BioShock 2: Minerva's Den

BioShock 2: Minerva's Den is a single-player downloadable content (DLC) campaign for the 2010 first-person shooter BioShock 2, developed by 2K Marin. The expansion takes place in the underwater city of Rapture, where two scientists vie for control of the city's supercomputer, the Thinker. The player assumes the role of Subject Sigma, an armored human known as a Big Daddy who must travel through Rapture's technological hub, Minerva's Den, in order to download a copy of the Thinker.

Minerva's Den was the last DLC developed for BioShock 2, and was created by a small team within 2K Marin led by Steve Gaynor, who based the game's setting partially on ideas from his hiring interview. The team conceived of a smaller, more personal story that grappled with themes of identity and free will, and explored an unseen part of Rapture. Minerva's Den was initially released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms in August 2010, followed by additional platforms and reissues at later dates.

Minerva's Den was well received by critics, who praised the game's story, characters, and gameplay. Publications such as Kotaku and Paste considered it one of the best video game expansions of all time. The experience of creating a small, story-focused project inspired Gaynor and other 2K employees to form their own studio, The Fullbright Company, and led to the creation of the critically acclaimed Gone Home.

Gameplay

Like BioShock 2, Minerva's Den is a shooter game, with gameplay experienced from a first-person perspective. The expansion takes place in the underwater city of Rapture in the year 1968, eight years after the events of BioShock and concurrently with the events of BioShock 2s campaign. The expansion takes place in Minerva's Den, the city's eponymous high-tech district. The player character is known as Subject Sigma, a "Big Daddy"—a person fused with an armored diving suit. As Sigma, the player must work with the scientist Charles Milton Porter to acquire the plans of his creation, a sophisticated supercomputer known as the Thinker, and escape Rapture. Opposing the player are enemies known as "Splicers"—Rapture's residents who overused genetic modifications—along with other Big Daddies and automated security. The game can be completed in roughly three to five hours.

The gameplay of Minerva's Den is similar to the base game. The player uses similar weapons and plasmids (genetic modifications that grant superpowers) though the player obtains access to these items in a different order. The expansion also adds new items for the player to use. These include the "Ion Lance", a laser weapon wielded by Minerva's Den's "Lancer" Big Daddies that comes with normal, burst, or incendiary ammunition; and the Gravity Well plasmid, which stuns and pulls enemies towards a central vortex. There are also new enemy types, including security robots armed with rockets or laser weapons, flame-wielding Brute Splicers, and ice-throwing Houdini Splicers.

Plot 
Subject Sigma is guided by the voice of Charles Milton Porter as he approaches Minerva's Den, Rapture's central computer core. Porter wants to reach his supercomputer, the Thinker, and retrieve its blueprints so he can recreate the computer on the surface. Sigma is opposed by Porter's former colleague Reed Wahl, whom Porter warns has become insane from splicing and his obsession with the Thinker.

Porter and Wahl each wanted to use the Thinker for their own ends. After becoming disillusioned with his role in World War II and the loss of his wife Pearl in The Blitz, Porter traveled to Rapture to pursue his dreams of artificial intelligence. Porter attempted to recreate his dead wife Pearl by emulating her personality with the Thinker, while Wahl believes he can program the computer to predict the future. Wahl betrayed Porter to Rapture's secret police to keep the Thinker for himself. Though Minerva's Den has been cut off from the rest of Rapture, the scientists have still taken to splicing, and attack the player.

As Sigma progresses, the environment becomes increasingly more threatening due to the Thinker's sophisticated defense system, as well as interference from Wahl and his private army of Splicers. Sigma arrives at the Thinker's core, and Wahl sets multiple Big Daddies and ultimately himself against the player. Sampling Sigma's DNA to print out its schematics, the Thinker reveals Sigma's true identity—that of Porter, who was turned into a Big Daddy after being handed over to Rapture's authorities. Porter's "instructions" throughout the game were actually from the Thinker, imitating the voice of one of its creators. The final sequence of the game contains no combat, and has the player walk through Porter's living quarters, where he obsessed over bringing his wife back digitally. Sigma and Doctor Brigid Tenenbaum return to the surface in a bathysphere; Tenenbaum is able to undo Sigma's programming and restore Porter's original human body. Porter visits his wife's grave and leaves a letter in which he apologizes for trying to bring her back using the Thinker, and that he has finally decided to let her go.

Development

Development of Minerva's Den began after the completion of BioShock 2. Steve Gaynor and a team of nine other full-time workers were tasked with creating a 3–5 hour single-player experience; Gaynor served as lead designer, having worked as a level designer for BioShock 2 and on story elements such as audio logs and dialogue. As an Easter egg, the names of the members of the development team were given to slugs scattered around the game's levels. The development team were limited in what form the DLC could take as they had to reuse as many assets as possible; Gaynor felt that the constraints of limited time and resources was a blessing in disguise. Though Gaynor felt many companies could treat DLC as a "cash grab", the lower expectations also enabled more creative risks. With such a small team, the staff collaborated, without remaining in segregated roles. "It has to be organic as possible, and when someone has something that's not necessarily their primary responsibility but they have a passion for it and ideas for it [...] I think you have to take advantage of that," Gaynor said.

In interviewing for his position at 2K Marin, Gaynor had been asked to propose a potential BioShock level. Gaynor recalled suggesting a story focusing on Rapture's computer core, and a character splicing to become smarter. During BioShock 2s development, level designer J.P. LeBreton and the lead level designer of BioShock suggested the possibility that technology from Rapture created a primitive A.I. that would lead to the development of the A.I. SHODAN from the video game System Shock. When it came time to develop ideas for what would become Minerva's Den, Gaynor suggested merging the ideas, doing a story on Rapture's computer core and a "steampunk" A.I., drawing from SHODAN's multiple identities and impersonations.

Gaynor wanted the content to fit not only the world of BioShock, but the real historical era it took place. When the team decided to focus on Rapture's computer technology, they decided to base it on the early computing age spurred by advances in World War II, including Alan Turing and the cryptographers at Bletchley Park.  Gaynor reasoned that while Rapture advanced using genetic technology, there may have been other technological dead ends the citizens of Rapture explored, and so they built areas into Minerva's Den devoted to robotics and automation. To prevent players from feeling like the gameplay was repetitive, the team tried to present a different experience within the required constraints. Shadowy level design and more dangerous enemies were crafted to give a subtle survival horror feel; they also adjusted the order players received equipment and plasmids to encourage players to interact with the environment rather than using purely aggressive weapons.

In comparison to long development and narrative of the main game, Gaynor enjoyed the opportunity to tell a shorter story where players understood the characters. "We could take the themes of BioShock that are native to Rapture," Gaynor explained, "and make them relevant to the specific fiction of Minerva's Den. When you have a super computer that can do a million calculations a second, how does that fit into the ideas of free will and predestination and fate, and choice, that BioShock is built on?" Gaynor wanted to adapt the grand themes of BioShock to tell a different story about loss and changing the past, focused on a single character—Porter, who formed the "heart" of the game. The final gameplay sequence, walking through Porter's living space, was important to give players time to reflect on the character's journey; Gaynor resisted calls to make the interesting environment host to combat.

Release
Minerva's Den was announced as the final piece of BioShock 2 downloadable content (DLC) in August 2010; in contrast with previous DLC releases for the game, Minerva's Den was the only expansion to offer new single-player experiences. The DLC was released on August 31 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, with minimal promotion. Initially, Minerva's Den and other BioShock 2 DLC was not going to be released on PC; 2K later resumed development of the PC ports, and Minerva's Den was released for Windows PC on May 31, 2011, and Mac in 2015.

With the closure of the Games for Windows Live Marketplace in August 2013, BioShock 2 and all its DLC was released on Steam in October 2013. The game was also updated to support Steam achievements, Big Picture mode and controllers. Minerva's Den was released for free for players who owned BioShock 2 before the patch. Minerva's Den and the rest of BioShock 2 were rereleased in a bundle with BioShock in January 2013 as BioShock: Ultimate Rapture Edition. It was also included in the remastered 2016 BioShock compilation, BioShock: The Collection.

Reception

Minerva's Den received generally favorable reviews, with a Metacritic score of 82/100 for the Xbox 360 version based on 12 reviews. The Daily Telegraph praised Minerva's Den after the lackluster BioShock 2 DLC that preceded it, and Eurogamer and IGN called it an excellent finale story for the setting of Rapture. Minerva's Den has a reputation as one of the greatest DLC expansions of all time.

Critics found that Minerva's Den played much the same as BioShock 2, but the new additions to gameplay were welcomed. Several reviewers considered the expansion as offering a complete, concentrated BioShock 2 experience, with Rock, Paper, Shotgun writing that Minerva's Den "hits the key beats of the ideas behind BioShock—manipulation, twisted technology, distorted values, ambition and folly—and it weaves all that into the improved combat system that, for some, makes BioShock 2 the superior of BioShock 1." Kotaku found the gameplay repetitious, especially in reusing "tedious" elements from the base game, while Engadget lamented that players had to perform certain gameplay sequences repeatedly.

Reviewers praised the narrative of Minerva's Den, with Games Radar's Andrew Heyward calling the story what made Minerva's Den a "must-play extension" of the universe. GameSpot's Kevin VanOrd wrote that while the setup for the expansion was familiar to BioShock players—voices on the radio telling you where to go—the appeal lay with its "personal nature" and Porter's character. Reviews from GameSpot and Eurogamer noted that Reed Wahl was not a strong villain, but that Porter was a compelling protagonist.

The game's twist ending was positively received, with VanOrd calling it "surprising from a plot perspective and thematically consistent with prior BioShock revelations," though Engadget thought that though the twist applied a retroactive motivation for the characters, it came at the expense of the player's link to Subject Sigma. Kotaku's Heather Alexandra contrasted the twist with that of BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite, writing, "[those] games want to impress you. Minerva's Den wants to move you." Several reviews called the story stronger than that of the base game.

Gaynor's credited the positive experience with a small development team as changing his perception of what it meant to make games. After moving to Irrational Games and his resulting dissatisfaction with the sprawling development of BioShock Infinite, Gaynor and two other Minerva's Den developers left to start their own game studio, The Fullbright Company. Fullbright developed the acclaimed Gone Home, which shared Minerva's Dens nonlinear exploration and character focus; Gaynor felt the final no-combat exploration sequence of Minerva's Den served as a template for what Gone Home would become.

References

External links 

The Cult of Rapture

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