You folks do realize that the ability was added to the game options to disable the Vita Chambers right?
Yep. I'd played the game by then. I'll quite likely play through again with Vita chambers disabled, but that's still not ideal. The thing that irks me is that Bioshock is in so many ways a clone of Irrational's own System Shock 2, which had a GOOD implementation of this feature. If you're going to clone something, you should at least keep all the good features intact.
In SS2 (and SS1 of course) the resurrection machines were there, but you had to find them and activate them on each level -- this resulted in an
excellent gameplay cycle between cautiously exploring a new level knowing that you have no safety net, and being a bit more gung-ho once you'd found it and activated it. Also, you had to heal yourself after resurrection, so dying still cost you something.
Bioshock's model means you are never in any danger. Ever. The sole downside to death is needing to make your way back to where you were. There is no sense of tension in the game, because it quite literally does not matter if you die. By comparison with the SS model, it plain sucks.
Really though Vita Chambers are no different that Auto-Saves
Nonsense. Not unless you mean an autosave that saves your progress up to the very moment you died, and then reloads at a safe location with a big health boost. Is that the sort of autosave you meant?
In Bioshock you don't lose any progress. If the Vitachambers had any resemblance to a save-game feature, facing a Big Daddy with only (say) standard pistol ammo would be madness. You'd never survive. In Bioshock you can do stupid things like that, because every hit you score remains in effect while you continually resurrect, until eventually the opponent goes down.
The closest this comes to being like a save feature is if you were hitting the quick-save key after every shot you fired.
It annoys me because it was a
monumentally stupid design decision (design
change, really) in a mostly superb game. If they'd kept the older system, the added sense of danger, tension, and achievement would have improved the long-term game experience two-fold or more. That is why I say that it hamstrung the gameplay.
This comment was edited on Mar 13, 06:37.