I wrote this post – a rant I’ve bored many friends with about how BioShock should have ended – on the 10th of October 2008, but never got round to taking shots for it. Then on February 10th, I got to see what 2K Marin are doing for BioShock 2. And annoyingly, some of it overlaps with what I suggest here.

That meant a) I couldn’t post this, since this would look like me leaking the details I was under a non-disclosure agreement to keep secret, and b) by the time I could post this, those details would have been announced and it would seem woefully unoriginal. I’m posting it anyway.

It’s my plan, in ten steps, for what should happen after your encounter with Andrew Ryan in his office.

1) As in the game, Fontaine forces you to hand control of Rapture over to him using Ryan’s key. You can’t help but obey.

I’m also going to add a few comments on these steps as I go along, there’s no need to read these if you just want the gist. This one’s a note about voice acting. Atlas has a very exaggerated, slightly comic Irish accent. I wish that when he turned out to be Fontaine, his true voice was very plain, deadpan and serious: I think the contrast could have felt really menacing. Instead he turns into just a different kind of sing-song histrionic moustache-twirler, and that’s a shame.

2) Tenenbaum manages to reach you on the radio for the first time since you entered Ryan’s office. Having heard about your command phrase, she asks if you would kindly DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO then meet her at her nearby hideout.

Seriously dude, once you’ve found out someone who can violate your mind is on the other end of it, you lose the goddamn wireless. If the Would You Kindly command to pick it up in the first place prevents that, TURN IT OFF. Either way, since Tenenbaum knows about your conditioning, she could order you to do it. This is fridge logic at its worst.

3) At the Little Sister sanctuary, Tenenbaum impresses on you that Fontaine is nearly unstoppable now that his genetic key is tied to Rapture, since Vita Chambers now work for him rather than you.

This factor never came up in the game, but to me it seems like the most important part of the handover of control to Fontaine: it would make him invincible, and you vulnerable. Double strange since 2K evidently wanted you vulnerable for the final fight, but didn’t seem able to think of a reason why you would be. So instead we get an unspeakably lame text box popping up to tell us that we are, just before we ascend to fight Fontaine.

A good design tenet is that if you need a pop-up text box to do something, it’s not worth doing.

4) She explains that the only way to stop someone who’s invincible within Rapture is to flood the whole city. You have to breach a wall in the central ventilation system, but the only thing that could drill through glass that thick and survive the ensuing flood is a Big Daddy.

The whole mood of the game is about the menacing inevitability of the sheer force of the sea. Enormous work went into making every room and every corridor of the whole city scream “THIS PLACE IS GOING TO FREAKING FLOOD!” To make a game about this place which ends without oceanic incident is pretty goddamn absurd.

5) You have to become a Big Daddy. Tenenbaum tells you how, and says to meet her at the bathysphere station you came in on once you’ve breached Central Ventilation. Near the Little Sister orphanage, there’s an iron-maiden-like steampunk machine that stitches you agonisingly into the suit.

People who say BioShock should have ended in Ryan’s office surely can’t have paid much attention to the game thereafter. Some of the most fascinating places and moving scenes are in that final section, and the places where Little Sisters and Big Daddies are indoctrinated are two I’d want to work in before all this.

6) Once Big Daddied, you’re virtually impervious to the Splicers between you and Central Ventilation – you can drill them in the face or charge them with right mouse to knock them flying. When you reach it, there’s an obvious crack in the glass there to drill.

It’s tough to model what happens to a live human when you put a conical drill into them, so let’s just have them die when it hits. There’d be no pacing reason to make this section challenging – it’s the reward for the terrible thing you’ve just done to yourself. Vita-Chambers no longer work for you, so challenge runs a higher risk of frustration anyway.

7) When the wall is breached, the force of the ocean smashes you into the opposite wall. But once recovered, you can stomp out of the wrecked room and out onto the sea bed. All around you can sea water surging through Rapture’s walkways and buildings, spreading out from Central Ventilation.

I was slightly sad that after that enchanting vista on the way in, you never got an impressive overview of Rapture’s scale again. This would be that, but with a twist of drama.

8) There’s an airlock that gets you into a room adjacent to the flooding station, but the door between the two slams shut just as you arrive. Through the glass, you see Fontaine wade over to the bathysphere where Tenenbaum is helping Little Sisters inside. He cocks a custom shotgun and blows her away without a word. Her body bobs and twitches in the water, Little Sisters scream blue murder.

There’s only one way out. Tenenbaum wants it for the sisters, Fontaine wants it for himself, and whatever your plans, you need it.

9) There’s a conspicuous crack in the glass between the two rooms which you can drill through to break in. Some Little Sisters are already inside the Bathysphere, the rest are huddled on a windowsill by the door – the water is thigh-high on Fontaine in here, so it’s already too deep for them to cross.

A watery end – both to the game and to whoever dies in this scene – seems appropriate.

10) Fontaine attacks you immediately, and his weapon is vicious enough to significantly hurt you. He’s an unspliced human, however, so a single ram or stab of your drill kills him gruesomely. Only for him to respawn ten seconds later, from the nearby Vita Chamber.

The idea, of course, is that your final fight with Fontaine should be a reversal of all those Big Daddy battles you’ve had. They were big and tough, but you could respawn again and again. It always seemed like the hardest decision to make in BioShock was not what to do with the Little Sisters, but whether to attack the Big Daddies in the first place. Getting to feel what it’s like from their perspective could be a fun play on that.

At this point, you’ve got two options:

A) If you don’t care about the Little Sisters, you’ll have to physically drag the ones already inside the bathysphere out before there’s room for you to get in. You can leave them splashing in the water anywhere. Once you’re in, closing the door behind you activates the bathysphere. Before it rises, Fontaine appears at the window, screaming something you can’t quite hear through the glass. You ascend, and the end scene rolls.

B) If you want to save them, you can pick one of the huddling ones up from the windowsill in your enormous hands and carry her over to the bathysphere. You’ll drop her if shot by Fontaine, however, and she’ll splash helplessly there until you can pick her up again. Actually: if you’re shot from the front by Fontaine, the blast will kill the Little Sister you’re carrying and she’ll fall limp into the water. You can keep your back to him to protect her, but he’s powerful enough to kill you before you get all the Little Sisters across. Killing him gives you enough respite to carry one Little Sister across safely before he respawns. At any time, you can close the bathysphere door from the outside, at which point a control panel by it lights up, and you can use that to send it to the surface and save whoever’s inside. Once it’s gone, the end scene rolls.

End scene: You, as a Big Daddy, standing motionless as the water rises time-lapse fast, everything zipping in motion-blur streaks around you. As soon as our view is underwater, everything goes silent and slow. The body of a little sister drifts slowly past behind you, its back to us. When all is still, Fontaine suddenly scrambles into view, thrashing spasmically, screaming bubbles, clutching his throat, red in the face. After some violent jerks, he lies completely still. A few seconds pass, then a light flicks on in the background. We cut to a close-up of it: after a beat, the Vita Chamber doors slide open and Fontaine bursts out again, screaming bubbles louder and louder as he thrashes towards us, and his terrified face almost fills the frame before we cut to black. Fin!

Obviously this needs to be re-rendered a few different ways:

• Without you, if you got in the bathysphere and escaped.
• Without the Little Sister body, if you saved them all.
• Without Fontaine, and with you collapsed, if you died in the final fight.