Jimquisition: Jimquisition Awards 2013 - BioShock Infinite

Eevee

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I loved Infinite! I've played it though when it came out and I loved it. It was a definite #1 Game of the Year for me.

Then I played it again, post the backlash it received... And I still love it, I just adore the series as a whole and I know it doesn't work for everyone. But I still recommend the game to anyone looking for good gameplay and story. I love Elizabeth, I love Booker, and I love Columbia. Call me a fanboy, but I appreciate your opinions too!
 

BrownGaijin

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First thought: At first I went "AWWW PUPPY!" and then I went "PIIIIINK! NOOOOOO!"

It's been a strange day with Bioshock especially after finding this article just after watching the video:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/12/16/5215468/tea-party-facebook-group-begins-posting-bioshock-infinite-propaganda

Well it might not be an example of Ludonarrative Dissonance, but it's certainly an example of irony.
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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Ronack said:
Phoenixmgs said:
Ronack said:
I have immense issues with this first award because the game in question tried to be Sliders but failed immensely so. The only thing the game has going for it is the city itself and the visuals, with gameplay being "been there, done that" 90% of the time. To be fair, the story was quite entertaining until the first "leap".
Those weren't "leaps".
Oh, thank you, my entire argument would have been void if you hadn't corrected this technicality!
I didn't mean to correct you based on a technicality. I said it that way so I didn't have to put spoilers in.

Booker and Elizabeth aren't going to different universes, Elizabeth is pulling stuff from other universes into their universe. And yes, if they are indeed leaping or going through tears, then the plot makes no sense. Flip that around though and everything then makes sense

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Full Metal Bolshevik said:
And that is what COD does perfectly. Say what you want about the series, but the gameplay was refined to near-perfection (even if I dislike recent COD's). Shooting in a Call of Duty game feels really well, something I don't feel at all with Bioshock Infinite.
'move & aim' might seem like a simple thing, but it's actually the most important part of an FPS.
It is very important, but COD does not do it to near-perfection either. Just from a movement, shooting, and controls standpoint, MoH Warfighter blows COD out of the water. Warfighter's campaign is shit for level design, story, enemy placement, and just about everything else (besides controls, movement, and shooting), but its online shines because all that stuff that makes the campaign suck is not present in the online multiplayer. Warfighter has a MANUAL lean (not that contextual bullshit that Ghosts and BF4 has) and a slide, which is a game changer (Ghosts finally has a slide). 1v1 gun battles are just so much more dynamic in Warfighter compared to COD. Infinite's shooting isn't the best but it's good and very competent. Plus, if you are playing Infinite properly, you're not shooting that much anyways, or at least you should be using the power weapons.
 

Antsh

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May 15, 2012
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Always laugh at that pre-release trailer.

That was not the game that I played lol
 

Therumancer

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BreakfastMan said:
Well, it appears I am the only one who deeply loved the gameplay of Bioshock Infinite. Really don't see what others hate in the combat...

Still, I agree with Jim on this one: Bioshock Infinite is definitely one of the best games released this year. I have it tied with Saints Row IV and Super Mario 3D World as my favorite game of the year. :D
People hate on the combat because they are pretty much FPS junkies, and miss the point that Bioshock is still trying to make pretensions of being an RPG even if it isn't one anymore, it actually has become a substandard FPS game when it comes to the mechanics. The idea being that in Bioshock the number of options you have is supposed to counterbalance the core mechanics being somewhat less than a dedicated shooter. What's more being based around super-abilities and crazy stunts it really is kind of floaty in an attempt to balance the gunplay with the use powers and such compared to other games that are priding themselves on the kind of realism that pretty much has you feeling the recoil of each shot.


In general the complaint about combat being "floaty" nowadays generally comes from people who primarily play games that have trained them to balance their reflexs with more realistic expectations, so they tend to automatically aim as if they expect a gun to be more off the mark based on it's recoil, compensate for simulated bullet drop, and similar things, and when that isn't there, and is replaced more by video game logic, it tends to be noticible. Compared to the amount of work a lot of games have put into their gunplay and making each gun "feel different" even over a computer, Bioshock is very much a "bad" game because Booker does all the assumed compensation as opposed to you the player.


In the overall scheme of things this is not bad, despite making it a bad FPS, I'd normally argue it's the best way to handle things in an RPG right behind simply making the gunshots stat based since it's supposed to be an RPG. The problem of course being that Bioshock also tends to fail as an RPG because Booker tends to wind up being able to do everything and pretty much solves most of the assigned problems in the same exact way, your choices in how to build him usually come down to what FX you like to watch when he kills.

Basically Bioshock started as a spiritual successor to "System Shock" especially the classic "System Shock 2" which in of itself was an attempt to pretty much transpose "Ultima Underworld" into a science fiction environment. This was done alongside the basic assumption that your typical gamer nowadays is too dumb or impatient to really deal with something like "System Shock 2" and to try and increasingly simplify it while trying to maintain the premise.

In System Shock 2, you pretty much had three major "paths" of skills, psionics, navy, and marines each of which had their own ways past problems, and specific things that could only be done by one skill set. You could also pick up abilities from each of the paths as you progressed and found the materials to unlock more abilities, but there was limited advancement opportunities and it was virtually impossible to make a perfect character who could get/see/do everything, not to mention if you spread yourself out too much it was possible to kind of put yourself into a sort of "Fail state" where progression would be almost impossible (say facing a battle your not tough enough to take on head to head, while lacking any of the abilities to circumvent the fight).

In Bioshock it pretty much removes the technical skills (Naval Path), and gives you what amounts to gunplay and psionics, with the psionics being used for the problem solving, and every ability being unlocked to it's basic level automatically which is sufficient to bypass any of the "puzzles" you run into if you use the right thing in the right place. Ultimatly it comes down to a choice of how you decide to deconstruct each area of enemies in front of you with the puzzles being ways of blocking arena to arena. You don't have to make choices like "do I want telekinesis, or lock picking, or the ability to have someone not laugh at me as much when I shoot them" and then being forced to apply your choice to problems from there on out, intentionally choosing to miss/close off options for a while. By the time you might have the ability to gain more than one, you wind up having more options and have to weigh the potential benefits of say becoming better at something than gaining a more versatile selection of skills. Nothing really closes out quite the same way in Bioshock... which is simpler, and more to the liking of people who want to do it all, but leads to less of an RPG-type experience as well.

Not sure if I'm articulating this particularly well.


The thing is that Bioshock is a good game, especially with what it's up against this year, but it's flaws are many and myriad, and that includes it's disadvantages coming from it's origin. In an attempt to at least seem like it's maintaining some RPG elements from it's spiritual predeccesor when it really isn't (powers just being basically more weapons that also act as keys) it's kind of become a lite FPS, "lite" being pretty accurate due to the amount of work FPS games put into the elements Bioshock is overlooking intentionally by being specialist games.

Those who complain about Bioshock being floaty, seem to mostly be argueing that the game should ultimately feel like a vintage gun simulation, and require the same kind of ingrained reflexes and adaption from other FPS games, especially seeing as it can be as hard to unlearn reflexs for compensation as it is to learn them.
 

Clive Howlitzer

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I'll have to disagree because despite all of its upsides, the actual gameplay itself was...boring. Unfortunately, that is kind of a key aspect of a video game.
 

MrBaskerville

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The only think i really liked about Infinite was that it looked expensive, i thought it was an absolute chore to play and i must admit that i thought the story was rubbish, and not just because of he silly plottwist. I hated all the silly v-logs (When do we retire this innefective storytelling device?), the endless moral discussions by random people in the streets (When do we retire this innefective sorytelling device?) and the overabandunance of underdeveloped themes. Booker was a boring character and i didn'tparticularily care for Combstock or Elizabeth either. It's the worst game i've played this year (Retail, mind you, not counting shitty demoes). It's one of those games where i just don't see where people are coming from, when they praise it.

Not that i think it's the worst game ever or anything, i just thought the gameplay was underwhelming and the story was kinda shit. Had the gameplay been good, then it wouldn't have been a problem, but when i wasn't bored trying to shoot stuff with my limited arsenal of weapons and my identical plasmids, i was just good old annoyed that people were crowding me from all sides. This game have a very annoying way to introduce challenge, to compensate for the fact that your health regenerates it basically just crowds you with enemies from all sides. And don't even get me started on the stupid revival system or the inapproperiatly named 1999 mode :/.
 

Thanatos2k

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The Goat Tsar said:
Thanatos2k said:
Trishbot said:
Full Metal Bolshevik said:
109 said:
Full Metal Bolshevik said:
109 said:
Time to admit it folks: Bioshock Infinite is the best first-person shooter released since Half-Life 2.
'insert laugh harder futurama video'

Want me to make a list of fps with better mechanics than Bioshock Infinite?
You can try, I'm going to love proving you wrong.
Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty World at War.

Can you tell me with a straight face that BI had better gameplay than those COD's?
I'll go one or two better. Halo 1, Goldeneye, and Doom. Expertly crafted with the right amount of pacing, variety, level design, and player agency, all through genuinely new and exciting forms of gunplay and character alteration.

Though BI is in good company, I think.
Goldeneye has horrible controls, Halo has regenerating health (Bioshock Infinite went halfway with that awful mechanic), and Doom is flat and doesn't have mouse aiming.

All three of those are inferior mechanically to Bioshock Infinite.

See, the thing is about people who say Bioshock Infinite has bad gameplay is that they're really suggesting that all FPS games have bad gameplay. There's REALLY nothing very different that hasn't been done before in popular genre-leading FPS games of the past. So people start in with all sorts of nonsense reasons like "the pacing" or "doesn't support the narrative" or all sorts of things trying to dance around things that they can't really say are wrong because it's not exactly different from things they claim are good.
You can't say those three games are mechanically inferior to Bioshock Infinite. Some people like regenerating health. Some people don't like mouse aiming. It's not bad, it's just different.
I could go into detail about why regenerating health is bad, but I can admit it's more preference based than some of the other things. Mouse aiming on the other hand is not "just different" - it's a factually superior aiming method proven time and again against controllers and arrow aiming. The point of an fps is to shoot your gun where you want the projectiles to go, and nothing does that better than mouse aiming. So yes, Goldeneye and Doom are mechanically inferior. It's not entirely their fault (Doom is a product of its time, and Goldeneye is on a console) but it's undeniably true. Same with any FPS on a console.

The issue I had with Bioshock Infinite's gameplay had nothing to do with the gunplay, I actually liked that. It was the enemies. Almost all of them were way too easy to me, but then I got to the handymen, who were just dumb. They were just giant bullet sponges that did tons of damage, I feel like they could've had more interesting mechanics and counterplay.
What difficulty were you playing on....? The harder difficulties are pretty damn hard.

Full Metal Bolshevik said:
And I repeat, 'move & aim' is what basically makes an fps, BI failed in doing that. Powers are cool, when done well. Take Dishonored has an example, while there wasn't much of shooting, the powers were cool to use, much cooler than BI's.
What does this even mean? Bioshock Infinite had more moving and aiming than nearly any other FPS, occasionally annoyingly so. You could barely stand still and had to constantly be running, gunning, flying around, and hiding. How in any way did BI mechanically "fail" to reproduce the same FPS move and aim experience you've gotten before? Use actual examples, not "it feels wrong!"
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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Full Metal Bolshevik said:
I'm talking about PC. Who cares about the inferior consoles?

Pc has no aim assits and the games I mentioned do have lean.

And I repeat, 'move & aim' is what basically makes an fps, BI failed in doing that. Powers are cool, when done well. Take Dishonored has an example, while there wasn't much of shooting, the powers were cool to use, much cooler than BI's.
It's the feeling you get from using them, or shooting on an FPS. BI simply sucks at it.
So you're a PC master race elitist then. I don't find playing playing shooters on a PC fun because it's so easy to aim and shoot with a mouse, it's takes the fun out of it. Nailing that perfect shot on a controller is so much better feeling. I played Metal Gear Online, which is a game that required headshots to kill and the best players (including me) could headshot you across the map in less than a second after just seeing you. I get accused of using an aimbot in every shooter I play and it's not even possible to have an aimbot on PS3. Plus, I hate using a keyboard, it was designed for typing not playing a game, and it only has digital inputs. I'm playing Dishonored now and while its powers are cooler in some respects, they are really overpowered, Blink alone is ridiculously overpowered, then you have time stop and the vision that lets you see through walls (which I will not get or use because seeing enemies through walls defeats the purpose of playing a stealth game).
 

Vkmies

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Goliath100 said:
Jimmy, who said that Bioshock has LD? I seen legitimate criticism of the reaction of the NPCs, and that the superpowers make no sense in the world, but the LD thing feels like straw figure.
It was explained that the "blueprints" (or the idea, whatever you wanna call them) for the salts were stolen by Fink and the Lutesces from Rapture through a portal. The same machine that they used to steal Elizabeth. Can't remember if it was explained how Adam can exist there, but I imagine the Lutesces worked out a man-made elixir to replace it that they implemented in the actual salts. What other critisisms have there been about salts? I haven't been following too closely about the argument, and I'd be interested in hearing some more. :)
 

Callate

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B:I exists in a strange place for me. I'm not sorry I played it, it's visually gorgeous, and it has a fascinating and well-realized world.

But I think the plot is a mess- just a mess that keeps enough balls in the air to keep many people impressed with the juggling act and distracted from the ones that fell. And I still very much feel that infinite possibilities and unavoidable conclusions are a conflict- and the game wants you to accept that conflict as a conclusion itself, rather than actually try to resolve it. I hesitate to say a game that so much work clearly went into is lazy, but it feels not unlike one of those other games we've all played where it's clear that after a certain amount of work they had to tie things off and get it out the door- only what got tied off and pushed out in this case was less the engine or feature set, but the storyline. That the Elizabeth of the reveal trailer has all her fingers only serves to reinforce this view.

So what do I say? I would love for more games to put as much detail and thought into their games as Bioshock:Infinite. I'm delighted that so much vision shows through in the final product, even if I miss promises like the falling bell churning up the street. I want to see more games shoot for the stars like Bioshock: Infinite clearly did... But at the same time, I can't help but feel a little disappointed in it.
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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Full Metal Bolshevik said:
Oh well, I won't bother continuing arguing. And again, the games I mentioned had manual lean.
They only had a manual lean on PC. So, you won't argue anymore because Infinite isn't about aiming and shooting if you are playing it properly yet you want to criticize Infinite for not having the best aiming when that's not what the gameplay is about? It's like criticizing Mass Effect for not having the best TPS aiming when the games aren't about pure aiming and shooting skill either.
 

Thanatos2k

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Therumancer said:
Those who complain about Bioshock being floaty, seem to mostly be argueing that the game should ultimately feel like a vintage gun simulation, and require the same kind of ingrained reflexes and adaption from other FPS games, especially seeing as it can be as hard to unlearn reflexs for compensation as it is to learn them.
I think this is a good summary. I remember back in the day when I used to play Counterstrike a lot I would usually be Terrorists and use an AK47. When not going for the single shot headshot, I would aim at a person's feet because the AK47's recoil would naturally drift the aim upwards when fired repeatedly.

This made me effective in Counterstrike but when playing another FPS I would still do that - reflexively aiming at the target's feet. Except in other fps games this didn't work so well. The problem wasn't those games - the problem was me, conditioned by another game. The lack of recoil felt "wrong"...for a while.

I think the same thing is happening here when people complain about Bioshock Infinite in the same manner, not realizing it's their own conditioning that's probably to blame.
 

nevarran

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Agreed.
Fun to play, gorgeous to the eye, and it made me think about a thing or two... What's more to ask from a video game?!

Choose your next hit carefully, Jim. I'm here to cry like a baby, if you choose a game I haven't played or didn't liked!
 

Thanatos2k

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Full Metal Bolshevik said:
Also, I gotta ask to people who liked BI story since I never finished.

Is it that good? How does it compare to 999 ?
999 is better. BI gets a little paradoxical at the end, much more so than 999 - which can actually make sense if you think through the situation and build a set of rules for the events that occur. BI never really makes sense. BI also goes for more metaphorical crap than direct event-driven stuff like 999 has.
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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Full Metal Bolshevik said:
Pc is objectivly superior. Besides, you can use a 360 controller if you dislike the keyboard that much.

I agree that Dishonored powers were overpower, but that's a different issue, it was fun to play and it felt better good.
So you want me to play on a PC with a controller to only end up being at a disadvantage against other players? PC is only objectively better with regards to graphics, which are the least important part of a game. I'm playing Dishonored now, which isn't very good looking but it's a bunch of fun, it can't be much of a looker even with max settings on a PC.