The BioShock games are known for their immersive environmental storytelling. The cities of Rapture and Columbia are the stars of their respective games, but though the original BioShock raised the bar for this kind of narrative at the time of its release, it’s far from a perfect game. There are plenty of ways the upcoming BioShock 4 could improve on the franchise's storytelling formula.
There’s one key way that the BioShock games have executed their environmental storytelling, specifically, which needs to be updated in BioShock 4. Fortunately, new development studio Cloud Chamber has plenty of ways it could achieve this.
Audio Diaries
Audio diaries are the backbone of BioShock’s environmental storytelling. Renamed Voxophones for BioShock: Infinite’s early 1900s World Fair aesthetic, the only way to understand the full story of any BioShock game so far has been to search for and to listen to as many audio diaries as possible.
The original BioShock tells most of its story through its 122 audio diaries. There are moments where characters like Andrew Ryan finally appear in cutscenes, and Atlas, AKA Frank Fontaine, does speak to the player via shortwave radio. However, in all three BioShock games, skipping the audio diaries means missing out on vital details about the world that help explain events and contextualize key characters far more than the main checkpoints of the story.
BioShock Infinite spent far more time with specific characters like Elizabeth, and the city of Columbia had a far larger active population than Rapture’s, almost all of whom had already become Splicers by the time of the player’s arrival. BioShock 4, however, should not continue the trend by letting the series’ focus on environmental storytelling fall by the wayside in favor of more tightly scripted linear narratives. Instead, BioShock 4 will need to find exciting new ways to tell environmental stories, while relying far less on audio diaries than previous games.
For a start, while most of the audio diaries provide interesting insights into the backstory, many of them can be more than a little immersion breaking. The BioShock Infinite Voxophone “Changing My Tune,” for example, reveals one of the most interesting aspects of Columbia. In the Voxophone, which can be found backstage at the Good Time Club in a dressing room, Jeremiah Fink talks to his brother, musician Albert Fink, about the rifts in space and time through which Albert is plagiarizing songs like Tainted Love and God Only Knows.
The idea that Albert Fink’s greatest secret – and by extension, Jeremiah’s knowledge of the rifts – would just be left lying around backstage or would be recorded at all seems a little silly to say the least. Though audio diaries shouldn’t be out of the question, there are more interesting ways to approach environmental storytelling that BioShock Infinite plays with as Booker DeWitt explores the world, despite there being 146 Voxophones in game.
Public announcements, propaganda, horrifically racist fairground games – all of these serve to help build an image of Columbia in a more immersive and believable way. In one moment when Elizabeth opens a rift, players can briefly see a French cinema playing “La Revanche du Jedi,” a fantastic early hint at the multiverse yet to be revealed in the main story, with "Revenge of the Jedi" being an early title for Star Wars: Episode 6 that clearly made it all the way to big screen in one reality.
Far more moments like this could be integrated into BioShock 4’s setting, rather than taking place in cutscenes. Players should be incentivized to explore the world in all senses, not just looking for audio diaries to directly explain what’s happening around them. Only then will Cloud Chamber be able to recapture the feeling of playing the original BioShock more than a decade after its release; to truly succeed, BioShock 4 will need to push the boundaries of environmental storytelling just as the first game did.
BioShock 4 is reportedly in development by Cloud Chamber Studio