BioShock Remastered Replastered To Fix Last Disaster

A patch has been released for the recent Remastered editions of BioShock and BioShock 2, hoping to fix some of the problems players have been confronting 2K about. The games came out as part of a collection, boasting about how good they looked. But they were also lacking a lot of the expected graphics options, not to mention the presence of treacly mouse controls and the absence of support for BigWide resolutions. 2K are hoping to balm those deep, deep wounds with these patches, introducing adjustable field of view, more resolutions and some other fixes.

I judge all games by their water effects, so I was mostly just unhappy to see that the water somehow looks worse in the remaster. But many were far more annoyed by the lack of options, with the games containing only the ability to change resolution, anti-aliasing, vysync and anisotropic filtering. A strange situation when even the original BioShock allowed you to change shadows, textures and so on.

But developers gonna develop. Here are the BioShock 1 Remastered patch notes, as listed in a recent update. Try finding your particular gripe and seeing if it’s fixed. The short version is that they’ve made FOV adjustable from 75 to 130, improved the mouse sensitivity, introduced 21:9 resolutions and provided new graphics options “for lower-end machines”. All that along with stomping out some bugs.

Got that? Okay, now here are the BioShock 2 Remastered patch notes. This got the same treatment in terms of FOV and 21:9 resolutions, as well as the adjustments for mouse, but has also received some DirectX 11 performance improvements while fixing some “graphical issues with Occlusion Culling”. There. I hope you’re happy now.

Ah, but it turns out you aren’t. Because now several people are complaining of crashes when they reach particular points, or try to load old saves, or simply when they press the space bar for the first time. Others report flickering textures where previously no problems existed. Hurrah PC gaming! 2K has yet to respond to any of this but given that these are currently just a few reports in the comments of those updates, they will likely wait and see how widespread any new problems are and whether they go away as people furiously update drivers and fiddle with their machines in a bid to figure things out.