BioShock™ 2 Remastered

As others have probably mentioned, Bioshock 2 Remastered is incredibly buggy. I'd heard many rumblings of the technical issues but had never played it on PC. I have the remasters of both 1 & 2 on Steam and wanted to get them here as well. I have barely ever had any technical issues regarding Bioshock Remastered. For most of my experience, it has run smooth as butter with maybe a few stuttering issues here and there. Sadly, this is not so for the remaster of Bioshock 2. I had some spare time this week so I dived in. Played through the vast majority of Bioshock 2 Remastered. Things worked mostly fine up until Siren Alley where the game began crashing an insane amount through most of the rest of my playthrough. I tried every bug fix I could think of to get the game to run smoothly and just couldn't get it working (forcing DirectX9 actually made it run worse for me interestingly enough). Forced myself to do a side by side playthrough of Bioshock 2 Classic to compare. Here are my findings. Bioshock 2 Classic overall is much better optimized by PC playing. There are far more video and graphic options which make it more suitable for modern PCs. The only glaring issues are some audio sync issues here and there, background textures can be blurry before coming into focus, and the control prompts (which are all in a game pad format in the menus and all in PC format in-game). Not that big of a deal for me, but it may bother some. (FYI, turning off DirectX10 and reverting to DirectX9 may improve graphical detail for some and also prevent crashing). To summarize, this feels more like a bundle of two games than one (it basically is). I'd buy this for Bioshock 2 Classic rather than Bioshock 2 Remastered. I am a huge Bioshock fan, but sadly I must admit that Bioshock 2 has not aged as well technically as the first game has. That being said, it's still a great game and it still runs fairly well. Enjoy.

this game is wonderful, and im really glad its here on gog, but as it stands now, this port is very broken. extremely frequent random crashes. the "remastered" version on steam does this as well. awful showing of an "update"

Bioshock 2 Remastered crashes constantly when there is any amount of action on screen, to the point that I can't go 5 minutes without it crashing towards the end of the game. I hope that a patch is released at some point, but now I can't really recommend this version of the game on PC. I haven't played the original, but after checking around, it doesn't seem to crash like the remastered version does.

Which is tragic because this game is AMAZING. Hacking and camera researching is way better. Also has my favorite combat of the franchise. But now let me (hopefully) help you fix it. I recommend sticking with the original (comes with the remaster). Remastered version crashes way too much and was a lost cause. Your call though. So for fixing the original: warning: this is not a guaranteed fix and i still experienced 3 crashes in 16.5 hours. (less than ~20+ i had on the remaster) Run the game once to create this directory: C:\Users\*your user name*\AppData\Roaming\Bioshock2Steam in-game graphics settings: max everything except for directx10 detail surfaces (off) game resolution can be set to native resolution in-game without problems (i ran it at 2560x1600) In Bioshock2SP.ini (C:\Users\*your user name*\AppData\Roaming\Bioshock2Steam): optional: find AutoAim and set it to False *potential crash fix* Find "TextureStreamingMemoryLimit" and set it to 1024 or 2048 (MBs of VRAM for game to use)... but watch out, because too high can cause delayed texture rendering (textures are too blurry for a sec, then render properly... didn't bother me, so i just set it to 8192) *LIKELY CRASH FIX*: Play in DX9! gog galaxy: create a duplicate exe in Bioshock 2/manage installation/configure/features/ ... add -dx9 argument to new exe (label it Bioshock 2 DX9 or whatever) ... now launch game from additional executables -> whatever your new exe is called not using gog galaxy: Create a shortcut to Bioshock2Launcher.exe (BioShock 2\SP\Builds\Binaries)... Go to properties, add -dx9 at the end of the "target" field You'll know if it worked if directx10 in-game graphics setting is greyed out also a mouse sensitivity fix: Open User.ini, find these lines, then set them to 500 or something MouseX=IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Count bXAxis | IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Axis aMouseX Speed= MouseY=IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Count bYAxis | IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Axis aMouseY Speed= Hope this helps!

Works on Linux via Lutris fine. Didn't run into any crashes. Note I had horrible pausing and blurry texture rendering, but I doubt this is related to Linux. The following will fix it in Bioshock2SP.ini: UseMultithreadedRendering=1 With that off, even opening the menu took forever, and all textures look horrible. Setting it on fixed all problems. As mentioned below, you would be best served by upping the video card memory from 512MB to 2048MB. Do not go any higher than this or it will have the opposite effect as the game cannot handle more than 2GB. That setting is as follows, and is again found in Bioshock2SP.ini: TextureStreamingMemoryLimit=2048.000000 My guess is the game had no idea what to do with my 16GB card which is part of the problem. With those two fixes, you should be good to go. I did notice someone setting mouse sensitivity, but this can be set in game so I don't know why you would do it manually. Maybe there is a reason, but I cannot think of one. Hope it helps.