Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Allow me to post this image in full, so it sinks in.

GameInformer's world exclusive. Lucky sods.

Yes. It’s not a fake. That, my friends, is a Big Sister. Big Daddies were huge, ponderous, and very scary, but ultimately fairly stupid and easy to kill. This thing looks like a cross between them, Terminator, and a Spider-Splicer (the ceiling-scuttling things from the first game).

There’s been a ton of new information over at the viral website, so let’s delve into everything and come up with what we know so far in total, as there’s fifty different sites, each with ten different articles, and this seems like a waste of time to analyse it bit by bit when we know it’s going to be one huge article eventually.

The viral site lists some interesting facts.

The Pattern

Every time a girl goes missing, the following criteria are in evidence:

• The girl is aged between five and seven. This is the approximate physical age of the Little Sisters who resided in Rapture, up until the point they were either killed by your character in the first game, or saved and taken out into normal society.
• There are “red ghost lights” spotted in the docks near every incident site, which we can now identify, and even back then as it was bloody obvious to Bioshock players, as a Big Sister.
• The girls are being abducted in a circle, and presumably being taken back to Rapture.
• They all look extremely similar, much like the little girls used in the first title. So, not just lazy character design, then.

The Reasons

There are a variety of reasons the Big Sisters could be dragging the girls down into the deep-sea world of Rapture:

• Fontaine/Atlas never actually died, or if he has, there are surviving humans down there trying to restore the status quo.
• Bear in mind this is set seven years after the events of Bioshock, so enough time has elapsed for Big Sisters to evolve and go hunting.
• We know that the character from the first title, in the “good” ending, is seen to live out his days. Now, bear in mind, he is surrounded by Little Sisters all grown up, but this is tens of years in the future, possibly even the present day. If so, you could be playing the same character, simply seven years on.

Plot Theories

Call me a crackpot, but I think any of these make sense, given what we know so far:

• The Big Sisters are, in fact, fully-grown Little Sisters who have returned to Rapture to rebuild it, using the armour of their possibly now-dead guardians in order to give them the strength and underwater abilities of their bulkier relatives.
• Rapture is being rebuilt from the ground up (well, sea-bed up) in order to start again as a haven, but there’s been one vital flaw: they’re missing the various people to do it with, this time. Andrew Ryan is dead, Fontaine/Atlas is presumably dead, and Rapture is leaking and broken, but, and it is important to note, not destroyed.
• The person tracking all of these discoveries is one Jeremiah Lynch, a name that is, as yet, unconnected, but I’m getting the feeling this guy’s going to end up being our protagonist, as he’s the only person that isn’t completely stupid. I’m sorry, but even in the sixties and seventies people would notice little girls going missing all over the world, on the same night that red lights are seen underwater, heading out into the sea in a direction that puts their destination smack-bang in the middle of the Atlantic.
• Interesting really, as it then basically means Rapture is sitting on top of, or at least near to, the location Atlantis was presumed to have existed.

Analysis of the Big Sister

Well, well, well. What do we have here?

• The armour is a lot tighter, and we know the Big Daddy armour didn’t contain a huge, fat man, because our protagonist, the skinny little man we controlled in the first game was able to put it on and wear it easily enough prior to the final battle.
• It seems to come equipped with a harpoon gun, and a cage to contain the Little Sister in. I’m thinking if you’re wanting to kill, harvest or free the little tyke, you’re going to have to wait until she leaves the protective safety of that metal net before you can get anywhere near her.
• Apparently, the viral site tells us Big Sisters have the ability to cut “perfect holes” in glass, and scale buildings easily, which to me indicates the abilities of a Spider Splicer inside a Big Daddy-esque suit, which has to be the most difficult-to-kill combination I could have come up with while playing through the franchise’s first title.
• She’s also standing inside an underwater dome, much like many of the rooftops in Rapture that contained town squares and more open areas of the artificial cityscape. She stands next to what looks like the foot of a statue, but we’re not sure what this is yet, though with the only major statues being of Ryan, it’s probably likely to be simply a ruin instead.

In the mean time, we’ll have to wait for more information, but it looks like American kidnappings are next on the list if we follow the geographical pattern playing out on the world map on the viral site. I await with baited (held, more like) breath.