Stephen Sossna said:
Soak said:
20 Minutes? Not quite. I think you are exaggerating quite a bit here. And the question is how else could it have been done? The ending required a lot of exposition, and that couldn't exactly be handed to you while you were fighting. As far as ending sequences go, it was actually refreshingly interactive, requiring you do actually
do the actions, which increased your identification with the character and hence the emotional impact.
Ok, i was exaggerating, i didn't actually meassure the time when i was going through it, but then again, considering it is "interactive", you could easily prolonge the time neaded to 20 minutes. But obviously that's not the point, that's never the point of exaggeration, point is, it is pretty long, but then again, compared to other story based-games, this appears to be in the current trend. I think, they could have just made it something like a cut-scene, similar to the conclusion from the former Shock titles, because honestly, at that point in the game i would've had nothing against it to just lay back, relax and see what was coming to me, because the "identification", or immersion or whatever, was pretty much gone for me, considering i noticed throughout the game that what i was doing would have had no real effect on the outcome and that all the points you were presented with a "choice", were just creating the illusion of choice in the first place.
Taking it's peak in the scene recent before the end, the confrontation with Comstock. When i had to "intervene" (and it is mandatory, the game just halts until you do it and there is no other option to get out of the situation, so what "choice" is there, but to otherwise stop playing?), i felt nothing more but "pity" (it doesn't quite describe what i actually feld, probably there's a better word, but i can't think of it right now) for Comstock and his motivations, so i would have actually let him live and left him alone in his knowledge that his plan was meant to fail. But nooo, in this sitation the game takes control from me and drowns him, giving him exactly what he wanted?! That is simply bad for immersion, sure it is subjective and some might have sit infront of their monitor thinking "yeah, take that Comstock"
but then again, every form of immersion is subjective, that's what it is all about, the question is how the player character is designed to deliver this immersion, if you are just "watching over the shoulder", as you guide the character through the game, but know it is an independet character, or if you are able to make every/most meaningfull decisions and thereby influence the character and the game itself (and some other possible forms to create a character). BioShock (and BS2) had a "nameless, faceless" protagonist, of whom you could still get to know some interesting background story, but which were basically "blank slates" to be filled by the player, down to several game influencing situations and "individual" endings derived from them. This makes for very good immersion, close to no matter who is playing. For DeWitt, he has a face and a name and a story being a crucial part of the main story itself, which is determined to break the immersion with some players going through the game. Now, i don't even see this as one of the major problems of the game, but it conflicts with the point of possible identification throughout the game and also with, as already mentioned, some of the "illusive choices", which then have no real impact throughout the game
yes, depending on weither you attempt to throw the ball at the announcer or the couple has an influence on a later situation and makes the couple either give you a gear, or attack you, but honestly, it still is nothing more than illusion and has no real impact throughout the game, starting with how the situation at the ralley resolves, neither later, when a body-count of +-2 makes no difference at all. and the other "choices" have even less meaning/impact throughout the game
and honestly, how interactive was the ending realy? You can just take a rest and do nothing, or jump into her face and Elizabeth wouldn't mind, because it was all scripted and didn't care for how you "interacted" with the game anymore, it's just the question of "when to move on", as you trigger the script along the way. I tried to interact with the ending
by taking another route when you have an option throughout the walk of the lighthouses
but it simply doesn't matter! While i also think this is kinda nice looking at the conclusion itself, it could have also had no matter while showing a cut-scene.
Stephen Sossna said:
Soak said:
There is a difference between "hype" and false advertising. A hype is something mainly generated by the playerbase (though it can be fanned by the publishers) and the developers are probably the people who have the least to do with it. Hyping up a game is
always bad. You can never fulfill hyped up expectations. That is why if you, as a gamer, allow yourself to get hyped up for a game, you are making a mistake that will likely sour your enjoyment of the game. We know advertisements and trailers make things look more awesome than they probably are. We know that for all the advertisement, the game will likely have at least a few significant flaws. However, insofar as you are accusing the game of flat out false advertisement:
Soak said:
Most of the exciting stuff in the trailers is gone...
That is simply factually false. The Trailers did not spoil actual scenes from the game, that is true. But all the elements were there. The Trailers showcased no feature that wasn't actually in the game. The only thing different is the sequence of events, and that was perfectly fine, as it actually meant the devs did do the extra work to create realistic trailers without spoiling any actual story.
Ehm, yeah,
OBJECTION or something ^^
Hype and false advertising are obviously entwined most of the time, as for this case. As i was trying to point out already, if ME3 wouldn't have had such good titles leading to it, it wouldn't have been hyped and if the developers/marketing wouldn't have promoted an amazingly complex ending and 'yadidadida', it probably wouldn't have been raged about. As for the relation of developers and marketing: Well, i'm not sitting in a game-studio myself, but i have been sitting in a company as a worker in conflict with the marketing of the company myself and i had to leave. I don't and can't really know (unless they would make it transparent in any way), how much "conflict" there ever was between the developers and the marketing in this case, but i do know that the marketing can not promote, what the developers aren't providing them with, considering gameplay trailers, or at least, the developers would have a choice to differentiate themselves from the marketing done, if it isn't showing what they are actually doing - though i can understand that developers often wouldn't do this, considering it will likely cost them their jobs. However, if you know about "injustice", are in the position to, but won't act about it, you make yourself responsible of "failure to assist" or what's it called in english, i don't know for sure; though this is not even supposed to be a trial and probably would not hold up against well payed lawyers saying otherwise/ contracts made which insist, developers won't talk about anything their publisher wouldn't want them to talk about in the first place, but it tells us something about their moral.
However, they made "false advertisment" and by that incited the hype, promoting things throughout the whole course of development, which then where missing in the actual game!
For some examples:
<a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6_PSJJFqmk> earliest gameplay video
1:30 cool thing, except as i remember something like this never happens in the game
4:00 yeah, i loved it, except you can't do it in the game like this, you just have a charge for dmg and a push for zoning, which you get way to late in the game for my opinion, but you just can't do it like this
4:10 oh yeah, Telekinesis is gone, no more pulling objects towars yourself
4:48 no cannon in the entire game works like this, to bad
6:10 again, no Telekinesis available, not at all
6:28 impossible to do in the game
7:10 oh yeah, one of the most interesting things promoted throughout all the trailers, gone
7:35 again, no Telekinesis
7:40 nope, no object in the game behaves like that
7:55 to cool, but again, never possible within the game
8:50 nope
9:12 yes, here they presented the "Elizabeth has to use her powers with restraint, or she will harm herself" premise, which appeared super awesome to most who had watched the trailer but is now gone
for one presented throughout<a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7BbE4LnMuE>the middle of development
1:00 here we see Comstock as a politician, this was further promoted in interviews
1:08 recognize how the Vigor gets a counter instead of a salt bar, well until then they said they would want to make the Vigors with a limited number of uses for each bottle found, which they then dropped (probably explains why you find so many Vigor-bottles later in the game which then just turn into salt)
4:15 never happens in any way comparable
6:30 no
8:00 as already presented through the last few minutes and getting to its peak in this very moment, in the game you never really have the posibility to make a decision like this, or if you want to just qietly move on or fight to do anything in the first place. Now you could point out the parts were you could "steal", or one particular with a potion in some kind of "shop" you could scip and go along, or "fight the owners for"... but those parts are so poorly designed, really! For the potion it is an invisuble line you have to pass somewhat infront of the potion, which will trigger a script making the peops standing before it to immediatly attack and the "stealing" is so random and with so little consequences, that i first didn't even recognize the difference and when i opened the first crate but didn't even take anything from it i notice "wait, wasn't the subtext red or something? what's that supposed to mean", but close to everyone around was already starting to attack and later, i didn't care anymore, because it would barely make a difference
8:25 no, never a point on the game
8:45 recognize the tear saying "doorway"? never appears in the game. an interwiev stated, that tears like these would accure to possibly bypass fights, which would have been cool, but was dropped
9:20 to bad, but no
10:15 remember the "superpower limit" for Elizabeth, kinda different, but still up in this trailer. Maybe i didn't use the tears in the game enough, because in most fights i only needed one or two, but i never recognized any restrictions, but it seemed like you could switch just as you wanted, whenever you wanted
12:00 i can't remember any skyline where you had the need to swith mid-riding, if in any cases, you only had obstacles to restrict parts before you would have cleared them away
12:45 where are all these dudes from? i mean, when i played through all the zepelins you could enter to bring them down were pretty much empty inside, or are there more on hard?
...and looking through the interweb these were actually the only two "major" trailers, later ones get shorter and shorter and show/tell less and less about the game. However, they never "corrected" the announcements they made or showed us throughougt development, on the contrary, in many interviews and announcements, i'm now to lazy to look up, they stated more enthusiasticly, how awesome the pieces they showed us would come together and form a complex world of choices on how to navigate through Columbia and how to resolve the problems at hand. Sure, they are allowed to change things, i can even imagine how sometimes developers have to be dissapointed, if some feature they wanted to implement then gets scratched in the process, because of various different reasons, but when it changes the majority of the gameplay you already showed to players, wouldn't it be good to say so? In a way, these trailers work like those/ the one for "Aliens: Colonial Marines" and i don't think i have to tell anyone how that played out? So please, don't try to tell me i would be factually false on this one, or show me how exactly i am.
Stephen Sossna said:
Soak said:
That is all highly subjective. As I said, the plot certainly has holes, but none of them in any way affect the impact of the story
as you play it. The plot and characters are certainly not on the level of good Literature, but they are still a fair bit ahead of the crowd. This goes back to "if you expect the game to be the best of everything ever made, you are going to be disappointed".
Now we could find out what is subjective and what is of measurable quality in a narrative, but i don't really feel like it right now
.
Instead, i would again just like to point out the comparison to the former BioShock: You didn't have to, but you could find out so much about the background stories of all those you encountered (every area, every named and even some unnamed enemies you would find) throughout playing it and even some more (sidestories told about characters you would never encounter, further establishing the whole background story of Rapture - and say what you want, but there are only half the amount of Voxophones in Infinite present and to me many of those appeared to be only half as interesting), plus the actions you took within the game actually had impact on the outcome (not in the best way designed, but it was very cool at the time the game was made and further increases immersion, which isn't as good in Infinite, making it a more complex, better narrated game. I can just imagine how cool it would have been to implement this into Infinite again, that your choices actually matter and that you would get different endings derived from those, blending perfectly into the premise of multiple dimensions. I am sad they didn't do that, yes, that is as subjective as it gets, but they certainly would have had the time and money and other recources to have done it and probably even better than in BioShock. They did otherwise and i respect that as an artistical statement, nonetheless i can still mention it.
Stephen Sossna said:
Also I can't find a single point about the combat that the first Bioshock did better than infinite. You do remember how tedious the big daddy fights could be, or how not having the right ammunition at hand could screw you up, of how all enemies where basically the same? There is a lot of selective perception going on in regards to Bioshock 1.
The weapon limit was functionally the same in Bioshock. Sure you could carry all the weapons, but you needed ammo for them, and you could only upgrade 2 to 3 weapons fully, which meant that, in practice, you were pretty much restricted to those. Neither do the vigors have less functionality than the plasmids, the functionality is just differently integrated. The only thing clearly missing is rage, but that always was an inferior possession anyways. Saying the combat in Infinite isn't perfect is fine, but I feel the people heavily criticising it tend to leave out all the interesting ideas that the game at least tried: Sky rail combat, switching between tears, heavy emphasis on positioning and traps.
Oh hell i can find lots of points to complain about the combat! The fact, that they did barely improve the points already criticized in BioShock, while they had said recources, knew about the problems, they could have changed them, but they didn't, is nothing but lazy design. Yes, as already said, the sky-devices are awesome and often make for exciting combat but then again aren't always present (sure if they would, they would become boring again fast), but in a way is even "counter" by so many other points which got even worse:
"Hacking" is now gone, or in a way replaced with that "charm" Vigor, which makes the combat more "fluent", considering you can fire it at any machine and know it now works for you for a set amount of time, but also less complex, compared to the former hacking, where you had to carefully look for the mechanical defences and sometimes plan on how to deal with them and as i liked it even more in BioShock 2, when you wanted to hack them in combat, you often got under preassure not to lose sight of your enemies and the hack-bar, unless you wanted to get toasted one way or another, or both ways. And here are the gears again... which replace the tonics from BioShock, which were well implemented in the game lore, were scattered throughout the game in set places, often secret (and there were lots more secrets in BioShock to reveal) and could make for nice combos, complementing the playstyle you would chose. The gear on the other hand has no connection to the lore (why would my hat set my sky-hook on fire?), is randomized on pickup and therefore may or may not complement your playstyle/ make for good combos (as i already stated in another post, i had a very wicked situation with gear, considering i had one for a long time which was completely useless to me, actually had a malus on what i originally wanted to do ("tunnel sight" or something it's called, one of the few with a malus), but i couldn't switch it out because i wouldn't find another piece for the slot for half the game, while i had one in another slot from close to the start, which would make me close to invulnurable whenever near a sky-device, which made for horribly broken combat). And compared to the Big Daddys (and Big Sisters for that), which you could chose when to fight or when to use for yourself to beat up others, while in Infinite you just get some "heavy hitters" sent against you in scripted situations which then would act like nothing but boring bullet sponges (i remember, when you get before the Bank of Columbia the first time, i big fight breaks out and at some point a handy-man appears. So i would just use the sky-line present to avoid him whenever possible, gun down the legions of other enemies, save him for last and then still need another minute just to finish him off because of his huge health bar).
Not to mention how the major part of gameplay as "super powers" (be it "Psionics", "Plasmids" or now "Vigors") is cut down on every title, making for easier/more simple, but less creative ways to use (Cyclone trap basically got implemented into all other Vigors, but would miss the push-ability, which was one of the best parts about it; Decoy is now implemented in tears, which are only axcessable in set places; Scout is missing in any form; the interaction with surroundings is seldom present and as already mentioned, but in my opinion most dissapointingly, Telekinesis is gone - and no, Undertow isn't Telekinesis, but more of a Sonic Boom which is only accessable for the last /10 of the game).
And while in System/ BioShock you had to "plan" on what to use, which "power to the people" station to use for what weapon upgrade, or on which Plasmid/Tonic to use your ADAM, in Infinite you just throw an amount of (random generated) money at whatever you want to use/try out.
I could probably think of some more examples for their bad combat-design, but already feel pretty save to say: They could and SHOULD have done better than this!
Stephen Sossna said:
Soak said:
I get how people who expected the game to be more like system shock are disappointed. But who are you to judge what the developers
should have provided? I find that argument terribly pretentious. I have watched that video review people have posted here, and it's main point is, similarily to yours, how the author thinks the game
should have been done:
- It should have elaborated on the founders/vox conflict and its implications more. Why? What could the game possibly have said that wouldn't come over as trite? That conflict is so old, there really isn't anything to say about it. No game is obligated to make political statements in regard to every conflict that is part of the story
- There should have been more inventory management and puzzles. Why? Inventory management in Bioshock didn't provide much for the gameplay, and it was actually criticized quite a bit for it's puzzles, which quickly got very, very boring. Now that these puzzles are gone people suddenly complain, as if they had forgotten that everyone thought the puzzles were stupid.
I think that if you honestly go back to Bioshock 1 and make a list of all the pros and cons of this game, the list of cons wouldn't be shorter than in Infinite. And if the game is up there with one of the best FPS/RPGs ever made, then why, really, would anyone be disappointed? Even if you expected the game to be "much better" than the original Bioshock, "pretty much as good as" would still be 9/10, would it not?
Well, i didn't expect Infinite to be more like SystemShock, i didn't even expect it to be "more like" BioShock. As from what i had seen and heard and read throughout the whole process of development i expected it to stand for it's own, but at least be as good as BioShock gameplay-wise. Though, i wasn't even as "hyped" as some others, i confess i was more hyped about Infinite than on any other game so far, but then i never was really hyped about any other game to begin with and i was still skeptical, which "promises" they made through trailers/ interviews and whatnot they would keep in the end.
Now, if i made a list of pros and cons about any Shock title i've played, sure there would be cons on any title, but i never said any of them would be perfect. But as i think about it, Infinite has much more cons and much less pros than any other title and this is simply out of balance (i would like to point out the different recources available to make them again) and even more out of balance considering all the good reviews it got.
So who am i to judge? Well, who is anyone to judge? Seriously, if the majority of "professional critics" isn't able to see and point at any of these flaws, but "blindly" praises Infinite and thereby do nothing but to follow the "hype", they just failed their profession! For myself, i am just a fan (and i rarely consider myself a "fan", but on this one it's true) of the former Shock-titles who sees how the franchise gets grinded down to a generic and for that even "bad" shooter with "some more story to tell" and i tell what i think about it, because it either gets "better again" in the future, or i stop playing and therefore buying the games of the series (which Levine hopes to bring out a title on a regular basis now) and as a customer, i have every right to do so!
