Ever since it began, all the way back in 2007, the BioShock series has cast a long shadow over the gaming landscape. Its innovative mix of in-depth narrative and exhilarating combat, along with some of the most fascinating settings in all of gaming, made it an instant classic.
With the announcement that a new iteration of the series is in the works, let’s take a look at a few features we would love to see in a new BioShock game.
A Fresh Setting
The first two games in the trilogy are set in the sunken city of Rapture. Rapture was once a proud utopian Objectivist state pulled straight from Ayn Rand’s psyche, but during the timeframe that the games are set in, it is now a leaking and nightmarish playground for the monstrous Splicers.
Infinite’s flying city of Columbia was a similarly intriguing setting. It exchanged the Libertarian values of Rapture for a hyper-Capitalist, not to mention uber-racist and ultra-nationalist, take on the turn of the century American values (complete with literal founder worship).
But, fascinating though these settings might be, I think I’ve seen enough of them. Rapture, in particular, seems thoroughly mined, as we even returned there during Infinite’s DLC.
And although Infinite’s cosmology has seemingly painted the series into a certain narrative conceit, (“There’s always a lighthouse. There’s always a man, there’s always a city”), even within the confines of those parameters, there is still plenty of room to explore humanities worst excesses, something BioShock has been doing since the very beginning.
How about an underground Socialist paradise, or a Communist state floating freely in the stars? After all, it’s in the aftermath of grand ideals that these games take place.
