toblix

BioShock Infinite

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I don't think I had any major problems with the ending.

 

I felt it was a bit mean for a game ending to go "Booker and Comstock are two sides of the same coin and there's no potential timeline where Booker deals with what happened in a constructive way". Wounded Knee was gross and the "I'm fucking terrible/no wait I'm amazing, those redskins deserved it" dichotomy there isn't particularly unbelievable.

 

I didn't mind the Finkton bit because there was lots of verticality to exploit and I had fun working out what Fink's game was. Turns out he was a fink!

 

I had a lot of trouble with the handymen; the siren was kind of tedious to fight but not especially difficult, but that's probably because I kept taking her summons down so she didn't attack. Didn't have a lot of problem with rocket guys and patriots by the end.

 

Pretty disappointed to see completion achievements for each difficulty level. What is the point of providing difficulty levels to match the players' skill, experience and temperament if there's only one that actually 'counts'?

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I just finished the game. Overall, I liked it. I do have a question/comment/problem with the ending.

 

So in the end, Elizabeth kills Booker/helps booker die. This ends both his life and Comstock's in all the possible timelines. You see all the versions of Elizabeth blink out, except for one. But if Booker dies in every timeline, shouldn't Elizabeth blink out too, given that she's his daughter, and if he dies, she never exists in the first place? We know that she was born after Booker/Comstock timelines split, because otherwise Comstock wouldn't have needed to steal her from Booker. So I wonder if she's not Booker's daughter after all? 

I also don't understand why Elizabeth has special powers. Maybe that's explained in a journal entry that I missed or something.

 

I guess the above is pretty nit-picky. But I feel like when an author chooses to do a time-travel/multiple universe mind-fuck, they should do it right and make sure the grand reveal actually makes sense. If the game seemed more allegoric than it does, then plot points wouldn't bother me at all. 

 

Apologies if someone has brought these up before. 

 

Generally I liked the game. It felt kind of like a really literal, unfunny Pynchon novel to me. Same kind of themes of mathematics, quantum mechanics, estoeric fields of studies, anachronistic cultural references, conspiracies and secret organizations, etc. The setting felt cribbed from Against the Day in a lot of ways, and the structure of the story reminded me pretty strongly of V (wide possibilities narrowing inexorably to a single possible finish). Actually I think the game would have been a lot better if it went full-on Loony Tunes bonkers; a little more slap-stick would have made the violence less jarring and, in some ways, more effective. 

 

I think the combat really got old by the end, and the game dragged on for me. The actual plot was "just OK" for me; the twists were pretty heavily telegraphed and I'm not sure it actually fits together all that well. Still, one of the most memorable games I've played in a long while, and easily the most beautiful. 

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I rather enjoyed the twist in Bioshock Infinite, but that also had to do with the fact that a lot of my personal criticisms of the game that were developing as I was playing it were sort of negated by the ending, so that was kind of neat.

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Honestly, i think the whole Finkton stretch of the game is the weakest stuff in Infinite. There's a lot of story problems, and the gameplay loses a lot of momentum.

As for the difficulty, if you're not having fun, don't play on hard.

Though i will say, the game felt to me like it had been balanced around the hard difficulty. I thought everything clicked in a really satisfying way.

 

I feel like there is no goldilocks difficulty for the first play through. Hard is a lot more restrictive. By the end of the game enemies feel like total bullet sponges and you're not getting to bomb around the environmental feeling all cool. You're just hiding out and popping out to take an occasional shot. Normal is just easy. 

 

Here's something I think that might have been mentioned earlier... If Bioshock was a game about objectivism then is Infinite a game about nihilism? Not just video game nihilism but general nihilism. Throughout the game none of the choices that you make matter or carry weight. At the end of the game we see a million Bookers all with slightly different experiences converging on the same "endpoint". The only way we are able to alter that is by negating our existence all together. So while on the surface this game appears to be about racism (and Mormonism IMO) it quickly ditches those themes. So the big "reveal" in the center of the game here is actually that  the story is primarily concerning itself with these nihilist ideas rather then the religious and racial ones most people had fixated on.

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I just finished the game. Overall, I liked it. I do have a question/comment/problem with the ending.

 

So in the end, Elizabeth kills Booker/helps booker die. This ends both his life and Comstock's in all the possible timelines. You see all the versions of Elizabeth blink out, except for one. But if Booker dies in every timeline, shouldn't Elizabeth blink out too, given that she's his daughter, and if he dies, she never exists in the first place? We know that she was born after Booker/Comstock timelines split, because otherwise Comstock wouldn't have needed to steal her from Booker. So I wonder if she's not Booker's daughter after all? 

I also don't understand why Elizabeth has special powers. Maybe that's explained in a journal entry that I missed or something.

 

I guess the above is pretty nit-picky. But I feel like when an author chooses to do a time-travel/multiple universe mind-fuck, they should do it right and make sure the grand reveal actually makes sense. If the game seemed more allegoric than it does, then plot points wouldn't bother me at all. 

I take it you skipped the credits and didn't see the playable epilogue? It's vague enough that it can be interpreted in a number of ways, but it has Booker waking up at his desk and calling out Anna's name. You, as Booker, get up and open that door and see the crib. Fade to black.

Personally, i interpreted the ending as rewriting the past such that all of the Bookers who accept the Baptism drown. Comstock never exists, Columbia probably never exists, and Anna is never taken from Booker.

As for Elizabeth's power, there's a voxophone that has one of the Luteces postulating that it's because she lost her pinky in a tear. The actual mechanics of it are left deliberately vague, but i kind of read it as the universe not being keen on people existing in two realities at once and trying to force her back together.

I feel like there is no goldilocks difficulty for the first play through. Hard is a lot more restrictive. By the end of the game enemies feel like total bullet sponges and you're not getting to bomb around the environmental feeling all cool. You're just hiding out and popping out to take an occasional shot. Normal is just easy.

Maybe, i honestly didn't even touch the normal difficulty, so i can't say anything about where that is at.

As for hard, feeling like you need to hang way back and enact some death-by-a-thousand-cuts tactics on enemies is probably a habit to break yourself of. There's a bit of Halo in how Infinite is balanced, there are big pay-offs for calculated risks.

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I feel like there is no goldilocks difficulty for the first play through. Hard is a lot more restrictive. By the end of the game enemies feel like total bullet sponges and you're not getting to bomb around the environmental feeling all cool. You're just hiding out and popping out to take an occasional shot. Normal is just easy. 

 

Here's something I think that might have been mentioned earlier. If Bioshock was a game about objectivism then is Infinite a game about nihilism. Not just video game nihilism but general nihilism. Throughout the game none of the choices that you make matter or carry weight. At the end of the game we see a million Bookers all with slightly different experiences converging on the same "endpoint". The only way we are able to alter that is by negating our existence all together. So while on the surface this game appears to be about racism (and Mormonism IMO) it quickly ditches those themes. So the big "reveal" in the center of the game here is actually that  the story is primarily concerning itself with these nihilist ideas rather then the religious and racial ones most people had fixated on.

 

Disagree with the assessment of hard. What I noticed is that hard requires you to be tactical with what vigors and equipment you use in a battle, especially towards the end. So the battles are actually more interesting and less reliant on guns. (the few times I switched to normal I was able to get by without even using vigors) If you're just hiding and taking potshots you're not getting everything out of the experience.

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I've not finished this game yet, I think I'm halfway through. I just stepped onto an airship, and then the story took a diversion.

Just an unorganized opinion dump!

 

This is a weird thing to say, but the vintage American racist stuff doesn't feel authentic to me. If Elizabeth was raised by Columbians, on American textbooks, wouldn't she be just as dismissive of black people aswel? She seemed surprised about their role in the city. Then just as I was thinking that, there was a huge sign that said "PROTECTING OUR FAITH, WEALTH, AND RACIAL PURITY!" which is pretty evil sounding already, but "racial purity" was in giant red font to really hammer the nail in. Just makes the characters feel a bit less like people and more like Dick Dastardly.

 

To balance that though, I should say that this game is really cool. I just got a great dose of roller-coaster combat and that is awesome fun. I'm playing the game on hard and it feels about right to me. I tried to avoid any info on this game, but I wish I would've avoided EVEN MORE! This game would be so great if you didn't know what the fuck it was about at all.

 

It feels weird that Elizabeth keeps throwing me money, but blaaaaahhh I bet you guys already spent like 4 pages talkin about that.

(Dick Dastardly dedicated his entire life to being a vehement racist)

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Yeah I feel that vis a liz. If you've read through this thread a topic of discussion has kinda been how that element of the story (the race and religion angle) really backseats itself into irrelevance as the game becomes more about other things. The opinion on the general net seems to be sort of divided about it. I'm actually rather glad this didn't end up being a game primarily about cartoonishly overt racism. 

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It's maybe like 20% that, but yea ok I'm glad that's not the entire plot.

 

...Actually when you mix that in with the evil church and over-patriotism, I think Ken Levine might be a cartoonish racist who hates Americans.

OH-- also: it feels weird that most of the pre-release stuff they showed is kind of in the game and kind of not. Like that video where Elizabeth brings a horse back through a tear, and then sees Return of the Jedi and closes it right before they get hit by a car: that happens, but it's completely different.

I don't think she ever puts a giant Lincoln head on in the game, and that giant Foreign Horde mural is INSIDE isntead of outside.

 

That's just a cool, weird thing to notice.

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I think you're being slightly hyperbolic. My issues with gameplay and story telling near the end aren't new issues that we've never seen.

Let me put it this way; take Infinite and put it against ten randomly chosen big budget shooters from the last three years; I'd bet the way we engage with Infinite would be in a whole other level than those games. A lot of the complaints I'm hearing would sound ridiculous if leveled against a lesser game. For example, I would never look for a character that was even remotely sympathetic in a Tom Clancy or Call of Duty game, let alone one of the boss enemies; similarly, I would literally never stop to look at anything in one of those games, save an explosion. Infinite also beats these games at what they're supposed to be best at: delivering a well-paced adventure. When AAA shooter has a low point in the action, it's a bad stealth section or a cutscene; when Infinite has a low point in the action, you're on the most sinister beach in the world, comparing the bathrooms of the different classes and listening to a white mom scold her child for kissing Irish girls.

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Or you're in a robber-baron company town, jesus I could forgive a lot of sins in that map just because company towns are terrible and I was glad we went there.

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It feels weird that Elizabeth keeps throwing me money, but blaaaaahhh I bet you guys already spent like 4 pages talkin about that.

But it's awesome why would anyone complain about that I'm confused.

 

I beat it like ten minutes ago. GOOD GAME.

 

Well, gameplay-wise, got stale and repetitive (my mistake for playing it on hard, I guess - bullet sponges are not a good method of difficulty-modification, damnit (also it started out lame, with corridor-calms and corridor-shoots and not enough vigors/skyhooks/tears to make combat interestings - picked up quick enough, I suppose)), but the story was great.

That Rapture bit definitely took me by surprise, and in a good way!

 

...Was it implying that Rapture is that universe's equivalent of Columbia, and that it's the same characters in a different context? I'm probably reading too much into it. Whatever.

I look forward to future stuff. I just hope that after THREE GAMES they decide to learn how to make the gameplay less bullet-spongey and repetitive.

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I don't think you're reading to much into it at all. That's exactly what I saw, a different version of this story with the constants liz talks about in the ending. A man, a city, and a lighthouse. Just with all the other variables way different.

 

I think the complaint about the money is less about the fact that she gives you free stuff (which is awesome) but about when and how she does it. Sometimes she'll interrupt dialog between me and another character or even odder do that JUST after finishing some conversation that was emotionally significant. They do such an amazing job making you empathize with her that when she does something super "AI'ish" I think it just REALLY stands out. Uncanny behavioral valley or something of the sort. 

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Oh, she never flipped me a coin at a weird time. I guess if that had happened, I'd have... well, probably just laughed it off. I loved everything about Elizabeth. Man.

 

Well, except for her freakishly large head.

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They house her freakishly large scarily empathetic eyes!

 

They did a super good job getting the same proportions on her exadurated features into the Anna baby model. I was super impressed!

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Those of you that are unhappy about the "bullet sponginess" of the enemies on hard, what were your tactics in a fight?

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... Which weapons? Which vigors?

How did you plan your build? Which upgrades did you take? Did you utilize your strengths, did you take advantage of your environment, did you properly exploit enemy weaknesses? Were you aggressive about calculated risks to maximize your possible damage output in a fight?

I feel like there's some off-handed dismissal of Infinite's gameplay merits happening here without even really attempting to first discuss it.

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I think the game plays fine. I'm not really one of the detractors. I leveled the hand cannon and the carbine style rile to their completion. I think I had some level 1 upgrades to the shotgun and machine gun by the endgame as well. I upgraded crows and possession as much as possible cause they let me most easily control the battlefield. I also had the chain lightning upgrade and some extra damage on the fire nades. 

 

I can't really remember what kind of gear I used. The only thing that I noticed was something that gave me salt @ 40% of my kills. I also got the increased shield recharge rate, which is always welcome (although I don't think it showed up until half way through the game). I don't think there's anything wrong with the game play. It just felt like it turned into a lot of me stun locking a crowd of guys and then just spraying bullets into them over and over and over. Alternatively I would just continually jump on and off the rails executing people since that seemed to be basically the quickest way to off "annoyance" class enemies. 

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Those of you that are unhappy about the "bullet sponginess" of the enemies on hard, what were your tactics in a fight?

I used everything I could, appropriately exploiting weaknesses, and picking up guns whenever I ran out of ammo (which was all the time, because, well, BULLET SPONGE).

 

None of that matters. When "difficulty" is measured by how much health an enemy has, and not by how smart they act or even by number (I would've preferred greater numbers to higher health, as it's more fun that way), it's a bad difficulty system. It's not fun to shoot a dude fifty times. For a handyman, sure, because fighting those guys is fun. They jump around, they're really mobile, they react to you abusing skylines, etc. For a normal dude with an RPG or a volley gun, I don't want to have to shoot at him for an hour just because he's got a bunch of health. Same goes for the patriots, actually. As far as enemies go, they're not very interesting, mechanically. They serve the purpose of being tanky dudes, which is fine, and they're easy enough to kill once you get rid of all the smaller enemies, but they're not fun.

 

I feel like there's some off-handed dismissal of Infinite's gameplay merits happening here without even really attempting to first discuss it.

There's not much to discuss... They have a lot of health, and there's no amount of fancy vigor abuse to make them have less health. It's my fault for assuming "hard" would make the game hard, rather than tedious.

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The armored, explosives-carrying enemies should not need to be bullet sponges when fighting against them, because there are immediate and effective ways to deal with them.

What their armor should be doing is forcing you into closer ranges where you can apply a vigor ability that will immediately remove them as a threat. (Possession, turn them on their allies. Bucking Bronco, push them off a ledge.)

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I just finished the game on 1999 mode last night. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, since I had the experience of playing it on hard the first time around.

 

I'm curious though, how did people handle the last siren fight and fighting against the ?volleycanon guys?

 

In the last siren fight, I always found myself trapped in the corner with the vending machines. I'd occasionally run out and grab a weapon when I ran out of bullets (In 1999 mode I abused the mosquito and ghost weapons gear after my sniper rifle ran out of bullets). But that was sort of an unfun fight because it didn't seem like there was a good way of taking care of those guys without getting blasted to pieces.

 

The volleycanon guys were also obnoxious since they could fire a heavy damage projectile anywhere in the map. They made the fight on the way to Emporia really annoying.

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Aaaahhhhh fuck I thought that spoiler up top was gonna just be a JPEG of Elizabeth. My own fault for clickin it! Oh well.

I figured that's where it was going anyway.

 

Was just gonna say that realising some old buskin' 1920's slave is singing Tainted Love was a very cool moment. Also I picked up a voxophone today that said THIS:

These holes have shown me yet another wonder, though I've yet to see the application for it. They illuminate a merger of machine and man that is somehow the lesser, yet the greater, of both parties. The process seems to be irreversible. Perhaps, though, Comstock will have some need of this kind of thing to keep watch in that tower of his.

--Jeremiah Fink

 

OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDDDD

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