The Lockpicking Corollary
In a game with optional lockpicking mechanics, designers must include chests and doors and such that contain treasure to justify the investment of (usually) finite skill points in an otherwise non-combat skill. This reward cannot be too generous however, as it otherwise moves lockpicking from being an “interesting choice” into becoming the only reasonable option.
If a player got midway through a game only to discover a plot-specific item or one-of-a-kind upgrade was behind a door they could not open, the player would be understandably upset. At the same time, without such incentives the opportunity cost of taking Lockpicking over other skills is usually pretty high.
In games with Lockpicking or Hacking, I almost always pour points into training these skills because the “what’s in the boooooooox” feeling is too strong, despite my inevitable disappointment that it’s just some ammo and currency of negligible value. But what else could the designers really do? It all seems like an inevitable Lose-Lose scenario the very moment you introduce the choice; I feel bad for leaving unopened containers behind, and am disappointed with what they contain.
The Stealth Dilemma
As I mentioned last week, I have started playing Kingdoms of Amalur. At one point during the tutorial, the game showcased the ability to perform stealth kills.
Surprisingly brutal.
So, now I have a dilemma. Do I actually trust the designers to have gone all the way?
Stealth is always a risky game design concept. By its very nature, stealth avoids traditional combat; yet unless a game is stealth-centric – such as Tenchu, Metal Gear Solid, etc – it must feature traditional combat robust enough to satisfy a more action-oriented playstyle. The more robust the traditional combat is though, the more powerful stealth itself becomes. Indeed, as players become stronger and enemies increase in deadliness, stealth can pass a certain threshold of absurdness that makes any other strategy seem poor in comparison.
Few mixed-gameplay games handle stealth well, and even fewer take stealth “all the way.” When I started up Dragon Age: Origins for the first time, I chose to make a dwarf rogue. My thought process at the time was that I always wanted access to lockpicking and trap detection, but the thought of those sneak attack criticals also appealed to the tactical gamer in me.
As it turns out, playing a rogue in DA:O was a pain in the ass. While you can scout out rooms and such, the nature of these sort of games (and most games, actually) is that ambushes are controlled by invisible programming triggers, such as “enter this room.” Sometimes this let me pull some counter-ambush maneuvers, such as flooding a room I knew to be occupied by hidden enemies with fireballs and poison gas. Other times, my rogue was made visible automatically by mini-boss or cut-scene decree. While I could still occasionally score sneak attacks in combat, doing so basically removed my main character from the battle until she could slowly move into position while the rest of the party got battered.
There are only two games in recent memory that I feel handled stealth well. The first is Dishonored. While it is true that the game is stealth-centric and thus shouldn’t really “count,” I was nevertheless impressed by the designers’ gumption to take the stealth mechanics all the way, i.e. even usable on the last boss. Unfortunately, killing the final boss with a single shot also felt horribly dumb, all things considered; it should not have been easier taking out the last boss than the very first enemy you encountered. The opposite wherein bosses are immune to stealth isn’t much fun either, as Deus Ex: Human Revolution demonstrated.
The second game that I felt supported stealth all the way was Skyrim. While I am not entirely sure if you could actually stealth around the last boss (such as it is), there was a talent at the end of the Sneak tree that allowed you to temporarily cloak long enough to activate your heightened Sneak Attack critical multipliers for an attack or two. Like with Dishonored, it felt sort of cheesy, but I had been two-shotting sleeping dragons with my bow for hours beforehand, so I already knew the absurd stealth line had been crossed.
Now that I think about it, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas also supported stealth gameplay all the way. Indeed, sometimes I feel like my playthroughs would have been 20-30 hours shorter, had I not been crouch-crawling through most of the game.
And so now I am left with the Amalur decision. As I level, shall I invest in stealth-based skills and abilities in the hopes they won’t be made irrelevant by boss battles and dungeon design? Or should I ignore the fig-leaf stealth design and instead focus on more mundane, useful abilities that I can actually utilize against 100% of the enemies I face, including the final boss? Or perhaps I should trust in my moment-to-moment stealth gameplay joys, having what fun I can in whatever percentage of the game allows me to stealth through?
It remains a dilemma either way. Many people celebrate having these sort of choices in their videogames, but choice requires trust in designers that one’s choices will actually be meaningful, and most importantly: balanced. When it comes stealth, as fun as it is, sometimes it is not worth letting the player have his or her way.
I Think I’ll Pass, Curt
A few days ago, I realized I had a GameFly icon on my desktop and couldn’t remember why. As it turns out, I had bought Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning at some point, undoubtedly during a sale of some sort. After installing the game, I was presented with the following screen:
I wonder if it all gets forwarded to Rhode Island…
I declined, of course.
Out of curiosity though, I checked to see what exactly would be going on with the website:
Strangest cyber-squatter ever?
Uh… huh.
In any case, now that I have Amalur downloaded and synced to my (sigh…) Origin account, I think I’ll go ahead and give it a spin. It kind of boggles my mind though, that Amalur still has a MSRP of $30 on Steam – nevermind how it was $60 last year, months after the bankruptcy. I know creditors need to be paid and all that (or maybe not), but those banking goons should have taken a page out of the THQ handbook when they did their massive sale blitzkrieg on Saints Row the Third and other games. I did end up getting Amalur on a $5-$10 sale, but they could have gotten my money a lot sooner than they did.
Cert-Gate
SOE dropped the bomb on Planetside 2 a few hours ago. In the latest 38mb patch, these seemingly innocuous patch notes appeared:
- A certification grant has been done for players who purchased duplicate weapons on multiple characters.
- Please note that if this causes a player’s certifications to go over 10,000 they will not accumulate any more certification points until some have been spent to bring it below the cap.
When Ps2 first launched, all the weapon unlocks were on a per-character basis. Fairly recently, SOE decided that one of the perks of purchasing faction-agnostic weapons with Station Cash was that it would unlock the weapon on all of your characters. Usually, the choice is 700 SC (~$7) or 1000 Certs for a weapon, with 1000 Certs representing a pretty significant investment both in time (I accumulated around 9,000 Certs after 150+ hours) and opportunity cost (spending Certs on class upgrades, like more fuel for your jetpack). Still, using Certs to unlock weapons means you can play for free; so being able to unlock one weapon and use it on every faction makes the Station Cash option that much more competitive. “But wait,” players reasonably asked, “what about all that Station Cash I spent on weapons I now have a useless duplicate of?”
Well, today we have SOE’s response: Certification reimbursement. But something has gone horribly, horribly wrong:
Spot the differences.
Yes, you are seeing that correctly. SOE has reimbursed me twenty-six thousand (26,000) Certs.
Holy mother of god.
The official version of things is exactly what I wrote above: SOE decided to reimburse the people who bought two of the same gun on two same-faction characters at a 1 SC for 2 Cert ratio. Did I spend $130 on, frankly, poorly-planned purchases on redundant toons? Of course not. As it turns out, the database query also captured all transactions in which you bought an item that was later a part of a bundle that you purchased anyway. For example, I bought the rocket pods for the jet only to find out they were included in the “Vehicle Starter Bundle” along with a lot of other juicy weapons; while I did not get a discount for already owning the rocket pods, the rest of the bundle was still a good enough deal to purchase.
The result is 26,000 Certs. On each of my three toons. And SOE has said they aren’t going to roll them back.
This is a literal case of the common WoW “log on, collect epix” hyperbole. The only thing I cannot buy with these Certs are helmets, camo, and other such visual extras. Oh, and XP boosts, but I don’t think I will ever be interested in such things again.
So I bought things. Lots of things. And upgraded everything else. A new pump shotgun came out today, this time with 11 pellets to the standard 10 at the expense of a slower rate of fire. Just last week I bought each faction’s pump shotgun for SC as they were 50% off. But who cares? I need to chew through these Certs because there is actually a 10,000 Cert cap beyond which you can’t earn any more.
Pretty much everything useful.
I stopped spending Certs after going down to around 4,700 as I found myself starting to purchase ridiculous shit. Did you know the Medic can carry around two sticks of C4? I would never have unlocked such nonsense for 700 total Certs, but now I have it. Forever. I can also give out Empire-wide orders and listen in on Commander chat now. Just ’cause. I was actually starting to worry about squandering my giant pile of unearned Certs – it is small enough to only purchase four new weapons – but it occurred to me that I still have a bit over 50% of the total amount of Certs I have ever had.
Let that last sentence wash over you for a second.
The big question mark, at least on a personal level, is where things go from here. After the 1.5 hour spending spree, I still participated in one of the newfangled Alerts. Let me tell you, it was great fun zipping around in a kitted-out Scythe with a 5-minute timer instead of a 9-minute one. Prior to today, I had been conflicted as to whether my next big purchase was going to unlock a second stick of C4 for the Light Assault (finally allowing me to potentially take out a Sunderer solo) or if I was going to unlock Rank 3 of my Scythe’s hover frame. I had previously waffled so much over the decision that I ended up hitting 1200 Certs a few days ago and purchased a submachine gun for my Infiltrator instead, practically unlocking a brand new play-style for the class.
But… now? Will I feel the same way about Planetside 2 without the progression angle? After all, I lost complete interest in WoW PvP once I had full Honor gear last time around. For now, I think SOE is safe; the core mechanics of shooting people in a wide-open world is great fun.
It is an open question though, how SOE will weather the building rage on the forums and Reddit. Not everyone got 26,000 Certs, and I can imagine what all those Battle Rank 90s are feeling to have my BR 38 ass flying/driving/shooting circles around their more generalist loadouts.
Hyperinflation has come to Auraxis in a major way, and the future is looking quite a bit grimmer than it was just yesterday.
Wait, When Did THIS Happen?
European Courts have ruled that it is legal to resale digital software licenses:
Buying and reselling any form of digital software is perfectly legal, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled. Software authors – or in the gaming world, publishers – can not stop customers from reselling their games, even if the publisher attaches an End User License Agreement prohibiting resale.
“The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a license is exhausted on its first sale,” the court has found.
This ruling covers customers in European Union member states, and games bought through services such as Steam or Origin. […]
Okay, so I do know when it happened: July 3rd, 2012. But… who… when… huh? That is damn near a year ago. Has anything gone forward since then?
I mean, the absolute latest news was April 2nd, when a US District Court stated that reselling iTunes songs violated copyright laws. Conversely, buying textbooks from Thailand and selling them in the US for profit is legal, according to the US Supreme Court. As is streaming TV service Aereo, for that matter.
Looking at that European ruling again, I would actually say there wouldn’t be any contradiction in reselling a license. You aren’t copying any files, you are merely removing your own rights to a digital good and granting them to another… and they’re the ones downloading it. Hell, in an always-online-esque DRM scheme, such a transfer would arguably be the safest for the publisher considering the seller literally cannot access the game anymore (as opposed to the honor system when it comes to reselling music CDs).
Obviously every publisher everywhere would fight tooth and nail against this breaking of their digital monopoly, just as companies like Microsoft (and Sony for a while) contemplate ways to smother the used game market. But the question of licenses has yet to be settled, and I am inclined to show uncharacteristic optimism in this regard. Most people would not look at playing Halo at a friend’s house as piracy or consider yard sales as theft, and yet that is what these companies would want you to believe.
Personally, I think it is only a matter of time until logic and common sense forever strip the asinine “you don’t own a videogame!” argument from corporate apologists everywhere. Physical game or license, you nevertheless (should) have the right to sell it. Nothing less makes sense.
The Next Xbox May Have Always-Online Requirement
The rumormill is a-churning away on this piece of news:
“Unless something has changed recently,” one of the sources told us over email, “Durango consumer units must have an active internet connection to be used.”
Durango is the codename for the next-gen Xbox.
“If there isn’t a connection, no games or apps can be started,” the source continued. “If the connection is interrupted then after a period of time–currently three minutes, if I remember correctly–the game/app is suspended and the network troubleshooter started.”
Lending a sort of credence to the entire affair, and once again proving that people become drooling morons on Twitter, is this series of Tweets from the Microsoft Creative Director, Adam Orth. I will go ahead and transcribe them here instead of just posting pictures of tweets like the dozen lazy websites I checked before realizing that no one else was going to do it:
Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an “always on” console. Every device now is “always on”. That’s the world we live in. #dealwithit
I want every device to be “always on”.
Alex Wells: Off the top of my head I know 5 people who own 360’s who current have no access to the internet. They would be screwed.
@TheonlyAlexW Those people should definitely get with the time and get the internet. It’s awesome.
Manveerheir: Did you learn nothing from Diablo III or SimCity? You know some people’s internet goes out right? Deal with it is a shitty reason.
@manveerheir Electricity goes out too.
Sometimes the electricity goes out. I will not purchase a vacuum cleaner.
The mobile reception in the area I live in is spotty and unreliable. I will not buy a mobile phone.
Microsoft apologized for the tweets by someone “not a spokesman for Microsoft” a day later.
Personally, I feel this is one of those rumors stupid enough to be true. Microsoft is already requiring the Kinect to be running the entire time the Xbox 720 is on, because somehow it’s important to Microsoft for there to be a camera trained on your living room the entire time you are playing Halo 5. Besides, this is not even the first time we have heard about this – here is an article back in February from an insider saying that Xbox games will require an online activation code and installation to the HD, thereby making the disc worthless to anyone else. It is not much of a leap to go from online activation keys to always-online.
Lost in all of this, of course, is what possible benefit there is to the consumer. Always-Online is not a feature, no matter how hard EA’s COO spins it, it’s a restriction. You have to be online to pay an MMO, or PlanetSide 2, or whatever other multiplayer game, yes, but that is because those individuals are not in your house. The single-player campaign or indie game or whatever is in your house and doesn’t require outside intervention except arbitrarily. Remember the SimCity fiasco? There were zero server-side calculations, or at least calculations that needed to be sent out to EA’s bank of super-computers (…lol) to process. Even if you could argue that Leaderboards or cloud saving were worthwhile features, no rational arguments were given as to why they could not simply have been optional.
Adam Orth’s analogy with cell phones is particularly instructive in regards to these corporate drones’ idiotic thought processes. Does your smartphone simply shut down and become unusable the moment you lose coverage? Or can you continue playing Angry Birds or taking photos or listening to music you saved to the device? Whether I am always-online already or not, there is no benefit to the requirement.
In any case, I cannot possibly imagine a better advertisement for the PS4 than the next Xbox coming out with an always-online requirement. Will it sway a majority of people away from the Xbox? Probably not. But as the margins in the console business continue getting slimmer, perhaps there will be enough losses that these anti-consumer practices will stop making their way out of the fevered wet dreams of CFOs everywhere.
And if not, well, there is always the $99 Ouya, right?
Weekend Anime Review Update
Just a quick note that I have finished my transition of decade-old anime reviews from my 2003 AngelFire (!) website that was, inexplicably, still online – people weren’t kidding when they say there is only one internet. While some of reviews are cringe-inducing, I am nevertheless impressed by the exhaustive thoroughness of some of the others written in my youth. If you want to read a nearly 2000-word treatise on Evangelion or 1500 words on Now & Then, Here & There, well, now you can.
I (un)fortunately stopped writing anime reviews halfway through college, and thus none exist for some of the other popular works like Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo and the like; it is unlikely that I will go back and write some up, just like I have little interest in importing the 60+ RPG reviews I wrote back in the day when I freelanced.
Anyway, I have pretty much decided to not feature anime reviews in the post feed proper (i.e. here), and instead periodically mention when several go up at once. So, well, several additional anime micro-reviews are also up, including Sword Art Online, Elfen Lied, and so on. Just click on the Review button along the top bar and navigate your way down to the Anime section.
My goal with these is simply to give you a quick overview of what to expect with the show, and to perhaps help decide if it’s worth watching. At this point, I am basically choosing shows at random as I am too far removed from the culture to know what to look for. If you happen to have some suggestions, perhaps in the form of a website or podcast you follow, by all means let me know.
My Issues with the Bioshock Infinite Plot
As you might imagine, the following post contains many spoilers. Read at your own peril.
I did want to get two things out of the way first (and help create some extra spoiler insulation). The first is to reiterate, as I did in my review, that I very much enjoyed certain aspects of Bioshock Infinite. The characterizations were quite good; Elizabeth in particular was fantastic. I also enjoyed the art style and the music. The combat was particularly weak in my opinion (and others), but not terrible enough to preclude suggesting the game to other people, at least at a lower price-point.
The imagery alone is worth, like, nearly $10.
Secondly, there is almost nothing in this world more personally maddening than when people suggest a given narrative is good (or the best ever) simply because it appears complicated. Why is convoluted nonsense confused for depth? I had to turn off this Kotaku audio spoiler discussion because the hosts actually suggested that not thinking about (for example) time travel paradoxes makes time travel plots better. Well… yeah. That works because you are taking away the bullshit plot as it actually exists and then substituting your own, better version in its place. And odds are that your own version doesn’t make any more goddamn sense, cobbled together as it is with your vague, unexamined good feelings rather than the jumbled pieces presented by the original writers.
I am not asking for a happy ending. I am not asking for Saturday Morning cartoon simplicity. Hell, I am even completely fine with leaving things up for interpretation; Inception’s ending was perfect, for example. What I am not fine with is when vague nonsense is elevated to absurd heights. If Bioshock Infinite’s plot is actually any good, then surely it can stand up to some peanut gallery criticism. Right? Right.
And by all means, if I am talking out of my ass on any of the below points, or you want to provide a different perspective, call me out in the comments below.
.
.
.
.
Redefinition of what Alternate Universes mean.
First off, this may seem like a minor quibble, but I think a lot of the confusion and suggested paradoxes stem from the fact that Bioshock Infinite is inventing its own version of multiverse/time travel theory. Levine is basically saying “I’m going to take this hackneyed, impossible-to-do-right concept and solve it with three words: ‘Constants and variables.'” What about the Grandfather Paradox? “Constants and variables.” What about all the universes in which Comstock is a good guy, or those in which Booker doesn’t sell Anna? “Constants and variables.” Why couldn’t Elizabeth just stage an intervention to keep Booker from drinking and gambling? CONSTANTS AND VARIABLES.
I’m sorry, presenting a multiverse theory in which there are “millions and millions” of other Comstocks and yet certain outcomes are arbitrarily 100% set in stone is simply lazy storytelling. I mean, it is not even inconsistent for there to be universes in which Booker never sold Anna! It almost feels like Levine crafted the “constants” based entirely on being able to railroad the player in that one room with the baby. You can still have an impetus to stop Comstock in any of the universes in which he turns into a bad guy, even if it is not ALL universes. Or, hell, add some moral ambiguity to the story by suggesting eliminating the bad Comstocks is “worth” killing all the good ones too.
“Constants and Variables” might be a novel “solution” to the problems of alternative universe storytelling, but only because no other writer thought anyone would actually buy into it. This feels like deus ex machina ^ ∞.
“There are a million million other Comstocks”
Someone has some daddy issues.
This was my literal reaction to Elizabeth’s line about why the game wasn’t technically over after killing Comstock:
“So what?”
Seriously, so what if there are a million million other ones? There are a million million other bad things in alternate universes too – not to mention real life in 1912 – but we don’t seem to be solving those. Was what Comstock did in the Columbia period so bad that killing him at the point in the timeline which we did, was not good enough? Let’s drown him a million million times in that same fountain, as god only knows our conveniently omnipotent Elizabeth can time travel us there; there isn’t even the Constants and Variables bullshit to get in our way. Elizabeth and Booker quite literally have all the time in the world.
When did the drowning occur?
Speaking of drowning, when did Booker get drowned by the Elizabethes? Before or after the baptism? If before, why did that not kill off all Bookers/Annas/Elizabeths, e.g. make the after-credits scene impossible? If it occurred after the baptism, as the extra scene seems to convey, why is it so important for Booker to come to the “smothering” decision? Why is the player’s Booker smothered, instead of watching a new Comstock get smothered? Narrative convenience?
At first, I thought the answer was easy. In the game proper, it seems as though Booker shares the memories of any universe he has been in. For example, after bringing in the weapons, Booker has memories of being a hero of the Vox. In this way, by traveling to the past (time travel and alternate universes, this is so deep u guyz) and presumably merging with the post-Baptism-yet-pre-Comstock Booker, we can have a scenario in which a not-yet-Comstock Booker realizes what is going to happen and accept the need for his own drowning.
None, apparently.
Which is… a pretty shitty moral scenario, if you think about it. More on that in a moment.
Of course, if the above is actually the case, then how is it possible for Booker and Comstock to exist in the same universe in the first place? Why doesn’t Booker have Comstock’s memories the moment he wakes up in the row boat, or when getting into Columbia, or when physically drowning Comstock in the baptismal fountain (ooo, foreshadowing) in the game proper?
To be honest, I might have missed the explanation for why Booker wasn’t a drooling, nosebleeding basketcase like the other dead-now-alive soldiers. Or why those soldiers were having such a hard time when, at best, they were “remembering” alternate universes in which they were dead. If the dead soldiers were now alive due to us changing things in the past, what does that really mean for the great swaths of population we killed across Columbia even in a no-Comstock scenario?
Negating all events that were experienced
Right in the feels.
Let us pretend for a moment that the ending makes perfect sense, there are no plot holes, and everything is wrapped up with a neat little bow. Hell, let’s pretend the ending is even happy, despite the fact that Booker is still a murdering, gambling, union-busting alcoholic single father with enough debt to legitimately consider selling his own daughter to the first person who opens a checkbook. And let’s further assume that he retained the memories of all that he accomplished in the game, perhaps giving him an impetus to try and set everything right instead of dropping baby Anna off in a basket at the closest orphanage.
In this best case scenario, Bioshock Infinite is a game in which all your actions are voided. Everything you struggled to accomplish is erased. None of it happened. Every moral choice you made, every time you refrained from stealing from cash registers, every interracial kindness you demonstrated never matters because those people/scenarios never exist. It boils down to a “it was all a dream” scenario, which is the most pernicious storytelling mechanic in the history of narrative.
If I had no other problems with the story, this alone would be enough to throw my hands up in disgust. Do you really feel like a game in which you endeavor to negate everything that happens is deep and meaningful? You can accomplish all the game has set you out to accomplish by simply not playing. As prophesied by WOPR in 1983: “the only winning move is not to play [Bioshock Infinite].”
Moral of the story?
Creepy Level: The Shining
Finally, let me kind of wrap all these various ingredients up into one complete shit sandwich. What exactly is the message being conveyed here in Bioshock Infinite? What is the theme, the moral of the story?
At the beginning, I almost felt like Booker was trying to make up for his sins, to seek forgiveness and redemption, to put things right. But what is Booker’s actual crime that he is repenting? To stop a person he never turned out to be from entrapping the person he is into a crime a third version must now stop? Booker choosing to be drowned seems a noble sacrifice until you realize what exactly he is undoing: choices he never made. Or, even worse, stopping a man (Comstock) he had no choice into becoming. There is never any “good Comstock” because apparently being bad is a constant. Fate. Predestination.
What is the message here about personal responsibility, free will, and choice? You have none because Constants and Variables. And suddenly, infinite universes means you are implicitly responsible to consequences that you never chose and never happened in your own universe. Do you remember when you donated to charity instead of setting a baby on fire? Well, you should feel real bad anyway because the not-you baby-arsonist is running amok and it’s up to you to stop yourself like you already did by not setting the baby on fire in the first place. GUYZ, DEEPEST PLOT EVAR.
Even worse, apparently Booker is the one on the hook for what the Lutece twins are ultimately responsible for. Who invented the Tear machine? Who gave it to Comstock? Why isn’t this game about the Lutece twins stopping themselves from transdimensional kidnapping, extortion, and/or human trafficking?
Ah, right. “Constants and variables.” And when the Lutece twins invent the Tear machine anyway and give it to the next megalomaniac – a real shortage of those in the early 1900s, let me tell you – it will once again be somebody else’s alternate-reality problem.
_______
Fake Edit: After “playing” through the ending sequence again, I believe the drowning question can be put to bed. Elizabeth(es) specifically say:
Preacher Witting: Booker DeWitt, are you ready to be born again?
Booker: What is this? Why are we back here?
Elizabeth: This isn’t the same place, Booker.
Booker: Of course it is, I remember – wait. You’re not… you’re not… who are you?
Elizabeth: You chose to walk away. But in other oceans you didn’t. You took the baptism. And you were born again as a different man.
Booker: Comstock.
Elizabeth: It all has to end. To never have started. Not just in this world. But in all of ours.
Booker: Smother him in the crib.
Elizabeth Esemble: Smother… smother… smother..
Elizabeth: Before the choice is made. Before you are reborn.
Preacher Witting: And what name shall you take my son?
Elizabeth: He’s Zachary Comstock. He’s Booker DeWitt.
Booker: No… I’m both.
In other words, it was not Comstock that was smothered in the crib, it was Booker before he made the choice to be baptized or refuse. Meaning, both Booker and Comstock are dead. Meaning, the after-credits scene is either a vision of an afterlife, or a cheap plot hole to make you feel better while masquerading as deep storytelling.
Please, tell me I’m wrong about any of this. Tell me there is a legitimate reason people are praising this plot, as if it holds even the slightest of candles to the original Bioshock. Am I missing something? Perhaps, you know, the Tear into an alternate universe in which Bioshock Infinite’s plot is any good?
Review: Bioshock Infinite
Game: Bioshock Infinite
Recommended price: $15
Metacritic Score: 96
Completion Time: ~14 hours
Buy If You Like: Stripped down, Art-Over-Substance FPS console ports
If only this level of polish extended to the gameplay.
Something that I struggle with when starting a videogame for the first time, is under which critique rubric I am to judge the experience. Sometimes the circumstances makes it easy: a $10 indie title ensures low-expectations, with potential high returns on either an entertainment-per-dollar basis (FTL, Binding of Isaac, SPAZ) or even an artistic one (LIMBO, Bastion). Indeed, in the years since the indie game revolution gained steam, I have found it increasingly difficult to justify $40-$60 Day 1 purchases of even AAA titles. What is the point, other than proactively (and expensively) avoiding spoilers? It was with this thought and a few other development team concerns that I initially decided to forgo Bioshock Infinite’s Day 1 purchase. That is, until I watched this fateful Adam Sessler video review. I mean, how could you not whip out your credit card right there?
Now, some 14 hours later and $45 poorer, I am wishing for an alternate reality in which I waited for the inevitable 75% off Steam sale to purchase the game.
Bioshock Infinite follows the story of Booker DeWitt, as he searches the floating streets of Columbia to bring back a girl to erase his debts. It is immediately clear at the beginning that Columbia is both visually stunning – seriously, where did these guys pull this fidelity out of the Unreal hat? – and an overt, artistic repudiation of Pax Americana fetishism. While rifling through picnic baskets and trashcans for every last silver dollar, you will run into signs of the blunt, religiously-justified racism and bigotry of the early 1900s. While I would be surprised if this is the first videogame rendition of this particular theme, Sessler is not wrong about game aspect of Bioshock Infinite functioning as a more effective prism to explore this theme, than had this been a book or movie and showing the same thing.
Elizabeth is the color in this Paint By Numbers.
Sessler and the other reviewers whom have catapulted Bioshock Infinite to a 96 (!!) Metacritic score are also not wrong about the brilliant elegance of Elizabeth. Rescued fairly early, Elizabeth initially serves both as a foil to the stoic/cynical Booker and as a player narrative stand-in. As the game progresses though, she provides a sort of… warmth that becomes noticeably lacking from the game proper whenever she is absent. Sometimes it is mesmerizing just watching her run around – the number of animations are incredible – or when she sits at a park bench as Booker stuffs his face with candy bars looted from the pockets of the slain. Immune to all damage, Elizabeth nevertheless avoids feeling like mere window-dressing (even in combat), while also avoiding the immersion-breaking pathing bugs we have come to expect from companion AI. She is simply… there. Present. And Bioshock Infinite is better for it.
I would also be remiss if I did not briefly mention the absolutely amazing soundtrack. While the omnipresent “angry violins” battle music gets old pretty fast, nearly everything single other ambient score is both haunting and melodic. Periodically there will even be barbershop-quartet-esque pieces that quite literally caused me to remove my hands from the keyboard and mouse to simply experience. Hearing songs like Will the Circle Be Unbroken and God Only Knows satisfies a need I never even knew existed. Any game that can fit in classical Mozart in a way both consistent with the fiction and powerful in execution gets mad props from me.
Unfortunately, where Sessler and all the other reviewers go off the rails is when they talk about (or conspicuously omit talking about) the actual game bits.
Simply put: Bioshock Infinite is not a very good FPS title, and absolutely not at all a good Bioshock title from a gameplay perspective. The skeleton is all there, with Vigors replacing the Plasmids, but there isn’t any meat. The gunplay is simplistic. Environmental damage combos are virtually non-existent. While the eight Vigors available seem to be a comparable number to the original Bioshock, the (usually) extremely open battle environments lends itself to one or two extremely OP strategies. For example, in an early combination with some equipment, using the secondary fire of Murder of Crows to create a single nest trap can disable dozens of enemies across the entire map; when one nest triggers, the crows chain from enemy to enemy, stunning and damaging them, and all enemies leave nest traps if they die while afflicted. Alternatively, once the Possession Vigor is upgraded, it essentially one-shots most enemies in addition occasionally scoring you kills if they actually get in some damage on friends.
For the record, I played beginning to end on Hard difficulty. So when I say things like the gunplay was simplistic, I do not mean that enemies fell over from one or two shots. Instead, firing the guns takes little skill, and there is little variety in the types of guns – there is no reason to have the Machine Gun, Burster, Repeater, and Crank Gun in the same game, for example, as they all occupy the same design space. While the skylines provided a useful gimmick to certain battlefields, their primary purpose seemed to be giving you the opportunity to one-shot weak enemies with a melee attack that would otherwise only remove 20% of their health.
Da Birds, da Birds.
The fingerprints of Console-ification are also all over the place. Bioshock Infinite uses a completely oblique Checkpoint system, with no Save & Exit option. There are no Quicksaves. Booker has a regenerating shield, and can carry only two weapons at a time. There are no First Aid Kits or other inventory-esque items, although there is “clothing” that acts as swappable passive abilities. While changing clothes might have added some depth to the combat, the reality is that most of the items are hopelessly weak in comparison to the aforementioned OP combos.
While some of these things do not sound bad on their own, the problem arises when you then apply these simpler systems to an artistic game so focused on encouraging exploration inbetween the banal combat. Why barge into every non-locked house on the street – and see the thematically consistent bigotry – if there is quite literally no point to do so? Even if I accept that Checkpoints aren’t all that much different in practice than Quicksaves, the ever-present hunt to replenish my First Aid Kit supply drove me to explore every inch of Rapture, to my ultimate edification. Conversely, I explored Columbia out of a vague sense of propriety, like when an acquaintance takes you on a tour of his house even though you couldn’t care less about what the pantry looks like. Don’t get me wrong, I explored every masterfully crafted inch of Columbia that I could. But the whole time I sat there thinking “There is no reason for me to be here,” which I count as a deficiency in the game design, especially given how the original Bioshock played out.
Finally, in an effort to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible, I will not talk about the specific issues I had with Bioshock Infinite’s plot or overall narrative. Suffice it to say, I did not feel that the actual message the writers were trying to convey made a whole lot of sense given what was presented and foreshadowed. Indeed, the whole narrative felt disjointed, likely due to the first half of the game consisting almost entirely of exploring Columbia’s working class issues, rather than the more fantastical premises that dominate the later game.
Ultimately, Bioshock Infinite is clearly an ambitious game, but at the end, I felt like nearly every aspect of it did not live up to its inherent promise. While that is a shame, that doesn’t mean you should avoid the experience altogether. Bioshock Infinite is definitely a game worth playing, it is simply not worth playing for full MSRP, or even half that amount. If you can wait, you should. And as far as Sessler and the others predicting Bioshock Infinite’s long-term “lionization” and discussion “for years to come,” well… I think they will be waiting for that for quite some time. Perhaps until the heat death of the universe.
In An Age 
Interesting Choices
Apr 15
Posted by Azuriel
Tobold put up a rather cringe-inducing critique of Mass Effect 3 the other day, prefaced by the Sid Meier quote of “good games are a series of interesting choices.” From there, Tobold argued that ME3 was not a good game, because the story choices being presented did not lead to gameplay changes. Indeed, he goes so far as to say in the comments:
First, that argument is so absurdly cliche that I started questioning whether he was simply trolling us at that point.
Secondly, in point of fact, you could not simply wait for Mass Effect: the Movie because any such film could not encompass the varied plot choices you can make over the course of the game. Characters can die in Mass Effect 1 & 2 and thus not show up in Mass Effect 3, cutting out entire swaths of character arcs. Who makes it through the Suicide Mission? Would the film feature a male Shepard or FemShep? Would the choices be primarily Paragon or Renegade? Which races get the shaft? Would the conclusion be the Red, Blue, or Green Cupcake?
The green one. Always the green one.
Third, I believe Tobold’s stance is exceedingly pernicious to the maturation of gaming as a medium. It simply boggles my mind that a self-professed lover of D&D would twist “interactive story” into a pejorative; are non-interactive stories supposed to be preferable?
Individual agency has a way of submerging players into a narrative in a way that traditional storytelling does not. Just look at the mind-bending (at the time) twist in the original Bioshock and the narrative arc in Far Cry 2. Even if you were not particularly impressed with the depth of these narratives, those story mechanisms simply cannot be replicated in book or movie form. Reducing games to their mere mechanical components would be an incredible tragedy of potential.
What the exchange highlighted to me though, was how squishy the venerable Sid Meier quote actually is.¹ To me, the choice between curing the Krogan genophage or deciding not to was interesting. In fact, I spent ten minutes or so agonizing over it when the dialog wheel was presented. Was it fair of us to cripple an entire species because we feared their hardiness and breeding speed? At first, I was worried about that hypothetical. Once the Reapers were gone, who is to say that the Krogans don’t simply out-breed and out-muscle the rest of us out of the universe? Then I thought: wait a minute, is this not the same sort of argument used against inter-racial marriages in the past, and even concerns about Islam today?
In contrast, Tobold simply picked whatever gave him the most War Assets.
This was meaningful to me, god damn you.
I do agree that a good game is full of interesting choices. But what should be obvious to anyone spending more than a minute thinking about it, is that what is interesting to one person can be boring/irrelevant/pointless to someone else. “Interesting” is not an objective term; Sid Meier may as well quipped “Good games are full of fun” for all the sage wisdom it contains.
¹ The full quote is actually: “According to Sid Meier, a [good] game is a series of interesting choices. In an interesting choice, no single option is clearly better than the other options, the options are not equally attractive, and the player must be able to make an informed choice.” (Rollings & Morris 2000, p. 38.) This does not meaningfully change my objections, as whether an option is “clearly better” and/or “equally attractive” is necessarily subjective. For example, I almost always prefer passive abilities to active ones, to the point that most of the WoW talent tree levels have only a single rational (to me) option.
Posted in Commentary
2 Comments
Tags: Bioshock, Choices, Far Cry 2, Game Design, Genophage, Interactive Storytelling, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 3, Sid Meier, Tobold