The entire time I was playing Bioshock I could not stop comparing it to Bethesda’s Fallout games. The faux-1950s aesthetic shared by both games is too similar to ignore. Both have you exploring crumbling art-deco settings while oldies music plays from radios as you shoot drug addicts, etc. Both games also have a ton of ambient storytelling and characters who speak to you via holotape audio diary. I wonder how much of a chicken/egg thing it is. Was Bioshock popular enough that Bethesda took cues from it when adapting the isometric Fallouts to 3D? Or was Bioshock paying homage to the older Fallouts (at that point, there hadn’t been one in almost a decade)? I tried Googling around for an answer (for like 5 seconds) and couldn’t find anything specific, but I did find a ton of 2007-8 forum threads arguing about which game copied which and which was better and yadda yadda ya. For what it’s worth, I think the aesthetic works better in Bioshock than in Fallout 3. In the latter, the retro-futurism seems to be just for the goof of it a lot of the time, and there’s a lot of incongruity regarding like, why are people still like this 200 years after the apocalypse? I could go on, but so many people have talked about the Fallout games and this isn’t a Fallout post. Bioshock, meanwhile, actualy takes place in 1960, so it’s got that going for it in terms of making sense. At the same time, a lot could probably be said on the topic of how much sense Rapture makes as a place, and the politics of Andrew Ryan or whatever. Again, I’m not going to get in to it, but these games are really ripe for comparison, and there a ton of things that I think Bioshock does better. It certainly runs way better on my laptop than any Fallout game ever has, that’s for sure.
The biggest difference between Bioshock and Fallout 3 is that Bioshock’s focus is 100% its combat. The gunplay is super polished and feels really nice, and I can tell there’s a lot of depth to it in terms of how you use your arsenal of weapons/ammo/magic/the environment. But while I can tell it’s well done, I just don’t enjoy it that much. When games have this much combat I tend to prefer to go hard into the game’s other systems to either trivialize the combat or avoid it entirely. Bioshock doesn’t really have any other systems though. It was hard for me to push myself to invest the amount of time that I wanted to in order to form a good opinion of it.
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