Bioshock series plot: really stupid or incredibly ingenius? WARNING: SPOILERS

Comment opinions and thoughts :D I genuinely am interested to see if I'm just a bigotted old bluff or if I'm part of a larger group of people who had mixed feelings about the game lol

I wasn't a huge fan.

Bioshock 1 recycled an important plot twist from a previous Shock game, then added on a meaningless plot twist and a bad branching ending. The dialogue itself wasn't bad, but the overall plot had no impact on me.

As for Bioshock Infinite...that was a half-baked mess. The central plot of the game - the city, the revolt, etc. - is all forgotten at the 11th hour, and the wider plot is full of an infinite number of infuriating plot holes.

Bioshock 1 has a top 10 of all gaming history level story.

I'm not sure. You can see that it's not until Bioshock Infinite that they get the idea of combining all the games into one storyline. Had this been the goal since they started on the first one then I think we'd get a more thought-out and depthful plotline rathers then what I viewed as a frantic attempt to tie up loose ends in the last moments of Infinite.

I agree with most of that ^ it seems as though Bioshock felt it had to tie everything together so that it would provide closure, but I found some of the leaps in story that it made to be very far fetched and mostly unnecessary to the point of ruining the overall series for the sake of having everything be related to everything else. Bioshock had no interest in explaining any sort of chronological order of the events that took place and seemed satisfied with simply saying "It's related, but don't ask how". It's like Irrational Games thought it would bring more to the table by complicating the storyline and by spacing out nuggets of information but did it to the point of totally losing the plot many times throughout the game.

It's a shame because I love the world that had been created in Bioshock Infinite which was incredible visually and also a lot of fun to play in. And I thought characters like the songbird and also the story for that game alone was not half bad at all, but by the end it just seemed so forced

I loved them, especially Bioshock 1.

I loved them myself. The first is my favourite followed by Infinite and then 2.

I thought the stories were awesome. I do however, think that them only basically showing these cities already in ruin, and not showing us the fall and decay beforehand, except rather obliquely in cassette tapes and stuff.

there really isn't much to Bioshock's plot...3 events really - the intro, the twist and the ending. Most everything else is you being told where to go and backstory. Now, I think when file collecting is done well it can do wonders for a game experience (see RE2), but it was so silly in Bioshock that people we're recording all their secrets on cassette and then leaving them scattered in fish barrels and such...and even more silly was how you manage to come across these cassettes in chronological order. It was just way too gamey. And you also can't leave your entire story up to files, either, which is what so many FPS like to do nowadays.

Infinite was a lot better, but the less you think about it, the more you will enjoy it. I'd say that was a bad thing, but it pretty much sums up my relationship with music, too, so maybe a lot of the things we like are like that.

Yeah, there was just never enough constant relevance to the plot or story as you were playing the game. After one or two hours of wading through countless enemies or combing through frustratingly large and confusing maps to find poorly placed objectives that you forgot what you were doing and why you were supposed to care about doing it. In reference to the Bioshock Infinite DLC, the first time I openly gave a hoot about what was going on and wasn't angry at the amount of pointless fillers to fluff-out the playtime for the game was right at the end of episode 2 of Burial at Sea when Elizabeth (out of the blue, might I add) said in the elevator "*sigh* I miss you, Booker ...". What?!? Where did that come from?! And why is this the first time the DLC is actually contributing to the lore of the series and exposing the characters at a deeper and more human level?? It's like Irrational Games didn't know what they were supposed to be doing and so relied on stereotypes and cookie-cutter gameplay as well as an overly complicated story to try to prove that they were 'original'.

The only Bioshock that I'd call literary is the first one. It's essay's on Objectivism and the illusion of freedom and how they were interwoven into game play are unparalleled. It truly is a narrative that can only be experienced to it's full effect in the gaming space and I love it for that.

Bioshock 2 is atrocious. It possesses none of the poetry, narrative, quality of character, weaving of themes, and philosophy of the first one. It reeks of quick cash grab. Even the creative direction took a nose dive. Whereas the first Bioshock had brilliant level design that resonated as an actual place that was once lived in, Bioshock 2 was little more than interconnected battle arenas. Even the graphics fell down a few notches with the lack of mist, ambient light, and the filter that smoothed out the textures in part 1.

Infinite stood fine on it's own to me. It was a grand adventure that I had joy experiencing while it lasted. It was a beautiful game with interesting characters. It's only downfall was that the entire package wasn't nearly as impactful as Bioshock 1.

...and for the love of god people, STOP SAYING THAT THE TWISTS IN BIOSHOCK AND SYSTEM SHOCK 2 ARE THE SAME! THATS AN OUT AND OUT LIE! They couldn't be more different. The only things they had in common was where they took place structurally and the fact that they were twists *eyeroll*

JUST STOP IT!

This, so much. Oh my god, you could not be so right about this.

I mean, for god's sake, one of the reasons why I played the Bioshock games in the first place was because of people praising the story. Then I play the game and so much of the story is confined to audio logs and files, which are hidden in desks and garbage cans. Thereby forcing me to spend so much time rummaging for ****ing trash just to play the game.

And again, it's one thing if a freaking Doom game wants to flesh out the story in audio logs or computer files. It's freaking Doom, no one cares about the story in the first place, so you'd might as well ignore that shit and just shoot demons. But Bioshock? A game which has so largely been prtaised BECAUSE of its story? And to then confine so much of that "story" to random trash that I happen to find in desks and garbage cans? That actually REALLY sort of annoyed me about these games. Do you have any idea how much time I spent completely stopping the flow of the game in order to look for trash? Do you have any idea how much of my game time was spent looking at the ****ing ground just so I didn't miss any files?

And shit, it wasn't even the files. It was ****ing ammo and money left lying around too. So even if I didn't give a shit about the story and just wanted to kill stuff, I'm STILL sort of compelled to spend my time looking at the ground and rummaging through every goddamn trash can. Don't get me wrong, I actually liked the games. And that actually makes me MORE angry. The games were good enough that they should have found a better way to handle this shit than to make me stop the flow of the game in order to go looking through trash cans for story files and ammo. Surely they could have handled this shit in a more natural manner that serves to actually get me more invested in the story instead of getting ****ing tired of looking down at the ***ing ground.

For an FPS, the plot just has to be good enough to give you a cassus belli to shoot people in the face.

To that purpose it was "good enough."

It wasn't Shakespeare but it fleshed out the world, between the fighting your imagination will fill in the blanks.