The BioShock: Collection is composed of BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite for Xbox One. Back when the game was released it was only of the very few games to run at 60 Frames Per Second (FPS), and since then it has recently received another upgrade.
Although it is unclear when the upgrade popped up on Xbox One but these updates are now available for any of you who own BioShock.
The games are now running at 4k resolution which produces a much sharper appearance on our screens. Unfortunately, though the menus seem to a little blurry which can get tedious to look at.
It has however retained its 60 FPS presentation so all in all, it is a lot better to play.
Now for the negatives:
In the original Bioshock collection, there were three games running on two engines.
BioShock and BioShock 2 operate on a customized version of Unreal Engine 2.5, and BioShock Infinite runs on enhanced Unreal Engine 3.
So, for BioShock and BioShock 2, PlayStation 4 Pro renders at 1440p, while Xbox One X targets full 2160p – 4K. Strangely though, with BioShock Infinite, 1440p is the standard for both machines.
Also, if you are playing on a PS4 Pro and if your front-end is set to 1080p and super-sampling is disabled, all titles run at 1080p instead of 1440p.
The first two games have very simplistic anti-aliasing implementations in place, so specular shimmer in motion is an issue, even on Xbox One X.
The blurriness I mentioned before could be caused by the very low level of anisotropic filtering deployed on both machines, which results in ground textures at oblique angles appearing blurry. Besides this, though BioShock 2 seems to have a higher default level of anisotropic filtering than its predecessor ever had, although there is definitely room for improvement.
The images sometimes have highly pixelated edges too, which is possibly due to transparency effects which seem to be delivered at a lower rendering resolution than the rest of the image, and when these transparencies intersect with opaque geometry, that is when we see the pixelations.
So, all in all, the negative issues are mostly on the images and their resolution on our screens, other than this though the update has made the experience of playing this collection more enjoyable to play.
BioShock: The Collection used to be part of Xbox Game Pass, but it has since left the service. We do sometimes get titles returning so we are hopeful. You can always just purchase it for $50 on the Microsoft Store if you don’t own it already. The Microsoft Store is also now showing that the games are Xbox One X Enhanced.