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.
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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.
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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!
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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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Rule #2: Double-tap
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
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.
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.
Rule #2: Double-tap
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
If being wrong's a crime I'm serving forever
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!
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.
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.
Rule #2: Double-tap
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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