BioShock 2

BioShock isn't an easy game to follow. A meticulously detailed and hugely distinctive gameworld, a remarkable story with a show-stopping twist, and two completely different endings - one of them apocalyptic — doesn’t leave a lot of room for tentative updates.

2K Marin has solved one issue simply by sticking with the original’s failed underwater utopia of Rapture as its setting. In doing so, it ties off the timeline: BioShock 2 takes place after the first game, but it doesn’t commit to what’s happening on the surface. The story, the studio’s keeping very close to its chest. But the basic setup is a whopper: you aren’t a hapless interloper, you’re a Big Daddy. And you’ve just been knocked off the top of the food chain. Years after the Little Sisters left Rapture, one has grown up and come back.

“People have talked a lot about prequel or sequel,” says creative director Jordan Thomas. “If we did a pure one of either of those, we wouldn’t be surprising you enough.” Instead, BioShock 2 is set “10 years–ish” after the first game in a battered but still largely intact Rapture.

“We didn’t think BioShock would be BioShock without Rapture,” explains lead artist Hogarth De La Plante. “Rapture was a really fascinating place, and there were lots of compelling untold stories and unexplored locations still within the city and within the mythology.”

The ending of the first game is never stated, although it’s become the stuff of legend among the once-human Splicers still fighting for dwindling reserves of genetic-upgrade material Adam. This vague stability is disturbed by the Big Sister: one of the original Little Sisters who has grown up, returned, and equipped herself with a sort of sports edition of the Big Daddy suit. For reasons 2K won’t reveal (and hey, letting the game reveal its own story is a large part of the fun), she wants to bring back the old Rapture, and is abducting girls from the surface to turn into Little Sisters. The city is hers now, and she guards it closely.

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