f13.net

Irrational announced a new game today. BIOSHOCK IN SPAAA... errr... AIIIIIRRR...

http://www.whatisicarus.com/

I liked the first game, haven't played the sequel, but I have to say I really like the flavor of this one.

I will say... Infinite is a stupid, stupid name.

It's dead, Jim. No matter how much you hump it, it's still going to be a corpse at the end.

I am always prepared to give Jules Verne-y adventure whatnot a tentative thumbs up. I'm not sure I understand how the timeline with all of this business works though.

I'm kinda scratching my head. So they're literally just making a new Bioshock but doing a 180 on the nature of its graphical theme, location, and gameplay style? Is there a reason I should give a shit?

How is the gameplay changing?

meh

The setting should come as no surprise to anyone, since Irrational (or Levine in particular) talked about a series of Bioshock sequels with radically different themed settings, including this aerial one.

You know what would be awesome! One in space with some sort of AI computer that has gone crazy...

You are just saying that because you are a pathetic bag of meat.

It's a partner-type game instead of a solo survival horror type of experience. I didn't say the genre was changing, just how you played it.

I didn't say you said the genre was changing either. :P I was asking speicfically about the gameplay. It's not Co-Op, so I dunno. Where did you read this, just out of curiosity.

Rock Paper Shotgun has an interview regarding the game.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/08/12/irrational-anthem-their-new-game-unveiled/#more-35781

I'm still not seeing a lot of gameplay change from that. Just have  a party member, I guess. Sounds like you'll switch between the two characters for different parts of the games/puzzles.

It almost kinda sorta sounds like Bioshock + Ico. That is not the worst idea I've ever heard.

I'm not sure Bioshock + anything is a good idea anymore.

for what it's worth, this is Irrational. The people who did the first game, and not the sequel.

It's only been 6 months since Bioshock 2 came out.  They really needed to wait longer before announcing this.

Do I get to play as a fucking vending machine (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1494-BioShock-2) in this one?   :awesome_for_real:

How much is gameplay really different on these shooters? 

If it looks like a decent story I'll play it.

This is the Bioshock 2 Ken Levine wanted to make. And Ken Levine is making it. Ego can make pretty good games sometimes.

So, instead of a city filled with white crazy drug addicts with Spooky powers, you will be facing an entire country filled with brown crazy south Americans. Who are presumably drug addicts with spooky powers.

This can only end well  :uhrr:

I liked the shot looking under the building with the air balloons and such.  That one gave me 'wow'.  I had fun with the first one, but never played the second due to GFWL issues. 

I like Irrational.

I like airships.

I'm in.

Thats pretty much how I feel.

I couldn't bring myself to finish Bioshock 1. It just grated on me in every possible way.

The worst part was the end anyway.

"You have to become a big daddy. Because you do. Oh and fight off hordes of splicers who are coming for the brat we provide for you while she sucks a corpse." "Can I say 'Fuck you if I'm doing that to myself, you demented witch'" "No" "Uh, ok *lacerates his voicebox*"

I'll likely give this a shot, although the trailer is a very weak version of the excellent BioShock one.

While we're on the subject of games with airships, there was an RTS / management game on the Amiga set in a world where you'd build airship armadas to fight and it would then go into a shooter-style game where you'd man the ballistas. Also you had to keep the population fed, happy and entertained, or end up assassinated the bath. Anyone know the name of that game? I enjoyed it, but can never remember the title.

I really hate the name.

I really like the setting. Against the Day, The Devil in the White City and all. I also like airships and floating cities.

I really don't like depending on an NPC for gameplay.

When the game was released I had some more thoughts but I've forgotten them now. The game will most likely be great but I would be more excited if it was set on the moon.

I will consider it a missed opportunity if I cannot jump off into space the minute I load up the game.

It'd be like that Samurai game where you leave the village as soon as you arrive. "Fuck this!"

How so?  Last I played, Bioshock wasn't some explorable sandbox world or something, it was a linear FPS.  The only difference between Bioshock Under The Sea and Bioshock In Space is the scenery outside the windows.  Bioshock and the World of Tomorrow might at least allow for some new elements since the cities don't have to be enclosed.  I'm just worried that those new elements are going to be some form of instant death jumping puzzles.

I just think that the Irrational Games take on Raygun Gothic could be pretty incredible.

Bioshock portal

Ten minutes of footage purporting to be gameplay. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0fDEA0BFSM) I think there might be some metaphors about modern politics, but it's subtle.

I bet Elizabeth would have an easier time catching her breath if she wasn't wearing a corset.

Needs more green.  :awesome_for_real:

Still, that little clip got me actually interested in this game again.

Every time I watch that trailer the sheer stupidity of a hot-air balloon city takes me right out of it.

Shit, I know you couldn't create Rapture with actual 1950's technology but at least "city under the sea" kinda makes sense in some ways.

You have no romance in your soul. :(

The stuff they are doing with lighting in that game is pretty amazing I think.

Oh it's visually superb, but the previous game (ugly as it was) had some plausible impossibility. Rapture was absurd, but it was wrong in ways I could wrap my head around. This snaps my suspension of disbelief like a stick across its knee. That said, it's a great trailer and I'll enjoy watching somebody's walkthrough on Youtube one day.

I feel this way about more and more upcoming games.   Its like they are trying so hard with story and atmosphere and everything, but its like..hell just make a movie if thats what you want to do.

That was way too heavily scripted to be 'real' gameplay.

Neh, that looked pretty plausible, if possibly a pain in the ass for the player who doesn't figure out quickly what he's supposed to do to get through each section.  I did wonder what happens if you grab the glowing ball of death your sidekick gives you and panic and throw it in the wrong direction or something.  Do you just have to kill the bad guys the old fashioned way then, or does she say "okay, I think I can do it ONE more time" until you get it right?

It was someone playing, but acting "in character" if I had to guess.

Pretty much. You have to realize the person playing that demo helped make the game, he knew exactly what to do and where to go to make it all look very seamless/

Just to speculate: The obvious evolution of the much maligned QTE is to have the required actions be natural player commands that are made obvious by visuals and queues, and to never remove freedom from the player. It's still "press X twice relatively quickly and accurately to not die", but X is the button you always use to do that particular psychic trick. Otherwise big bad comes over and kicks your ass and there's really nothing you can do... and the game restarts at an invisible save point right before the dramatic moment. Cutscenes without the cut, and slightly more interactive than Valve has been making them.

Knowing Bioshock's urge to vomit up hints every time there's any doubt you don't know exactly what you ought to do, I wouldn't be surprised if it subtitles the required commands in a vaguely QTE fashion: "Press L1 to activate telekinesis." then "Press X to grasp objects telekinetically, and then press X again to throw them."

That's why it's basically totally implausible.  He had a plasmid/whatever that let him catch the artillery shell when it was fired directly at him.  That would have made the entire "encounter" about ten seconds long if he'd used it at the start when the building was being shelled.  He missed a few rifle shots which similarly would have ended the entire encounter before the first building was destroyed.  You could maybe argue that the AI is just THAT GOOD that it can dynamically generate an entire encounter based on what the player does, but first off, that would be so far ahead of anything any other game has done that it's not even funny, and second of all, you'd still have to build mountains of unused content for the game to draw on.  The voice acting alone would be rediculous, you can't generate that stuff algorithmically yet.

I suspect this will have as much resemblance to the real Bioshock: Infinite as the trailer for the original Bioshock (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymg2HzHF9-4) did to the final product. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emSVFyjPIlU&feature=related)

I think its fairly obvious that it isn't representative of the experience most people will have actually playing the game, that doesn't mean it isn't gameplay though, in the same way Freeman's Mind is "gameplay" of Half Life, in a way.

I have to assume you haven't played many FPSes so you don't know how trivial it is to keep players from doing stuff that messes up your scripted scene.   :awesome_for_real:  

For example, if you used the artillery-shell catching plasmid too early, it just wouldn't work for some reason -- I note that the first shell hit the building, which means that you couldn't get right in its path (since you can't get on the roof of the building).  I'm betting subsequent shells also strike places where you wouldn't be able to catch them but that encourage you to get the fuck off that platform so you can move on to the next bit.  If they were sloppy and a shell did land somewhere that you should have been able to catch it, the plasmid just wouldn't work.  That would be lame, but games do lame shit like that all the time.

The bad guy that was running away while being shot at and missed?  It wouldn't have mattered if he'd been "hit", because I can guarantee you that he's effectively invulnerable during that scene.  As the player you'd rationalize this by thinking that you either missed him or that he has lots of health and the one or two shots you landed weren't QUITE enough.

From what we saw I'm quite confident that the story is on very tight rails, like most story-heavy FPSes (including the first Bioshock).  We just didn't see the rails because the player in this case was careful not to bump into them.

I've played a fair bit, but haven't seen any that are anywhere near as intrusive as what you're proposing.  They take away control during cutscenes, hide the villain behind bulletproof glass, lock out your weapons if you're aiming at friendlies, cause you to fail the mission if critical characters die, and so on, but you can tell pretty quickly what you're not supposed to be shooting.  They don't just put the villain in front of you, let you wail away on him to no effect, and wag their finger at you because "Simon didn't say."  If this game is really does just arbitrarily toggle an invincibility mode on certain characters without telling you who is invincible or when they're not or what the hell you're supposed to be doing, this game is going to be a powerful force for suck.

Having a tough boss-type villain "get away" as you're trying to kill him (so you can eventually catch up to him and "finish the fight") is a well-worn device; I'm pretty sure you've seen it before and just didn't realize what was happening because it was executed well enough that you didn't question it.  In this case the bad guy at least got away quickly rather than sitting there taking repeated immersion-breaking shots to the cranium before making his exit.  

(edit) Although I do wonder what happens if you shoot him first rather than allowing his lackey to distract you.  I'd guess he just hightails it out of there at high speed as soon as you either shoot him or kill his lackey.

That's what's bugging me, there's too much "what if" for this to be real.  What happens if you shoot the guy you're not supposed to shoot?  What happens if you knock Charles off the ledge slightly further to the right, do you lose that tonic forever?  What happens if you don't run from the cannon (since it can't shoot at you without you catching the shots and destroying it)? What happens if you guess the wrong alley to duck down when the mob is chasing you?  I just can't imagine the actual game being like this.

I mean, picture what a strategy guide for this game would look like.  "Walk around until you see the gazebo with the guy lecturing on it.  Don't get the gun or he'll attack you.  Instead, jump on the rail and go to the next building.  If you go in the bar here, the patrons will mob you, so don't do that.  Just look for a rail to your left you can ride to the next area, where some anime chick is waiting."  The whole movie is filled with avoidable encounters, and anime chick makes the one boss fight trivially easy.  I mean, it's a very dramatic trailer and all, but dramatic and good gameplay are not normally in the same room at the same time.

Without even looking at the video given that the game was just announced and is still relatively early it's almost certainly staged. Even if it's 100% in-engine it probably has very little to do with the final gameplay, that's just the nature of these things.

Yeah, I think this is it.  I sort of just assume "gameplay" means "in engine" when I see stuff like this, not someone actually sititng there playing the game that has never touched it before (which is what the real experience of that would be like, you'd run around, hit a dead end, turn around, etc).   This guy knows where to go, how to act, etc, but its still gameplay in that there is a physical person sitting there playing. 

Bioshock Infinite Trailer set to "Mind Heist". (http://youtubedoubler.com/?video1=1WDQ4FhslSk&start1=11&video2=lOJqicM6x84&start2=0&authorName=Doofl)  Works out surprisingly well.   :grin:

In other news, apparently Levine went through quite a number of kneepads to get this game on everyone's "Best of E3" list.

Well, this thread hasn't seen any action in a long time, but this is just too good to pass up:

http://irrationalgames.com/insider/announcing-1999-mode/


I'm not sure which I like more, a proper hard mode, or the fact that they've given it a name that is condescending to anyone under 25.

It sounds like Resident Evil mode to me. 

Well System Shock 2 was released in 1999 but I don't remember it being that hard. Was there a special mode in that game that this is trying to copy?

Now that you bring that up, I get what they're trying to do.  In SS2, you picked your specializations at the start of the game, right before you departed on the ship.  It was supposed to simulate your "early career" as a space marine, but it did give you certain skills and boosts.  You could eventually just learn and do everything with enough money and time spent, but it was an interesting mechanic in that you could mix and match specs.

Sounds like hype talk to me.
So you shot a bullet and the bullet can't be picked up. Loss of resources. Oh shit.
No re-specialization? Wow. Truly revolutionary.
SAVE GAMES = HARD MODE, PEOPLE.

F***ing hardcore!

Skills you had to prepick, bullet management and guns that degraded.

It was kinda hard.

I'm pretty sure that the entire point of it is to be anti-revolutionary.

ARISE !!!

Up for pre-order on Steam.  Release date 16 Feb 13

Pre-order benefits include a flash puzzle game you can play (?grind?) for in-game goodies.

Is it me or does this game just not appeal to me at all because it looks, sounds, and feels like a reskinned Bioshock 1?

Um, only you can tell us why a game doesn't appeal to you.  :-P

I'm curious to hear some reviews on this one.  I enjoyed Bioshock 1 (mostly, I thought everything up to A MAN CHOOSES was great and then it started to drag), and then I heard that Bioshock 2 would only ruin whatever good memories I had of Bioshock 1, so I avoided it.

Mostly different studios. Though I heard 2 wasn't as bad as people said. But anywho, Bioshock 1 > Irrational. Bioshock 2 > offshoot of Irrational over in San Fran. Bioshock Airship > Irrational again. No idea how good it's going to be, I'll probably look at it more when it's closer to release time.

It wasn't that bad.

The narrative isn't as strong, but it has some great level design (like Ryan's Amusements) and the part where you run around as a Little Sister, seeing the world as they do, was a good change.

The Minerva's Den DLC is stronger in my view, but that's because it is shorter and more focused.

I can't wait, they made a game taking place underwater where you can't drown and die.
It's time to take it to the skies where you can't fall and die.

 :awesome_for_real:

Bioshock 2 is like a high-quality fangame. Bioshock 1's story was pretty definitively finished, but well it sold so let's make another. This time Rapture is still somehow not destroyed (it is in a more serious state of decay now), and now your enemy is an evil deranged female collectivist that was never ever talked about in the first game because Ryan had her secretly bumped off (or at least he thinks he did).

Instead of fighting Ayn Rand you're fighting WaterMarx, and you're a big daddy instead of some cloned guy.

Yes because games must be in believable settings or they will suck

Yeah, well the jerk store called and they said they were all outta you!

Hang on gonna bookmark this topic for your comeback in 2015

There are unbelievable settings that are cool and then there is a city held aloft by hot air balloons. It's a dopey concept.

I looked at the city and thought it looked like a cool setting. Guess it's just me though. And fabricated sorry no come back not worth the time.

It's not believability per se, it's suspension of disbelief. The first game bothered me too... not with the location, but with the goofy arbitrary things "plasmids" could do. Basically the same reason the magic system in Harry Potter makes me wince: No consistency. I'm sure we all draw the "plausible impossible" line in different places, and if the balloons were larger or Columbia's architecture more obviously featherweight it might not bother me at all, but they've simply dropped 19th century masonry onto tiny airships. Every time I see it, I have to purposely ignore it again.

1950's art deco architecture was hugely over-designed: Flying buttresses came back, over-sized pillars and support beams everywhere, tiny port-hole windows on thick steel walls. It always looked like it could survive a nuclear war without sacrificing aesthetic... and it doesn't look out of place at the bottom of the sea. If they wanted to build a city on hot air balloons, I would have recommended the spiderweb windows and gingerbread balconies of the Art Nouveau 1910's and 20's. Unfortunately that never really took off in the US, so we don't have the same visceral connection to it that we do to colonial stone.

Adam Sessler stumbles over so many words in his review while trying to be as effusive as possible while sounding as intelligent as possible.

He's so in awe of the game that I actually don't even want to play it anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jchIi-vR_js

Seriously, I think he just discovered the adjective and it's just blowing his mind.

Edit: If you don't want to watch it, at the end he compares it to Half-Life or ... Uncharted 2? I mean, I liked Uncharted 2, but uh what?

I've been looking for something to play, so I attempted to get this today off Green Man Gaming.

I either bought it 4 times or not at all.  I'm not sure which at this point.  :awesome_for_real:  My account says I don't own it, and I didn't receive any receipt emails, but that site took so much effort and there were so many cryptic errors during checkout and billing that I'm still not sure what happened.

Guess I'll stick to Steam and the odd GOG/Origin purchase.

Origin. lol

Bioware, man, Bioware.

I know you dislike, but I like.

Bioware isn't even a husk of a company anymore.

It's a couple of franchises remaining that I'm somewhat attached to.  I'm old.  Leave me be.

Maybe order the Digital Download version from Amazon (essentially just a serial code you can redeem on Steam).  They give you X-Com (which probably anyone who was interested in it already owns), and also $30 credit on another 2k Games product (not usable on Infinite's season pass or anything for preorder, but you have a year to use it).  Probably going to use mine on that upcoming Civ expansion after it releases.

And the writing team for DA is still intact.

So word is that it's really really good. Huh. I pre-ordered it after the pre-order shit on steam put me over the fence and I had a friend I wanted to try X-COM (who I also owed a birthday gift) so we'll see I guess.

Some cockslap of a reviewer from one of the major gamewank sites said something along the lines of "people say 'when will videogames have their citizen kane moment?', I say when will we have another Bioshock Infinite moment?" or something like that and I want to throw them out a fucking window.

Yea there's been a lot of hyperbole-throwing around in the review-o-sphere over this title. I'm mostly just curious and there's a derth of other stuff now that I finished Tomb Raider and the Dishonored DLC doesn't come for a few more weeks. If it's half as good as these reviewers are falling all over themselves to claim it to be, I'll have gotten some money's worth out of it.

Hi guys.

Just gonna drop this here.

This is not new.  Racial superiority complexes was something they advertised in previews for a while.

I'm still iffy on it so far.  It seems to be consolized even more than Bioshock 1 and 2, with regenerating shields and only being able to carry two guns and two plasmids, and no manual saving is a huge pain in the ass.  The setting is interesting thus far but has had very very few creepy moments compared to System Shock or Bioshock.

I'm getting this today.  Really enjoyed Bioshock and I'm jonesing for a shooter/story experience again. 

Mine's preloaded but I have to wait until 8pm to play. This is going to be a long day...

"Really enjoyed Bioshock."

Does not compute.

Yeah, I don't get it either. I didn't like the original all that much and didn't even bother with 2. Then again, one of my monkeys liked it so much she got half of her arm tattooed with biosshock imagery, so maybe I'm just too goddamn old to get it.

I liked it plenty - not enough to get a tattoo of it though  :ye_gods:

Sometimes people like games you do not. Sometimes those people might even post in a thread about follow-ups to that game.

Bioshock again was pretty good IMO. Shallow compared to System Shock 1/2 but I think it nailed the atmosphere pretty well, had memorable set pieces, and was generally fun enough to be worth a playthrough...one playthrough. I imagine this will be the same.

I have three already - the rest of what you said is true though.

After playing Far Cry for the last week, the on-rails aspect of this stands out like crazy. They have crafted a beautiful, interesting world but I can only explore the parts they want me to, when they want me to. Enemies all attack when you trigger their area. There's no different ways to play - it's move forward, uncover story (which I have to admit I'm getting more and more interested in), defeat wave of enemies, continue.

Also - I liked Bioshock. It's one of the rare games I actually finished.


Well said - sums it up about right imo.

You finished it because it was impossible not to finish.  If you even TRIED not to finish it, it pushed you out a Vitae chamber to try again.

 :grin:

I think SS2 holds up so well because different builds have real consequences; a Psi-Ops playthrough is a WORLD away from a Marine playthrough in SS2.

Bioshock, you were a golden unstoppable god at the end even if you played completely half-assed and skipped nearly every upgrade you could.

I better write an article about how it's GAME OF THE DECADE GAMING'S CITIZEN KANE MOMENT

Use tacos instead of nachos this time.

What I expect from this game, having read a few reviews, is the popular manipulative "DUN DUN DUNNN! YOU ARE THE ENEMY!"-schtick of games that offer no choice. It seems to impress the plebs, I mean, press.

I played it for about 3 hours, then put it down to go play Mount and Blade with a new mod.

I may finish it at some point, but my inital reaction was to just wait near this lighthouse for help. The story makes no sense to me. Why would I ever get in that sub?

I enjoyed Bioshock though thought it should have ended when you  the first time. The bolted on "IT'S A TWIST!" feeling after that moment was a let down. I did not try 2 because after the end of 1, there seemed no reason for a 2 other than $$$$$$$.

As for the positive, nay GUSHING, reviews on this one... Sim City. Even the first Bioshock got rave reviews on release that a month after the fact everyone was walking back. Also, the games press are fucking whore-y big pub cum dumpsters.

http://www.destructoid.com/racists-call-bioshock-infinite-a-white-killing-simulator-240586.phtml

I ... sigh. Just sigh.

 :facepalm:

lol

I liked that one of comments was written by "End White Genocide Now"

Oh man. The irony, she is so very heavy.

Because WOULD YOU KINDLY get into the sub?

I feel like the game would have been so much better without that  :heartbreak:

I thought it was a pretty clever use of narrative to excuse (via lampshade) a lame (but common) gameplay trope.

Me too. It was pretty much the only thing to distinguish it from all the other decent AAA FPS titles I've played. I don't get the hype for the new bioshock except that since it was marketed like crazy, everyone's talking about it and I guess a subset of those people want to play it.

Can we call Colonial Marines gaming's "Baseketball moment"? Can SimCity be gaming's "Waterworld"?

I liked Baseketball.

I enjoy all the interviews with Levine where Bioshock 2 is literally never ever mentioned. They must agree to that beforehand or something.

I also liked Baseketball.


Steeeeeeeeeeeeeeve Perry!

I had the exact opposite opinion.  I saw them intentionally break the fourth wall (Wonder why our game world is linear despite allegedly being a "city?" It's because of mind control, not limited game development resources at all!) for no reason other than to wink at the audience ("Hey, I'm cured of the mind control now, I guess that means I'm free to..." NEW OBJECTIVE RECEIVED) which dragged any immersion I had out behind a shed and murdered it.  From that point on, I couldn't get into the game as a setting, it was just a video game with some tired mechanics and a ridiculous story I had to progress through.  Why can I carry a million guns and ten tons of ammo at once, is that a plot point?  Is there some magic plasmid explaining how I can run for three hours straight without getting tired?  What magical convergence of ley lines causes nothing but vending machines selling bullets to survive the apocalypse?  I assume there must be an explanation for all this stuff, right?  Otherwise, you would just be lampshading something for the purpose of lampshading it, which is just lazy.

I can ignore logical flaws or shortcuts in the gameplay if you don't have a choice, but don't point them out like you're proud of them and then expect me to coo with appreciation that you managed to awkwardly wedge it in to your already fairly nonsensical narrative.

That's probably because he passed on Bioshock 2 and had nothing to do with its development.  Bioshock 2 was made by 2k Marin, not Irrational Games.

He was asked about it a lot when he decided not to do it, but there isn't much else to ask beside that.

Actually, I agree with both of you, which is why I wanted the game to end after that bit.

Because it was clever and it made everything after make no fucking sense.

But I'm only talking about the story, the game itself was shit even up to that point.

Shit.

I'm with you, I liked Baseketball. Quite a bit actually.


Hey you said no more Journey psychouts.

I still sometimes pull out the Steve Perry, and also - "Your sister is going out with Squeeks!"


I wonder how many of them play Madden, or anything else sports related.

I kinda want to fund a game called, "Kill Whitey" Just to watch these douchebags' heads literally asplode.

I'm not minding killing the racists.  It's quite satisfying.

The game so far is just Bioshock 3. Or 2 if you want to ignore the one that no one played (I didn't).  The gunplay feels a bit improved.

Yes, but is it fun?

Started it. Good art direction, they actually know something about American history, and...it's Bioshock 3. Same formula. Totally on rails.

In many ways, I think the Bioshock games are really adventure games, not FPS. Adventure games with a little FPS minigame stuck inside.

It's not only that you can't go anywhere but the narrow corridors that you're meant to go on. There are other things that don't make sense and didn't make sense in either of the other Bioshocks. If it were a novel, I would point out that it has a very strange point-of-view that doesn't really work creatively. You are the protagonist, but the protagonist is a bad combination of a specific and a general character. He says specific but often quite stupidly general things in response to environment and events, as if he's talking to you. But he's not narrating, omnisciently or otherwise--he doesn't tell you all the things that "he" knows. So you're forced to do things without even knowing why you're doing them, even though you are controlling a character who DOES know. You are rowed to a lighthouse in Maine where there are ominous signs. A sensible person would just turn around and go away. But you don't--so you have a reason for expecting these things and going onward. But he doesn't say what that is, and yet also reacts with surprise to some of what he sees. Why is he surprised and yet not surprised? Is he expecting a city in the clouds? It sort of seems so and yet it doesn't seem so. Because that's the dumb way they've chosen to build the story in all these games: with a person who is part of the story and yet not part of the story, who is both the player and not the player.

I'd just as soon watch it and not be pretending to play it. It's interesting enough as a creative work, which is why all the reviewers are spurting all over it--because in the exquisitely dumb landscape that is contemporary video game storytelling, it does look like "Citizen Kane" in one sense. But it's really, really not--Citizen Kane rethought its medium, expanded the boundaries of what a film (and a cinematic narrative) could be. Bioshock Infinite has a crippled structure as a game and a world--it is at best a terribly traditional structure to a very passive kind of game.

I disagree with Khaldun on a couple points. First is that in a lot of parts so far I don't find the corridors all that narrow. Some are, but a number of them so far have also had a good amount if side areas to explore along with an occasional optional goal. The annoying thing there is that since you can't save the game (it only has a checkpoint system) I'll spend a lot of time exploring an area and the have to force myself to push forward to a checkpoint in order to save before I turn the game off.

Also, having only played around 4-5 hours so far, I feel like they do a fairly good job of filling in what your character does and doesn't know (he flat out states at one point that he didn't even know this city existed for instance).

Yes, but that doesn't make any sense, at least so far--what did he think he was going to a lighthouse in Maine for? He seems pretty well briefed on his target once the shit hits the fan and he's running from the cops. Plus if you look in all the kinetiscopes you see that Columbia & the Prophet at least *claims* to have been in the news re: the Boxer Rebellion and its secession. Maybe that's all unreliable narration, I suppose I'll see. Or maybe the protagonist is a dumbass who doesn't pay attention to the news. There's no way to know given the way they choose to write the p.o.v.--which of course means whatever the inevitable twist or surprise is, it will probably be as "sigh, yes, I get it, it's a game" as the first Bioshock's.

It's not literally corridors but you can't go anywhere you're not meant to go, even when the terrain seems to make it possible. Nor, at least so far, do you have any meaningful choices that open up branch points in the plot or in the way the character develops. Maybe that will also change. I doubt it mightily.

I also find the FPS controls unwieldy.

I'm finding the FPS controls a bit janky but not unwieldy, and I don't feel the corridors any more than I did in TR. There's limited resources, there's pushing you in a specific direction, you can backtrack to 100% everything if you want, and the game is going to give you one way to get to a place. Heck, the comparisons go further: you're not entirely sure what's going on but you're pretty sure there's an objective*, you're making shit up as you go, and you quickly find out there's more to the place than you thought.

I will say this is the brightest looking Unreal Engine I've seen in while  :grin:

* Big difference of course is how the mission goal is conveyed.

Tens of hours too early for me to critique, but this kind of game makes me miss Dishonored's treatment of open-ish world and options to achieve goals.

I'm having some issues with them.  I can't seem to get the mouse sensitivity in a good place.  If it's just right for aiming, it's too slow for turning.  Push a bit up and I can no longer aim.  I dislike that I have to hit a button to pick up health and salt in firefights.

I'm looking forward to playing tonight.  I enjoyed Bioshock despite its flaws, so there's no surprise I'm having fun here.  

Perhaps they should do the next iteration of the franchise in space on a derelict ship or something.   Open up the exploration a bit.  Think of the potential.

I just really, really like how they animated Elizabeth; She's almost alive.  Add to that to the almost mythological take on early America. 

Played a few hours. Really fun, nice looking, well written, etc, but incredibly linear. Moreso than Bioshock was. Setpiece to setpiece to setpiece.

Also unless it's explained later the "vigors" are a gigantic asspull in order to add the equivalent of plasmids or Psionics to a game set way before either. Plasmids figured directly into the plot of Bioshock; they were integral. Vigors? Eh who the fuck knows, just drink the shit and use..."salts" to cast them. Salts? Like literal salt? I guess not since they're sold sorta like smelling salts, but what? Whatever shut up or you won't be casting magic fireballs at people.

Also I don't get the vehement Bioshock hate unless this is some leftover nerdrage for old people who were mad it didn't have inventory tetris or dozens of skills to meticulously level or some dumb shit like that. I mean, yeah, it was pretty linear and easy. So fucking what.

fake edit: oh yeah- there is one thing Infinite utterly fails at. Being scary. System Shock was scary, Bioshock was scary/creepy too IMO and had more than cat scares. This game is not scary. It's not even really creepy. It's just more commentary/takedowns of nationalism/etc. Like, I kinda thought the main undercurrent of the the *shock series was dumping an unaware player character into a hostile, fucked up environment controlled by people/things that are literally/figuratively alien. Like, SS2 isn't like, "awww yeah time to blast some aliens", it's "oh god, these people are still conscious and can feel me killing them and they can't control their bodies and AI is trying to kill me what the fuck". Bioshock is an underwater utopia-turned-dystopia ran by psychotic Randians who found a way to twist themselves into the monsters that they really were.

Columbia is...uh, what if Americans were even bigger racist/nationalist assholes than they were back then and made a floating city. And also some shit about time/string theory or whatever I guess. Uh, okay.

Elizabeth is really well done.

I just beat the game.

It's... huh. The whole ending sequence is gonna take some time to process, i might run through it again.

Ruin it for me please.

I don't want to!

Carnival song on the beach sounds a lot like "Girls just want to have fun".

The ending feels like it was a rejected concept for a Twilight Zone/Generic late night sci-fi suspense show. What happens to
I honestly think it would have made a much better game as a dating sim where you dress up Elizabeth in different outfits and go do date stuff.

Hudson Hawk?

Oh Dear God.

I loved Hudson Hawk.

What the everloving fuck did I just read?

Bioshock is the M Night Shyamalan of games.

It's like you don't enjoy good movies

I was thinking more critical/monetary failures rather than if it's good or not. Hudson Hawk/Baseketball are totally watchable but well, they weren't tremendous successes.

Yeah, but most of the shit they've been pumping out of late hasn't even been enjoyable.

That's a really terrible ending.

My choice to not trust Adam Sessler was correct.

Welp that cements my decision to only ever buy this on Steam sale for at least half price or less.

Are there any writers in this stupid generation that can write a proper ending?

I still expect all video game stories to be shit, this one was just slightly less shit and I enjoyed it for what it was, even though it was trying really hard to be deep and meaningful.

Like, maybe too hard.

I guess The Walking Dead spoiled me then, because it showed video games CAN have good stories and well executed endings. If some game on a budget can manage it, so should those big AAA titles.

The Walking Dead spoiled you?

There's at least 30 modern examples prior to The Walking Dead that should have done that.

That one had the advantage of hiring the writers from Tales of Monkey Island. I would hire those guys to write any game story over whatever assholes EA is employing.

Walking Dead was the first example that came to my mind. Feel free to insert your own favourites.

The point is that bad writing in games isn't something that is inevitable or excusable.

At the very least, I feel like an example of good storywriting shouldn't be a licensed property where the core structure of the story is already done.

Holy crap I forgot about the new monkey island, at the time I was excited but wanted to buy it whole once all the chapters were out, then forgot.  I now have something to look forward to this long weekend!

Yeah, I just didn't get that Colonial Marines was viewed as good, but I see what you're saying now.


Finding a good writer is tough enough, finding one which can also write a proper ending is like trying to find a needle in a haystack where the haystack is made out of cowshit and whatever a sewer cleaner pumps out from under a brothel.
Though, I was also going to say the Walking Dead from what I'm hearing. Having established writers or a core IP doesn't change the fact that the story and ending still need to be executed well. As we've seen time and time again with EA and Bliz - having a licensed property (or any of the most well known or beloved franchises) does not automatically provide a fast path to a good story and proper ending.

Time to out myself. I quite like Hudson Hawk. It was a fun, silly movie. How can you not like a movie where they time robberies by singing a song? Where the team of villains uses candy bars for their code names?

My name is Shannow, and I like Hudson Hawk too.

Arise my HH loving kin!

(I have actually used 'Swinging on a Star' as a lullaby for my daughter)

I'm gonna say Tomb Raider was a good story and before you stone me, hear me out.

It was concise. It was an Indiana Jones pulp adventure novel with a clear(predictable yes) plot line that told the story it wanted to in an exciting way.  The original bioshock had a "twist!" and that was nice and all, then the ending fell apart. Now it seems like they believe bioshock needs that twist to be good.  Tomb Raider shows you don't need twists or surprises, you don't need edgy and shocking reveals at every turn, all you need is to be concise and tell the story you want, well.

No I'm not saying there isn't room for more thought provoking games, certainly they all shouldn't be as straight forward as Tomb Raider but false depth is one hundred times worse than a simple adventure story.  Go look at the final fantasy series to see what I mean, all style and no substance.

Bioshock from a story perspective seems like all big ideas but then after all the set-up they couldn't figure out a good way wrap it up, which is arguably the most important thing.

Writers today in shows, games, etc. put no emphasis on wrapping things up. They write terrible, grandiose stories with huge questions, then they provide almost no good answers to any of their crap because they NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT THE ENDING.

Then, when they get caught doing it, they spew the same crap that it's all about the characters and the journey and blah blah blah. No, they suck. They deserve to be horsewhipped for not following up on the social contracts of storytelling.

LOST

I liked Lost's ending.

(http://pics.blameitonthevoices.com/052010/lost-gif-dog.gif)

I was going to say Scrubs because it did have a great ending after a good long life (for a TV show anyways), but then I remembered season 9 which proves Paelos right. :oh_i_see:

If that season is ignored, as it should be anyways, then Scrubs qualifies. I believe it should anyways since what was originally the last season was during the writer's strike and switched networks yet still managed to be awesome.

Don't confuse setting, tone, and art direction with narrative.

You can have a game that has great narrative and shitty settings. Not common but it's possible.

You can have a game that has great setting, tone and art direction and shitty narratives. Much more common.

You can have a game that has great setting etc. and great narrative AND YET not be a completely great *game*. E.g. where what's great about it is not particularly game-like. See The Walking Dead.

A game that's operating on all cylinders where the writers understand not just what an adult emotion is like, what a sophisticated plot might be, and have non-derivative ideas about setting AND ALSO understand the structure of gameplay? Really rare. There's a reason why so many of us love Planescape: Torment so deeply.

Just finished the game, the ending is really... strange.   That being said, I like this game a lot more than the original Bioshock.  Unlike the original I was never bored and enjoyed the narrative immensely.  Elizabeth was one hell of a character great job to the team on her.  I hope the direction of Bioshock from now on is more like this one.  One criticism I would have is that I didn't feel like I had any choice whatsoever after the first few chapters.  It would have been nice to have had more choices throughout the game especially at the end.  That is going to really hurt its replayability IMHO.  Now that being said there were some thing about the story I really have no clue on, specifically the endings, I was hoping some others who finished it could enlighten me:

I think Deadly Premonition is the poster child for this kind of game. The game side of it is utter shit. The rest though is so awesome (and weird) that I can overlook bad graphics, bad controls, bizarre voice acting, inappropriate and odd music, etc.

Being on a budget is a plus when it comes to delivering a decent story, not a minus.

On a production like Bioshock 3 you have so many moving parts and team members that there are bound to be different people working on it with totally different views about what the plot, tone, etc are supposed to be. The guy modeling the environment for a particularly section is often going to know fuck-all about how it ties into the overarching narrative. How often do AAA movies have good scripts? Big-budget games have many of the same issues big-budget movies have: too many cooks, strict adherence to convention, set-piece driven design, wow-factor over coherence, etc.

On a small production if the guy in charge is a decent writer or is working with a decent writer you'll get a decent narrative. On a large production even if you have great writers how they fit into the process is usually going to be very awkward.

Let's not even get into the issue of "video-gamey" stuff completely trampling all over what your story is trying to do. It's very rare to find a AAA game where form and function meet in terms of narrative vs. game mechanics. For example Tomb Raider - in cutscenes you're some innocent shocked person who is both opposed to and not good at killing, in the actual gameplay you're like the most cold-blooded and highly trained assassin on earth. A lot of game plots just don't work at all unless you consider what happens during gameplay essentially non-canonical. Usually the more serious they attempt to be the more ridiculous they become.

Press E to comfort Elizabeth

I hate her character model so much.

Never say that in front of a chick with blood all over her and a pair of scissors in her hand. :grin:

This is a pretty fun game but I'm not sure why they decided to call it Bioshock anything.

"White Racist Killer Simulator" probably wouldn't have sold that well  :why_so_serious:

(http://i.imgur.com/XNKGBtjl.jpg)

No, we all agreed that Colonial Marines was bad.

Star Wars Episode 1?

Prometheus.

To tug at the purse strings of the Gamestop kiddies that often refer to Bioshock 1 as the best game ever as proof if their hardcore gamerness. Plus, vigors, which still make no sense.

It is a lot of fun.  Very well done with some interesting touches in parts.  Game really picks up once you get Elizabeth.

Yes, I know it will end badly.  The general plot is too "out there" for it not too. I don't care at this point.

Bioshock convinced Something Awful that libertarianism was a crap philosophy.  Seriously the whole debate forum was full of randroids until that game came out.  In the near future every political party will make games pimping their beliefs to capture the young vote.  I'm not even kidding.

Almost nothing anyone does in this game makes any sense past a certain point.

The one that annoys me the most is...well, it's not a spoiler we're trying to save the girl right? Well at one point people are fleeing the already advertised interfaction fighting, hopping onto the small barges and flying away from the city. There's one you can see where there's some drama going on because a woman is too scared to jump onto the thing to her husband.

Like. It's right there. I mean, it's a skiff leaving the city. RIGHT THERE. The people on it aren't hostile. Why can't I'd just jump onto it and fucking leave? There's no parachutes either? I'd think there'd be some emergency parachutes somewhere in a gigantic floating city? Couldn't I just get some, or hang out in some house and make a ghetto one, then just...parachute off the floating city? We're clearly over land.

...I guess not? Okay, let's go through all this trouble to secure this one very very specific airship instead of just stealing another one. Whatever.

That's what drives me nuts--is when I have to do something when everything in the visual and narrative environment seems to give me the choice to do something else. I just hate that.

The problem ironically is that you have Elisabeth with you. Yeah she's great and adds to the game portion of it a lot but that means you have to keep contriving reasons for us to not just jump the fuck off of Columbia, which the game does not do.

I guess they could've implied more strongly/earlier that songbird would be up your ass the instant you hit any real airspace around Columbia and make it so you had to dick around finding ways to kill/incapacitate it or leave without being noticed and skip the whole faction fighting thing, but they don't really do that.

It sounds like the game itself is really unambitious. At any point where they had a choice that could have resulted in lower sales or less lowest-common-denominator-focused gameplay they chose the safe conservative path. (Including even the box art!)

It's a little weird to have "big ideas" in a plot which is arguably somewhat bold on top of a game that is just "Standard Game: The Game." There is a lot of "hey, it's a video game what do you want?" coming out of Irrational. It's hard to give them a lot of credit for being bold and imaginative with the story and some stuff like the art design when it doesn't apply to the underlying game.

There is this weird notion in many AAA games right now that the moment to moment gameplay in a game is essentially non-canonical. That you are supposed to dismiss most of the game as "eh, it's just a game" and that the real narrative only comes from the non-interactive parts. You spend the vast majority of the time interacting with a game but somehow none of that counts compared to the time you spent passively listening to an audio log.

It does make you appreciate games with interesting narratives where the gameplay works as part of the whole rather than being something to ignore. (For example Silent Hill) I don't really get this idea that you can take what is basically a generic military shooter and paste an entirely separate story layer on top of it and have it work. It's like if Super Mario Brothers had cutscenes and in them we found out that Mario runs a wildlife refuge that specializes in turtle conservation.

I've noticed this as well and think it is unfortunate.  It is also one of the reasons I really like Valve's shooters even though they are quite linear (which is not usually a quality I like in a shooter), they integrate the story so well with the gameplay.

Okay yeah I beat it just now and the ending is complete pretentious gibberish, to the point whoever wrote it needs slapped in the fucking face.

Between this and ME3 I'm wondering if there's a videogame writer out there that isn't so far up their own ass they see their tonsils.

Both were follow-ups to successful games. Success is sometimes a writer's worst enemy.

Finally finished the game, all I can say is that they had a really great idea, but then made a shooter. It wasn't bad or anything, just the disconnect between the story and what you do in game is jarring.

ProTip to any game writers: You need to be very good at what you do to pull off an ending of the type Bioshock Infinite has. The vast majority of you absolutely do not have the chops to do this.

Plot spoilers, suckas!

That said: it's a good game, and exposes that I'm not nearly as in love with these sorts of endings as game reviewers are. I loved pretty much all of it until the end.

will the circle be unbroken
by and by, lord, by and by?
is a better home a-waiting
in the sky, lord, in the sky?

There is an after credits sequence that is really brief and may actually play in to what you're saying.

It was fun and I enjoyed playing it, it's just that the ending was poorly crafted and could have easily been done better by presenting it too any nerd who's seen a scifi show with that type of story and let them soot holes in it until it makes sense.

Sadly, the thing I'll remember most about the game is

I didn't realize how many covers/originals of pop songs there were in the game. I heard what I'm guessing is some original Jazz version of Tainted Love, a pedestrian in Finkton singing "Fortune Son", and of course the barbershop quartet cover of "God Only Knows", but there's a lot more.

For example, when you land on battleship falls, you can hear I think an organ version of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". There's a cover of "Shiny Happy People" later on as well.

Lol. I suspect you're not alone in that Bob.

Now that I've read this, it's pretty clear that this is his way of putting "Would You Kindly" in another BioShock.

He probably would've gone the Old Boy route if he could have.

Elizabeth's head was way too big for any of that.

There's a Vox about that later on.

She's a Disney princess!

I can confirm that the timeless music of Cyndi Laupner is in the game.

 :awesome_for_real:


Ahh, I didn't catch that.  Thanks.

It's actually in the game twice. Once on the beach and later in a tear as a fully sung version.

A lot of big ideas, absolutely magnificent art direction, and a heaping pile of the same old shit.

In order for a game's narrative arc to feel authentic, the actions and motivations of the player have to match (or at least parallel) the actions and motivations of the character. If I do not understand why Booker needs to do some particular sidequesty thing, it's hard for me to understand why he doesn't just go ahead and do the things he actually obviously needs to do. Mysterious keys and the cipher/codebook dynamic in the game are a spoilerless example: They're functionally looting. In theory they might have had important information, or shortcuts... but they don't. The plot is staggeringly linear, and the protagonist's distractability just looks foolish.


Then there's the whole problem that all of these plot-heavy shooters have. They are mass-murder simulators. It is possible to produce psychopathic madmen for whom mass murder plots are appropriate, and it's even possible to create sympathetic side-characters who stick with them in spite of it by becoming as broken and jaded as they. This game really doesn't do either. Booker remains bitter and judgemental about murderers and abusers no matter how many varyingly-innocent people he kills, and Elizabeth gets frighteningly efficient and helpful by the end of the game despite how distasteful she claims to find the preceedings.


Then the ending squeezes a lot of plot that could have been genuinely foreshadowed or doled out slowly into a silly and dizzying few minutes. Plus it renders meaningless most of the actions the protagonist took in the entire game...  ultimately one short, if weird and beautiful , step away from "it was all just a dream". How much stronger would it have been had Booker remembered pieces his past earlier and fought with himself to justify keeping it a secret from the people it would hurt?

I really want to love this game like I love its setting (silly quantum hot air balloon city and all), but it ends up being a lot of sound and fury signifying only the depressing lack of narrative depth the weary old FPS genre allows.

I expected more from Elizabeth, considering they've been tooting their horn for years over her. They want us to like Elizabeth so desperately that they pull all the tricks they can, it seems... I'm not really feeling much other than "that was some terribly good animation". The character feels so deliberate (just look at that character model) and talks so much yet gets so little personality across. Story wise, she's such a huge, huge hassle and offers nothing but complications, judgement and dry exposition in return. I would have knocked her over the head and put her in a bag until she was delivered.

Please, keep her, Songbird, I'll go into hiding in Argentina instead of dealing with all this shit - how little does having another ruined life on my conscious matter.

Maybe I'm just a psychopath. On the other hand, I cared more about minor characters in The Walking Dead than Elizabeth.

She's Rapunzel: Spent the last 20 years hiding in a tower reading books, painting pictures, and inventing games. Basically a blank slate, and without much opportunity to develop over the course of the game. The characters in The Walking Dead are at least implied to have pretty realstic lives, concerns, goals. Elizabeth wants to get out of her tower and go to Paris. That's it.

Also she doesn't like all this killing she exists to help you with. That concludes the development of her character...

Just finished it.  It was an amazingly beautiful, technically well-made game, but it didn't resonate with me as emotionally as they wanted it to.  Artistically, they swung for the fences but only hit a double.  But I'm grateful they tried.  We need more games like this that try to push the envelope. 

Pretty much everything above.

A legitimately novel take on Elizabeth would've been actually making her pretty much socially retarded/introverted/nearly mute like she would've been in real life since she spent her whole life locked up with almost no human interaction. Instead she's literally a Disney princess; I was waiting for a literal magic carpet ride. They kinda got her being naive but she's pretty much instantly an empathetic social butterfly who is better at talking to people (when she does) than Booker, who can't seem to stop flashing his fucking sign of the devil everywhere.

There a reason Booker didn't immediately pop into a clothing shop to grab some fashionable fingerless riding gloves the INSTANT he noticed his brand was on a sign that basically said, "SHOOT ANYONE THAT HAS THIS BRAND"?

The game doesn't really follow the internal logic of its own world, and it doesn't even make an effort to handwave shit it can easily handwave. Again: Why am I not hopping on any of the barges fleeing the Vox later? What about any of the barges? Why aren't I PARACHUTING OFF THE FUCKING FLOATING ISLAND THE INSTANT I SAVE THE GIRL? You could've easily established that Songbird would be up your ass the instant you set foot off Columbia and set up some thing where maybe you can get the Vox to help you kill the Songbird so you can escape, and THAT'S why you want to get them guns so badly!

...but nah whatever let's just make something something vague deal with some NPC who has no reason to help us.

At least the game is fun.

Also this is "Politics" worthy but fuck the writers for being gigantic pussies and playing the "Both sides are bad!!" card after spending 3/4ths of the game establishing how racist, backward, ignorant, and vile the upper half of the citizenry/government are.

Elizabeth's problem as a character is that everything she says is at face value. Clementine in The Walking Dead is god damn terrified at all times but she's as terrified of being seen as a burden. Realizing she acts (and therefore, is) brave out of concern for others is what makes her sympathetic. This would be true of anyone but even more so of a young girl.

Crying when you're expected to cry isn't sympathetic, it's understandable. Sympathy requires selflessness.

Having Elizabeth go "Mhmhf..." and stare at the ground when addressed would have been great. :awesome_for_real:

Truthfully, though, I think a reason Elizabeth alternates between this angsty child and a paragon of awesome power is one similar to your comment on the writers being pussies - they worried about, or didn't know, how to write a female character that didn't seem unfashionably weak. It's an odd thing I've noted in some reviews - since Elizabeth has this supernatural power, she is a strong character and not at all a damsel in distress, eventhough the game acts exactly as if she were. Well, until the last ten minutes.

That hasn't been legitimately novel since Ico did it eleven years ago. I think rather than being concerned that she would be seen as weak, the team was concerned that the player would be annoyed about having to drag Elizabeth around. A character who genuinely inspires fear in Booker is one which probably inspires annoyance in anybody controlling him.

I also want to second the "vitachamber resurrection mechanics are dumb no matter how much you dress them up with plot justification" thing, too. What's the point of dying if it's not even remotely a hassle? Why include mortality at all?

Some of your complaints are valid but this one? Not at all.

Let's say you're booker. Let's say you just got the girl out of the tower. Let's even pretend that for some bizarre reason you've had training in sky diving in a time period where that makes absolutely no sense.

What would you make the parachutes out of? How about the harnesses? What do you do about the terrified girl? Strap her to you and knock her out? Ok. I hope the harnesses are made for that.

Also, I hope that Columbia just happens to have the right type of material to make a good parachute. I also hope all of those cops who have been trying to shoot you don't fill the parachute with a lot of holes or you know, casually fly over to you in one of their airships and shot you as you go by.

At least in this version when you died any of the tough creatures you were fighting got their health back. In One, I could attack a Big Daddy with a wrench until it killed me, run back from the vita chamber in the next room and just keep on whacking away at it, eventually killing it.

Just finished it last night, and the ending made my head hurt. Then I started reading different opinions on what the ending meant, and my head hurt any more. Then I found out I had missed the post credits ending...  :uhrr:


The game wasn't perfect by any means, and timey-whimey stories will always be annoying, but this game really did do a lot of things right. There was enough engagement between the story and the gameplay to get me to finish it in a week. Games like this usually take me about two months to finish, if I ever do.

For me, Elizabeth sets a new bar for what you can do with an NPC in a single player game. There's all kinds of ways you can criticize her character if you like, but the mechanics behind her are ground breaking for this type of game.

If I accept that there's a floating city held aloft by 1900's super-science it stretches my credulity to the point of snapping if parachutes haven't been invented at said floating city.

This. It's like building a goddamn city in the trees 100 feet high, then not putting railings on the walkways between platforms. Fuck you, architects of Kelethin.

Even Ewoks understood that.

I found it funny that there was no wind to speak of at "ground level" in the city, yet at the top of Elizabeth's tower you had the howling winds that should have been present all throughout the city.

All the quantum that protects citizens from basic physical laws is at the bottom of the platforms.

Magnets. It all comes down to magnets.

I just want to say I've been avoiding this thread because for the first time since ME3 I really don't want to even risk spoilers. But goddamn is this a fine playing game. Each time I thing I've got it figured out (eh it's on rails but pretty, wait it's not so on rails. Eh so I just got to save the girl right, oh she hates me and I'm now arming a rebellion wtf?) it all changes. Gunplay isn't the awesomenest, but I kinda treat that like Tomb Raider: combat as a vehicle to exploration and bow=sniper rifle :-)

I don't think safety was a major concern back in 1900.  We have plenty of examples of that...

So is this good or not?  I'm not quite getting the warm/fuzzy feelings from this thread that I'm seeing in the reviews (go figure, right?).


Meh.  It's been pretty well established that people are dicks, regardless of who is in charge. 

I enjoyed watching my roommate play.  The whole thing was more interesting than 1 & 2 for me.

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before, I haven't read the whole thread and haven't finished the game, so I'm kinda wary of even minor spoilers.

Why is the game constantly undermining its own immersion? This happens just moments into the game, where, you're exploring this lighthouse, oh crap here's somebody murdered whats going on .. completely distracted by OOH SHINY, COINS! Constantly through the game so far, little stuff I wonder, why. People dead, in grotesque situations, hanging, half burned - oh here's a banana I can grab from them! Or a pineapple! Or fucking cereal! I just... don't understand. Couldn't the same purpose have been served by simply looting bandages off these people? Medicine? Syringes of GO GEL? When you put pineapples and cake and cotton candy bananas and cereal on these bodies, it's just fucking ridiculous, every cultural meme about these items is frivolous, silly, feel good food.

These choices seem so over the top as to be purposeful, am I going to get to some endgame metamoment where these ridiculous and jarring design choices make sense? Like Elizabeth constantly flicking you coins, regardless of what situation you're in?  Are they so worried you might not like her tagging along that she literally has to pay you to like her?

I don't get it, because so much of the design of this world is gobsmackingly beautiful and original to the point of sensory overload, and the story is intriguing and the characters interesting ... why does the game constantly strive to ruin this mood it creates by having me loot fucking bananas off a hanging dead man?

I got nothing.

The fact that the protagonist has no real inventory was equally dumb in Rapture. Just imagining this guy running around grabbing every piece of food, bottle of alcohol, or cigarette he finds in some garbage can or corpse's pocket and stuffing it immediately in his mouth (with sound effect!) is a more than a little bemusing. Elizabeth's coin collection wouldn't be nearly so distracting if it didn't include the distinct animation and sound effects. Those worked in combat, mind you, because they broke up the fierce monotony of FPS gameplay, but in the game proper they were an unpleasant distraction.

They've said basically as much, except dressed up in some BS about "emotional connection." They made her a useful tool so you would like her. It's interesting to compare in approach to something like the Walking Dead, where people like an essentially useless companion because she's likable.


They wanted to make a great story and a great game without thinking about how the two would co-exist. I think this game is doing a lot to disabuse people of the notion that a hugely expensive game with a giant staff can be a coherent personal vision. (Or at least that it is extremely rare) If you have a large staff of mostly specialized people the vast majority of them do not consider the big picture. The gameplay guy is thinking about how combat would be cool if you could rip dudes heads off, even if that undermines a story beat where that is supposed to be a singular and shocking event.

The sad part here is that it doesn't seem like Levine et al tried to make a coherent game and just couldn't do it because there were too many moving parts, it seems more like they didn't really try and just accepted that the video game layer and story layer would be distinct and often contradictory because video games.

It's like the exact opposite approach of Japanese games that have crazy non-standard save systems or buttons dedicated to sheathing/unsheathing weapons. Those games often suffer because they try so hard to make a coherent whole that playability suffers - they make all the systems reinforce the feel and themes of the game past the point of reason. Here instead it's like the developers are content to make a bunch of decisions that are optimal locally even if the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Edit:


Chances are that it was originally more subtle and got ratcheted up after play-testing because some people in the play-test didn't immediately notice it. Play-testing tends to push games in more obvious directions and prioritize surface-level issues over systemic or long-term ones.

"After playing this game for a few hours this system I thought was cool becomes really distracting and annoying" said no playtester ever.

They should have thrown out looting bodies, period. There's no videogame law that bodies have to be looted in every game. That would have been a huge step towards more immersion at zero cost to gameplay.

My favorite must be how Booker spends his time eating out of trashcans. Dude must've gotten low.

It's Levine-esque metaphor. The working man survives on the scraps of the rich, or something.

Even if they existed, Booker would have no clue what to do with it and without training a parachute can be quite deadly. I know I said "pretend you've had training" but in all honesty, you wouldn't. So, no parachutes didn't bother me at all. Besides, the game would be about 1/2 hour long at that point. I've seen far too many movies and read far too many books where there is an obvious solution but it would short circuit the entire story. "Dude, just shoot the villain in the face while he monologues!"

++ on this about looting. It's just stupid and unnecessary in this game. It shows you how completely arteriosclerotic most game design has become. "We have to put looting in, that's supposed to make people want to play."

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1411632/wonka.jpg)

Eh, they might have been invented but not in use. Parachutes existed during WW1 but no one used them because it made you a pussy. I really don't get that, but I'm not a biplane pilot or some asshole in blimp. People can call me a coward all they want for using a simple device that saves me from a five minute fall to my death.

(http://24.media.tumblr.com/2d10503e5ec7a18262f369057c6b7ebd/tumblr_mkwng8fAeo1rhwn5ho1_500.png)

 :oh_i_see:

Still playing this. Turning over every rock. Still avoiding this thread. Falling ever further behind in the analysis. But damn as soon as I finish this I'm gonna have some stuff to say!

I finished, and the one thing this game succeeded in doing is get me to reinstall System Shock 2.  The System Shock inventory/scrounge for stuff system that was mostly gutted in Bioshock is now just plain gone, replaced with an intensely unchallenging regenerating shield system.  Gobble pineapples off of corpses to stay alive!  Pay to upgrade your weapons, throw them away, and find new upgraded weapons from that point on.  Everyone in the world magically upgraded their weapons at that point, must be some quantum entanglement thing.  Be named Bioshock, even though the ethics of biological modifications are never brought into any question.  Replace magic gene potions with just plain magic potions.

KILL EVERYONE.  They're either automatically evil racist rich cultists because they're white, or they're automatically evil murderous looters because they're black or irish.  In no case will any of them decide not to try to fight the man who's just killed a few hundred people, nosir, they're going to blindly charge at him.  It's bound to work out better for them than for the previous 524 people.  Set them on fire and saw off their faces for an achievement.  Do this while Elizabeth the Disney princess is watching.

Attempt to make reasonable negotiations with people.  Not once will the people you're trying to negotiate with accept the reasonable offer.  Time to saw their face!

See the fascinating sights on a floating city full of racists who for some reason let the black and irish people into their floating city instead of just denying them entry and flying away to be racist in peace.  Apparently they not only let other races into their flying racist city, they did so in such numbers that the other races had enough people to actually take over the city, which just seems like terrible planning on the face of things.

You lost me once you started ranting on gun upgrading.  It's a video game.

moar pineapple flavored nachos

The last bit is what happened in the South for real dude. We "imported" so many slaves that in many areas of the south Blacks outnumbered whites.

As for the rest, yeah. Everyone but you being completely fucking insane for no apparent reason is retarded. The whole Vox gun plot thread made no sense considering there were a million better ways to get off Columbia.

On some of the "sugar islands" in the Caribbean, slaves were up to 85% of the population. The small white planter class pretty much held views close to the folks on Columbia, maybe without so much shouty religious stuff. It's kind of the point: almost nobody is a racist of the "I don't want anyone near me who is not like me" kind, then or now. They're racists of the "I want those folks under my heel and at my service" kind.

There's a voxophone that talks about how the people of Colombia expect a utopia where they don't have to do the menial tasks. So African Americans are brought in with false promises of a better life.

Don't know about the Irish though - I'm still early on in-game.

That's pretty much Atlanta in a nutshell. There's a reason a black majority migrated here after the 1960s. As an overally generalization, racists down here don't care how close you get to them personally, they just care how high you rise in the economic system. As you go further north, racists don't care how high you rise, they just don't want you living nearby.

Exceptions being poor as fuck rednecks who don't want you close OR making more money than them, because they are idiots living in a bumblefuck county nobody notices.

So's System Shock 2.  Throw away an upgraded gun in that and pick up another, see how upgraded it is.

One of the things that I most miss in Infinite that was present in Shock 2 and still mostly present in Bioshock is the need for care.  While you could just kick open a door and start throwing grenades, it was often much wiser to carefully explore, hack some defenses and lay some traps before starting to shoot people.  In Infinite, run straight through a linear level, shoot everything, keep running, keep shooting.  Not only is permanently hacking area defenses not very valuable, it's flat-out not possible.  Zap a turret with the possession thing, it shoots at people for about ten seconds, then goes right back to shooting you.

I'm watching someone LP SS2 right now as a Psionic which I never did, and after struggling through the first couple decks it seems to have degenerated into him keeping Agility up so he can run around really fast, then wrenching (later laser rapier-ing) to death with adrenaline, with judicious use of the cyberaffinity psionic skill to hack stuff when needed. Psionics actually seems like it'd be broke as hell at high levels...I didn't realize it until the guy did it but with Pyro Field you're immune to the explosions from Protocol Droids.

The thing that SS2 has over all of the Bioshock games is that you have a lot of build options rather than just "welp you're good at everything do whatever".

You also couldn't spend an entire combat sequence zipping around on skyline at 100mph while shooting things in System Shock 2. They are different games. The word Shock is about the only thing they have in common.

You complain that having weapons stay upgraded after you drop them - would you prefer the hyper realism of carrying around twelve different guns simultaneously?

They're just completely different games.  Have been since the second you set foot in Rapture.   I think Infinite's shortcomings as a game aren't interesting in the ways that for the third consecutive time it failed to be System Shock 2, it's the ways that it continued to hitch itself to the systems in Bioshock.  But as a member of the franchise, I guess we get magic powers + upgrades, guns + upgrades, looting, and vending machines until the inevitable reboot when I'm in my 40s.

It would have been cool to see something a little more customized to the setting (outside the hook) or different this time, but overall the systems didn't hamper my enjoyment of the game.  They just didn't fit as well.

I actually prefer the hyper realism of an inventory system with finite capacity rather than having eight magic transdimensional holsters that will hold any weapon regardless of size.


I've done psi-only runs in SS2; they definitely put a different spin on the game.  Most of the powers generally suck compared to just shotgunning something in the face, but in a few situations they're insanely useful.

Anyone wanting to play it today should use the instructions here (http://chriscamaro.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-get-the-most-out-of-System-Shock-2-Installation-Mods-and-Setup) which will apply the 2012 patch to make it compatible with modern OSes and widescreen monitors, as well as the much-needed graphical updates made by the fan community.

Kind of funny really. They get great acclaim for innovating RPG elements into a shooter then spend the next 14 years trying to get it out again.

I liked it for what it is. It really isn't an RPG so much as its an interactive story, mixed with a shooter. I thought it reminded me more of a game like Uncharted or Resident Evil. People seem to be determined to call it an RPG when it really isn't.

I liked that the gun upgrades forced me to focus on a play style. Going through a game maxing out shotgun and the heavy pistol would play totally different from one focused on the sniping weapons. I had to make that choice of whether or not to pick up that RPG in a given situation, given how much better my upgraded burst gun would be in the next area. Same with the vigors. I maxed out Murder of Crows, which lent to a totally different combat approach compared to some of the other powers.

Honestly, combat wise, it was a well balanced, reasonably fun game with some silly quirks. Based on that it was an average game at best. 
I loved the game because it played in to my obsession with finding things and learning back story. The story was bizarre enough to keep me coming back for more. I wanted to know just what the hell was going to happen.

For anyone curious about this LP, I've been watching it too, and it's by Psychedelic Eyeball from the SA forums:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBiA98i89bbWA5zvLKGSzNKKp3GRKpP1h

Ah, you're a cock puncher.  Say no more.  You're not looking for games, you're looking for penance.

Duke Nukem Forever was successful because they limited Duke to 2 guns at a time.

At what point does limiting the player to two weapons make sense? Having an inventory system is now penance? What is wrong with you people.

Halo.

It also has regenerating shields.

Much like BioShock Infinite.

Item tetris doesn't technically make any sense. How the hell am I keeping an assault rifle, laser pistol, laser rapier, grenade launcher, 400 bullets of random types, 3 cans of soda, annelid glands, an environment suit, and a basketball in my magical pocket of holding? How does Polito "upload" me cybernetic modules when the things are very clearly a physical item? How does pressing a button on an upgrade station make another implant slot magically appear in me?

There are times when realism gets in the way of enjoying the game.

Yes, realistically I can't drag 100 pieces of platemail around. But if I have to walk back to town after the second armor drop I will do so, and I will hate the game for it instead of myself for being a hoarder.

I'm looking at you, Path of Exile.

Tell me you didn't just write that.

How is it I can upload a file to you, but a USB key is a physical item ?

So if cybernetic modules are files, why can't they be infinitely duplicated and how do they literally make me physically stronger and faster since that would make them software upgrades rather than some nano-machine/part kinda module that physically upgrades my rig? Why would Polito have a hard time finding them?

So if one thing doesn't make sense, nothing else can, and we must throw all good things out the window?

Just saying that very little of the "videogamey" stuff put into games for the sake of playability make sense and they aren't something to get too worked up over. You can only carry two weapons because you can only carry two weapons and that forces you to prioritize upgrades, find your favorites, and adds difficulty when they aren't available readily and you have to buy ammo or conserve it.

Also how do the replicators make the same stuff with fewer nanites after I hack them?

Ugh, none of what you just said makes any sense. But I'm too tired to care. Enjoy your console shit.

My condolences on your autism.

There's nothing wrong with limiting the player to two weapons and nothing wrong with allowing more. In terms of "realism" not many inventory systems make a lot of sense, nor is realism a good goal of an inventory system unless realism is a major theme of the game as a whole. In a game which is about realistically surviving in an environment a realistic inventory system is cool - otherwise who cares?

Finished. And read thread. I hear a number of people did this in 12-14 hours. Took me 20. Not sure what the difference was, except maybe I just played conservatively.

I have no history with Bioshock. I walked by some demo of the first, saw a guy on screen shooting up, got immediately turned off, and ignored the franchise until I realized this would launch just as I finshed Tomb Raider, so the heck not? And after all of this, I might go play the first one.

I get what many of you are saying. The ending doesn't jive with 99% of the rest of the time you spend in the game. While Fink, Comstock and others stealing tech through Tears contextualizes early 1900s style with quantum physics as hovering device, it also highlights that the multiple timestreams aren't traveling in parallel. As such:


I didn't find this story particularly complex. The ending did have a nice twist , but from a sci-fi standpoint, you don't even need to be on the outer fringes to have read variants on this before. That's not a critique. I quite liked the ending.

Elizabeth was very well done. I'm very glad I didn't follow the marketing of this game though. That whole stupid "you'll care about her" PR bullshit about Tomb Raider about killed that game for me until I got past it. Here I'd have hated caring about Elizabeth after being told everything about her design was intended to make you care. It's fine when I find that out through the presentation of art. But not when the PR wonk comes right out and says it.

I don't know why they chose to put in the racist stuff. It's not like historical accuracy was top of mind (ya know, the whole floating city on borrowed future tech thing). Maybe I'm missing some larger metaphor, or maybe it's just one-dimensional "even the good guys are bad" trope?

Game play wise, it was an ok action shooter ala ME2, but in no way would I call it an FPS. I never once effectively run-and-gun'd it, and I found every weapon except the sniper rifle largely gimp. I probably could have optimized my play style around flowing through situational use of weapons for each level/encounter type. But I really only needed Devil's Kiss, that Shock one, and a Sniper Rile for 95% of the game, and Crows for when those goddamnIhatethose Handy Men. Even fighting from the high wires was little more than moving around, aerial assault, find a corner, snipe away.

There was no choice in this game, which makes it especially odd for them to layer in the kind of multiverse that has at its heart "all possible choices" and partner you with someone who could literaly make them. I mean, the underuse of her ability is like that goddamned time turner from Harry Potter. Go back a full day so you can double the course work, but don't then use it to, I dunno, off Voldemort for good when Dumbledore first meets him at the boarding school? At the same time, this game structure felt similar enough to Tomb Raider I was conditioned for open world that was actually just large corridors.

Overall I thought this was very well done. The world was interesting, the game play was effective, the ending at least was thought-provoking in a good way, there's sufficient room for more in this or parallel worlds, and they at least tried something beyond the usual tropes. Though the game had most of them, the twists were welcome.

Because Americans have shitty history educations, generally speaking, especially when it comes to post-Reconstruction times, and we need to be slapped in the face with our own heritage once in a while to remind us. It's not a bad thing.

The only thing I can think is that they wanted to put in a reason to excuse shooting the Columbia people in the face by the hundreds, so they made them dirty racists.  This strikes me as a bad idea.  One, because I don't need a videogame person to be a racist/nazi/robot/alien for me to not have a problem with shooting them, if they're running up and shooting at me.  Two, because racism is insufficient grounds for executing hundreds of people.  It, like other forms of ignorance, really shouldn't be portrayed as something to deal with by deadly violence.

Then your problem should be with the entire 'shoot all the mans' genre.

This is a complete non-sequitor. His problem is with the way racism is deployed in the game - I can't think of any other "shoot all the mans" game that uses racism in the same fashion.

Why is this an unacceptable justification, when other story-imposed justifications in other games are fine? Ultimately, you're shooting Nazis, or Cerberus, or Nemesis, or Caesar's Legion - all villain groups from other games with racist ideologies. It's just not OK because suddenly these are American equivalents?

These games are excuses for the player to go about murdering dozens of faceless thugs on the flimsiest of motivations; squawking about this particular one rings a bit hollow in my ears.

Games with nazi's dont generally have them BEING nazi's and commiting hate crimes while you watch.

I was explaining it to a co-worker today and really what bothers me is NOT the racism, it's the lack of plot tied to it. Yes columbia is racist and evil and whatnot but what does that have to do with why you are there, or comstock or the infinite stuff at all? Columbia could be racist, could be anything else and it really doesn't matter, it's just a setting. In bioshock one however the randian world of rapture wasn't just the setting, it WAS the plot, it was the reason for everything that happened and does happen in that game. The hyper capitalism of bioshock one was integral to the plot whereas the racism and hyper nationalism of columbia is simply there as window dressing.

As I said earlier, I think it's there to slap Americans in the face with the enormous, unpleasant cock of our history. Which any visit to a game review comments thread should tell you is sorely needed.

Yeah great selling point in entertainment. Reminding people of uncomfortable truths is always a fucking dance around the Maypole.

I actually think entertainment is probably the best way to reach people on stuff like that. Once people are out of school and into their no-new-information bubble, entertainment media is one of the few ways you can reach them.

Shit, look how much better the Daily Show is at changing minds than regular editorial news content.

It's there because the first Bioshock was a commentary on Rand and Objectivism and the gaming press wet themselves at the thought that a game could have a message, because having a message means you're art. Now, I do think that actually did add an atmospheric element to Rapture, just like I think the racism of Columbia is a part of its atmosphere. It's not just that they're saying, "Here's American history", it's that they're very specifically saying that nostalgic fantasies about barbershop quartets and small-town Americana pretty much call back to a moment in time where much of what you see about race in Columbia is only slightly exaggerated from the way it actually was. But anyway, it's an attempt to make Columbia into a place that isn't just art design, but that has a specific culture, a specific character, and to repeat the conceptual hook of framing that around an ideology or a politics, which is pretty much now the defining attribute of the series the way that stealth is a defining attribute of the Thief games.

"People in the past were racist" is not by itself something anyone needs reminding of. If anything by setting it in the past it provides a clean break with modern times. (Not to mention that US history does not include a floating city) Even the staunchest conservative will admit that yeah, in the past people were racist. This is a reminder on the level of that water is wet.


Because different games are different. There's no idea that doesn't work in any context, the problem is this specific context. Shooting Nazis in Wolfenstein is fine - the plot and setting of the game are almost completely irrelevant and the game has a fucking robot Hitler in it. At no point do I think to myself "hey maybe these Nazis have families" because it's just not that type of game. The problem Bioshock has, and that a lot of "AAA" games have, is that they try to model real humans and real behaviors, have "mature" stories that are major focuses of the game rather than a paragraph in the instruction booklet, then still include stuff that just doesn't fit.

I'm fine with a game where you just kill a bunch of dumb racists. However that game is probably something similar to Postal. If a game like Bioshock is going to incorporate racism I expect it to be on level above that.

I suppose it's fair to say that the racism is just part of the world-building. However before release the messaging was that Infinite would have Something To Say (TM) about topics like racism and American exceptionalism presumably beyond "these are bad!"

Stop criticizing this masterpiece.

(http://storefront.steampowered.com/v/gfx/apps/8870/extras/quotes-banner.jpg)

You are a remarkable optimist.

"People were a bit racist" isn't something people need to be reminded of. The thing I think Bioshock does well is remind people that casual racism by today's standards was HOLY SHIT back then. You know, shit we like to forget such as the Irish were hated on hardcore as well.

Think of it the other way: you want to make a semi period piece in 1920. You set out to do some research on the specifics of the period,old posters/style/etc, and find holy shit kind of stuff. Do you include it, or do you water it down?

I was a little shocked by the level of it in Bioshock, but I also know that it's a semi political series, so it's more shocking to see it displayed. And I think that's the entire point.

I do agree that a lot of devs would simply leave racism out of the game entirely, and they deserve credit for not presenting an idealized view of history. I suppose based on pre-release word I was just expecting more to be done with some of these themes beyond world-building.

Ok so this all makes sense. But racism as a byproduct of a period piece does not justify the period chosen which happens to include racism.

This ties into Ingmar's original response above:

Why? Not "why do we have shitty history education". Everybody has shitty history education. Pre-college education is citizen indoctrination. College is when you start to ask questions. But by then the point is to become better prepared to enter the workforce to make incremental change, not charge in with piss and vinegar that upsets the slow pace of change.

No, I mean "why" in the context of "why chose a period wherein racism needs to be a part in order to connote accuracy"? This is my personal blindspot becausee as I mentioned, I've never played Bioshock 1 so only know from the coverage that it was a critique of Ayn Rand and such.

So on the one hand, sure, maybe core to the Bioshock brand is sociopolitical commentary.

But on the other, there was nothing about the underlying premise of Infinite that really required it be a period piece that included contemporary social norms of great dissonance with modern permissable thinking. You've got spacetime tears pulling things in from the multiverse for chrissakes. Putting it in a time that requires racism to be accurate feels like little more than window dressing to drive shock value that generates controversy which ultimately drives PR.

This is a bit unfair to Irrational because I really did like the game, and to a degree I'd give it high marks and wouldn't even consider this sub-topic a ding against such. It's really more about the idea of video games as social commentary in the first place. We've got an industry of retrograde mysognists objectifying women and continuing to capitalize on modern stereotypes. This is the best time to be re-introducing historical ones we'd like to believe we've outgrown?

Sorry to derail. I'm just bothered by the idea of racism as a PR hook, even if it's package as "hey this is a history lesson for all you 36+ers who slept through 11th grade".

Really now.

What part? The "everybody"? I could strengthen that by saying "everybody who didn't then do post-high school history", but I kinda implied that :-)

Damn, I also meant to ask: is this worth playing through from scratch again? Like, ME and Witcher I would because at key points a different decision may be interesting. But here the only reason i could think to play through it again would for some esoteric achievements I couldn't care less about.

Not to continue the derail, but I think there's a much better case for the racist dudes in the world building being an artistic choice rather than a "PR hook".

I get what you are saying but your formulation is a little weird.

Most time periods include racism or something akin to it. You'd be hard-pressed to write historical fiction about the US without setting it in an overtly racist time period.

Now that said I don't think accuracy is a goal of Infinite, and you can find critiques specifically about the lack of accuracy in the way it portrays things like race relations. The world of Infinite is intentionally a sort of Greatest Hits version. It's one thing to include racism because racism was a thing. It's another to write a story about a floating sky city run by white supremacists who worship John Wilkes Booth or some shit. When you do that you seem to indicate that you have something to say beyond simply communicating the stark reality of the time.

I think it's fair to say that compared to Bioshock 1 Infinite is overstuffed and less coherent.


For Bioshock bold artistic choices are the PR hook. The PR for Bioshock is largely centered around how the series has big ideas and how Ken Levine is some sort of brave mad scientist. Not that I think someone said "let's include racism so we can do PR about it" but tackling weighty themes is the Shock schtick. It didn't have to be racism and religion but it did have to be something "serious" and not just sci-fi stuff.

Well yes, there's a difference between casually referencing something and actively commenting on it. In Bioshock, the trappings of the 1950's were just scenery. In Infinite, the trappings of Gilded Age America are just scenery. Each is so loaded with symbols that it feels like it ought to mean something, but neither has the thematic or storytelling chops to actually attempt a message or a point.  "It's bad, mmkay?" is just cartoon cynicism.

I think Django would like a word. :)

While insisting it doesn't exist now.  Some people are a bit obtuse and need it thrown in their face to get it.

i hear blacks can ride horses now in the US?

But infinite isn't really a commentary on racism, it's about why dimensional fuckery is bad, with added racism.  If you actually dealt with it or it was the reason for the dimensional fuckery or vice-versa it would be a bit better.  As it stands, it's more "Look at how controversial we are!"

Having serious themes and exploring them are two totally different things.

The racism seemed to have no point other than to demonize the inhabitants of the city.  It would've been more interesting if they'd been a non-mustache-twirling level of racist and believing that they were progressive not-racist people.  Because sure, they make the African and Irish people scrub the toilets and live in the cloud slums, but they aren't going and lynching anyone or burning crosses, and sometimes they'll even talk to a black person.  That's super swell of them, right?  Then halfway through the game you find out that they're putting minority people through involuntary cyborging (also making the game finally sorta bio-related if we're having 'Bioshock' as the name) and chalking it up as being 'for their own good' and 'improving their job opportunities in life'.

Suddenly you're confronted with the true stripes of what had previously seemed a relatively benign racism, when people who still have a smile on their face believe that other people are unfit to make their own way in life without the 'help' of the ruling class.  People who will tell you that it's okay to chop off a black man's limbs and replace them with steam-powered ones whether he wants them or not, because his skull shape proves through science that he can't plan more than a week into the future.  That would be WAY more creepy than everyone whipping out KKK hoods all of a sudden.

Yea that's basically where I was headed, I just couldn't figure out how to say it well.

I'm cool with games including controversial concepts. But include the controversial concept, don't just treat it as some window dressing for the purposes of inciting sideshow conversation.

Having said that, I don't think that was Infinite's intent. I didn't really feel it as racism as much as plight of the common man, the unacknowledged true class of people who make things work. That's as old as one group declaring superiority over another.

One thing I don't feel is answered is exactly what time period is Comstock from originally and where did the quantum/multiverse stuff come from? I could see that Comstock was trying to recreate his idealized view of youth, and place himself above reproach. All his sensibilities are from that time, and faithfully recreating a city for that time does include that cultural superiority that subjugates the other classes. And the attack on NYC looks like it was also from that same time period (at least 1930s).

But then: quantum stuff. The brother and sister, future scientists who get lost in time and find Comstock Prime? Descendants?

Also: is Bioshock 1 worth playing or should I finish these ME3 DLCs?

Bioshock is very worth playing.  Bioshock 2 is good but can be skipped without missing anything earth-shattering.

The racism angle of Bioshock: Infinite is undermined by


I liked Bioshock 1 a lot, but you've probably had the twists ruined by now. However it works better than B:I because Rapture has an atmosphere to it that Columbia lacks.

I also think Bioshock 2 doesn't get the respect it deserves as it has some exceptional set pieces, even if the main villain isn't as strong. Plus Minerva's Den is excellent as DLC.

(http://i.imgur.com/HWXkw.jpg)

... I don't get it. John Constantine in Colombia?

I wrote over 4000 words on my blog that basically says how disappointing Bioshock: Infinite is and how bewildered I am that out of over 100 professional reviews on Metacritic there is only one review that gives this game less than 80% (and that's Tom Chick's review). As a title it is pretty and soulless, with an ending that doesn't hold up to an iota of thought.

Looking forward to reading this after I start and finish it.

Didn't play the game, but well done on cutting the veggie and tossing the salad plot.
I really hate games that tries to present a story but not really enhancing it with the gameplay. Instead, both seems to be very unrelated to each other and the player just have to accept that his gameplay matters not when it comes to the plot resolution.

Yea that was basically the vibe I got while playing. Great looking game, interesting story, workable action shooter, they all had very little to do with each other at the time. But in retrospect, the ending kinda establshed:

I may be repeating myself from earlier comments but this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately: most AAA games these days operate on the premise that the gameplay is essentially non-canonical. The "story" of the game is just the audio logs, cutscenes and locations you visit, but very little of the in-game action.


Game reviews strive for a sort of faux-objectivity. The game is pretty, on the surface appears intellectually at least somewhat ambitious and doesn't suffer from major technical problems. So it's going to get 80+ from every outlet.

So, I bought this like three weeks ago. I played for a couple hours and go to the point where

.

At that point I quit in disgust and haven't gone back yet. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but it seems to be a pretty stock corridor shooter with very nice art and a teenage-intellectual veneer tossed on top. Am I missing something? Should I really go back and finish?

How many more fucking hours do I have to slog through?

None, unless you're a game reviewer getting paid by the word and therefore must slog through it.

Or:

Probably another 8 from that point, or maybe 5 if you speedrun?  :grin:

Badly phrased. "How many hours remain, if I were to slog through?" would be closer. But...


Fffffuuuuuuck that.

What? No. Maybe half that. 2-3 hours. Faster if you are playing on easy. And the last half hour is basically exposition anyway. You're in the last third of the game, for sure. 8 hours? The entire game can't be more than 10.

I'd just finish it, I liked the last third. Even though the game took a sharp right turn. If you think it's teenage-intellectual now, you haven't seen anything yet. Just wait.

Do you mean

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. As soon as I saw that pop up I was like "no, fuck you for using the oldest video game trick in the book", save (lolno, I mean checkpoint), quit. If I wanted to play shitty RPGs where every single quest is interrupted by "well, I'll help you BUT FIRST YOU MUST TRUNCULATE THE SIX MACDOOGLES" I'd go play one of those.

I don't even know what I expected though. I gotta stop buying shooters.

I had the same though when I got there, but once I played it it really didn't bug me as much, as they use the whole run around to present more of the plot line and story.

The game is certainly an on rails shooter, but I really liked how they integrated the telling of the story in to that. Guess not everyone else got the same out of it that I did.

I think it was 6 hours for me. I played this real slow though. I hear people did the whole game in 8-10 hours (maybe some even faster), but it took me 20. A couple of sequences I had trouble at, and I pretty much combed every part of the world though. Rare for me, but I heard it was short so somehow that made me want to stretch it out.

I have no idea  if Yuri had my special brand of OCD in this game though :-)

And son of a gun, when looking to confirm my hours in Infinite, I accidentally clicked on Bioshock 1 in my library. Turns out I bought it at some point. Guess I don't need to think about doing so anymore...

Infinite's "story" makes me want to punch baby giraffes. Games are not storytelling machines. They are story-making or experiential-sharing machines. If you want to tell me a story, go make a fucking movie or write a book.


I started off poking around in every corner looking at shit, but eventually it got tiresome and I put the "must finish game" blinders on.

I did this as well.  Finished in 12 hours.

From there you've got:

Man, Bioshock 1 really ripped off Infinite. Same lighthouse, Eve is just Vigor, Adam is just Health, coin counter is the same. No creativity at all!

 :grin:

Really wish I played this first now (or second, depending on timestream). Finally beginning to understand ya'alls references.

Depends what we are judging 'worst' on - worst output, or worst to work for?

Oops, wrong thread.

I'm playing this on 1999 mode and it really points out the weird spike in combat difficulty - I'm only in danger if I'm rushed (which all the big opponents do like Firemen or Motorized Founders).  Otherwise the best tactic is to sit back (preferably up high, with some cover) and then use the sniper rifle / carbine / pistol to shoot my targets. The AI doesn't seem to like the idea of jumping on the skyrails and may actually only be spawned on them, jumping off when they get close to you. If they have a ranged weapon (and if they have a melee weapon but there's a gun nearby, they'll go and pick it up) then standard enemies will find some cover and generally stick to it.

The Boys of Silence are also a completely wasted enemy type. I'd love to see a post-mortem of all the stuff that got left out of Bioshock: Infinite that appeared on shelves.

Finished it in 10.1 hours. I didnt rush, and I pretty much explored all the side buildings. I enjoyed it up until the ending, which I didn't hate but it just kind of felt a bit cliche. I was expecting a real twist.

I don't think I would have wanted it to be much longer, but I don't feel cheated out of my money ether.

My problem with that is that Tom Chick was the reviewer who was so unbelievably ridiculously over the top in his praise of Bioshock 2 that anything he says regarding these types of game should really be ignored.  Either he was bought and paid for, or his frame of reference is massively outside normal gaming - say whatever else you like about Bioshock 2, I don't think anyone would describe it as the amazing storytelling experience Chick was pushing it as.

Personally, I absolutely loved Infinite. Enjoyed the fights,loved the storyline, and really enjoyed the ending. Absolutely worth every penny and definitely one of the best games I've played in a a long time.

I really liked Infinite.  I think my only problem with it was it was way too linear for my tastes.  Then again I had just got done playing Far Cry 3 before transitioning to this.

He's always the outlier, he does it on purpose, and you can pretty much ignore anything he says about any game safely. (Tom Chick that is, not UnSub.)

I've got no problem with Tom Chick being a contrarian, provided you know he's a contrarian.

I saw the other day that B:I has 3 DLC packs on the way, all allegedly single player content. So to get the 'full' B:I story, you're going to have to shell out more money.

Well played, Mr Levine. Well played.

I'm just wondering how the DLC is going to fit in, will I have to start another game, or are they somehow going to make the DLC make sense on its own outside the original story?

You're asking how they can shoehorn SP DLC in when it's a game about multiple universes?

 :awesome_for_real:

I hope it continues the story rather than doing what ME did (filler). This is not a linear enough I felt any reason to go back and replay, because the "twist" was entirely at the end.

The DLC is apparently single player stuff that explains the settings and world in more depth, but isn't a continuation of the single player story. The first one apparently has a new AI companion for example.

That's fine by me - I don't object to DLC that allows me to go back to the universe and explore it more from a different angle. It's when the content is stuff that clearly should have been in the main game (Leviathon for example in ME3) or was purely cut to make DLC (Assassins creed).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832205061

50% off + $5 NewEgg gift card.

GO!

It would be great if my order wasn't in the "Order Verification" state for the past 5 hours.

Should've paid the $2 :awesome_for_real: :oh_i_see:

Just got the code....

And just finished.....

Just finished.

I had fun, but most of the systems/story felt...disjointed?

Was really hoping:

It did to me. Like there were a number of pieces that were put together to make the game / narrative that were cut from pieces of a much larger cloth. It might fit together, but you can see the stitches if you look.

The new DLC just went on to Steam today. I love Steam Remote install btw - waiting for me to play when I get home from work.

Reputedly Buried at Sea Part 1 might only last 90 minutes if you ignore the sightseeing parts, and 3 hours if you take your time.

I'm curious, but not $15 curious.

Get the season pass then.  It's like, what, $5 more and you get more stuffs?

I watched a Youtube LetsPlay which lasted about two and half hours. The guy didn't seem to skip any content and watched all the little video-booth propaganda videos, as well as audio logs he found - so yes 90 mins to 3 hours, depending on player, seems spot on.