Another firm kick to the crotch of devoted PC purists and multiplayer personnel alike came today with the revelation 2K's BioShock 2 would not ship with a dedicated server model - a trend beginning to plague most games to the clear chagrin of core mp players, and those of us with s***ty net connections (such is our case here in Australia).

Digital Extremes have been handling multiplayer duties on the game, which is a first as the original was a stand-alone single-player product. It's also a particular area of the game we're not worried to tell you hasn't done much for us up until this point; here furthering our dislike of its addition.

According to an interview (or rough Q&A) up over at fan site The Cult of Rapture, 2K Marin decided there simply wasn't enough time to implement dedicated servers or LAN support stating "There is always a finite amount of time for the development of a game. Bringing Multiplayer to BioShock was a daunting task between the tech (there was no multiplayer support in the codebase from the first game) and the expectations of the community. Either you try to do everything and so nothing feels finished or you focus your efforts to do a smaller number of things really well like an accessible online experience. We chose to spend the time we had creating a solid game foundation and unfortunately that did not include LAN play or dedicated servers."

This situation really is becoming worse and worse; and a mp mode not too many people are excited for is looking to push even more people away.

We recently posted a preview for the single-player portion which can be found here.

I will buy this game but MP would be a trinket to me. It might be good, it might be bad - I don't care because I'd buy this game for the SP.

It's interesting they took an SP franchise and expanded to MP - wonder if they did some market study to make that decision and if it's a sign of an underlying trend in the growth of online gaming? I suppose you don't need a market study, you can just look at WOW's market and the huge potential of the online market.

Yeah, I'm still not even sure I'm going to get this, but if I did, it wouldn't be for the multiplayer.

the mp looks lame anyway

Meh, Bioshock 1 was all about the SP, even though there wasn't MP. Will be the same for Bioshock 2.

"We chose to spend the time we had creating a solid game foundation and unfortunately that did not include LAN play or dedicated servers."

Yeah, cause matchmaking systems are quicker to write than those things.

And it begins.

Did anyone actually intend to buy Bioshock 2 for the multiplayer? lol
They could have just left it out completely no-one would have been any worse off.

and we see how well it's working for cod mw2.. oh another cheater change server.. oh a cheater here as well.. change server, rinse and repeat till u get lucky

From what I've seen of the mutliplayer so far, it may very well only serve to make a potentially great singleplayer game look tacky by association. They really should have just left it out, it seems so out of place.