I realized today that Bioshock has no story. It has a very interersting setting, a powerful mood, and lots of clues scattered throughout about how Rapture came to be in its current state. In fact, by the time the player arrives on the scene, everything seems to have already happened. Rapture's society has fallen apart, and all that's left to do is fight through the zombies and crazies created by the what has happened before the game begins.The events of the game itself have no real plot driving them forward, despite all the claims about the game being "story-driven." Clearly, it isn't.

So that got me thinking - it's unfortunately that Irrational didn't set the game DURING the fall of Rapture. Clearly, that is the chain of events that the writers put thought into. All the information you are given in the game is about what happened then, rather than what's happening now. So why not set the game in the midst of the rich and chaotic history. Fight crazies AND ryan's thugs as he institutes his crackdown. Sneak through Apollo square while people are getting "rounded up" instead of reading about it in some diary entry. Hell, maybe the player should have BEEN Fontaine or Atlas. Who knows? But if you've got a story, you should set the game during that story instead of after the story is already over. As it is, it's just a backstory which serves only to enrich the setting.

Speaking of games that are supposed to offer you the flexibility to approach fights in different ways and make choices - when I play Halo I feel alot more freedom and flexibility than when I play Bioshock. Halo's focused and comparatively simple game mechanics are so well balanced and polished,its environments offer you so much room to move around, and the pacing of the action is so well-managed that you literally - and I'm using the word "literally" correctly here - feel free to approach things the way you'd like to. In Bioshock I feel limited and basically harrassed no matter how many choices I have about what to zap enemies with.

I think a review should focus on what the game actually is not what they were hoping for.

duxup

So how should they have rephrased their criticism of the impact of in-game decisions and the AI in order to meet your requirement of focusing on "what the game actually is?"

For a game that focused on telling a story, that would be disastrous.

I'm not that far into it yet, but I have yet to see a focus on "telling a story." So far the game seems focused on creating a setting and mood. That's not the same thing as "story."

Interactivity and storyline can go hand in hand, they're not mutually exclusive UpInFlames

I assume interactivity and story must be more than just "not mutually exclusive" or else games wouldn't be cohesive experiences at all.But that's not what the review said. It said the game's "primary focus is story and character." Then it went on to describe specific elements of game mechanics, such as special powers and enemy difficulty, in great detail for a couple of pages.

The review itself is so focused on game mechanics that for long stretches of it, it almost read like a game manual. And you could draw an analogy with reviews of narrative films (which ARE primarily about story) by saying some weakly-written film reviews read like plot summaries instead of like film criticism.

So it's interesting that a poorly written review of a narrative film reads like a plot summary, while a poorly written review of a game that the reviewer claims is all about "story" STILL reads like the summary of a game manual.

only going into detail there would spoil things.

Skilled movie and book reviewers have found ways to give interesting criticism of story-based media without "spoiling things." They've been doing it for a long time.

This claim early in gamespot's bioshock review stuck out at me: "its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters..."

I find that to be kinda an odd statement. Games are interactive experiences. The primary focus of an interactive experience, I would think, is the nature of the interaction. I don't doubt that story elements can be an important aspect of that interaction, but to claim that a game like this is primarily focused on its "story" seems to me to be reductive.

The fact that the review goes on to exhaustively describe the specifics of a great many game mechanics (for example, weaponry, enemy types, the way combat is executed, etc) right after asserting that the primary focus is "story and character" seems like an odd contradiction. What's up with this?

Bethesda creates absolutely beautiful worlds - truly inspired. I agree with a lot of the sentiment here, that what they need to work on is the way progression through the game happens. Obviously a big thing, which a lot of people mention, is that the environment scaling system in Oblivion didn't work. Morrowind's system was probably actually better as far as motivating progression ("I want to get powerful so I can go explore places I couldn't go before" works better than what they did in Oblivion.) I think they also need to make sure it's not so easy for you to totally screw up the game for yourself by clicking on the wrong thing and then have the whole game go haywire now that you're a "thief" etc. It's such an odd series because the games are so brilliant yet so flawed. It's hard to know what to make of them.