I wrote this years ago, not because I wanted another BioShock game, with or without that asshole Ken Levine, but because I thought it would be an interesting exercise to imagine how to fix this deeply problematic series. I don’t think you can, at least not easily. And I don’t think anyone should. But since they are going to try anyway, the question got stuck in my head.

I left the text mostly intact, just cleaned up a few mistakes and typos, and decided to make a post. After all, why have a blog if you can’t put your bizarre and useless thoughts on it. 😁

Huge caveat: you would need an amazing, diverse, brilliant, clever, knowledgeable development team to pull this off without stepping on any landmines, otherwise don’t even bother – I don’t want another game that mishandles a serious issue.

So, problem. BioShock is kind of like taking an already bad idea, turning it up to 11, and watching it collapse, right? Fascism eats itself because it can’t function without enemies. So here is the setting: World War II is over. A bunch of Nazis flee to, say, South America (and I’m not going to go into details here because I don’t think I’m qualified to be on a team that can pull this off). They discover a very well hidden plateau (you can play with ideas from The Lost World here, but not too much: no dino fights or anything like that). At first they kidnap the locals to build them a city, but very quickly they say “we are Nazis, we don’t want to see anyone non-Aryan!” Their solution? First, they introduce a “purity” rating. If you are a 1 (highest) you can be in government, if you are a 5 you can have an office job, and if you are a 10, well, somebody has to drive cars. Second, robots. You have to have some techno BS there, right? And those two things create a conflict: on the one hand, you have people trying to be very “pure” through plastic surgery and gene manipulation. On the other hand, people would say, hey, you can’t even count the bumps on my head if I’m just a brain in a metal body. Cyborgs, baby! And on the third hand, you’ve got people who can’t afford the first two solutions. Conflict, war, collapse, ruin. The setting is set.

Protagonist. Local woman, anthropologist, archaeologist or something. Gets a rumor about something weird, gathers a team, goes there. Strange lighthouse (there’s always one, blah-blah-blah…), seems to be automated with strange technology. Oh, right, by the way, you need some time to build a city, prosper a bit and then collapse, at least 30 years after WWII, so the game is set in the 90s or later. You follow a fuel pipe, it goes underground, through some caves, and then very high up, and boom, you are in the ruins of a Nazi city in the jungle. You’re still with a team (instead of talking to Nazis, you get missions from your teammates), you build a camp. The exit collapses (sabotage?), so the goal is simple: get out. The next day you are attacked by some robots, they hurt you, your team takes you to what they think is a hospital (no one speaks German), there is a strange machine that looks like it should heal you… and it does, by replacing your arm with a metal one! So instead of plasmids or tonics, you can have upgrades to your arm that give you not only combat abilities, but other stuff too. Maybe you can crush locks and get into rooms. Or use zip lines. Or even have a hook shot! With a camp that you return to, it can be cool to have Metroidvania elements. So you go on missions, explore stuff, fight Nazis, metal or not, maybe start to learn a language so you can understand more and more of what happened here. The usual BioShock stuff.

Twist. Hm. Not sure if it’s a good one, since it kind of undermines the “Nazis are going to eat themselves”, so you have to be careful when implementing it. So you start to find evidence of communication with the outside world. Someone from Europe. USA. South Africa. Russia. Etc. Basically, rich people all over the world were supporting this city by sending resources. There are Nazis everywhere, shocking, I know. But when they realized that all the promises – “We are totally gathering the army here to take over the world, you guys!” – were BS, they stopped sending ships, and then the city collapsed because it wasn’t sustainable, because Nazis suck at everything. So if you gather enough evidence before you leave, you’ll get a good ending where you expose all these rich fascists. If not, then you start an underground group (there are enough people who believe you) to fight them. So even a “bad” is still pretty good, because it’s a power fantasy and because fuck Nazis.

Looking back, there are some things that need to be massaged into shape, sure, but overall it is a decent start, if I may say so myself.

Also, my position seems to have been if you want to be political – remember how Infinite tried to be “both sides” but was really just racist? – go for it. Hire a diverse group of people, do extensive research, be careful, but go for it. If the rumors about the setting of the new BioShock are true, they don’t want to do that. Well, I could be wrong, but choosing another remote location, where they are trying to create a very sanitized version of a topic they want to explore, is telling.