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Bioshock Infinite
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geggis
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April 9, 2013 - 6:00 pm
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Okay, so I'm just going to dump a few emails in here rather than type them all out again! If some parts make no sense, my apologies, but you should be golden.

---

I finished it last night after... 30 hours? And overall had a blast -- hugely intriguing, thrilling chaotic combat, and very well paced. Good job Irrational, you managed to make the closing moments not suck. I'm just going to spill my non-spoilery thoughts here.
 
On hard Mat (are you playing on hard?) [Tap forum edit: I played on hard] you need to be using Bucking Bronco constantly because it softens most enemies up, immobilies them and is the cheapest vigor to use. I coupled it with a fully upgraded Devil's Kiss and some Gear that stunned enemies when I 'overkilled' them and the results were glorious. All my other experiments didn't really kill enemies fast enough on hard mode to warrant risking using them. They occasionally found their uses, but for general reliable mass damage output I went with Bucking Brono and Devil's Kiss while distracting people with Possession and Crows. Possession I always used on the tougher human enemies. Shock Jockey was handy at times too for stunning turrets, motorised patriots, mosquitoes etc.
 
I've had my reservations with the combat but in the long run I've come to really really enjoy it.
 
- I miss using traps and environmental hazards (like water and oil spills) so much, mainly because the environments are so open that enemies often manage to get around them without walking through them. I found that in the time it takes to hold your vigor button down, aim and release you could have hurled all kinds of fiery hell on your enemies directly so I rarely used them as a result despite trying plenty of times. The fact that you only occasionally revisit or travel through areas again means you don't quite have the same affinity with your surroundings as in former Bioshocks. The more well travelled areas of those games coupled with carefully planning your attacks against Big Daddies, defending Little Sisters and duking it out with Big Sisters meant that combat felt a lot less clusterfucky as far as I'm concerned (I'm talking about Bioshock 2 here btw, awkward PC hotkeys notwithstanding). You knew where to position yourself, where to draw the enemies (into turrets and security cameras and aforementioned traps and environmental hazards) and what plasmids were best used and where.
 
- the regenerating shield coupled with the more open environments has turned the game into more of a cover shooter which I didn't enjoy as much as just getting stuck in, this feeling was confirmed later on in the game when I maxed my shield out and equipped a bit of Gear that made it charge up quicker and with less of a delay so I didn't have to worry so much about taking cover. It was great just wading in there causing mass destruction rather than hiding behind a barrel.
 
- conversely, the removal of medkit/hypo stacking means that you have to run around mid-firefight hoovering up supplies while you're half-dead. This can be quite fun and intense at times making a mad dash across a hot open space but I died so much trying to stay alive while my shield and health got torn through. Elizabeth helped me no end of times but she couldn't really be relied on as her help was quite sporadic.
 
- I'm in two minds about the two weapon limit and ditching of ammo types. I agree with Armand that it makes the combat much more fluid and makes on-the-fly decision making that much easier (the radial menu I wanted to make love to for this, I love love loved it because it paused the action giving me time to consider my moves [Tap forum edit: it made the combat less chaotic and more tactical]). However, I found myself on a few occasions running out of ammo for my current weapons against tough enemies with very little health, low on salt and trapped behind cover where there were no other weapons to pick up despite knowing I had tons of ammo for everything else. I can live with these moments though for how much more streamlined the general gunplay is. The thing I miss the most is the visual upgrades to the weapons. I really really missed seeing how pimped out my shotgun was so upgrades felt far less rewarding as a result.
 
- I also miss seeing several types of AI fighting each other - security bots, Big Daddies, splicers, Big Sisters, brutes -- all that stuff was pure popcorn entertainment for me and didn't happen enough in Infinite. Possession only went so far with its single target at a time. I also miss seeing enemies hurl themselves into water to put themselves out when they've been set on fire or seeing them retreat to heal up at a med station. These things made the AI look far more 'alive'. [Tap forum edit: Enemies just weren't convincing as humans. Hell, splicers were more convincing as they muttered stuff to themselves and walked around scraping their pipes along the floor and looting corpses.]
 
- There were a few instances where the enemy had massive lights glaring my vision, shooting from behind. That was pretty cool. The problem was I couldn't shoot out the lights to expose them - I could do this in 1999 on Aliens Versus Predator! [Tap forum edit: this is further evidence of there being a divide between you and the world. It made it feel like a very static, if beautiful backdrop]. There were also many occasions where enemies could see (and hit) me perfectly but I couldn't see them through light shafts or atmospheric smog, which was irritating.
 
The skylines felt a bit gimmicky at first but came into their own later on with the verticality of the levels. The cloned character models and wooden NPC animations (Elizabeth aside) were a shame given the richness of the surrounding world. Looting got tedious really fast (I think it might be the straw that broke the camels back for me after Fallout 3 and DX:HR). Weird inconsistencies with consequences from stealing and nobody seemed phased by me holding a gun in their face. Items in silly places (bullets in a baby's pram for instance). You take damage from falling a small height but can land at any height from a skyline! But these are all minor nitpicks.
 
Perhaps the greatest thing I can say about Infinite is that it's one of the few games I've played that I've enjoyed more towards the end -- that's all too rare these days for me. Funnily enough, the last 'longer' game I played that did the same was Bioshock 2. Both games were the perfect length although I wish Infinite had gave me more toys to play with sooner.
 
The worst thing about Infinite without a shadow of a doubt is the goddamn save/checkpoint system which is just altogether backwards and an absolutely baffling design decision.
 
---

I'm not feeling the skyline hook melee combat as much as I thought I would. At first I thought it was quite visceral but as I've played more with it, it feels a bit loosey-goosey, like I'm not feeling the connections as much as I did in BS with the wrench and BS2 with the drill and all the other weapon butts.

 

---

Max, Devil's Kiss is a real mass damage dealer. I had it upgraded so that it did extra damage with a greater area of effect (by letting off smaller projectiles when it exploded) and coupled it with Storm and Overkill so that if it killed anyone it would chain attacks and stun anyone who was still alive. It's also fairly cheap compared to the other damage dealers like Charge and Murder of Crows. If you have the monies, show it some love!

 
As a UT flak cannon and Doom 2 shotgun lover I was usually toting the Volley Gun or Shotgun. But for a spell I was using the Carbine. Towards the end I was running around with the really heavy weapons like the RPG, Crank Gun (hell yes) and the Heater as well as the Shotgun for close up finishing shots that would overkill enemies stunning any others nearby.

---

One thing that's really putting me off replaying it, aside from the general linearity and lack of random enemy spawning (this was great in System Shock 2, Bioshock and Bioshock 2), is that your growth as a shooting man that shoots things is dependent on how much silver you pick up to upgrade your weapons and vigors. The majority of your silver is acquired through rifling through 23,021,397 containers throughout the game and finding lock picks to open safes. Replaying the game would require me to do this all again and if I played on 1999 mode it would be even harder with spongier enemies, causing more death and more loss of silver. This sounds dreadful as an experience and from a design standpoint. Bioshock and Bioshock 2's 'power curve', as Tom Chick calls it, didn't depend on amassing currency and spending it on upgrades, it depended on simply finding upgrade stations, plasmids and tonics and using them. Purchased upgrades were relatively sparse and I don't remember shit being as liberally spread everywhere. Irrational really should have given the contents of the many containers throughout Columbia more context so you didn't feel compelled to spam-F everything. Bins should not contain money, prams should not contain bullets. As it happens this is a serious problem if you want to jump back in and have some fun with a different spec shooting man.

Jonathan Blow raised an interesting point about regenerating shields giving way to spammier enemies:

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/04/04/bioshock-infinites-combat-blows/

This I totally agree with, and I noted it down after my first encounter with a Fireman. Bouncing area of effect bombs and an area of effect attack when in close range so you can never take cover. The same goes with those volley gun and hailfire wielding dudes. I found that the shield didn't last very long at all for most of the game, despite almost maxing it out, until I got the appropriate gear -- attacks would wipe out my shield and take a chunk of my health away in one or two hits. Not good.

And for the record: (spoilers!)

I didn't die once during the final battle, at least, I don't think I did, thanks to the shield gear I acquired which charged my shield up faster and with a smaller delay (I died more trying to be clever during earlier 'easier' fights! Namely, the first Handyman, and several Firemen.) I also called Booker being Comstock. How? Not through logic (as if!), but simply because it was one of the most plausible but out-there twists I could think of (and Meho told me there was a nobody-will-ever-expect-it twist! ;-) ). I wasn't so keen on the info-dump near the end. There was absolutely no way of sussing much of it out until those final pieces of the puzzle were presented to you, then it was up to you to put them together. I'd have played it again straight away to try and work it out but... yeah, see above!

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geggis
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April 9, 2013 - 6:08 pm
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Just noticed that that Quarter To Three link links to the Kotaku article you posted up Meho -- a very interesting read, thanks!

This about summed it up for me:

I do a skyline run to find the last guy, and as I'm doing so I think, "Oh wow, this is a neat level, I didn't even notice!"

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Meho
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April 10, 2013 - 8:16 am
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Whoa. Some really good points about combat and scavenging there. I can agree with most of it except that I was terrible as a gunperson and as a consequence the final battle took me at least fifteen tries to go through.

 

But actually, a really good call is what you say about replaying the game. I mean, I want to do it sooner rather than later but right now the thought of having to go through every single container and collecting every piece of silver out there triggers a depressive response in my mind. Again, if collecting stuff was slightly more nuanced, if you could combine stuff in more complex ways, manage the inventory, I would be happy to do it (playing Don't Starve now and it's almost nothing BUT collecting stuff, managing the inventory and combining items into new items).

 

This is what I actually deeply admire about what Eidos Montreal did with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. My first playthrough was "normal" albeit non-lethal because I tend to play non-lethal when presented with the opportunity. But I did my share of collecting shit and getting upgrades. But for my second playthrough, and the Missing Link DLC playthrough I decided to go the no-upgrades route. And the game adapts very well to it. If I could do the same with BioShock Infinite, play it the second time but avoid combat as much as possible, and sneak/ talk my way through, I would be thrilled. But obviously, it's not that kind of game.

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Synonamess Botch
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April 10, 2013 - 11:49 am
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After watching Xtal's gameplay video, I'm even less inclined to play this one.  Dumpster Diver Infinite is what it should be called.

</crotchety>

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Steerpike
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April 10, 2013 - 1:06 pm
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That really does begin to grate on you. It's not like the looking of dustbins is painful or anything, it just gets so stupid. You click and click again, click click, like whack-a-mole, just hit everything real quick and move on. You don't even look at what the items are.

THEN the game gets cute at one point by putting poison in some containers. Instead of sixteen bullets, a phial of salt, and a slice of lemon meringue pie, you get sixteen bullets, a phial of salt, and a slice of hemlock-walnut pie. Kaboom! Health down a little. To punish you for not looking, I guess.

Not to mention the issue Gregg had - it's random, so you find corpses carrying, like, slices of pizza. Hot dogs in chocolate boxes. Cash in garbage cans.

 

A small thing, but when a game is generally great (and Infinite is, don't know why I feel the need to keep reiterating my position on that), you tend to notice the small things more.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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Meho
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April 10, 2013 - 2:45 pm
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Dang, I didn't even notice those poisonous items!!! Obviously, after the halfway point I was just taking all without looking anyway...

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geggis
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April 10, 2013 - 7:05 pm
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It always bugged me that you had to pick up and consume everything in a container or leave it be entirely, in all the Bioshocks. One silver eagle and a rotten apple? Whadya do? And what the fuck? There was even a scavenger tonic in one or both of the first two Bioshocks that allowed you to 'reroll' a container's contents if you didn't like what you saw. If you didn't take/consume the first batch it got mysteriously replaced (and lost forever) by a second batch of items. If you took the first batch, you couldn't scavenge/reroll any further. What the fuck?

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xtal
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April 10, 2013 - 7:55 pm
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That was the worst tonic; I hated it because it just meant more scavenging. In general I agree completely, I hate the scavenging of every Bioshock game. I like systems where you get a certain flow of cash per enemy kill. I killed him, took his money, or whoever I'm working for paid me..whatever I don't care, it just makes so much more sense.

Just looting in general seems utterly pointless. Just give auto-pickup cash and buy ammo at machines. Solved.

If being wrong's a crime I'm serving forever

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Synonamess Botch
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October 19, 2013 - 1:08 pm
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I think this sums up pretty well what bothered me about Bioshock (the original) and why Bioshock Infinite never interested me.

http://www.theastronauts.com/2.....-infinite/

Some other games have done this as well, and of course the degree to which it bothers me is subjective.  Enslaved comes to mind.  And Alan Wake to a lesser degree.

 

 

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xtal
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October 21, 2013 - 1:28 pm
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I sympathize with the author of that article. Personally I don't mind confusing intros, which as he notes is highly subjective anyway, but I fully agree on losing immersion what with all the ridiculous looting in Bioshock Infinite. And people will defend it and say "but every other game ever does it too!" – while they would be right (mostly) to suggest that, the point is that Bioshock Infinite wasn't supposed to be every game ever. It was supposed to Bioshock-ify shooters the way Bioshock did. We hold it to a higher standard, with good reason. It is an incredibly highly received game (overrated, if you will) with compelling narrative themes, but is an utter disappointment in the gameplay department. Feel free to disagree with me on the latter part; tell me I was wrong to play the game on Hard (I wasn't – the game was wrong for failing to properly balance difficulty and minimize its uneven spikes – another game notorious for this is Mass Effect 2), but for me there was no reconciliation. No redemption either. There could have been an ending that made my struggles feel validated – there wasn't. The end battle was an awful experience, and the payoff left me cold. No, I don't think Infinite's MASSIVE TWIST was done well at all. The story didn't earn it. The game's story was always at the very least interesting, with "good" being just out of reach for 99% of the game. The compelling themes we always talk about were just that in Infinite – themes. None of them were ever brought to the forefront with much grace. You can't just cram your whole story into the last 1% of a game, reveal it in twist after twist after twist and call it well done.

Stewing on the experience for several months now, Bioshock Infinite has to be one of the most disappointing games I've played.

Every day there are brave independent studios taking risks, putting their next paycheck on the line, all for a chance to innovate and excite. Levine & co. have the backing and the power to attempt a hundred times the innovation that brave little indies do, and they piss away that opportunity to be great for the guarantee of monetary stability.

Yeah, it's a business, but shit. You used to make System Shocks. Now you make pretty skyboxes.

If being wrong's a crime I'm serving forever

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Synonamess Botch
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October 21, 2013 - 2:22 pm
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I was hesitant to post this one, given that I've not even played the game, and have already poo-pooed it enough as is.  But I wanted to get others' take on it.  If you think you recognize the author's name, it's the guy who wrote the Saving Zelda essay a while back, which we had a good discussion about in the Demons' Souls thread.

I'm not sure what his hangup is with heterosexual white men, as if they're somehow collectively to blame for...something.  Everything?  That and the banal "diversity is strength!" platitudes.  Anyway, if you can get past that, it's pretty interesting, IMHO.

On Videogame Reviews

 

EDIT: I'm with you on the confusing intros thing Xtal.  The example that immediately springs to mind is The Matrix.  I had no idea what was going on at the beginning of that movie but I was totally in.  Maybe it's a semantic problem with the word "confusing."  It doesn't necessarily conflate with "mysterious."  Even so, confusing is not objectively bad.

 

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Steerpike
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October 22, 2013 - 10:16 am
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Oh, there's been discussion about this article on some game journalists mailing list I'm part of. I'll have a look at it, thanks for the reminder Botch.

Don't know about the heterosexual white male thing. Speaking as one I guess I'm willing to shoulder blame for something. You know, fair share or what have you. I'd like to know what blame I'll be getting before I get it though, because I don't want to be blamed for something really bad, or something I can't feel suitably guilty about.

Blamed for Hollywood not making enough movies with strong female leads? I'll take it.

Blamed for the Yosemite super-volcano? No. That would have to go to someone else. Gay white men maybe? I'm not sure. It does seem like evangelists are always blaming the gay community when there's a natural disaster, but I'm not sure if that's based on any actual scientific evidence.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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Dix
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October 22, 2013 - 11:19 am
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Ugh, yeah, I always feel terribly conflicted reading rants like that, with their valid points coupled with that holier-than-thou proselytizing that holds up no better than many of the rant's targets.  Sigh.  Righteous indignation just gets me.

I think we're all, here, pretty aware of the problems of the game review community at large.  I don't think we have (at least that I've heard) a particular BioShock Infinite apologist, or whatever.

Anywise, I'm personally appreciative, for my own peace of mind at least, when I do a review, that we don't institute a numerical score system here, even if what we've got is pretty close.

"Home is not a place.  It is wherever your passion takes you."

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Steerpike
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October 22, 2013 - 12:57 pm
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Well, having read it I'm with Dix. I certainly had a lot of complaints about Bioshock Infinite, but the foundation of Thompson's complaint is that it's a 2 because he didn't like it, which destabilizes most of the rest of his argument.

Objectively, Bioshock Infinite is not a 2. Like it or not, and I didn't like it very much - or rather, I thought it was a terribly missed opportunity - you can't reasonably give it that score. There's an objective baseline that must be calculated before subjectivity enters. There has to be, and the baseline for a 2 requires flaws that Bioshock Infinite objectively does not have. So Thompson gives it his "2" because he didn't like the game, complaining about misapplication of numeric scores even as he misapplies one.

The result is turn-offably self righteous, despite including laments with which I agree completely: that Elizabeth is a "great" female character says something about the height of the bar in games, for example. I'm playing Tomb Raider right now, and I like it, but you're kidding yourself if you deny that it's 50 hours of a woman being brutalized, and that the brutalization is front and center in a way it never would be with a male protagonist. It's not what Lara endures, it's how she's shown to endure it. And claiming it's an intentional indictment of Gaze or something is probably giving Crystal more credit than it's earned. I have a point here.

My point: Thompson prefers to complain about the sideboob, which is, yeah, very meat-market. So is Elizabeth's ridiculous waist and cleavage and corset. But they're symptoms. And while offensiveness could warrant a 2/10, Bioshock Infinite doesn't remotely qualify. At worst it's misguided from time to time.

It's like claiming Microsoft is the epitome of evil. As Alex St John once said, "anyone who calls Microsoft evil should spend some time in Bhopal or El Salvador and see what real corporate greed can do."

I award the essay 5 out of 10.

Points Plus: excellent grammar and sentence structure, reasonable arguments about valid issues.

Points Minus: over-holy tone causes the writer to lose focus from those valid issues, reducing the potential impact.

 

Technically we do have a numerical score system, but even Steerpike The Consistency Nazi rarely uses it. It was more a tool to appease Metacritic, and we were delisted in 2007. I like the icons, though, and I like better that the system is so old and so intentionally nebulous that it's up to the reader to guess what number each represents. Besides me and MrLipid, only Toger and Scout could possibly remember its entire history. Maybe we'll bring it back, but with several more equally up-for-interpretation icons, and no context at all. Interpret the words, interpret the rating. Gamification is "in," you know.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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Dix
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October 22, 2013 - 3:12 pm
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I tend to prefer either highly nebulous rating systems or highly specific ones that rate several things separately and then average for the overall.  Deciding how to rate a game is often a tug of war between what "matters" for the game more, and what does not; I think ideally each component (presentation, gameplay, etc.) should be given equal weight, though obviously we all have our prejudices about what will more quickly win us over (or earn our ire).

Often perspectives that complain about the mid-to-high scores AAA games tend to receive even when they're just so-so seem to disregard the presentation angle almost entirely, where graphics are just graphics and that's all.  I'm not really one that prioritizes graphics above all else when it comes to reviews: to be frank I don't have a very good eye for them.  There's a perception that money can make up for skill in that area, that indeed making a game look good for millions of dollars is simple, but making a game look good for little to no money is hard.  But having worked alongside a lot of modelers, animaters, artists, sound designers, and so on, I know that making a game with AAA production values is not an easy task.  BioShock Infinite is of high technical quality at the very least, as are a great many generally-overrated AAA games.

That doesn't mean they deserve 9s, or even 7s or 8s, necessarily, in an ideal world; but in some ways it's hard to not give them at least some points for those traits alone even if the rest is an unplayable mess.  (Hell, my middle-of-the-road rating for Beyond: Two Souls is almost entirely based on the amount of good-looking and good-sounding the game is, and the nontrivial fact that it isn't technically broken - also trickier than people tend to think.)

"Home is not a place.  It is wherever your passion takes you."

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xtal
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October 22, 2013 - 10:03 pm
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Read it yesterday, what the hell was that, 400,000 words? Yeesh.

I don't remember his previous essays being so wordy ... but maybe I just forget. Agree with you all mostly; he makes many valid points (and his writing is well articulated) but indeed comes off holier-than-thou to an unbearable degree. Oh look, the straight white male decrying the horrors of...straight white males. He uses the word "boys" so frequently to mock those he sees as beneath him; ironically his argument for forcing diversity is childishly naive. Diversity will happen as ... diversity happens. There's no Diversity Switch someone flips.

On reviews and scores I agree with his point, which is nothing new -- basically just a rehashing of the New Games Journalism argument; I'm all for subjective reviews and personal points of view. I don't, however, think that pointing out commonly understood "objectiveness" renders someone's review/critique a failure, as he so pompously suggests.

I appreciate Thompson's writing, a lot actually, but he's got his head half-in-the-clouds. He could also take a lesson or two in brevity.

 

Side note: amusing (and gratifying, I admit) to see someone, who lambastes big titles with low scores, award a 10 to Demon's Souls.

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geggis
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November 7, 2013 - 4:04 pm
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Stewing on the experience for several months now, Bioshock Infinite has to be one of the most disappointing games I've played.

Every day there are brave independent studios taking risks, putting their next paycheck on the line, all for a chance to innovate and excite. Levine & co. have the backing and the power to attempt a hundred times the innovation that brave little indies do, and they piss away that opportunity to be great for the guarantee of monetary stability.

Yeah, it's a business, but shit. You used to make System Shocks. Now you make pretty skyboxes.

QFT and beautifully put xtal. My thoughts exactly.

Just for posterity, that article Botch was written by Adrian Chmielarz, the founder of and creative director at People Can Fly, developers of Bulletstorm and Painkiller. That was one of the more popular critiques of Bioshock Infinite I think and deservedly so!

I've not got time to elaborate on Tevis' piece at the moment but I read it a couple of weeks ago and was nodding a lot throughout it. I'll be back!

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Steerpike
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November 10, 2013 - 11:31 am
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It says something about the industry that People Can Fly is now considered a "fixer" studio: technical firepower with little or no creative input, brought in when some other studio's big game is foundering. It usually doesn't happen to name studios, but it can - that was 2K Australia's fate, for example.

PCF ported Gears 1, worked on Gears 3 multiplayer, and apparently now in charge of putting Fortnite back together. Chmielarz and the other leads left a while ago to form The Astronauts, so it's not really the same studio. To my knowledge Epic generally treats its people and studios well (PCF is wholly owned), and in some ways being a fixer is prestigious... you're the one they trust enough to make things right when they go wrong. But it's not yours. 

Given Epic's general reputation, I prefer to believe that PCF's current status is just a business need, not backlash from Bulletstorm's retail performance. Did Epic do this because Chmielarz and the others left, or did they leave because Epic did this? 

I wonder what a People Can Fly version of Bioshock Infinite would've been like.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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Synonamess Botch
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November 10, 2013 - 10:21 pm
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Thanks Gregg. I like connecting the dots like this.  Not having played any of their games, what would a PCF Bioshock look like Steerpike?

That gamer OCD drawing he did - it felt like he was reading my mind.

Steerpike I disagree with you about there needing to be a minimum bar before subjectivity enters in.  Or more specifically, it should be up to the reviewer.  I think the Star Wars prequels were crap and no amount of highly skilled special effects work could change that.

I understand it's hard to ignore technical merit in a game, especially in regard to gameplay execution.  It is, after all, a game.  Great mechanics can save an otherwise mediocre experience.  I just think that no aspect of a game should give it a pass, even if only partially.

 

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Steerpike
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November 11, 2013 - 1:27 am
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This may be an instance where cinema and games just don't share any common ground, though. When I say there's got to be a bar before subjectivity enters in, I mean that a 2/10 for Bioshock Infinite (what Tevis was advocating) is just objectively inaccurate; no professional could responsibly score it that way. Of course there are no hard rules, but it's fair to say that a 2 implies major technical flaws, instability, serious design issues, control problems, that sort of thing. Stuff that's mechanically broken. I'd add offensiveness (admittedly subjective) to that - I would severely penalize a game if it were overtly racist, for example. 

Bioshock Infinite has many qualities, most of them disappointing. But it is not broken, it's not buggy, it performs admirably on spec hardware, its controls work well and have flexibility, it delivers outstanding visuals and sound design - all these things are true no matter a player's subjective opinion of the game. You HAVE to take them into account before moving on to the "did I like it subjectively" score. At least, I think you should.

The War Z is a 2 because it's technically appalling, a cheap plagiarism, has horrid visuals, forces microtransactions, and so on. It's also no fun, but that factors in after the "hard" stuff, the technical issues and so forth.

The Star Wars sequels are a good comparison here because like Infinite they were highly anticipated and rather disappointing. But unlike games, a movie doesn't get points for being technically proficient but otherwise shitty. The quality of a game is more heavily rooted in its technical foundation, I guess, while a super low-budget movie can still be really amazing.

 

As to what a PCF Bioshock Infinite would look like... gosh. Painkiller was bleak, but it was mostly a great action game. It moves into art territory in the last level, with a presentation of Hell so unique and so... likely that it stays with you forever. Sort of like Peter Stormare's portrayal of Satan: unexpected but oddly believable, more than most. Bulletstorm, meanwhile, was this raucous, hilarious, shameless, super-confident blammo shooter...

...

Hectic. A PCF Bioshock Infinite would be hectic.  But assuming it told basically the same story, its real differentiator would be the way they approached the core theme of American Exceptionalism. As a Polish studio PCF would naturally have a different view than the American Irrational Games could. Americans are the worst qualified to explain the concept, partly because it's indefensible and partly because it's not something we rationally understand ourselves. Irrational's Bioshock Infinite is an intellectual indictment of the American mind. People Can Fly's would be less intellectual and more visceral.

It would probably also have an energy-whip. You can't go wrong with an energy-whip.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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