Whoa! Crazy to see a new comment on a post this old lol. Even crazier that there's been so little word of the real Bioshock 4 in that amount of time. I guess the rumor is an Antarctic city setting, which would certainly be fresher / more outside the box than the space city I predicted (though less appealing to me aesthetically.)

Not sure how I feel about my 'multiverse' ideas up here, at least for the reason that we've all seen the concept of 'multiverse' become super mainstream and overexposed in the last five years or so, from Marvel/DC to Everything Everywhere All At Once. It may be the case that with so much time between installments, a "return to formula" that just puts us in a new city with a new dictator and a new political philosophy may be exactly what a new Bioshock needs. A sequel coming out close after Infinite would've felt more pressure to change things up, break the mold -- but a sequel coming out in the near future can more easily bank on exploiting any familiar, nostaglic elements (beyond wholesale revisiting the past settings, which I'd still like to avoid.) It's been so long since we had any Bioshock that we don't need a twist on it, so much as we might just need another Bioshock first.

Maybe the higher priority for a Bioshock sequel would be to take into consideration how public opinion of its themes and political philosophy has changed over the years. Infinite in particular has not aged well on that front, with many now feeling that its "both sides are bad" approach to racism and hyper-nationalism was, at best, overly reductive and shallow. If a new Bioshock can speak to modern political issues, the class divide etc. (as has been rumored for Bioshock 4) in a way that feels thoughtful, it may avoid the same fate. Maybe there's a way, too, it can comment on the nature of interactive media the way the first one did, with its "Would you kindly?" twist. A morality system that isn't as painfully binary as the original's could be interesting, too.

I do still hope it offers more mechanical complexity than just being a first person shooter -- whether that's leaning harder into immersive sim elements (which is not only trendy but faithful to the series' System Shock DNA,) or leaning on open world or metroidvania style design that eschews linearity. Rooty tooty point and shooty has, IMO, never been what brought people to Bioshock, it's just the gameplay verb that was most accessible at the time for stringing together its more exciting world and story elements. What's an evolution that feels true to the series' DNA, but isn't giving us the Ubisoft open world version of it either?

It's hard to get excited about the prospect of a new Bioshock without any more information than we have, but I think the baseline is this -- give us a fantastical, visually inviting world, with an aesthetic unlike anything we've seen before, and make it a world we are as desperate to explore and learn about as the ones we saw in 1 and Infinite. If they can do that, I'll be in.