Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: Where does Bioshock 2 take place?
BioShock 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by 2K Marin and published by 2K Games. A part of the Bioshock series, it is the sequel to the 2007 video game BioShock and was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox 360 on February 9, 2010. Feral Interactive released an OS X version of the game on March 30, 2012. Set in the fictional underwater dystopian city of Rapture, the game's story takes place eight years after BioShock. Assuming control of Subject Delta, a hulking Big Daddy, players are tasked with fighting through "splicers", the psychotic human population of the city, using weapons and an array of genetic modifications. The game also introduces a story-driven multiplayer mode called Fall of Rapture, which takes place during Rapture's 1959 civil war, before the events of the first game.
"Burial at Sea" is set after the events of "BioShock Infinite", which spanned several alternate realities and was themed on the nature of choice. Whereas "Infinite" took place aboard Columbia, the floating air city set in 1912, "Burial at Sea" takes place in an alternate reality within the underwater city of Rapture in 1958, before the events of the first "BioShock" game. The game features Booker DeWitt as a private detective, and Elizabeth as a "femme fatale" who employs Booker's services.
"BioShock Infinite" was developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games, with Ken Levine working on the game as the creative director and lead writer. Irrational and Levine, who had previously developed the original "BioShock", passed on the opportunity to work on the sequel "BioShock 2" in favor of a new "BioShock" game with a different setting, with Take-Two Interactive allowing them the freedom to develop it. Work on "Infinite" began in February 2008, with the game's concept being formed six months after the original "BioShock"s release. Under the moniker "Project Icarus," Irrational worked in secrecy on "Infinite" for two-and-a-half years prior to its announcement on August 12, 2010. The game's development took about five years, with it finally announced as going gold on February 19, 2013. Irrational's work on the game required a team of about 200 people, while also receiving substantial assistance from developer company 2K Australia, which was formerly part of Irrational Games.
"BioShock 2" was announced in 2008, with its development being led by 2K Marin. Levine stated that Irrational (then 2K Boston) was not involved in the game's sequel because they wanted to "swing for the fences" and try to come up with something "very, very different", which was later revealed as "BioShock Infinite". "BioShock 3" was also announced, with its release assumed to likely coincide with the "BioShock" film. "BioShock 2" takes place about ten years following the events of the first game. The player assumes the role of Subject Delta, a precursor of the Big Daddies who must search the fallen city of Rapture for his former Little Sister, Eleanor. "BioShock 2" was released for Windows PC, Mac, Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3 worldwide on February 9, 2010.
BioShock 2 is presented as a first-person shooter, with the player taking on the role of Subject Delta, a prototype for the Big Daddies 8 years after the events of the first game.[3] As in BioShock, the player explores Rapture and fights off splicers, the remaining psychotic human population of the undersea city, using a combination of the environment, weapons, plasmids, and tonics.[4] Plasmids and tonics are special genetic-reencoding liquids that grant the user active or passive abilities, respectively, and include many of those introduced in BioShock as well as new ones.[5] For example, plasmids can give the player the ability to use telekinesis or to invoke fire,[6] while tonics can improve the player's movement speed, attack damage, or damage resistance. Several of the weapons in BioShock 2 were previously seen carried by Big Daddies in the first game, including a powerful drill and a rivet gun. The player can use each weapon in a close-range melee attack, unlike in the first game, and is able to equip a weapon and a plasmid at the same time, which they can use in quick succession to destroy enemies. For example, the player might freeze a foe using a plasmid then shatter it using a spear gun. If the player is killed, they are revived in the most recently visited "vita-chamber."[7]
Since its release a direct sequel has been released, "BioShock 2" by 2K Marin, as well as a third game titled "BioShock Infinite" by Irrational Games. A remastered version of the original game was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 13, 2016, as part of "", along with "BioShock 2" and "Infinite". A standalone version of "BioShock Remastered" was released for macOS by Feral Interactive on August 22, 2017.
The collection includes all three titles in the "BioShock" video game series—"BioShock", "BioShock 2", and "BioShock Infinite"—alongside their single-player content originally released as exclusives or downloadable content packs, including "BioShock 2" "" and "BioShock Infinite" "". The first two games in the series were newly remastered for the collection. The multiplayer component from "BioShock 2" is not included in the collection. It includes the challenge game modes from all three releases, and the Museum of Orphaned Concepts, a feature from in which the player views an in-game gallery of abandoned development concepts. The collection adds a director's commentary called "Imagining BioShock", featuring the series' creative director Ken Levine and lead artist Shawn Robertson; players unlock episodes of this commentary by finding new collectible objects that have been added to "BioShock". The remastered games all run in full 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second across all platforms. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 retail release is spread across 2 discs.
By March 2010, BioShock 2 sold 3million copies across all platforms, close to the original BioShock's 4million lifetime sales at the time.[62] In an earnings call, Take-Two Interactive's Chief Financial Officer noted that the game had "lower than expected" sales, adding "sales slowed down sooner than we expected."[63] Prior to the game's release, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick stated that he expected the game to sell 5 million copies across all platforms.[64]
The "BioShock" series is a collection of story-driven first person shooters in which the player explores dystopian settings created by Ken Levine and his team at Irrational Games. The first two games, "BioShock" and its direct sequel, "BioShock 2", take place in the underwater city of Rapture in the 1950s and 1960s, which was influenced heavily by Ayn Rand's Objectivism. The third installment, "BioShock Infinite", is set aboard the floating air-city of Columbia in 1912, designed around the concept of American Exceptionalism. Though "Infinite" is not a direct sequel to the previous games, the game is thematically linked; a short scene within the core "Infinite" game returns to Rapture, while the downloadable content "" tie in many of the plot elements between "BioShock" and "BioShock Infinite".
While "BioShock Infinite", developed by Irrational Games and released in 2013, shares the name and many similar gameplay concepts with "BioShock", the title is not a sequel or prequel in story, instead taking place aboard the collapsing air-city of Columbia in the year 1912, and following former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt as he tries to rescue a woman named Elizabeth from the dystopia it has become. "Infinite" involves the possibilities of multiple universes, and one scene during the game take place at the lighthouse and bathysphere terminus of Rapture as part of this exploration, though any direct canonical connection is not given in the main game. The episodic expansion, "", takes place in Rapture in 1959, prior to the war between Atlas and Ryan, while continuing the story of Booker and Elizabeth. This content links the two stories while providing expansion on the causes and behind-the-scenes events alluded to by the in-game background from "BioShock".
Ken Levine is most notable for his conceptualization and work on the "BioShock" franchise. Levine and his team worked on "BioShock" and "BioShock Infinite", passing on the opportunity to make "BioShock 2".
The in-game setting of Rapture is nearly completely rebuilt with very little reuse of "BioShock" assets. The gameplay for the content was altered to fit the setting and feel of Rapture compared to the larger battles of "Infinite". The city of Rapture seen through windows is built up by 3D models instead of the 2D backdrops used in "BioShock" and "BioShock 2". The added content includes new weapons, gear, and Plasmids (the Rapture equivalent of Vigors), as well as bringing back the mechanic of the "weapons wheel," used in the first two "BioShock" games, where players can swap between more than two weapons at their disposal. One of the Plasmids is Old Man Winter that freezes and shatters enemies. The concept was created by Joe Trinder, a fan and graphic designer, shortly after the reveal of "Infinite". The concept art, mimicking other in-game posters for Vigors, caught the attention of Levine, who decided to incorporate the concept within the "Burial at Sea" content with Trinder's help. The artwork was redesigned to match the Rapture setting, but further influenced one section of the content where a portion of the city has been converted into a winter wonderland where the Plasmid will be found.
Jordan Thomas, BioShock 2's creative director, said that the first concern with a sequel to BioShock was "where do you go with this? How do you bring people back to an experience and terrify them and shock them in a way that they're not expecting, but also fulfill the many expectations they're projecting onto it?"[26] Early on, Thomas decided that it couldn't be a BioShock game without the city of Rapture, and that there were many unseen locations and untold stories that could remained with the setting.[27] The developers wanted to bring some of the mystery back to the location of Rapture, and maintain a balance of surprising old players while introducing the setting to newcomers. Thomas and environmental artist Hogarth De La Plante agreed that the setting of Rapture was fertile ground for new ideas, and that as they were both veterans of the original game, they were excited to add never-before-seen parts of the city and push the artistic style they had developed. "Any idea was out on the table at that point, and I think nobody has played BioShock more than the developers that made it, so I feel like in one respect we are a pretty good litmus test for whether it's still an interesting place or not," La Plante recalled. "And if that doesn't bore us and we're the people that played it for thousands upon thousands of hours, then I think we have a pretty good perspective on how interesting that location really is."[26]
Professor Ryan Lizardi draws parallels between "BioShock 2"s themes of community versus the individual and the issues of McCarthyism and the hippie movement that occurred around the time period of the game's setting. "As this sequel is an extension of the first game's storylines and characters, there are direct contrasts between the extreme politics of Andrew Ryan's objectivism and the extreme religion/politics of Lamb's collectivism," he writes. ""Bioshock 2" specifically asks players to question all sides of debates when extreme stances are taken, and asks players to weigh their decisions in an alternate and complex history. " Lizardi also noted "BioShock 2"s multiplayer option, "which in games often represents the least narratively challenging moments, but which in this game is used as a place to hammer home a connection to the first game's politically extreme spectrum."
The player first experiences Rapture in "BioShock", in 1960, a year after the fateful riots, as a man named Jack that has come to Rapture after a plane accident over the mid-Atlantic Ocean where the city was located; during this, the player comes to learn more about Ryan's motives and those that he struggled against to keep the city's ideals until the very end. In "BioShock 2", the player takes the role of a "Big Daddy", a heavily modified humanoid in an armored diving suit, designed to maintain the city, and would soon come to serve the purpose of protecting the Little Sisters as they collect ADAM from "Angels", which are dead bodies that harbor significant amounts of ADAM; this takes place eight years after the events of the first game, and while Ryan has been killed, there remain those that vie for the vacuum left in his position of power.
BioShock 2: Minerva's Den is a single-player downloadable content (DLC) campaign for the 2010 video game "BioShock 2". The game is a single player first-person shooter in which the player takes on the role of an Alpha Series Big Daddy with the alias Sigma, who must travel through Rapture's main security station, Minerva's Den, in order to download a copy of the city's main computer which is located within.
"Minerva's Den" takes place in the fictional underwater city of Rapture in the year 1968, ten years after the events of "Bioshock". The story does not reveal where Rapture is, nor the approximate size of the city, other than that it is enormous.
According to Levine, the team had to revolutionize their previous work on the "BioShock" game in order to realize Columbia, including both indoor and outdoor settings that take place thousands of feet above the ground. The original "BioShock" engine, a modified Unreal Engine 2.x, was inadequate for their vision, and so they chose to work with Unreal Engine 3, modifying it with their own lighting engine and means to simulate the movement and buoyancy of the buildings. The development team found that the implementation of open spaces created new gameplay options for the player, such as deciding between long-ranged attacks or finding a means to move in for short-range or melee combat. While Irrational had followed 2K Marin's work on "BioShock 2", "Infinite" does not include any further improvements that 2K Marin had made on the original engine. According to Levine, all assets of "Infinite" are created from scratch.
As with "BioShock" and "BioShock 2", the player is able to locate audio logs—Voxophones—and film projectors—Kinetoscopes—that will expand on the history and nature of Columbia beyond those events occurring within the game. Though the game takes place before the events of the previous two "BioShock" games (occurring in 1960 for "BioShock" and in 1968 for "BioShock 2"), the question of whether "Infinite" occurs within this same timeline remains unanswered.
2K Boston and Irrational Games produced BioShock to critical and commercial acclaim.[22] Several ex-BioShock developers moved to 2K Marin, a new Bay Area studio parent company Take-Two Interactive formed in late 2007.[23][24] 2K Marin started on BioShock 2 with a core team of eight in November 2007, adding 78 additional personnel at peak development.[25]
"BioShock: Ultimate Rapture Edition" is a retail package containing "BioShock" and "BioShock 2", along with all downloadable content for both games including "", and a set of stickers based on "BioShock Infinite". The edition was released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in North America on January 14, 2013, Future release dates planned for other regions.
Though "BioShock Infinite" shares the same name with the other two games, Levine has stated that this is a new direction, and was coy to answer if they shared the same universe. Levine referred to the term "BioShock" not as a specific location or setting, but a concept conjoined by two ideas: the exploration of a fantastical setting, and the use of a large number of tools and abilities in creative manners to survive. Along with the "System Shock" games, which Levine and other Irrational developers had worked on, the titles share the same idea of a "component of learning about a new place" and shocking the player into discovering more of the setting, according to Levine. Levine affirmed that with the similarities between the games, "It would be dishonest to say this is not "BioShock"". Similarly, Timothy Gerritsen, director of product development, stated they wanted to keep the feel of the "BioShock" experience but still consider "Infinite" to be a new intellectual property; as a means to sever the implied connection to the previous games, the teaser purposely shows a Big Daddy figurine being crushed at the onset. This was furthered by the selection of the word "Infinite" as part of the title, to reflect the "many possibilities" they wanted to explore with the "BioShock" concept. The game does not completely eschew "BioShock", as certain elements like the sound effects representing the player's health or for gaining new quests from "BioShock" are reused without modification in "Infinite"; Levine stated that they had worked these common elements as former "BioShock" players would already understand their impact, and that they had spent a great detail of time during "BioShock" to get these elements right and felt no need to reinvent the sounds again. Further, the introduction of "Infinite" purposely mimics several elements from "BioShock"s opening: one example given by writer Drew Holmes is the act of walking through a candle-lined water trough in a Columbia church to be baptized, which visually is similar to swimming through the flaming wreckage of the plane to reach the bathysphere terminus for Rapture.
Game Informer's Andrew Reiner scored the game an 8.25. He criticised the game for being too similar to its predecessor, saying that "For roughly 10 hours, BioShock 2 follows directly in its forefather's footsteps, too fearful to inject anything new into this twisted world." However, he praised the game's ending, stating that "Eventually this disappointing adventure does turn a corner. It takes 10 hours to get there, but the final two acts (lasting approximatetely three hours) are brilliant." He concluded with "BioShock 2 eventually becomes the sequel I hoped for, but spends too much time getting there."[81] In 2013, Liz Lanier of Game Informer included Dr. Sofia Lamb among top ten female villains in video games, stating that "an extremist obsessed with the "greater good," Lamb will sacrifice anything and anyone for her own agenda; whether that means brainwashing or murdering to create her utopia, she's down."[91]
In contrast to the first BioShock's focus on libertarianism and Ayn Rand's philosophies, BioShock 2 focuses on collectivist ideals.
A smaller limited edition, titled BioShock 2 Rapture Edition, was officially announced on December 2, 2009. Its contents are the game and a smaller, 96-page art book, packaged together in a special slipcover. As with the Special Edition, the Rapture Edition was limited to a single production run.[56] The BioShock 2 Rapture Edition is available in Europe, New Zealand and Australia, in addition to the BioShock 2 Special Edition.[57]