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[Esquoret]

fadetoone said:

Esquoret said:

BioShock is a soft science series (as opposed to the hard science of Mass Effect) - you're to accept and appreciate the poetic beauty of how its universe works. In terms of plot - who did what - it makes perfect sense. Listening to all the voxophones will provide you with the pieces required to put everything together. Looking at user-created timelines will also help you to map things out - and they can be mapped out without ambiguity.

I just think people who expect a Sheldon Cooper kind of person to appear at the end and explain all the physics in a professor-type way is approaching it from the wrong angle.

Right, I get the story makes more sense after being provided with all the intricate information.  The problem is most people playing the game either miss certain things or don't particularly care to pay attention to all the little details, making the story seem to be a convoluted mess.  Developers shouldn't rely on the collectables and stuff like that to tell the story.

I still enjoyed the game quite a bit, but if I have to go online to make sense of the story, the game didn't do a good enough job of telling it.

From watching interviews with Kev Levine, I gathered that he highly values player exploration. So yeah, we do have to work for the story - look around the environment, try and find those voxophones which serve as the pieces of a puzzle to be solved. It may seem like a problem at times too, like you said, if these things are missed, whether intentionally or unintentionally. But at the same time, it's a challenge as well, and if you're able to discover these things for yourself, it's far more satisfying than being force-fed a cutscene that can't be missed/skipped.

All in all, a different approach with pros and cons. Personally I slow down in BioShock games (than playing other FPS) because they are harder to decipher. I think the genres  tags of "mystery" and "puzzle" may also be suitable to define the series. It's also a joy to be able to share and discuss your findings in a community, and witness the internet piecing together every detail and observation - can't say that about many games. A lot of subtlety exists, more than what we, as gamers, are used to in the common video game narrative.

Again, a different approach; it may attract some people, may turn others away. Inception was a complex movie, but within it there was a lot of interactions that delieverd exposition for the sake of explaining, quite obviously, to the audience of how things worked. While some people appreciated that, others complained about the lack of subtlety. So, to each their own I guess.