just a way to 'add more' to a story I already felt was good, and thus would be worse.
Most people did. It was made by a B team and wasn't marketed super well. But it ended up being a better game in everyway, with a well made story that barely touches the original other than adding some background to it.
BioShock created a fantastic world full of philosophies and moralities worth exploring, then decided "eh, too much work" and made it Half Life But Capitalism Is The Bad Guy. Very lazy Saturday morning cartoon morality.
BioShock 2 is a better game because both extremes are represented and portrayed as disastrous. Anarchy got us the hellscape of drug addicted supervillains that is Rapture, while collectivism got us The Rapture Family. Midwits accuse it as being boomer-tier "both sides are bad, I just want to grill" fence sitting, but the real message is that extremism itself is bad no matter what form it comes in.
Ironically, the splicers tell probably some of the most indepth and philosophically groundbreaking stories in the original Bioshock. Unfortunately this story is entirely told by their random dialogue while they aren't hostile and is basically impossible to assemble with a video putting them all together (Dark Souls before Dark Souls!). It does better at showing the flaws of the system than any "Ryan is a hypocrite!" could ever do.
The sequel actually does rather well at not making it "extremism v extremism" anymore. Sinclair alone would be an absolute villain in any other story (including Bioshock 1), and he is filled with villainous actions the game doesn't shy away from showing, but in the end he is shown to not be a cartoon caricature and capable of thinking beyond his ideology and politics plenty of times like a normal human.
Hm, didn't know this, I skipped out on the sequel because I thought it was (at the time) just a way to 'add more' to a story I already felt was good, and thus would be worse.
With this in mind I'll have to check it out then.
Most people did. It was made by a B team and wasn't marketed super well. But it ended up being a better game in everyway, with a well made story that barely touches the original other than adding some background to it.
BioShock created a fantastic world full of philosophies and moralities worth exploring, then decided "eh, too much work" and made it Half Life But Capitalism Is The Bad Guy. Very lazy Saturday morning cartoon morality.
BioShock 2 is a better game because both extremes are represented and portrayed as disastrous. Anarchy got us the hellscape of drug addicted supervillains that is Rapture, while collectivism got us The Rapture Family. Midwits accuse it as being boomer-tier "both sides are bad, I just want to grill" fence sitting, but the real message is that extremism itself is bad no matter what form it comes in.
Ironically, the splicers tell probably some of the most indepth and philosophically groundbreaking stories in the original Bioshock. Unfortunately this story is entirely told by their random dialogue while they aren't hostile and is basically impossible to assemble with a video putting them all together (Dark Souls before Dark Souls!). It does better at showing the flaws of the system than any "Ryan is a hypocrite!" could ever do.
The sequel actually does rather well at not making it "extremism v extremism" anymore. Sinclair alone would be an absolute villain in any other story (including Bioshock 1), and he is filled with villainous actions the game doesn't shy away from showing, but in the end he is shown to not be a cartoon caricature and capable of thinking beyond his ideology and politics plenty of times like a normal human.