Fixing Bioshock's Morality System In One Scene

As part of my attempt to clear my Steam backlog I've gone back and replayed Bioshock as I purchased the remaster a while back but never played it (though I did play the original in 2008). A lot of people have written both in praise and derision of Bioshock so a lot of what I say about it is largely going to be the same; gameplay and story are great with incredible world building. However, the morality system doesn't work so well; with the only tangible difference from the morality system is the FMV that plays at the very end. With that said as I replayed Bioshock, I noticed that there is an opportunity no one brings up to fix the morality.

To understand what the fix is, we need to go over the plot and morality system that run through Bioshock, just in case you haven't played it before. In Bioshock you play as a man who winds up in Rapture; an undersea city gone amok. In order to escape you're forced to survive crazed gene splicers, gene harvesting little girls called Little Sister's, and those girls' protector's, the Big Daddies. All in an effort to kill the top dog of the city, Andrew Ryan.

Bioshock's morality system comes into play with the Little Sister's; mutated little girls who harvest genetic material called Adam, which you need. When you meet your first little sister their remorseful creator, Dr. Tenenbaum, will come on the comm and ask you to redeem the children for less power but a future reward. Meanwhile the friendly voice guiding you like an Irish Navi, Atlas, will tell you to just kill them for immediate power. Like I mentioned though, the only downside of killing these little girls is your ending, which doesn't sound worth it to most given the benefits of getting more power.

But like I said, we were going to make the morality system in Bioshock worth it. And the opportunity comes right after you kill Andrew Ryan. Here, Atlas reveals himself to be an evil mastermind controlling you the whole time with the phrase "Would you kindly." But instead of using the phrase to kill you Atlas simply tries to kill you with robots. However, you make a quick and daring escape, get the command phrase taken out by Tenenbaum (regardless of morality), then go off to kill Atlas.

The fix here is simple; instead of robots and a daring escape, Atlas simply speaks a phrase: 

"Would you kindly blow your own brains out?"

With that one change the morality system kicks in with real and painful consequences. If you resisted Atlas' suggestion to kill all the Little Sisters or kept above 50% of them alive the player can resist the suicide command as they had already been refusing to do what Atlas told them already. Maybe resisting the command to make it so the shot doesn't hit your brain and only knocks you out (a thing that can happen in real life) to be saved by Tenenbaum's redeemed Little Sister's. 

But if you chose the quick and easy path, killing all the Little Sister's simply because Atlas' friendly Irish tones were guiding you? Well, it means that you really were Atlas' slave, and you die like one too. No escape, no salvation, just a dead slave. It would reinforce Bioshock's main theme of choice and whether or not the player truly has agency in the world of a video game. Having a real tangible consequence beyond your ending FMV would send that point home.

Now if cutting off a third of the game based on morality sounds unsatisfying then yeah, that's the point. You did unsavory and evil shit for selfish reasons; you don't get the satisfaction of revenge. A morality system that punishes you for not being moral, it's something Undertale does to critical acclaim in ways I won't spoil. Applying that logic to Bioshock would make the game much more poignant. Which is saying something because Bioshock is very poignant already, but I hoped I proved why it could be just a little bit better.

(PS: The final third still would suck ass though.)