BioShock Preview

Next Generation kicks off the weekend with a quick preview of Irrational Games’ now-gold FPS/RPG hybrid, BioShock.

Moral decisions aren’t new to games, but you won’t have experienced a choice as graphic and difficult to resolve as this one. Videogame logic will tell you that the pros and cons of either will probably balance out, but without the likes of KOTOR’s sliding scale of evil and its binary choices, BioShock takes a much more profound step into questions of morality. (It’s about humanity, and the loss of humanity,) says senior designer Joe McDonagh. (It’s about what you’re prepared to do to survive.)

With such moral positioning and its intriguingly novel setting, a 1940s utopian society that has fallen prey to greed and vice, BioShock has great power to say something about science’s relationship with idealism and unchecked human nature, but from this look at its first level, the emphasis is on reveling in scene-setting.