Bioshock Infinite Catch-All

lostlobster wrote:

I'm at the final (GOD I HOPE IT'S THE FINAL) fight and am so sick of the combat in this game. About half-way through, killing tons of folks became the price I had to pay to get the pieces of the story. But I was interested in what was happening so it was pretty much worth it. Now I just want it to f*cking END already.

There has to be a better way for games to tell stories like this one than to shoehorn them in to ultraviolent FPSes.

It finally occurred to me after listening to Walter's excellent takedown of Infinite on the recent GWJ podcast that I should just turn the difficulty down to normal and finish this thing that way. The harder difficulty isn't making it brilliant, like Dark Souls, or better, like KoA. It's making me run around frantically, because many enemies will swarm you in certain scenarios.

Totally agreed with his assessment that it's a brilliantly conceived world and good storytelling bolted on to a corridor shooter. Which makes me wonder what the developers really care about, and why they're lauded for game design in the first place. This is the first Irrational game I've ever played, and as far as it being a "game", I'm not impressed.

shoptroll wrote:
Scratched wrote:
heavyfeul wrote:

Less than a week away from August and no Season Pass content dates have been announced. They have 7 months to deliver all three DLC packs and not even a screenshot.
I love being in the dark, especially when money is involved.

Yeah, taking money for DLC/a DLC season pass when the release wasn't imminent is something I'd call "not classy". By all means say what your plans are.

I guess it comes down to your personal take on preordering though

And how you feel about Kickstarter.

I understand that software, particularly advanced software like video games, takes time and I am always willing to wait it out for a quality experience. I just do not understand why there has been no substantive communication?

If developers want more money upfront for expanded content and they want people to stay interested and spending money on a game, they have to run it better than Irrational is doing.

Could it be that the game is in financial trouble and they just do not want to spend any more time or money on PR and Community support, when they have three releases they are on the hook for in the next 7 months?

heavyfeul wrote:
shoptroll wrote:
Scratched wrote:
heavyfeul wrote:

Less than a week away from August and no Season Pass content dates have been announced. They have 7 months to deliver all three DLC packs and not even a screenshot.
I love being in the dark, especially when money is involved.

Yeah, taking money for DLC/a DLC season pass when the release wasn't imminent is something I'd call "not classy". By all means say what your plans are.

I guess it comes down to your personal take on preordering though

And how you feel about Kickstarter.

I understand that software, particularly advanced software like video games, takes time and I am always willing to wait it out for a quality experience. I just do not understand why there has been no substantive communication?

If developers want more money upfront for expanded content and they want people to stay interested and spending money on a game, they have to run it better than Irrational is doing.

Could it be that the game is in financial trouble and they just do not want to spend any more time or money on PR and Community support, when they have three releases they are on the hook for in the next 7 months?

It's possible it's a reaction to how Infinite was over-publicized well before it launched. We're talking about the studio that had a fairly significant presence at PAX East only to 3 weeks later announce the game was being delayed and they were going on media blackout for almost a year. I have a feeling they don't want to show anything for the season pass until they're good and ready to do so this time around.

Communication - it always seems to come down to communication and usually the lack of it when a company isn't doing so well for whatever reason. In the back of my mind, I'm remembering that BI has had it's share of delays before release too, I just hope that there isn't too much 'refactoring' going on and it's just making the damn things rather than designing them as they go along.

Given that they're all taking a little while, I wonder how much common content there is between them, say if they all exist within a set of common maps and as soon as one is done then two and three will follow quickly, or if it there's little shared and it's a fresh batch of work for each. Probably a mix because I'd assume they'd do things like the voice acting as one job.

Scratched wrote:

Communication - it always seems to come down to communication and usually the lack of it when a company isn't doing so well for whatever reason. In the back of my mind, I'm remembering that BI has had it's share of delays before release too, I just hope that there isn't too much 'refactoring' going on and it's just making the damn things rather than designing them as they go along.

Given that they're all taking a little while, I wonder how much common content there is between them, say if they all exist within a set of common maps and as soon as one is done then two and three will follow quickly, or if it there's little shared and it's a fresh batch of work for each. Probably a mix because I'd assume they'd do things like the voice acting as one job.

To your first paragraph... see the Bethesda and Skyrim DLC debacle for the PS3. I will remember this for a loooong time as a major PR/communication failure. And to this day, they never apologized to fans for what happened there.

Scratched wrote:

Given that they're all taking a little while, I wonder how much common content there is between them, say if they all exist within a set of common maps and as soon as one is done then two and three will follow quickly, or if it there's little shared and it's a fresh batch of work for each. Probably a mix because I'd assume they'd do things like the voice acting as one job.

I'm guessing it's a fresh batch. Before Borderlands 2 launch Gearbox was already talking about how they were working on the initial DLC content while the game was going through the certification process. I don't recall that happening here.

CptGlanton wrote:

The more I think about this game, the more I see it as an ethical clusterflop. People resisting oppression are just as evil as the people doing the oppressing, and you murder hundreds of strangers because they made a pretty white girl feel bad. That's the story in a nutshell. It reminds me of Fox News.

That's a lot of what I dislike about the game. The story is told in such a hamfisted manner that any impact it might have is lost. That initial moment in the fair with the baseball is really the pinnacle of storytelling in the game, and the rest mostly amounts to dimestore philosophy hoo-hah.

I know I'm late to this party. Just finished after buying on Steam sale. Some random thoughts:

I'm firmly in the disappointed category. A good game to be sure, but not as good as I'd hoped.

First few minutes were awesome. The anticipation of getting to Columbia, looking around once there, listening to people talk and getting a feel for things. A ripped, shirtless, Benjamin Franklin statue.... that's something I never thought I'd see. Slightly disturbing.

Then the combat started and my enjoyment gradually died down. By the middle of the game it was almost becoming a chore. I wanted things to be over.

They put in some peaceful areas, which added some variety, but as mentioned, the NPC's just standing there and constant trashcan scavenging was a bit immersion-breaking. I wish they had taken a page from Deus Ex with huge open hubs, more detailed NPC interactions and multiple side quests.

The levels on Bioshock 1+2 felt more open-ended to me as well. I miss looking at the automaps and figuring out where to go next. I also liked the tense, decaying feel of Rapture. More like System Shock than COD. Big Daddies > handymen and patriots.

Checkpoint system sucked. At one point I was painstakingly exploring Emporia for all the voxophones and uneaten hot dogs. Something came up and I had to leave quickly. Went to exit, expecting to lose at most 15 minutes or so of play time... Nope... Try 75 minutes. I was pretty pissed.

Things picked up for me again around the

Spoiler:

Asylum area after Elizabeth is taken. Dudes with wooden Founder masks. Creepy. Very nice.

After that I barreled through to the end. Made a huge mistake beforehand though:

Spoiler:

At one point I was wondering if Comstock was wearing a confederate uniform and where that came from. Thought I'd look that up real quick... Wait a second... Comstock is who? Dammit all to hell!

I still liked the ending overall and some of it was still a welcome surprise. That redeemed it somewhat. Still, I'd probably go replay Bioshock 2 before this one again.

I'm trying to think how the ending could have gone if there was less "cut through an army of grunts" filler in the last few hours and the end sequence had more room to breathe, and wasn't just a non-interactive deluge of dense exposition. I'm wondering whether they could have made it into a few hours worth of content.

Too right about the checkpoint system, Gewy. That's an unbelievably sh*tty design in this day and age. Really unforgivable. What were they thinking?

I played on Easy and the revive system did not respawn dead enemies. I would not contend it is flawless, but I liked that it saved progress and kept the battle moving forward. I am not sure it works the same on Normal.

gewy wrote:

I still liked the ending overall and some of it was still a welcome surprise. That redeemed it somewhat. Still, I'd probably go replay Bioshock 2 before this one again.

One final thought. I just kind of accepted the ending at the time and it seemed pretty cool. The more I think about it though, the less it makes sense. Guess I should head over to the spoiler thread now to see what the consensus is.

gewy wrote:
gewy wrote:

I still liked the ending overall and some of it was still a welcome surprise. That redeemed it somewhat. Still, I'd probably go replay Bioshock 2 before this one again.

One final thought. I just kind of accepted the ending at the time and it seemed pretty cool. The more I think about it though, the less it makes sense. Guess I should head over to the spoiler thread now to see what the consensus is.

My take on it is that while I can see the overall story and how it ties up within the game (there's a bunch of overviews you can read), it doesn't really work too well within the framework of a game. It's a good story, but not a good game-story. Bioshock1/2 worked well because they went within the game framework.

CptGlanton wrote:

The more I think about this game, the more I see it as an ethical clusterflop. People resisting oppression are just as evil as the people doing the oppressing, and you murder hundreds of strangers because they made a pretty white girl feel bad. That's the story in a nutshell. It reminds me of Fox News.

Having said that, I find its political and ethical vapidity so interesting I actually am thinking about replaying it. And my interest in doing so is probably the most interesting thing about the game.

I think there's a more subtle message here. Remember that Rapture in the original Bioshock was not supposed to be a strict analog of America--it was supposed to be a funhouse mirror twisted version of America if there was no social safety net. Columbia is the same. Not that America was happy fun land at the time, but the history of America is a lot different than that of Columbia. Consider what was going on in America at the time:

The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West for most of the 20th century. Some historians differentiate between the first Great Migration (1910–1930), numbering about 1.6 million migrants who left mostly rural areas to migrate to northern and midwestern industrial cities, and, after a lull during the Great Depression, a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more people moved, including many to California and other western cities.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M...

Contrast that with the all-but-in-name slavery of Columbia. The game takes place in 1912, right? Consider this:

The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid-1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_...

I cannot possibly imagine Columbia is only a decade away from anything like that. So what I think the game is actually about is how oppression provokes an equal and opposite resistance. When society has safety valves and the hope and promise of things getting better, the flow of history is more peaceful. When the oppression is brutal, the reaction is brutal. In fact, there's a curious line about the Vox Populi choosing the color red beyond just the Russian Revolution, and something much closer to home:

The Red Summer refers to the race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities in the United States during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans. In some cases groups of blacks fought back, notably in Chicago, where, along with Washington, D.C. and Elaine, Arkansas, the greatest number of fatalities occurred.[1] The riots followed postwar social tensions related to the demobilization of veterans of World War I, both black and white, and competition for jobs among ethnic whites and blacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sum...

Columbia is not America. Columbia is a plantation in the sky. I'd say the story in a nutshell is that the worse the oppression, the worse the liberation, much like the original Bioshock's story of fascism vs. social welfare.

lostlobster wrote:

I'm at the final (GOD I HOPE IT'S THE FINAL) fight and am so sick of the combat in this game. About half-way through, killing tons of folks became the price I had to pay to get the pieces of the story. But I was interested in what was happening so it was pretty much worth it. Now I just want it to f*cking END already.

There has to be a better way for games to tell stories like this one than to shoehorn them in to ultraviolent FPSes.

Maybe, but one thing about Bioshock Infinite is that it is an ultraviolent setting. The first thing you encounter getting off the boat is:

Spoiler:

a dude who has been worked over with a knife and a chisel. The police stronghold alone seems to have a hook, a large butchers knife, and...something else I can't remember assigned to every cell, like a default torture kit. There are saws and dental toolkits all over the place. I think the violence wasn't just incidental to the story, I think it's part of the setting: Columbia is a brutal, brutal place, and that's part of the story here.

I'd also say that the violence is part of a theory: that you're eventually supposed to think of Booker as the supporting character and Elizabeth as the main character.

Spoiler:

People have commented on how Booker never really changes as far as his bloodlust, and maybe that's because he's not supposed to: he's a supporting character, and so he can remain fundamentally flawed.

On your last point:

Spoiler:

It's been a while since I thought about this game and intend to replay it, but when it comes to the ultra-violence, I definitely think it serves a greater purpose, though sadly you get desensitized to an extent. Killing someone with a skyhook becomes repetitive. But seeing brutal deaths does not.

However, the core of Booker's character is that he solves problems through violence. When he was outcast by other soldiers for having Native American blood in his veins, he went on a brutal rampage and committed horrifying acts of violence. When his paths split, he became an alcoholic whose only knowledge of redemption was to go and kill people and get his daughter back, or to try and create his perfect world by burning off anything he did not want. He's a violent man whose only method of solving a problem is violence.

Gee, I wonder if there's any sort of meta-commentary going on there.

So what's Elizabeth's arc? Going from a Disney Princess to a woman willing to kill in order to set things right. First by wanting to kill Comstock, then by killing you (and potentially herself). Booker, in his desperate journey to try and save her and keep her from doing anything horrible, only condemned her to do horrible things.

The best way for Booker, and by extension the player, to save Elizabeth is to "not play", so to speak.

I'm sure I could get all kinds of meta-commentary out of the game if I spent more time playing it, but I honestly really dig what Levine did with Infinite.

ccesarano wrote:

On your last point:

Spoiler:

However, the core of Booker's character is that he solves problems through violence. When he was outcast by other soldiers for having Native American blood in his veins, he went on a brutal rampage and committed horrifying acts of violence. When his paths split, he became an alcoholic whose only knowledge of redemption was to go and kill people and get his daughter back, or to try and create his perfect world by burning off anything he did not want. He's a violent man whose only method of solving a problem is violence.

...

The best way for Booker, and by extension the player, to save Elizabeth is to "not play", so to speak.

Spoiler:

This has got to be my biggest beef with game design, where a designer makes a game that requires constant violence, for example, and the meta commentary is that violence is bad and the only way to win is not to play. If you really want to show that violence isn't the answer, just make a really awesome game with no violence. The self-critique approach just suggests that I'm somehow at fault for playing the game as it was designed. For Bioshock, at least the meta-commentary is pretty easy to ignore. I'll never play Far Cry 3 because they throw this same issue in your face.

Spoiler:

To be fair, I don't know if that last translation is what Levine intended, but it is easy to pull from what is there. Levine certainly loves his meta-commentary (hey, isn't it funny how you don't actually have free-will or any meaningful choices in games?), so anyone that's used to digging so deep is bound to be looking for something.

@CheezePavilion

Nope on all counts. The evidence you refer to doesn't prove any of the conclusions you draw from it. Arguing that Columbia is or is not capable of a Harlem Renaissance in the near future ... I don't even know where to start. But even if you picked different evidence, the type of argument you want to make just isn't going to fly. You are making an "authorial intent" argument.

I have to agree with that, and it seems to be affecting more and more games as they try to do something more with characters beyond a generic soldier (which doesn't affect generic military games I guess). Tomb Raider is another one that comes to mind. It's really a limitation of the gameplay where enemies are just obstacles to be eliminated before the exit unlocks, and there's no other way to progress.

I guess it's more annoying when there are games that do show alternatives such as Dishonored, or Deus Ex, or Mirror's edge (to pull a few bad examples out of thin air). Using Dishonored's gameplay wouldn't really be able to show the story that Levine wrote or wanted to tell, and the existence of that choice makes BI's story feel shallower.

CptGlanton wrote:

@CheezePavilion

Nope on all counts. The evidence you refer to doesn't prove any of the conclusions you draw from it. Arguing that Columbia is or is not capable of a Harlem Renaissance in the near future ... I don't even know where to start. But even if you picked different evidence, the type of argument you want to make just isn't going to fly. You are making an "authorial intent" argument.

I disagree.

Finished a replay on Normal. First, Normal is absurdly easy. I made it through the entire game without dying in combat ( I did walk off of ledges two or three times). Second, all of my previous thoughts were confirmed. I still think they did a great job of creating the world, and I think it works as a commentary on a dream of self-creation and agency common to both gaming and American culture(s). The lines of dialogue equating Fink and the labor organizers still make my skin crawl. And the game still has a deeply reactionary politics running underneath its rosey anti-racist exterior.

One of the most interesting games of the generation.

Levine has said on Twitter that he is excited about tomorrow- and then later gave an even more heavy-handed hint that it would the announcement of DLC. So, probably more info to come tomorrow.

CptGlanton wrote:

Finished a replay on Normal. First, Normal is absurdly easy. I made it through the entire game without dying in combat ( I did walk off of ledges two or three times). Second, all of my previous thoughts were confirmed. I still think they did a great job of creating the world, and I think it works as a commentary on a dream of self-creation and agency common to both gaming and American culture(s). The lines of dialogue equating Fink and the labor organizers still make my skin crawl. And the game still has a deeply reactionary politics running underneath its rosey anti-racist exterior.

One of the most interesting games of the generation.

I'd say there's a difference between labor organizers and revolutionaries, and between reactionary politics and radical politics.

There is nothing radical about a story in which the end of a society is depicted as a pretty white girl being held against her will, and One Man With A Shotgun being the only one who can save her.

And with that, I am out.

DLC details: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/07/3...

1 set of challenge maps, and a 2 part story

Spoiler:

Additional content for BioShock Infinite will come in the form of Burial at Sea, a two-part episodic story that will make up the remaining two pieces of DLC in the Season Pass. The first episode of Burial at Sea is set in Rapture on December 31, 1958, the night before the famous fall of Rapture. Players will once again take on the role of Booker DeWitt, but in mysterious new circumstances that include a new, noir-like version of Elizabeth. A second episode will allow you to play as Elizabeth, but Irrational hasn’t released many details yet other than saying that her gameplay will differ from Booker’s, and be “almost survival horror.”

The challenge maps "Clash in the clouds" is out today for $5.

I'm a lot more interested in the story DLC than the arena/challenge maps. On the other hand, I'm a bit disappointed we don't get to spend more time learning about Columbia through the DLC. Barring any surprise twists in the story DLC. I would've liked to see some DLC focused on Fitzroy since that was a really underdeveloped part of the game given how much bluster there was about the Vox prior to release.

Spoiler:

At least now we know why they tossed BioShock 1 on the PS3 discs as a bonus

EDIT:

Spoiler:

I would not be surprised if the theme of the story DLC was mostly in response to how people handled the ending sequence. That would explain why it's taken them a lot longer than say Gearbox to start rolling out their DLC content.

Something else not specific to BI, but I just can't get behind episodic releases like this, when you say you're going to release one part now (or soon) and one part later, I'll just wait until they're all available and then pick them all up. With Dishonored, I'm waiting until the xmas sale to get the 2 parter DLC, although partially because I've got other stuff to play.

Trailer:

It would be interesting if they had appropriate ages (+45 or so years), but that's not going to happen.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/WrgemXCl.jpg)