ifeelasleep wrote:
Is it just me who has trouble following the story in FPS games. I didn't really understand Bioshock that well and as for Half Life 2 (which I have just finished) I had no idea what was going on or why throughout the entire game, and I finished Half Life.
The whole point of Half-Life 2 was that you were meant to be disoriented by what you saw, and that everyone else didn't really tell you as they'd lived through it all and didn't think it out of the ordinary.
Half-Life 2:
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
As a result of your actions in Half-Life, a 'portal storm' occured with those portals (as seen in the original game) opening all over the Earth, depositing aliens. The satellite you launched enabled the alien race behind the invasion - The Universal Union or 'Combine', who travel time and space enslaving - to arrive. They crushed the Earth's militaries effortlessly. The fabled administrator of Black Mesa, Dr Breen, negotiated a truce to save humanity from total destruction. Under the pretence of helping humanity advance, the Combine are plundering the Earth's resources and experimenting on the surviving inhabitants. Humanity has little choice but to agree, as their own forces are destroyed and the countryside is infested with alien creatures deposited by the portal storms.
15-20 years after all this, you, Gordon Freeman, are released from suspended animation by the mysterious Gman and returned to the carcass of the Earth. Your mission is to help your friends stop the evil collaborationist Dr Breen and free Earth from Combine rule.
Bioshock (only read if you've finished it!):
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
Industrial magnate Andrew Ryan has built a huge undersea city, Rapture, intended to allow the intellectual, scientific and industrial elite to carry out their work free from the interference of morality or law. Of the many achievements from this hidden enclave, the greatest was ADAM - a form of stem cells extracted from sea slugs. Fuelled by a counterpart substance EVE, ADAM allows self genetic engineering. Users could reverse aging, alter their appearance... or gain super powers. Ryan also banned religion and other materials which he considered to be 'beneath' (if you'll pardon the pun) the needs of his intellectuals. He underestimated people's longing for such comforts - especially the blue collar workers who were needed to keep his undersea empire running - and so smugglers arose to meet these needs. Eventually, one smuggler, Frank Fontaine, grew so powerful he challenged Ryan himself, and war was inevitable. Fontaine, under the guise of a great philanthropist, organised an army. Ryan, meanwhile, used pheromones in the air to control the ADAM-addicted residents of Rapture as his own army. On New Year's Eve 1959, the war finally broke out and society in Rapture quickly crumbled into anarchy.
You are Andrew Ryan's illegitimate son, Jack. You have been genetically engineered to reach maturity in only a few years, and were safely removed from Rapture prior to the civil war. Unbeknownst to you, you've also been brainwashed by Fontaine to return to Rapture and kill your father, enabling Fontaine's own forces to take control of the city.