BioShock Infinite

[TychoCelchuuu]

Yeah, back when it existed only in our imaginations based on the trailers we'd seen.

[Twig]

BI is a great game!

[dibs]

Yeah, back when it existed only in our imaginations based on the trailers we'd seen.

Speak for yourself! I am skeptical of all things trailer.

[cowuponacow]

As far as I know, there is no impact at all from any choice or action you can take.  I only played it through once though, so I could be wrong.

There is one, but it's essentially cosmetic.

During the bit where you get ambushed while trying to buy a ticket or whatever, it's possible to get stabbed in the hand. If you do, Elizabeth bandages it up. At the end of the game, where you see the another version of yourself and Elizabeth amongst all the lighthouses, the other Booker will have a bandaged hand if you don't, and vice versa.

[SecretAsianMan]

I've now met up with the Vox Populi.  I'm amused that even though Elizabeth doesn't trust me and has her grumpy face on, she's still throwing me money and ammo.

[Architecture]

You should just stop now as you've seen everything worth seeing. You can Youtube the ending if you absolutely must know how it finishes.

 

Edit: I realize how harsh and dismissive that sounds, but I feel like everything that Ken Levine promised failed to materialize. It's funny how similar this and The Last of Us ended up being (down to the same goddamned lead voice actor!), and yet how easy Naughty Dog made it all look while Irrational drowned in its pomposity.

 

I find it incredibly difficult not to become venomous when discussing this game--it's more of a denouncement, really--and I'm not entirely sure why, to be honest. I think it might have to do with how insulted I felt intellectually. Mr. Levine hammered his utterly simplistic, derivative view of the world over my head with such force that I had no choice but to recognize its klutziness.

 

Technical wizardry can't mask nonsensical storytelling.

[Forbin]

You guys are acting like this game ends as badly as Lost or Battlestar Galactica.  It's really not that much worse than the general presentation of the game up to that point.

[Architecture]

I'm criticizing everything aside from the opening hour, really. I really loved walking around in a video game for an hour without being required to just fucking murder everything in sight. Bioshock's violence is particularly gruesome, too--unnecessarily so, I'd argue.

 

I think the disappointment for some of us is that it literally took hundreds of people millions of dollars and six years to realize one man's vanity project. Bioshock Infinite is Ken Levine's double album; he's fucking done.

[youmeyou]

I was pretty satisfied with the way Battlestar ended. Argue!!

[Twig]

I was pretty satisfied with the way Battlestar ended. Argue!!

Me too. Lost I couldn't care less about, though. It stopped being good halfway through season two.

[Frenetic Pony]

I was pretty satisfied with the way Battlestar ended. Argue!!

 

You just said that to cause and argument and you know it.

[Bjorn]

I didn't watch BG until years after it was finished, so I already had some warnings not to expect an ending that would blow me away.  And I wasn't particularly disappointed when it didn't.  My expectations were low, unlike my expectations for BI.

 

 

BI is a great game!

 

Instead of just repeating that, why not explain how it's a great game?  I won't even argue or anything, I think I've said everything I have to say in this and other threads.  But there haven't been many positive critiques of the game around here for awhile. 

[Gormongous]

Instead of just repeating that, why not explain how it's a great game?  I won't even argue or anything, I think I've said everything I have to say in this and other threads.  But there haven't been many positive critiques of the game around here for awhile. 

 

This is also something I'd sincerely like to hear from you, Twig. I have a friend who's looking forward to playing Bioshock Infinite since he just got it after signing up for Playstation Plus, but he won't talk to me about it now because I don't have anything nice* to say, other than, "It reminds me of how great a sequel Bioshock 2 was."

 

 

* There's also a separate conversation to be had about how negative opinions are intrinsically much less well-received than positive opinions, even in discourse between friends, but not here in a thread that's the exception to that rule.

[dibs]

I've now met up with the Vox Populi.  I'm amused that even though Elizabeth doesn't trust me and has her grumpy face on, she's still throwing me money and ammo.

 

That annoyed the shit out of me. Every time i went to open a fhere, I found this.

[Griddlelol]

This is my response to Bjorn from the recently completed video games thread. I don't want to derail it completely.

 

My response will be in spoiler format...

Then there's the respawn mechanic, which is never actually explained. 

The ending pointed towards a complex game exploring multiple paths and the nuance of how people evolve over their life. Unfortunately that game never got made. 

 

So these are the two main point you make, both which amount to (from what I can understand) "The infinite worlds explanation would have been good, if it had been used throughout the game play, rather than just dumped on you at the end."

 

I couldn't agree more. I suppose that we fundamentally agree as to why we didn't like the game. I thought the ending didn't serve the game play and felt like deus ex, you felt the game play didn't serve the ending and missed a great opportunity. In the end they're the same criticism, just levelled from different angles. 

The ending could have been good if the story wasn't so linear and had an opportunity for the player to interact with different pathways rather than just dumping it on you without explanation.

 

It's similar to the respawn system which as you said wasn't explained. I took it to mean out of these infinite paths there must always be this one ending, as there are always infinite Bookers to come in and shoot people. It just made the ending fall flat, which implied that there can be multiple ways, as long as you do or don't make a choice at critical times. The respawn and the ending seemed at odds with each other. The whole game felt like the ending was made, then everything else was created to feel as much like the original Bioshock as possible - respawn, bullet sponges, plasmids and running around pulling junk out of trash cans. They should have made a new game, Bioshock Infinite, not Bioshock 3 - The Sky Rapture.

 

Oh also I found the game play tedious. Hundreds of bullet sponges running around just got tiresome. I felt bored each time an enemy would arrive and would strive to run past them only to find that the next area is gated until I kill them all off.

 

 

It's absolutely fine to like it, opinions are what makes creative endeavours so interesting. As others said, the beauty of the whole thing is amazing. In my mind it's a game I didn't like and when I see screen shots I can't believe it's the same game. It just looks so beautiful. I just dislike the disconnect between the narrative and the game play as well as certain story points. 

 

[SecretAsianMan]

Contrary to all the negatives I've expressed about the game so far, I don't hate it, at least not yet.  I'm mostly just underwhelmed.  The combat feels ok but nothing revolutionary or especially exciting.  The story's not really getting it's hooks into me, but that's not a totally fair position because I knew a good amount of the plot before starting the game.  The acting seems pretty well done which is what I'd expect from a major studio like this.  I overall don't think it's a bad game, it's just that there are a lot of things I don't like.  Some of them are little such as Elizabeth's shock at Booker's intention to take her to New York instead of Paris despite having called him the roguish type and seeing him brutally murder a ton of dudes.  Others are bigger like the excessive violence and racial setting.

 

One thing I am enjoying is zipping around on the skylines.  Moving around on those things is pretty satisfying and is a nice contrast to the master of parkour that many other games seem to present.  As a person who tends to play shooters from a distance and avoid close combat where possible I appreciate the ability to quickly move to high ground or a new defensive location while still being able to have offensive capability.

 

To balance that, here's a nitpicky thing that bugged me.  I was walking around the Finkton loading docks and I saw some gear.  I just wanted to see what it was, but I didn't take it.  Yet that was enough to trigger everyone to start shooting at me.  I saw that the action was in red text, which I guess should have told me this would happen, but I was hoping that looking would be ok while actually taking the thing would have set everyone off.  I probably would have taken it anyway because it was a good piece of gear and karma seems to mean nothing in this game, but I was still bothered that I was "punished" for looking despite taking nothing.

[Stuart]

This game just makes sad. Not sad because of its narrative, but about how it seems to tell Irrational's general state of mind during the last year or so of its development. It saddens me because, unlike most people, I don't see this as a grand failed vision of some video game auteur, but rather an incomplete, messy, stitched together hodge-podge of a game. I have played the game four times and each time I play, I always wonder "Is this the game Irrational wanted to make?" I never got the impression that this was the work Levine and his team wanted to end up producing after years of work. Nothing, excluding the first hour and the divisive ending, exudes vision or focus. It felt like a game that was almost done, then broken into pieces, having many important parts taken out, and then stitched together at the last minute.

 

I always was reminded of this article when playing. The time/dimension hopping thing in the narrative started to become less like a thematic idea or plot point, but more like yarn to piece together whatever was left from the game's already focused, set narrative. Levine has gone to say that he's used to stitching things together in his games, and Infinite feels nothing less than that: a stitching job. And its weird since this all happened right after it came out.

 

 People speculate whether this demo was real, but I feel it is. The demo is obviously very controlled, but signs such as the slight AI hitch at 8:!7, the somewhat awkward animation transitions in Elizabeth's animation, or the control layout look very definitive and ready make me truly believe this was an actual build of the game. So much was promised and that demo had it all. Open hub like levels larger than Bioshock 1's, an open skyline movement system, Elizabeth engaging in the battle by offering choices that were beyond just "open turret here"...hell, there's even the much touted idea that asking her for help was an important choice since it drained her energy and would this affect the game's narrative. All of it looks there, ready to be done, and the release date was early 2012...and then something happened.

 

I have no clue what happened, and that's perhaps the largest tragedy of Infinite. There will never be context of the game's development, as that is tightly locked up behind contracts provided by the publisher. Leigh Alexander pleas for both journalists and publishers to be more open of a game's development, for the betterment of working conditions and game journalism. But when this kind of shift in privacy from AAA studios will happen I cannot say, but after playing Infinite, I can only beg for that shift to come sooner than ever. I beg for it because this is the studio that made me want to make games, the studio that told me you can tell amazing, weird, and exciting stories in games. Playing System Shock 2, SWAT 4, Bioshock, and Freedom Force created this vision of amazing creators, not just one auteur. But to see their studio crumble in secrecy because of a bad, messy, yet ambitious game...that just pains me. I literally cannot play Infinite anymore because it depresses me on how it reminds me of what was, what could it have been, and the AAA industry's cold, mechanical hand over its creation.

[SecretAsianMan]

 People speculate whether this demo was real, but I feel it is. The demo is obviously very controlled, but signs such as the slight AI hitch at 8:!7, the somewhat awkward animation transitions in Elizabeth's animation, or the control layout look very definitive and ready make me truly believe this was an actual build of the game. So much was promised and that demo had it all. Open hub like levels larger than Bioshock 1's, an open skyline movement system, Elizabeth engaging in the battle by offering choices that were beyond just "open turret here"...hell, there's even the much touted idea that asking her for help was an important choice since it drained her energy and would this affect the game's narrative. All of it looks there, ready to be done, and the release date was early 2012...and then something happened.

 

I paid zero attention to Infinite before it was released.  Any impressions I had of the game only came after it was finally out, and it's only now that I've finally gotten around to actually playing it.  So basically I know nothing of what the game could have been like or was like at some point.  I have to say though that I do like the idea of actually getting Elizabeth engaged in the combat, and more specifically that doing so would have a narrative impact.  In the current form of the game, Elizabeth just ducks into a corner when there's trouble, occasionally popping out to throw me a gun or something.  When the game told me that during combat I didn't need to worry about Elizabeth and she could take care of herself, I was hoping that meant she would actually be doing something.  The first time I saw her cower down and then express shock/disgust that I had just ripped a guy's eye out, I thought maybe she would become more involved as she got used to it.  But even though she's actively mad at me right now, her behavior is exactly the same, so I very much doubt I'm getting any level of involvement beyond being thrown random loot and opening tears.

 

I think a cool design choice would have been to be able to request that Elizabeth do things like open tears beneath a guy so that he plummets to his death, or that even actually pick up a gun and shoot, and that by doing so you're damaging her psyche.  The more you request her to take direct action, the more disturbed and crazed she becomes.  Or you could go the other way and keep her innocent by doing all the dirty work yourself.  That's the kind of thing I imagine a Bioshock game could do really well, considering how much they love audio logs of people descending into madness.

[aperson]

 People speculate whether this demo was real, but I feel it is. The demo is obviously very controlled, but signs such as the slight AI hitch at 8:!7, the somewhat awkward animation transitions in Elizabeth's animation, or the control layout look very definitive and ready make me truly believe this was an actual build of the game. So much was promised and that demo had it all. Open hub like levels larger than Bioshock 1's, an open skyline movement system, Elizabeth engaging in the battle by offering choices that were beyond just "open turret here"...hell, there's even the much touted idea that asking her for help was an important choice since it drained her energy and would this affect the game's narrative. All of it looks there, ready to be done, and the release date was early 2012...and then something happened.

 

I have no clue what happened, and that's perhaps the largest tragedy of Infinite. There will never be context of the game's development, as that is tightly locked up behind contracts provided by the publisher. Leigh Alexander pleas for both journalists and publishers to be more open of a game's development, for the betterment of working conditions and game journalism. But when this kind of shift in privacy from AAA studios will happen I cannot say, but after playing Infinite, I can only beg for that shift to come sooner than ever. I beg for it because this is the studio that made me want to make games, the studio that told me you can tell amazing, weird, and exciting stories in games. Playing System Shock 2, SWAT 4, Bioshock, and Freedom Force created this vision of amazing creators, not just one auteur.

 

What does it mean for a demo to be "real"? You mean in-engine? Well sure. You mean "real" as in a actual functioning, systemic game and not just smoke and mirrors? Probably not. Most demos that early on are not "real" in the sense that they can be built out into a complete game, they are largely throwaway work.

 

The second part seems like pure confirmation bias. You want to believe that earlier Irrational Games were a group effort of amazing creators and BI the work of one self-absorbed auteur, but is there any reason to believe that other than that you really want to? The team grew much larger with BI, logically Levine had less influence over the final product. On a team of 200 people a game is never going to be just your vision, no matter how much you want it to be.

 

The "and then something happened" is probably "the game wasn't fun." Or "the game as a whole couldn't come close to what was demonstrated in that demo." The point of a demo / vertical slice that early is to wow you, then it's up to the team to figure out how to feasibly make that into a game. At the time the demo was shown I was pretty sure the real game wouldn't be anything close to it, because the demo is almost all one-off content. Almost everything that happens is heavily scripted and custom. Making an entire game with that approach would be a nightmare. (And would probably get blasted for being so highly scripted anyway)

 

It was probably a bad idea to release a demo that early and for the demo to be so hard to translate into a full game. But it seems very strange to claim that the demo is evidence of a working game and that then "something happened" that made it go off the rails, when what likely happened was that it was a typical super-fake demo that would fall apart the moment you interacted it with it in any real way and that was created for maximum E3 impact rather than to reflect the state of the game in development.

[Twig]

Instead of just repeating that, why not explain how it's a great game?

Because I don't want to! I did all that back when the game had just come out, and at this point I don't remember enough to make any strong argument for or against anything. I'm sure my opinions are somewhere in the earlier pages of this thread.

[Dewar]

It was beautiful at least.

[Sno]

I did the same, i wrote a lot of things about the game very early on, but you know what? I'm going to sum up some things again.

The narrative has clear problems, the game's own muddled opinions push it towards a kind of gross and uncomfortable thematic nihilism, but i think a second playthrough reveals a lot of strong character arcs, both subtle and overt. I love the game's characters, i think the game works really well as a character story, and i wish it was kind of more that.

 

It also feels, to me, like a lot of the confused ideas in the game might have come about from pieces of the story being hastily shuffled around, like some chunks of the game come earlier than they're meant to. I'm not sure the story being clearly told would alleviate some of the larger concerns about its narrative, though.

The mechanics of Elizabeth's abilities definitely don't make sense, but it's not the ending that is breaking a bunch of implicit logic rules - which is actually so vague that almost anything can be inferred - it's the Finkton stretch of the game that is problematic.

However, the gameplay is fantastic and it evokes a lot of things i like about Half-Life and Halo. BI's strongest when it opens up into large arenas, and if there's an issue there, it's that i wish there were more of those kinds of fights in the game.

I feel that the abilities are balanced and that the difficulty presented on higher levels properly encourages careful specialization to overcome those challenges. (Pick a few vigors you like, pick a few guns you like, then focus your resources. Don't ignore the late-game vigors as viable options.) I've done multiple playthroughs of the game now, all the way up to 1999, and i've utilized widely disparate builds and tactics in each game. The game's battles present enough flexibility for its systems to be expressed in a lot of really distinct ways, it is absolutely not a CoD-style slog. I think the game is mechanically so much more solid than anybody is giving it credit for. (Still, definitely going to say: The fight with the Siren is total bullshit, it doesn't work. It absolutely wrecks me every time, regardless of the difficulty level.)

I'm not exactly clear what people even wanted Bioshock Infinite to be, it often seems as though it was expected to be a kind of game Irrational has never made. BioShock Infinite certainly doesn't betray any studio legacy, at least, as Irrational has made many very disparate kinds of FPS over the course of its history.

[feelthedarkness]

i think you could point to Metro Last Light as a successful heavily scripted FPS, that also had mechanically driven elements.

 

I also didn't hate the combat in itself. I enjoy that kind of retro FPS style, without cover. But I also agree that there was less option for strategy than BS1. BS1 also had more situations where the vigors were useful. You get like 8, but I pretty much only used crows for the stun. I wish there were more contextual/environmental reasons to use the others. 

[Badfinger]

I really liked Bioshock Infinite. Maybe it wasn't the Bioshock-est or something, but they created an amazing world (that I disagreed with in many parts) and an amazing spectacle that I enjoyed breezing through. I played through the whole game the day it was released. The Luteces are incredible characters, the anachronism was awesome, the actual combatting was the best I've used in Bioshock to date.

 

 

Oh my god the Luteces were so awesome I am remembering now and I'm all tingly.

[Stuart]

 

What does it mean for a demo to be "real"? You mean in-engine? Well sure. You mean "real" as in a actual functioning, systemic game and not just smoke and mirrors? Probably not. Most demos that early on are not "real" in the sense that they can be built out into a complete game, they are largely throwaway work.

 

I can't explain this, but to me, despite it being heavily controlled and probably scripted as you say, it felt indicative of an actual work and had many of the different mechanics and ideas they had been talking about before that demo reveal. It was after 2012 that those systems and mechanics were talked about less and changes started to appear during the few months before the game's March release.

 

 

The second part seems like pure confirmation bias. You want to believe that earlier Irrational Games were a group effort of amazing creators and BI the work of one self-absorbed auteur, but is there any reason to believe that other than that you really want to? The team grew much larger with BI, logically Levine had less influence over the final product. On a team of 200 people a game is never going to be just your vision, no matter how much you want it to be.

 

Whoah, I never said that BI was just the work of one self absorbed auteur. Read: 

 

It saddens me because, unlike most people, I don't see this as a grand failed vision of some video game auteur, but rather an incomplete, messy, stitched together hodge-podge of a game. I have played the game four times and each time I play, I always wonder "Is this the game Irrational wanted to make?" I never got the impression that this was the work Levine and his team wanted to end up producing after years of work.

 

Perhaps I should've specified that it was a hodge-podge of a game by an entire team. That's my own fault. And I understand that everything I'm saying is speculation, and hence why I said this:

 

I have no clue what happened, and that's perhaps the largest tragedy of Infinite. There will never be context of the game's development, as that is tightly locked up behind contracts provided by the publisher. Leigh Alexander pleas for both journalists and publishers to be more open of a game's development, for the betterment of working conditions and game journalism. But when this kind of shift in privacy from AAA studios will happen I cannot say, but after playing Infinite, I can only beg for that shift to come sooner than ever.

 

I want that context, for the benefit of criticism and the benefit of those who worked at Irrational who want to speak up their minds on the project. Also, (which I didn't state before) for the benefit that whatever negative practices occurring at Irrational can slowly stop occurring in the industry at large. 

 

The "and then something happened" is probably "the game wasn't fun." Or "the game as a whole couldn't come close to what was demonstrated in that demo." The point of a demo / vertical slice that early is to wow you, then it's up to the team to figure out how to feasibly make that into a game. At the time the demo was shown I was pretty sure the real game wouldn't be anything close to it, because the demo is almost all one-off content. Almost everything that happens is heavily scripted and custom. Making an entire game with that approach would be a nightmare. (And would probably get blasted for being so highly scripted anyway)

 

Oh no, "the something happened" is in reference to the game's propositions beyond just the demo, but multiple interviews, dev videos, and such that touted both design and narrative ideas that were never present or barely fleshed out in the final game, and were freely talked about when the game had its original 2012 release date. And then, as we all know, it was pushed to early 2013 and there was literally months of silence till late 2012, when Irrational started giving out screenshots and brand new trailers that showed a different game.

 

And really, nobody knows if that demo or any info on the game before 2012 was true or not unless you worked at the studio. Like I said and tried to say before, I'm just stating my own assumptions, in order to get to the main point I wanted to make, which is I want more open studios and greater developer visibility. Or else, we'll just end up staring at a bunch of amazing failures like Infinite, without learning anything about how to avoid such failures or anything that may give insight and context as to why it ended up being a failure. 

 

It was beautiful at least.

 

That I shall never debate against. It's the most visually and aurally beautiful game I've played in a long time. The artists should be commended and Garry Schyman further proves himself as one of the best music composers for games. Yet, that doesn't change my negative opinion on the game.