ERMEHGERD BEROSHERK INFERNERT- Bioshock Infinite! (Spoilers warning!)
GnomeQueen
The Lulz QueenMountain Dew Mouth Icrontian
First of all, major thanks to AMD, @Thracks, @Mertesn and @Canti for making it possible for me to even play the game at this point. Usually I'm six months to a year behind everyone else in major games because I can't afford them when they come out. Being able to play at the same time lots of other people are is super exciting!
Second of all-- has anyone else finished the game yet!? MY MIND IS GOING CRAZY RIGHT NOW WITH THAT ENDING.
Second of all-- has anyone else finished the game yet!? MY MIND IS GOING CRAZY RIGHT NOW WITH THAT ENDING.
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Comments
Still a bit confused with the whole thing, but great ending. Thanks to the same group from me, as well, for allowing me to experience it.
I'm not going to be able to switch my brain off tonight, am I?
Woah.
Happens after heads/tails.
I thought the mechanics of the game were among the best designed I've ever encountered. The weapon variety and scarcity was great, and though it occasionally annoyed, it was a really great choice to limit the player to two weapons at a time. It really made me think about which weapons I really needed, and it occasionally forced me to go long stretches without my preferred weapon, when I had to drop it, and use something else due to a lack of ammo. It took me out of my comfort zone for long stretches, and kept me searching. I kept a Carbine and a Sniper rifle for most of the game, but I once had to go for nearly an hour with a repeater and a hand cannon, fruitlessly searching for the weapons I wanted. My sense of relief upon locating each of them was tremendous, "Now I can fight properly again!".
I was a little annoyed occasionally by the lack of a save-anywhere, since it occasionally meant I had to lose progress when I wanted to stop playing, but hadn't reached an auto-save point recently, but the death penalties are set up well the way they are. Loosing $50 to respawn was just enough penalty to make me really not want to die, but not so much that dying made me want to go all the way back to the last auto-save
I'm glad that I saw an article before playing which warned to start one's first playthrough on 'Hard'. I usually play on 'normal' assuming that this is the 'intended' gameplay level, but I can see that playing on normal, I would not have needed any sky-hook combat, nor had to worry about any cover. As it was, I only had to lower the difficulty for one fight.
The siren was definitely annoying; I managed to snipe her to death in the first fight, but it took a couple restarts, because you needed pretty much every shot the gun had.
My main problems with the game:
--Lack of interaction with environment and populace-- In the trailers/game play, you see the people doing a lot of things; throwing chairs through windows, conducting a hanging, etc. In reality, the populace of Colombia is mostly absent whenever there is conflict, except for a few instances. It's a far more static place than I expected.
-- The amount of copied populace faces was a bit jarring. I understand it must take incredible resources to make individualized characters, but I think that they could have at least made a few more ones. People standing in the same groups together would be copies.
--Lack of choice? I'm actually not sure how much this bothers me. In the previous Bioshock games, the choices that you made were reflected in the games, which I do think that I missed a bit in this game. That being said, there are plenty of fantastic games where you don't get choices either. I think I'm mainly thinking about the Half Life series in comparison, right now. The guy in this video does say that in "new games" you need choice, so perhaps HL is too old for his purposes as a comparison. Everyone has been comparing Mass Effect to BI, and I haven't played that; does that storyline allow for a lot of choice?
--I CAN see this guy's critique that in a game called "Infinite" you don't get infinite choices. But that's also kind of explained by the storyline? You have infinite choices, but you really don't, too. He will flip that coin a million times, and still get heads.
--Pacing of the story-- The story is really amazing, and I love it, but I wish it were a bit better paced. You spend the first 3/4ths of the game slowly learning what's going on, and then everything else is packed into the last 1/4th, and the main, huge realizations of the game are given to you by a godlike Elizabeth. I think it would have been better if Elizabeth and Booker slowly learned things together throughout the story, instead of everything being back in at the end, with a lot of it simply being told to you.
But really, I'm still giving it 9/10. I can't stop thinking about it!
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A lot of people harp on the idea that choice is of some utmost importance in interactive storytelling, but I think they've got it a bit off. What's important is 'agency', not simply choice. I can make choices all day long, but if those choices don't provide agency to me as the audience, then they serve little purpose other than to make people feel better about how 'interactive' the game is (they also provide replay value in some cases, but I don't put stock in that from an analytical perspective). Agency is more about giving the audience a sense that their actions are important to the story and the setting. I think Infinite is a good example of a game that delivers a lot of agency without delivering a lot of choice, while games like Mass Effect give the player 'choices' out of their wazzooo, but these choices are just moving a little needle on a badometer, and provide very little agency.
One of the most interesting things about Bioshock Infinite is how it plays with the player's agency, essentially turning that agency into one of the mechanics of the story (rather than the game. The player is given the power to act most of the time, but that power is taken away for key moments in the story, as Booker's power over his own destiny is being taken out of his hands; as his own personal power is revoked, so to is the player's agency being slowly eroded. It's sort of the opposite of what the original Bioshock did, in which the ending of the story showed that all of the moments when the player had felt empowered, were in fact the very moments that power was being taken away from the protagonist, and that the only moments in which the protagonist had free will were the times the player was not controlling him, thus turning the player into an unwilling taskmaster for the protagonist, rather than an empowered ally. The game essentially tricked you into doing something which was inherently wrong, and wanted you to feel powerless for having done it (whether it pulled it all off is up for debate; personally, all I think they really ended up doing was creating a serious narrative disconnect (though I still loved the game)).
As a series, Bioshock is basically built around messing with the agency of the player in interesting ways. I look forward to seeing what they do next.
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Also: I don't agree with the voice in the video: Taking something seriously does not require destructive critique. It instead requires careful analysis. We should not be looking at a narrative and saying "here's what is good and here's bad", rather we should look at it and say, "Here's what this explores in the human condition and here is how it relates to the artform as a whole."
I just finished the game, had my progress delayed for a bit with lots of RL stuff. This game is a masterpiece. I loved every moment of it. I didn't see the twist coming until right when it happened. I have never been so stunned by a twist before. The ending was perfect, the music, the scene, everything. I sat with my mouth hanging open just as it faded to black.
That whole final sequence as you're going through the doors, piecing it all together was one of the best revelation moments I've experienced in any medium. Holy cow, that was so well done.
I was similarly shocked in Bioshock, but continuing the game after the big twist kind of ruined it for me. To have this massive reveal and then just take you to the credits... flawless. I love it.
Non-story point - the combat was a little meh (some of the 'powerful' guns didn't feel worthwhile), and the plasmid powers weren't as cool as Bioshock. I basically stuck with 2 of them through the game. Difficulty was a little weak, too. Hardly complaints though, fantastic game.