Playing a level means getting to know the ins and outs of a specific part of Rapture. The game encourages you to know where vending machines and health dispensers are. Some abilities center around hacking cameras or turrets to create safe zones. Rapture is the primary means through which most of the characters are channeled, and the game's systemic preoccupations are about space. Pointing out such inconsistencies can be beside the point, but in this case it shows a fundamental difference between the two games' design. In one of modern gaming's most frequently observed plot holes, protagonists Booker and Elizabeth are tasked with arming a revolution in a world where you can throw fireballs with your bare hands if you buy the right bottle from a vending machine.

Unlike in BioShock, their presence does not feed back into the narrative. They are part of the carnival which opens the game, but how and from what they are made is unexplained. While Plasmids get several audio logs exploring how and why they came to be, Vigors get tertiary consideration. For example, Rapture's Plasmids return, here renamed Vigors. Unlike the prior game, there is no marriage of convenience between practical and narrative concerns. They too built Rapture out of necessity, a world constructed out of gameplay constraints, that could only exist digitally.īioShock Infinite is similarly artificial, but it is also far less clockwork in construction.

Maybe that's because his goals were similar to the designers'.

Though BioShock's narrative ultimately, tepidly, condemns him, it also finds some nobility in his mission, in the purity of his vision. In director Ken Levine's own words, 'we wanted a very believable reason why they would be there.' Rapture's founder Andrew Ryan (a thinly veiled stand-in for writer Ayn Rand) cannot imagine a place where he can build his ideal, objectivist world on land, so it must be done in the sea. Now Playing: BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode Two Launch TrailerĮven the game's preoccupation with objectivism comes from these kinds of practical considerations. By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's

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