BioShock Infinite

[JonCole]

I thought the incidental Elizabeth stuff was generally well done, except the fact that it'd bust right in the middle of a voxaphone playing. I also wish that they could chain Elizabeth giving you stuff with using the skyhook, mostly because there were far too many times where Elizabeth shouts that she has ammo or something for me just as I'm jumping up and then I inevitably run out of ammo/salts or die seconds later. If jumping on the lines could also trigger a cool automatic catch of those pickups mid-leap, that'd solve another niggling problem I had.

[soggybagel]

I did find it maddening sometimes when she'd say "Oh look a lockpick" but I didn't see it. So I'd scour the room.

[Quatto]

Gosh, so I'm going to make an argument for this ending. It's late and I was up late writing a paper last night too, so if I begin to sound like a crazy person just ignore that part and see if my main point is useful.

This game is like a 400 page novel that concludes with a 30 postmodern poem, which may or may not contain the characters we've seen up until that point. I mean to say, our previously linear shooter all of a sudden becomes Thirty Flights of Loving. Which, uh, is obviously a really weird thing to do. So why do we get that kind of ending and not a trip to Paris like the narrative seems to have led us to expect? It seems very likely to me that this should be read as a continuation Bioshock 1's analysis (in it's twist) of the role of the protagonist/player in the shooter. Only this time, instead of agency, we are asked to consider complicity. Booker is complicit in Hannah/ Liz's abduction; the player is complicit in violence and acts which cause violence in kind. The ending, the final drowning of Booker, whoever that really is, could then be read as the epitaph of the genre--the men who stop murderers are murderers, and they must be stopped just as judiciously as their adversaries. Where does this leave the genre? Well, you can't make another regular shooter after that, after you've just killed your protagonist/player. 

I don't think all of the stuff that goes into the ending makes sense, but this is a game about a fucking city in the sky. Realism is not the goal of this game. But there's a huge amount of interesting work being done by this ending, if the kind of stuff that is more exciting to English majors than someone not looking to explore dichotomies of violence that may be intrinsically embedded in a genre. So I also kinda understand the urge to be upset at this? Because it could seem unfair to bring me through a relatively normal game only to at the end change the rhythm and nature of the storytelling to imply that all I've spend the past 13 hours doing is perpetuating something bad. I don't agree that it is unfair, but I understand the reaction. 

So of course when you get back to the main menu, 1999 mode unlocks so you can replay with EXTRA CHALLENGE and fuck video-games why do I even bother.

Good gone brain motors. I buy this. But it also demonstrates a strange rift in Irrational's thinking through the 'problem' of game narratives.

 

Irrational tends to immolate the very motions of playing through a video game by setting you up, formerly, as the duped fool (BioShock 1) and now as an infinity of infinitely looping assholes who can only do wrong (Infinite). Irrational's answer, in two separate degrees, seems to be killing off their entire video game. This self-defeating situation faced the first game when, after realising that you didn't have any agency in the first place, it meant drudging on for a few more hours in a typically directionless shooter. Now, in Infinite, it compresses a similar problem down to a non-game where you're essentially told that video gaming in video games is a problem where erasure is the only solution. Infinite's entire narrative project is achieved by no longer being a game, by turning games off, by erasing all your actions. Weird. This meta, self-reflexive turn has twice cornered Irrational.The problem, especially in Infinite, seems to be in jumping the gun in openly thinking through the problem of game narratives without opening them up to new possibility - Ken Levine, uber video game nihilist. Infinite makes a beeline for a grand meta-narrative endpoint while at once raising and completely abandoning opportunities like any other game out there: What the hell is Colombia? Why is it there? What secrets does it hold? What's the race angle? What's the political angle? At least the first game had depth archaeology fleshing out such possibilities. Games are good at being tactile repositories of a past or, more simply, offering information rich spaces. We haven't even begun to explore the true potential of this materiality. Why not arrive in a dead city and tear back to when it was alive? Anyway, now I'm fanfic'ing. Good thoughts.

Good day.

[tronhound]

One thing I was disappointed with was the lack of Elizabeth interacting with the world. From the single trailer I saw (I think Liz puts a funny mask on at one point) I got the impression that if I stood near something cool long enough, she's come over and say some quip or tell me a bit about it. While it did happen a handful of times, as the game progressed she increasingly became some insane person who is only interested in picklocks and maybe coins.

 

Because then your complaint would have been, "Why does Liz keep on ranting on about bullshit when her whole world is crashing down around her? Wish she'd just get into the zone and find me some lockpicks and coins."

[Sno]

I burned through on the hard difficulty and shared those somewhat sleep-deprived impressions, and i'm now gradually playing through the game on the 1999 mode and i'm still really enjoying it.

I wasn't sold on the idea that this game, with its relatively more straight-forward game systems, was the kind of game that could support the kind of hardcore resource-limited gameplay they were promising.

I'm kind of going back and forth on it. At the surface level, i still have every ability and every weapon at my disposal, but deeper down, i definitely seem to be having to allocate my money for upgrades more carefully. I have still ended up playing a more specialized, focused character than i was on hard.

The intent and mechanism behind Elizabeth's coin tosses has also somewhat revealed itself on 1999 mode. It's clearly meant to normalize the game economy opposite to the penalties for player death and other expenses. I'm apparently doing well enough on 1999 mode that the amounts offered have gradually whittled down to a single silver eagle.

It's also become evident that the loot boxes are completely randomized, which i think is wonderful and it makes me like the gear system a whole lot more. That gives the game some interesting replay variety.

I also still really don't like the random "DON'T STEAL THIS!" tags applied to some miscellaneous objects during a few of the non-combat events. They're such a rare occurrence applied with such inconsistency that it just ends up feeling very incongruous with the design of the game. I'm not sure you can even tell when you're not supposed to steal from a vending machine, can you?

So story stuff.

I think probably my biggest issue with the narrative is that it has a lot of big thematic aspirations, but sort of bores of them about half way through as it whittles away into a very character-driven narrative that ostensibly has something to say about how we experience games. (My hope is that the DLC will explore the social and political themes more thoroughly, but i struggle to imagine how they'll make any of it seem to matter given that the conclusion of the main story voids the existence of anything happening inside of Columbia.)

I always felt like the original BioShock was a pretty thorough exploration of the themes it raised, so it was disappointing to see Infinite take on the biggest topics it possibly could and then not really draw any conclusions. (Outside of, i suspect probably inadvertently, blaming religion for all the woes in the world.)

Just after my first playthrough, i would have also had the complaint that Comstock isn't developed enough as a character, you never get a sense for why he ends up doing what he does. He doesn't really seem like somebody who could have plausibly branched off from Booker. On this second playthrough however, i feel like he actually reveals a lot through his voxophone sermons rather indirectly. The revelations of the game's conclusion bring new perspective to a lot of the dialogue in a some fairly interesting ways. (The situation with Slate also takes on a slight tinge of tragedy.)

Ultimately, i think Comstock is a character who chose to deny responsibility for his actions, and had freed himself from the guilt that would come with it.

There's a few plot holes in the Finkton stretch of the game. Mainly Booker and Elizabeth bulling ahead blindly with the assumption that they still have a deal with Fitzroy in the alternate reality(ies) they've created/entered. (It would be a totally fair justification to say that they don't know how any of this alternate reality business works.)

Why do they even need that one specific airship so badly? Columbia is a city literally made out of airships.

There's a few other small incongruities that feel like things had been shuffled around or changed at the last second. I felt like Fitzroy's turn kind of came out of nowhere and i suspect that her death probably originally came later in the game than it did, because the stuff that happens in the city later on better serves to establish why she needs to die. There's also some other oddities, like the crow dudes being a bit contradictory with their place in the narrative.

Speaking of the ending, i loved it, i thought it was a pretty beautiful conclusion. The twist... I kind of saw it coming, because it's basically the plot of Fringe turned on its head. (It's much too similar to ignore, there's no way it was coincidental.) Even so, i was quite surprised at how affecting i found it to be, and i enjoyed it in spite of feeling like it ultimately kind of betrayed its initial ambitions.

Why do people keep saying it's a time loop? It's not a time loop, not even a little bit.

[Sno]

Having been through the game once, I found it quite interesting looking back and seeing how different the old promotional demos were, and how little of what was shown in them found its way into the release version.

You can pick up on loads of narrative differences, and generally get a glimpse at much bigger, broader designs that were probably fairly unfeasible.

Holy fuck, that second demo, i want to play that game. Relative to what ended up on the disc, that is a preposterously enormous location to be fighting through.

You also never see city blocks situated above and beneath eachother like that in the release version, that seems like a missed opportunity, that kind of verticality might have been really interesting.

[voxn]

my oh my this was a fantastic game I would have loved infinitely more had it been half the length, explained less, and scrapped all the shooting(+ endless dominos of concessions it requires). Interested to hear TheThumbs thoughts; especially Chris who I imagine must have played an earlier build.

 

 

edit; okay it sounds like that woman is screaming MORTAL COMBAT which is kind of hilarious

[melmer]

Finished it last night. Good game.
 
Ken must have been reading The Dark Tower
 

People going mad as they have memories of dying in an alternate reality

There are other worlds than these

 

The only bit i don't understand about the ending...

 

Statue blows up and Elizabeth gets all her powers back making her an omniscient time and dimensional travelling being, that can appear at any time and place and alter history.... whatever, video games, i don't really have a problem with that.

When Booker was travelling through the doors he would always revisit place that he or an alter version of himself had experienced, and appear inside his own body. So i assume, in the alleyway scene where Anna/Elizabeth loses her finger and the Lutece Brother first travels through. Booker must have had second thoughts and had tried to get his daughter back. Thats all fine...

 

But why the fuck was Comstock there? Did he come through the portal to hold the baby and just walk straight back through it again?

[melmer]

I had one problem with the game, the third and final Vox decoder message side mission thing

 

You get the decoder book first and an absolutely huge area to explorer with a locked door at the end which looked to me very much like a 'Leave the area / triggers a cutscene and spits you out in the next level with no means of returning'. I've had this done to me hundreds of times in the past

 

So i didn't touch the locked door and instead explored the whole area again 3 times looking for the code, i was adamant that the code would be in the bank, as the bank had a hairpin locked door with nothing on the otherside.

 

It was actually a youtube comment in the end which informed me that you have to significantly progress the story before the area with code opens up.... In the bank

[melmer]

BioShock Infinite: Reviewers Roundtable

http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/2/4174386/reviewers-roundtable-bioshock-infinite

This is a thing I just watched

[melmer]

Someone's gone all out on gaf

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=533205

[melmer]

Super ultra spoiler of the last 30mins of the game

People in that gaf thread are suggesting that you can hear the songbird dying in the original bioshock and they have video evidence, I personal cant hear it myself.

And I rewatched the 2010 infinite gameplay demo and the songbird makes low groans like a big daddy, it's a shame as it would be so awesome but I don't believe it for a second

[Dosed]

Having finished this game and reading some of that gaf thread I had to agree with a poster on there. I really liked the story 

but I felt like it was way too much of a head fuck and the ending was a bit of an info dump. Although it has to be said the last 30 minutes was the most fun I've ever had playing a game where my sole input was pressing square. Oh and "Accept Baptism" is one of the best command prompts I've ever seen in a game.

Besides the game was super good looking and I haven't stopped thinking about the whole experience since I completed it several days ago. I'm really looking forward to the DLC which I've heard is all specifically story related. 

 

I had one problem with the game, the third and final Vox decoder message side mission thing

 

You get the decoder book first and an absolutely huge area to explorer with a locked door at the end which looked to me very much like a 'Leave the area / triggers a cutscene and spits you out in the next level with no means of returning'. I've had this done to me hundreds of times in the past

 

So i didn't touch the locked door and instead explored the whole area again 3 times looking for the code, i was adamant that the code would be in the bank, as the bank had a hairpin locked door with nothing on the otherside.

 

It was actually a youtube comment in the end which informed me that you have to significantly progress the story before the area with code opens up.... In the bank

 

 Oh and my brother had the exact same problem, but I hadn't found the book only the cipher. If I didn't accidentally run into the code book I never bothered with those things. I wonder how long the game would take to complete if you just ignored every single side mission/room/sky rail and just completed the main story line? I felt like a lot of the time the game was padded out by the fact I attempted to scour every single inch of a certain area before carrying on.. which I evidently didn't do very well because I missed out on just under half of the voxophones. 

[TurboPubx-16]

This post doesn't have any big specific spoilers, but none-the-less you've been warned.

 

I tried my hardest to drop expectations, but the introduction was so incredible that it put those high standards on itself very early. There is little to say but that I spent my first play-through with my mouth agape.

 

What I wasn't expecting was the strength of the combat. I've put 31 hours into this game, which includes one play-through on hard and another one-and-a-half on 1999 mode. I highly recommend that everyone try 1999 mode. Booker is so utterly god-like in his abilities, and not just because of one or two strategies; there seem to be so many combinations of gear, vigors, weapons and environmental tools that killing these racist/eyeglasses-wearer haters won't get old for a long, long time.

 

One complaint I heard is that the game feels like it's from the early 2000's. It seems like every game in the last ten years has tried to make shooting and movement more sluggish. The pistol is the pistol from Half Life: the secret hip-shot sniper rifle that I missed so much. Booker has unlimited sprint, is impervious to fall damage when he means to fall, and can jump as high as the Hulk. After years of military dudes who feel like they were hit by a maple syrup truck, Booker is a revelation.

 

I was initially put off by the ending, but then again I never go for time-travel/alternate dimension story lines. What's important is that the emotions were true and that the characters reached a satisfying conclusion.

 

I feel manipulated to like Elizabeth through the incredible marriage of her animations and voice acting. The actual character is not likable but I can't stop watching her reactions to things and I still get shivers when she sings and dances. The fact that someone pointed out how she is basically rotoscoped from the Disney princess I adored in my childhood makes me feel much better. I'm curious to see how Alyx holds up now; I like to believe that she was a cool character and that she wasn't engineered through psychological suggestion for me to fall in love with her. 

[darthbator]

BTW booker totally takes fall damage. The only time he doesn't is when you're dismounting a skyway. 

[osmosisch]

the game only has autosave and I started a new game.

I cannot stress enough how much this vexes me. Similarly the super-far-apart checkpoints and lack of a save-and-exit option. Very irritating when you have small children / a spouse.

[Dosed]

Yeah, I'd love to start a new 1999 mode but I don't really want to erase my old save just yet. I'm a bit worried that I'll start a 1999 play through, get a substantial way through and pack it in only to start a new hard mode play through and throw away all my 1999 progress. 

 

Also what did everyone think about the racism theme running throughout this game? At first I found it fascinating, and was really inspired that the medium was taking such a serious attitude to such a taboo subject of American history. Especially when films such as Django are beginning to become (arguably) comfortable with exploring this dark topic. 

 

However, I think the ending of the game

because it was such a head fuck, and essentially meant that nothing which occurred in these alternate dimensions really mattered, kind of helped to wash away any of the interesting discussion that the game was attempting to cover on the topic of racism. If that makes any sense? 

 

[darthbator]

hmmm regarding the race discussion. 

 

I don't think the end really invalidates it at all. I'm actually rather glad that they didn't make that a central resolvable story point. Booker isn't going to stop racism, he's really not that interested in it. Plus "white man comes to sky city to SAVE the minorities" is a pretty gross plot line. I like where they took it more. People are people and there are monsters on all sides. Booker is self interested, that doesn't change no matter how the ending bends it. Comstock is self interested and so is Booker. It's another illustration of how they're a different reflection of the same person. I'm super glad the game's core conceit didn't continually attempt to push some social hot button in order to be deemed "current" or "relevant".   

 

Also the save system in this game is complete BS. The level select screen is actually a load menu? There is no manual saving? lolwut?

[osmosisch]

I definitely agree that

a lot of the themes of Columbia itself have completely disappeared by the time the game ends, and that is a great pity.

.

 

Playing through this game was a great experience marred by a lot of niggles like that. The violence and continuous popups were quite disturbing for example.

 

Still, the gorgeous world and largely fascinating story more than made up for it.

 

Also, the sequence near the end where

you hear Elizabeth got tortured

was almost too much to bear for me. That really speaks for both the quality of the voice acting and the emotional bonds this game managed to create in me.

[darthbator]

Playing through this game was a great experience marred by a lot of niggles like that. The violence and continuous popups were quite disturbing for example.

 

I'm rather interested in this general idea. I should lead by saying I am not one of the people that is "off put" by how much of a traditional first person shooter this game is. I didn't have any real preconception that I was going to be doing anything other then shooting people in the face. Getting back to the point at hand there does seem to be a vocal section of the community saying things like "I wish this wasn't a shooter" or "To much violence!". 

 

However it's not really like that game has a lot of other things to stand on. This game basically has art direction (I'll roll story/VO etc into art direction) and combat. It's not like irrational has shown a lot of competency (any) building games that aren't basically first person shooters. I will admit I could have done with a little more exploring with Elizabeth guns "down". That's just because most of those sections are spent wandering around the equivalent of a minefield of combat starters. My issue isn't really with the frequency of combat but rather the predictability of it. Any map you enter with a gun out can be accidentally turned into a combat zone by walking in the wrong place.

 

I just wonder where this leaves "core" games. I mean this is probably one of the better examples of a "core FPS" that we're going to see. It's not about army men and it actually has a story that attempts (IMO succeeds) being heady and relevant while also satiating the "core gamer" shooting mechanics well. Is this just the internet complaining about absolutely everything? Maybe in my older age I am just setting my expectations more realistically but infinite really delivered on everything I thought it would and then some. 

 

I also think it's worth talking about that the games "accessibility vector" to most people is actually through the violence. I did my first play through on normal mode in about 16 hours. I played at what I would call "columbia tourist" speed. I listened to every conversation and hunted for every voice recorder. I saw most of the games twists and etc coming due to how clearly foreshadowed they are in the non critical path stuff. The next day some friends came over and wanted to play. So we started a normal game and started passing the controller around. They missed everything not on the critical path. They didn't listen to recordings, didn't do side quests. It was almost like clinical FPS playing, pushing the game forward at a break neck pace. We plowed through he entire game in around 7-8 hours and they where completely blindsided by every single plot twist. They where in love with the brutal executions and the combat. They where also totally enthralled with the story even though they weren't actively engaging it the way I would. That's pretty good design in my book. They serviced 2 very different types of player with the same general experience. People with an urge to explore and people with the urge to destroy.

[osmosisch]

- Freedom Force is awesome

- Infinite is a great experience but I found playing as a rampaging murderbeast to be not fitting with the beauty of the surroundings, with shepherding a young girl around, or with my current personal tastes.

- It's great that Infinite is fun for people who don't like to explore; however, their preferred playstyle (whoote verything) is basically imposed on me, while mine (peaceful exploration) isn't on theirs. This is a sensible choice from a developer's perspective but I can't help but be disappointed that the game isn't perfectly suited to me.

 

Wtinessing Columbia's fall, rather than sifting through the remains of the wreckage of Rapture's society, turns out to cause too much dissonance for my tastes. Alternatively, this can be phrased as "I don't enjoy playing as an unavoidbly evil character".

[darthbator]

- Freedom Force is awesome

- Infinite is a great experience but I found playing as a rampaging murderbeast to be not fitting with the beauty of the surroundings, with shepherding a young girl around, or with my current personal tastes.

- It's great that Infinite is fun for people who don't like to explore; however, their preferred playstyle (whoote verything) is basically imposed on me, while mine (peaceful exploration) isn't on theirs. This is a sensible choice from a developer's perspective but I can't help but be disappointed that the game isn't perfectly suited to me.

 

Wtinessing Columbia's fall, rather than sifting through the remains of the wreckage of Rapture's society, turns out to cause too much dissonance for my tastes. Alternatively, this can be phrased as "I don't enjoy playing as an unavoidbly evil character".

 

I mean as long as you realize that bolded statement basically is nuts I get you. I would have liked for them to cater more to my desire to walk around and just listen to people talk about this strange world rather then just blow all their heads off. Using the combat more sparingly could also have allowed them to put more weight behind it as a plot device.

 

Really the biggest complaint I can see leveraged against all the combat is that they didn't design any way to facilitate the explorer experience without having to engage in all the murder on a  personal level. An alternate path through or even mechanics to facilitate a less then lethal play through would have been a crazy scope bomb. At least they do their best to couch the madness of it all inside the game world. They do their best to not make DeWitt the Nate Drake "everyman wise cracking serial killer". 

[Dosed]

hmmm regarding the race discussion. 

 

I don't think the end really invalidates it at all. I'm actually rather glad that they didn't make that a central resolvable story point. Booker isn't going to stop racism, he's really not that interested in it. Plus "white man comes to sky city to SAVE the minorities" is a pretty gross plot line. I like where they took it more. People are people and there are monsters on all sides. Booker is self interested, that doesn't change no matter how the ending bends it. Comstock is self interested and so is Booker. It's another illustration of how they're a different reflection of the same person. I'm super glad the game's core conceit didn't continually attempt to push some social hot button in order to be deemed "current" or "relevant".   

 

Yeah, I see what you mean, and I would hate them to bring race in just for the sake of covering it as a relevant issue. But I feel like this game is so intelligently written, cleverly crafted as a whole and has a lot of weight behind it as a triple A title that

the ending kind of makes a lot of these themes redundant, not just racism, by suddenly just focusing on this all encompassing theme of multiverses etc. And I get that this theme is kind of the only thing that matters.. because it in itself is discussing the possibility of endless iterations of universes and the futility of trying to change anything, but I feel like they may have wasted their potential by simply cutting out all the other important themes by the end. If that makes any sense?

 

Wtinessing Columbia's fall, rather than sifting through the remains of the wreckage of Rapture's society, turns out to cause too much dissonance for my tastes. Alternatively, this can be phrased as "I don't enjoy playing as an unavoidbly evil character"

 

I really liked seeing the downfall of Columbia tbh, I thought it was a good way to explore the effects that Booker has on the city

since he is the reason the city exists in the first place and also the reason it falls.

I also tend not to play games as myself unless I'm playing an explicitly RPG, and even then I even have trouble doing so -- so for me at least I really didn't mind playing as a clearly shady and shifty character.

 

I think it might have been on a recent Giantbomb Cast that they discussed the notion of video games being weird in the sense that they attempt to appeal (which changes into a misguided attempt to "relate" or "represent" their players) as many people as they can. For example it's no secret that many of video games' main protagonists are white, male, 25-40 year old, which just so happens to be the most prominent demographic which consume this content. However, novels and films are interested in making their audience experience life as a character, or through a character, who they may have no clear cut connection with e.g. age or sex yet readers/viewers connect with them in some other manner e.g. personality or just plain old human plight.

 

[melmer]

Earlier i looked at the xbox live gallery images and they're all still from the 2010 demo where Comstock doesn't have a beard or is particularly old

Everyone should watch the 2010 10min demo again once they finished the game it's fascinating, there's telekinesis and all sorts going on

The quantum levitation thing must not have been thought up yet either as the buildings are on big old air balloons

I want a moving mechanical horse! I kinda really want to play that game now.

Man I hope being tied to this console generation didn't massively hold the game back, it fit on one DVD for the Xbox for Christ sake. Saying that, after seeing PC screenshots I feel like I've missed out massively not playing this on a PC. I hope to god they put out a next gen game of the year edition with all the DLC, make it a console launch downloadable title and it'll probably be the first game I buy

[osmosisch]

I mean as long as you realize that bolded statement basically is nuts I get you.

I wouldn't say nuts, more having high hopes; Bioshock 1 fit past me better than Infinite does current me and I was hoping for the reverse to be true. Phrasing it that way is my way of ackonwledging that a lot of it has to do with who I am at this moment - I hope that was clear.

 

BTW @Mington: the PC version looks absolutely stunnigly gorgous and runs like a charm on my laptop.