Topic: Bioshock Infinite Spoiler Thread [is anyone even playing this game?]

[Oblivion]

Damn. That was a POWERFUL ending. I don't want to say to much until I know more people have beaten it.

[magicpixie]

I'm playing it.  Got a bit in after the Leafs game last night.  The art direction in this game is pretty awesome.  My only complaint so far is that NPCs seem to just stand around doing a whole lot of nothing, which kind of pulls me out of the game since everything else seems so well thought out.

That tower section before the beach was awesome.  I'm not going to rush through the game since I agree with most of the reviews about how this game should really be savoured.  It seems like so much work has gone into crafting this world that it would be a shame to miss out on any little detail.

[broodwars]

I am playing the game as well, but I am avoiding forum thread discussion on it until I have completed it.

[Oblivion]

So it seems like I'm the only one that has beaten it. I guess I can twiddle my thumbs until someone does.

[magicpixie]

Gah.  Just lost my long-winded post.

Anyway, I just finished marathoning the game today in honour of the long weekend.  I have mixed feelings about the game, overall.  I loved the combat of the game.  The vigors are great, and the guns are mostly satisfying.  I've heard that auto-aim on PC is turned on by default, but I'm not really bothered by things like that.  In fact, I probably enjoyed the game a bit more because of it.

My favourite combo in the game was to start off encounters with Shock Jockey, then clean up with a headshot from the Combine(or just splatter them with the shotty).  This works exceedingly well(especially with auto-aim) once you get the ability to chain lightning.  Possession was a lot of fun; I love having Patriots mow down their own teammates.

I've read a lot of reviews that have complained about some pacing issues, specifically padding in the midsection(don't we all have that problem?).  I'm inclined to agree, though I think the problem extends through the end of the game.  To me, encounters felt a lot more like encounters from Uncharted/the new Tomb Raider.  I also took issue with the forced backtracking in some areas.  Fighting Elizabeth's "mom" was particularly bad in this regard.  Perhaps it was an issue with the order I was doing things, but I would go through an area, kill the bad guys, reach an endpoint, have to go back through the previous area, and fight another group of bad guys.

Anyway, how 'bout that ending, eh?  It's strange, to me, every major development in itself isn't really shocking.  Maybe that's because every review has done it's best to remind you of the OMGWTF plot twist(sort of like watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie), so you're mentally prepared for it.  But honestly, all those developments were, at one time or another, considered possibilities in my mind.

Any time you introduce alternate universes and time travel into a story, you open yourself up to plot holes.  Personally, I tend to gloss over the plot holes and try to look at the overall outline of the story.  Movies and videogames are much more enjoyable that way.  Infinite is no different.  My favourite part is the pinky incident, even though by that point, it serves more as confirmation of the major plot point than as anything revelatory. 

Anyway, TLDR.  Great game.  Though it was tough at times playing with a wireless keyboard/mouse that are running out of batteries.

[Stogi]

So far it's absolutely perfect. Although it got me thinking. No matter how good games get there is always gonna have to be some stupid ****.

Like I'm searching through a guys basket on the beach. And he has like a sandwich, some cotton candy, and machine gun bullets. I'm happy the motherfucker has machine gun bullets. I need those. But he had an interesting afternoon planned. Homie, you are with your kids. You don't need machine gun bullets. You looked so peaceful.

And then I go up to a Carmel stand. Eat three caramels. Then look in the Carmel box and what's in there? Fuckin potato chips. It nourishes me the same. But do you know how pissed off I would be in real life?

If I went to a Carmel stand.
Got a box of caramels.
Got home.
Opened them up.
And found a bag of potato chips?
It would make me want to carry machine gun bullets around for no fucking reason.

[Oblivion]

I'm assuming somebody was hiding those chips in the caramel box. Or the food inside the container is randomly generated. And you should beware this thread since there are unmarked spoilers here.

[magicpixie]

Hurrrr....

I seem to be deleting my thoughts before posting a lot.  I think it's great that the game seems to be provoking so much discussion around the community(just not this one).

Beware unmarked spoilers in a spoilers thread!

So, two camps, it seems.

1) Elizabeth kills Booker, and, by extension, all instances of either Booker or Comstock.
2) Elizabeth kills one instance of Booker, and, by extension, all instances of Comstock.

I haven't revisited the ending since my first playthrough, so some of the details that might clear that up are a bit murky.  Personally, I like the second option, because it is less depressing.  I think the post-credit sequence lends credence to this option since it can be assumed that it occurs outside of the universe where Elizabeth kills Booker/Comstock.

My interpretation is that before drowning Booker, Elizabeth mentions that in that specific timeline, Booker had just made the decision to accept Baptism and become Comstock(at least, that's how I'm remembering it).  At this point, she drowns Comstock.  I'm inclined to believe that the multiple instances of Elizabeth is a reference to the constants and variables theme of the game.  At this point, Comstock's death is a constant across all universes where Booker chooses to accept rebirth.  Elizabeth, as we have come to know her, no longer exists.

This leaves all universes where Booker rejects rebirth intact.  I think.  Anna never gets sold/lost to Comstock since he never comes into existence.  Everybody lives happily ever after.  Possibly.

Thinking about it further, that theory leaves a lot of holes, too.  Technically, the PC Booker shouldn't be the same Booker/Comstock that Elizabeth drowns since it isn't his universe(at least, I don't think it is). 

Argh...  The more I type, the more I think, the more I second-guess myself.  This is why alternate universe/time-travel/ambiguous storylines always run into problems!

[broodwars]

I just finished the game, & overall I found it...extremely messy, like a game that's been redesigned & rewritten dozens of times over the last 5 years, leaving the resulting product feeling fragmented & not particularly compelling. It was nice to see the opening area of Rapture again, though, even if Levine violated the rule of "don't reference a far superior product in your ****ty one."  : :

I guess it was a decent game overall with some outstanding artistic design, but I came away from the experience pretty disappointed.  In my opinion, it's the weakest of the 3 Bioshock games in terms of mechanics, level design, and story.  At least Elizabeth was cool.  I was amused, though, that for all that Ken Levine publicly ****ted all over Bioshock 2 (IIRC that was around the time of the game's release), he sure was eager to rip parts of it off (such as the Hall of Heroes being very similar to the Andrew Ryan Museum/theme park in Bioshock 2).

[Oblivion]

Nope, sorry, you're wrong.

[magicpixie]

Teehee...

Found a nice quote from the SomethingAwful forums:

Elizabeth is a good NPC. She's not constantly screaming "HELP ME, BOOKER!" instead I'm screaming "SAVE ME, ELIZABETH!"

My thoughts exactly!

Also, a blog post that dissects the major themes in the game: http://peripsuche.blogspot.ca/2013/03/bioshock-infinite-thematic-analysis.html.  It's a pretty interesting write-up.

[alegoicoe]

I beat the game yesterday, it took me between 12 to 15 ours, that's a rough estimate since the game has no counter. The game was pretty good, it had some very fantastic moments including the ending.

[Do_What]

I am surprised by how much people love this game. I thought it was a lot of arena shooting segments and a setting that was ultimately shallow with a lot of cardboard characters. I cannot believe how many times I was locked in a room and force to fight enemies that came from monster closets. That **** is old and boring. Maybe I'm just tired of shooters, but that particular design element is a real turnoff to me. The flying around on rails was fun. The combat isn't bad unless there was one spare enemy I couldn't find and I couldn't move on because I had to shoot someone. It doens't do it all the time, but it does it enough to where I noticed it.
The story of Booker and Elizabeth is neat, but the payoff isn't really there. They tell you how its going to end fairly early on. Eh, whatever.
I think this game thinks its more important than it is and is saying something that it actually isn't, and I feel like so many reviewers of this game think they're seeing something special that they aren't. Like, the racism ****. There's no discussion or critical analysis going on. It's just like "here's some racist stuff." And then you shoot a bunch of people and we immediately drop out of it. I lends NOTHING to the story, it's just a backdrop that only differs from something like farcry 3 in that this game intentionally makes a cartoon out of it, but they both accomplish the same thing. Which is nothing. The bird means nothing. It's there for one scene. dropping it off in rapture means nothing. seeing rapture means nothing The multiverse ending would be neat, I guess, if I didn't grow up in a world with DC comics or star trek or countless science fiction books that tackle this subject. Even books where you follow the main character who is fighting against a version of himself that he doesn't know is himself exist. So this wasn't actually powerful in any substantive way to me.
Also, Elizabeth really needed more than two scared poses. She crouches in a corner or does the deer in headlights things for just about the entire game. Good move making her invincible though.
I don't like any of the characters, and that's not a good thing to me. I feel no sympathy for booker at any time in this story. Fitzroy isn't a character at all. Comstock is that preacher dude from the x-men comics. Fink isn't a character at all, actually. Like, I don't think he appears. He's just a voice that locks you into another fucking arena fight. The vox populi don't make any sense in the story at all.
I was feeling okay towards it until I started writing down my feelings and I got more and more negative on the game. I guess I don't really like it much at all.

[magicpixie]

I think Elizabeth is a really interesting gameplay/narrative device.  For as much as she's vital to the story, she really doesn't do much.  Her AI is... interesting, if a bit underused.  The game's AI pretty much ignores her existence, so she really never was in any danger.  I think this implementation, and the community's acceptance of it, is really an indictment of the gaming industry's inability to make NPCs who are vital to the storyling, but aren't completely detrimental to the gameplay experience.

I agree with the arena shooter aspect.  I think I mentioned how the encounters felt like those in the Uncharted series.  It might be laziness, but more likely, it's probably just another convention of the medium.  I did kind of like how the musical cues would let you know if you were done with the combat sections.

I watched Angry Joe's review of the combat system, and he bemoaned the lack of depth and options in the game.  He said he found no real reason to use any vigors/weapons other than the ones he had an affinity for.  I actually felt the same way on my playthrough.  Strangely enough, the vigor/weapon choices he made were COMPLETELY different from mine.  And I've heard other people have different play styles, too.  I'm actually quite surprised at how differently people are playing this game from me.

The racism stuff, while overt, it's role in the story is much more subtle.  Booker's past is reflected in Comstock's present.  Early in the game, Booker is hesitant to undergo the baptism, because he does not believe that it will wash away his sins.  Comstock obviously believed that it would.  Since Comstock never put in the effort/time to truly rid himself of the demons of his past, he was doomed to repeat them.  This is reflected in the society he's built.  Ironically, in one of the interpretations of the ending, in order for him to "fix" everything,  Bookerstock must be "baptized" by Elizabeth.

Of course, in my opinion, the story's setting does not necessarily have to be relevant to the story other than that's where it takes place.  I found Columbia to be a visual marvel.  For a lot of games, that's enough.  But adding the layers of labour unrest and race relations serves to make the world feel more alive.  The fact that it could serve as a metaphor for the nostalgia that many Americans remember was a better time, to me, is more gravy.

Oh, and did anyone else get a kick out of the Founders' patriots being George Washingtons, and the Vox Populi's patriots were Abraham Lincolns?

[ShyGuy]

Played through the first hour with my cousin. So far it's about as disappointing as the first Bioshock.

Not to say they are bad games, just wasted potential and a shallow experience compared to how they sell themselves. They treat philosophical concepts like a hipster treats his new fad.

[Do_What]

I agree. I think the shallowness really kills the entire series, and especially this game. Because this game is clearly going for something bigger and grander and since ALL of it is shallow it feels like a waste.

[syn4aptik]

I played through to the end "boss" and decided to rage quit and watch the ending on Youtube. You're going to make me change up the entire way I've come to play because you wanted to pull something cute and change things up at the very end? So very cliche.


Well after playing the game all the way through on Hard and trying that end scenario about 6 times, I tried once on Easy, failed, and decided it just wasn't worth my time anymore.


Now, I am not a huge shooter fan, but I appreciate good ones. I absolutely adore the HalfLife games and episodes. I liked the Deus Ex games, even the "crappy" second one. I don't hate on FPS style games just to hate on them.


But I did not like Bioshock: Infinite in the end. The gameplay was somehow both tedious and frantic. The most fun sections - the ones including the skylines - were too disorienting to feel strategic. The story...man if you think this was a good or intelligent story, you really should read more books. The whole multiple dimension/time travel weirdness thing has been done a million times by much better authors.


There were a lot of great things about this game, to be fair. The art direction, some of the voice acting (well, the Lutece sibs), the whole vibe of Columbia. But I found myself *tolerating* the gunfights in order to get to more of that stuff. If I don't like the "game" part of a game, I don't like the game.


So yeah. I can certainly see why some people might like this game so I will not **** on their opinions. But for me, I just didn't like it.

[syn4aptik]

They treat philosophical concepts like a hipster treats his new fad.

Yes, sir

[Oblivion]

You must suck at the game because the ending battle is not hard in the slightest. Use that special "power" you get at that point in the game on the George Washington guys and you'll be fine.

[broodwars]

You must suck at the game because the ending battle is not hard in the slightest. Use that special "power" you get at that point in the game on the George Washington guys and you'll be fine.

I actually had some trouble on that fight as well, though I didn't end up losing it. I found Songbird to be very picky when it comes to just what distance from an enemy it would allow you to target. In some cases, I had to be practically rubbing my face against one of those zeppelins to get the Songbird attack command.  Despite clearing it, though, that was an incredibly poorly-designed final gameplay sequence, and it illustrates magnificently why the combat in this game sucks compared to the combat flow of previous Bioshock games. Pure chaos != "fun" or "well designed".

[syn4aptik]

You must suck at the game because the ending battle is not hard in the slightest. Use that special "power" you get at that point in the game on the George Washington guys and you'll be fine.

I actually had some trouble on that fight as well, though I didn't end up losing it. I found that Songbird to be very picky at just what distance from an enemy it would allow you to target. In some cases, I had to be practically rubbing my face against one of those zeppelins to get the Songbird attack command.  Despite clearing it, though, that was an incredibly poorly-designed final gameplay sequence, and it illustrates magnificently why the combat in this game sucks compared to the combat flow of previous Bioshock games. Pure chaos != "fun" or "well designed".

I am in complete agreement with you, broodwars. My specific problems with that section were 1) the controls were very finicky and unreliable when it came to selecting a songbird target (PS3 version), 2) I had a lot of difficulty finding the straggler enemies, who would just keep plinking away at my ship health while I ran all over the place looking for their health bar to pop up and 3) it was just do damn long.


Oblivion, considering I played through the rest of the game on hard without much difficulty, I wouldn't say I sucked at the game. Just at that part.


But what does it say about you that you went for an insult after I gave my opinion? Pretty lame, dude. It's not like the Bioshock devs are going to land an airship in front of your place one day and present you with a trophy for being the most awesomest defender of Bioshock and game player extraordinaire.

[Oblivion]

I fail to see how I insulted you. I wouldn't care if someone said that to me; maybe it was true?