Take-Two has finally announced a firm release date for the highly anticipated BioShock 2. February 9, 2010. Checking my calendar and I see nothing else booked that date so I just made a big X for the whole day.
BioShock 2 Release Date
10 Responses to BioShock 2 Release Date
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
That’s a creepy picture.
I hope this game works out. Word out of the grapevine is that development is in serious trouble; four studios on three continents are now working on this project, and last anyone heard, 2K Marin had gone begging to series creator Ken Levine for help… which he refused to give.
Jordan Thomas, the cruel madman behind Deadly Shadows’s Shalebridge Cradle mission, is in charge of this project. His vision I don’t doubt, but I’ve come to have serious doubts about the creative direction and health of the project as a whole. If “Big Sister” is the most creative twist the team could come up with, I worry. Nonetheless, Bioshock 2 is one I’ll be watching with great interest.
Wow, that’s some quality industry gossip you got going there, Steerpike.
Anyway, Levine is a playwright primarily so I don’t even know what his role in the actual design of the game is after all… I don’t expect much of this game anyway…
Despite the negative buzz, I’m choosing to be optimistic. I loved the first game, loved the story and the game world. It had everything I look for in a game, though the ending blew. But endings in any medium tend to be weak. I’m hoping Jordan Thomas will hand us a nifty little horror experience. If so, I’ll look into getting Steerpike some anti anxiety meds…
On the other hand, if the devs have just stripped away everything Levine put into the first one in favor of nothing but gameplay, then I will be pissed. Gameplay I can get anywhere. Give me something to chew on, something beyond the immediate and impending n-teenth death of my player character.
It may simply be that Thomas is a great designer but not great at running a project. If so, luck is with us: his vision will be realized and, since it’s Bioshock and sure to be a good seller, 2K Games will give him the money/support from other studios necessary to get the game done. It just worries me whenever I hear 4-5 studios are working on the same project. That screams trouble.
Still, though I wouldn’t call Bioshock a “horror” game, it had some horrifying moments, and Thomas’s work on Shalebridge Cradle (he’s done other work on the Thief and System Shock games, but I can’t recall which parts) indicates there’s no one quite as talented at creating unsettling atmospheres. I’d kinda like to see Bioshock 2 as a horror game, since I’m not going to get my original wish – an open world relational shooter set before the fall of Rapture, in which your character chooses activities amongst several factions, but which culminates in the civil war regardless, so you can’t change the outcome, just the circumstances. Maybe Bioshock 3.
Your version sounds better than the Big Sister thing we are hearing about. Sort of Witcher meets System Shock 2. Personally, I don’t think it will be a horror game, per se. I am just hoping for some unsettling situations in lieu of a deep story. But yeah, all those cooks in one kitchen is not giving me the warm fuzzies. Design by committee usually tends to fall flat. Give me a single, strong vision and a dedicated crew to execute it any day.
Bioshock really annoyed me because it took many of the gameplay elements perfected in System Shock 2 and turned them into sugar-coated-puffy-fluffy-meta-globs-of-happiness. Player choice went through the window and with it replayability, tension sapped by pausing time during hacking, inconsequential Vita Chambers and overly abundant ammo. Don’t get me wrong I loved the emergent combat and was bowled over by the dystopian 1930s Art Deco aesthetic but the gameplay felt too soft for such a harsh environment. I kept playing for the story and was let down by the bum ending (System Shock 2 had worse). I’ll be very curious to see if any of the dev teams involved will have had the balls to make Rapture as unforgiving as its seems.
I’m pretty inured against horror and terror in video games with one exception. System Shock 2. It wrung me dry. I have yet to run up against anything that raw and intense.
Yeah, I’m with you Scout. The thing I remember most about System Shock 2 was that claustrophic silence and the uncertainty around each corner, those residual psychic emanations that caught you off guard every time and the gentle and unnerving hum of the Von Braun. Which was the scariest bit for you Scout? I reckon it was the upper levels where the escape pods were. It was so dangerously quiet up there that I once ran into a Rumbler stood silently around a corner! My whole body got goosebumps, instant adrenaline and sweat. Terrifying.
Gregg, I don’t remember exactly where but it was relatively early and I got trapped up an elevator in a medic’s office. No ammo, nothing but that wrench and those zombies down in the corridor waiting for me. I would go down the elevator, take a step out into the hallway and then retreat back up the elevator. I had to quit the game for months before I got the nerve to start over. Once I got trapped in a resurrection machine with zombies right outside it. Every time I resurrected they would jump me, kill me and send me back in. I had to reload an earlier save. Several times I had to quit playing. Usually I stop playing because I get bored. But with SS2 I was too upset to go on. Something about that ship just unnerved me no end.
It was those damn babies for me: “Babies need sleep. Wise is the one who does not harm them…” Ugh. I just wanted to go back to elevator and suck on my grenade launcher.
As for Bioshock 2, aich. I’m suspicious. It’s hard to see how four different companies can make a coherent story, much less a game. It will probable be pretty to watch but derivative to play. The storytelling of Bioshock 2 combined with the art direction made the first game for me. The gameplay was decent enough, but the world was just so damn immersive and most of that was due to the creepy environment.
I don’t know if Bioshock 2 will recapture it. I’m not particularly interested in playing a Big Daddy under whatever contrived circumstances their tri-continental team dreams up.
Perhaps I am wrong.
Shit. I am never wrong!