I’m playing my way through Bioshock 2 again (It’s a sight-seeing playthrough; I’ve already finished the game previously) and as I pause to smell the plasmids and perhaps staple a recalcitrant splicer to the wall with a spear-gun, some thoughts occur to me that I thought I’d share with the other gamers here on the boards:
Firstly, who the hell is refilling Rapture’s vending machines? Rapture pretty much stopped being a functioning city a decade before the game is set. I can’t imagine any of the splicers are concerned with making a profit from vending machine sales, and anyone who isn’t spliced up is likely more concerned with finding a functioning bathysphere and escaping from what’s left of Rapture.
How is anyone still alive in Rapture? There’s no food coming in, there’s no way there was a 10-year supply of food for each inhabitant when the Civil War broke out, and even if there was a massive food stockpile and automated fish-farms etc providing food or whatever, the generally dangerous environment of Rapture (other splicers, security systems, Big Daddies, the fact the entire place is leaking and falling apart several miles below the ocean surface) would have killed pretty much everyone in the 10-year timespan between the games. Or at least, you’d think so.
I know Rapture’s a huge place, but it seems surprising that (in its current state) it can support the several hundred splicers that invariably keep getting impaled on the protaganist’s mining drill, riveted to walls with his industrial rivet-gun, or attacked by swarms of angry bees summoned by one of his many plasmids during the course of the game. Especially when you consider that their numbers were already reduced by the protaganist of the first game and his fistful of lightning/pimped out guns combo too. How many people are there still left in Rapture by this point?
Why does Sophia Lamb keep referring to Ryan’s death as if it were some recent event? It was a decade ago. Everyone knows he’s dead.
Where’s Tenenbaum gone? You never see or hear from her again after encountering her in the Atlantic Express ticket office, yet the dialogue at the end of the first game clearly indicates she survives and gets back to the surface somehow.
Surely Rapture is known to the outside world by now? At least three adults are known to have visited Rapture and made the return trip topside- (One of the characters in “There’s Something In The Sea”, Jack, and Tenenbaum) and a couple of other people (including your character and Mark Meltzer in Bioshock 2) found Rapture either by accident or as a result of a deliberate search effort. Also, Frank Fontaine (and a few other people) had a smuggling concern going at the time of the civil war- it stands to reason that some of them took their submarines and got away as fast as they could when the fertiliser hit the ventilator. And there would have been people who, upon being approached by Ryan and asked to come to Rapture, said “No Thanks” for whatever reason.
There are, in short, rather a lot of people topside who are (or could conceivably be) aware of Rapture’s existence and location, and have absolutely no reason at all to keep Rapture’s existence a secret- especially by the time the events of the second game are taking place.
Where’s all the ammunition for the guns (and the guns themselves) coming from? Letting people fire off guns in an undersea city seems like a Bad Idea at the best of times, but handwaving away that fact, there’s still a lot of small arms and ammunition lying around, especially considering the war that’s been raging in Rapture for the past decade and a bit. It’s not like there’s a still-functioning Rapture Armaments Company making Webley revolver and Thompson SMG copies, after all.
What value is there to being Supreme Ruler of what’s left of Rapture? Neither Ryan nor Lamb seem to be capitalising on their roles, “ruling” over a leaking, decaying city that’s beyond repair and inhabited by armed crazy people who are addicted to a substance that can’t be obtained anywhere else. Since they’ve shown a curious reluctance to take the knowledge of Adam and Plasmids to the surface, what’s in it for them to keep sitting around on the ocean floor with the splicers watching the city deteriorate?
I wonder if they’ll make a Rapture RPG- like Fallout 3, perhaps set in the mid-late '50s (before the first game) but with more character interaction and story and less “treating everything else you see as a target”?
Why didn’t Eleanor have you reincarnated somewhere considerably closer to where she and Sophia Lamb were? It would have been much easier for you to rescue Eleanor if you didn’t have to cover half of Rapture, gun down splicers left right and centre, and generally give Lamb a very good idea of who you are, what you’re doing, and what you’re capable of before you got there.
Anyway, just some musings from my recent re-play of a very enjoyable game… anybody got any thoughts on these, or their own Rapture-based musings they’d like to share?
not reading not reading,
allmost though my first playthough, just wanted to how brilliant the little sister level was
still not reading stlill not reading,
will comment on thread again when I finish the game,
I loved Bioshock 2 to pieces. I think I loved it even more than the first one and that was saying something.
Okay, sadly most of these answers are an exercise in handwaving rather than I think especially convincing answers but still…
Hmmmn. Maybe no-one? Maybe just before the whole thing went to cock, the city’s vending machines were filled to capacity and you’re just feasting on the last food and ammo of the dying city. And, er the splicers are too stupid and/or poor to use them. Yeah, that’s it. Except for the ones with guns. Er…
The splicers feast on the dead? Again, not really sustainable, I guess.
I think the endlessly respawning splicers are one of the hardest things to handwave away. I guess the city really is that big and they really do have tons of food. shuffles feet awkwardly
By the way, aren’t the bees just the best? I love that posh lady splicer who goes “oh my God. BEES!” The voice acting cracks me up.
This one I think actually was fair enough. He did stick her in prison and then she escaped to finally see his downfall and take over his City, triumphing utterly. In my personal experience, when people experience great triumphs, they can keep going on about it for years if the win is big enough. Sometimes, this eventually starts to look counter productive, suggesting that there’s been no similar triumphs in waaay too long. See England and the 1966 winning of the World Cup, for example. So Lamb’s constant harping on made sense. Plus, she seems to define herself in part by how she differs to Ryan so I guess he gets mentioned on that basis.
Hopefully I 'll get to the rest of the questions later.
I’m going with the theory that you’re just finding the few things left in the machines - many machines will actually run out of an item if you buy more than 2 or 3. And the splicers have gone nuts enough that they don’t even realize the machines still have stuff in them.
She’s been on the surface for most of the past 10 years, but when she heard that girls were being kidnapped from oceanside locations, she realized it had to be Rapture, and went back. She’s scooped up as many girls as she could find when you meet here at the ticket office, and is bringing them back to the surface right then. Whether she plans to return or not to rescue more girls is unknown, but certainly you never hear from her “live” again.
It was Ryan’s greatest creation - there was no way he was ever going to leave. He was convinced up until the end that it wasn’t a failure, and could be made back into his ideal.
And Lamb does plan on leaving - once she’s turned Eleanor into the first Utopian. She’s been working on that project ever since the end of Bioshock 1.
You have to reincarnate in the Vita-chamber closest to where you died?