I don’t know whether to be happy or sad.
I completed Bioshock in just 33 hours. For an RPG, it’s a damn short one.
Seriously.
The screencapture is taken from my profile page at Xfire. Eversince I joined back in 2004, it has been tracking every game I have ever played since, and it tells me how long I spent playing each.
33 hours for Bioshock is actually somewhat of a let-down for me. I had expected more. After all, it’s billed as an RPG, and RPGs aren’t 30 hours. Even Neverwinter Nights, which I thought had a short campaign, lasted 60 hours.
On hindsight though, it wasn’t much of an RPG. No skills (other than the plasmids), no attributes, no character classes. What it is, is more like an FPS with some RPG elements like customizing your character. Even so, it’s not a pioneer in this – Deus Ex and Deus Ex 2 appeared years before Bioshock and had done this.
Well if I take it as an FPS, 33 hours is typical. Half Life 2 took about the same amount of time. COD4 took the cake though, I completed it in only 5 hours.
I didn’t rush through the game. I attempted to explore everything I could. Many times I even ignored the glowing arrow which points me to my next quest objective, and started exploring places.
Yet, it ended in just 33 hours.
Well I might try to re-play this again, but I doubt so. Somehow it doesn’t have that incentive for me to run through it all again. No character classes for example. Even right up to the end in Bioshock, where I had opened all 6 slots in Plasmids, Body, Technology and Combat attributes, I still had some unused skills stored in the Gene Bank and didn’t put them into use. I don’t think I will want to re-play this game just to see what those unused skills would have done for me.
However, the “good news” is that after playing through Bioshock, it made me want to re-install System Shock 2 and give it a go again. For one thing, I have never completed System Shock 2. Yes, surprising isn’t it? I don’t know why I didn’t complete it, but I think now I should. I do remember however that I got pretty far into SS2 before I stopped playing it and never got back into it.
Well the next post you see might very be on System Shock 2!
