Pokes head up.
Hello everyone. I'm feeling much better, and am starting to get back into the swing of some simming things. You still won't see me about a lot, but I am poking at my chapter and trying to get back to checking LJ and responding to my f-list. Today's post though is something completely different and very long winded.
During my hiatus, I’ve been playing a couple of other games to take a break from TS2 and clear my head. I thought I’d jot down some of my thoughts on them here, just like I have with DAII and ME in the past.
The first game I’m going to talk about, is Bioshock Infinite, because although, it’s not the first game I picked up, it is the first one I completed.
The premise of the game is that you play Booker DeWitt, veteran of the US Cavalry and Ex-Pinterton Detective turned Private Eye. You’re an alcoholic and a gambler who has gotten into debt with some men you really don’t want to be in debt to. They’ve given you the task to travel to the floating city of Columbia in order to “bring us the girl (Elizabeth) and wipe away the debt.” It sounds simple enough, but of course it isn’t.
I wasn’t going to get this game: I haven’t played the first two Bioshocks, even though they were on my list of games to get (Widget kindly gifted me the first game the other week, and I’ve played through the intro now), and I didn’t know anything about this one, but a few of the youtubers I follow started playthroughs or did videos of it and it was getting very high scores (10/10s and 5/5s) so I was intrigued. I have to say I enjoyed the game a lot: it’s a good solid FPS, but did I think it was worth the perfect scores it was getting? No, I don’t, and I’ll explain why in this.
I guess I should point out that I’m a picky person, and as far as I’m concerned, for a game to get a perfect score, it has to be a perfect game, and I’ve not come across one of those yet. Even TS2, which as you all know I love to bits, to the point where if I was told I could only play one game for the rest of eternity, I would pick it with no hesitation, isn’t a perfect game to me. I have to use too many third party hacks to fix bits of the code, and there are too many game mechanics written into the very core of the game which will lead to your neighbourhoods becoming irredeemably corrupted, for it to be perfect. Bioshock Infinite is by no means perfect, either in the way it’s coded, the gameplay or the story, but it is a good game and worth playing.
Visuals
I’m going to start talking about the graphics first because I’m a sucker for the pretteh, and this game is pretty. My graphics card is a little aged now, and can’t cope with some of the new fancy post processing effects the newest games utilise, but after turning those off, I could play with textures and level of detail on ultra and still get a frame rate which didn’t affect gameplay.
The city of Columbia itself is beautiful, with well rendered buildings and little touches, even if some of the models for items are so low poly I wouldn’t even put them in TS2.
My biggest complaints are that the colours look a little oversaturated to me (but I can understand why the developers would make the decision to do this: it adds a real wow factor to the place when you first see it, and is a good contrast to not only the lighthouse where you start off, but with the city of Rapture in the first Bioshock), and there is far too much bloom. I don’t like bloom very much: it gives me the impression that my eyes are blurring because there’s something wrong with them and I can’t see the textures clearly. I really don’t like it. I would have preferred an option to turn the bloom down or off, but again I can see what the developers were going for with it, that it shows the impressive, bright quality of light in the city due to its altitude and gives everything a heavenly glow. The saturation and bloom also help to give the city a cartoony look, rather than a realistic look and I do think that works, especially with Elizabeth’s character model.
I also really liked the Steampunk elements present in the design, and they felt very natural, unlike some Steampunk where anachronistic elements are shoehorned into things because they create the effect of a futuristic design or look cool. (I’m thinking of vacuum tubes or valves turning up in decidedly 19th century settings for no real reason. *shudders*) The mechanical horses are especially great.
The story is set in 1912, but Columbia has been isolated since the turn of the century. I’m not an expert in the Edwardian era or pre-war years, and certainly not from the viewpoint of American history, but apart from one outfit that has me foaming at the mouth, the clothing of the townsfolk isn’t bad. It’s not 100% accurate, but it does the job of conveying that this is set in the early part of the 20th century. I mean, certainly the number of men in shirtsleeves would be unusual from an English standpoint (shirts still had connotations from when they were underwear at this time, and so it was not “polite” for a man to appear in public without a jacket), but I don’t know about from an American perspective so it could be fine. Likewise, the lady’s wear isn’t cutting edge Edwardian fashion, but the shapes and styles are of the time and look good.
The one outfit that leaves me foaming at the mouth? Well I’m going to put it into a spoiler because it doesn’t appear until after the halfway point of the game.
[Spoiler (click to open)]That outfit is the one Elizabeth changes into after Finkton. It commits a cardinal sin in my eyes: she wears an 1890s corset as a bodice! Ok, ok I know it’s justified by her saying that is all she could find to wear and the clothes she was wearing up until that point were ruined, but it is WRONG. Today’s equivalent would be a character going out wearing her bra as a top. In fact, even that isn’t a straight equivalent, because we have very different attitudes to nakedness and the human body today to 1912. It is one of the most scandalous things a girl in 1912 could have done. She would have at least tried to find some material, a sheet or something to wrap around herself to make it obvious that she was not wearing HER UNDERWEAR AS OUTERWEAR. *gnashes teeth* Oh and to make it worse, later in the game you come across a statue of Lady Comstock, whose clothes Elizabeth is wearing, (which is why the corset is dated: Lady C died in 1895) and the statue depicts HER as wearing a corset as a bodice too. In fact, she’s wearing it over a blouse! It’s just NOT RIGHT!
Ok, time to calm down and get on with the rest.
One thing which did annoy me hugely, was that the game reuses the same character models again, and again, and again and it is VERY noticeable. Just look at the pretty pictures below:
These screenshots are all from when you first enter Columbia proper at the start of the game and as you can see the faces of the townsfolk all look the same! Now I can understand reusing the same character models because it saves on space and resources, (every game I’ve played does the same, including TS2 with its face templates), but this so far too noticeable. There are maybe three different faces for female townsfolk in this section of the city, that is all, and the same for men, although the addition of facial hair can change the look of the face drastically. All the hawkers at the fair for the sideshows look the same, and all the hotdog or fruit vendors do too. Where is the variety? (And yes I know this is already a big game, taking up 13GB on my HD, but come on. How much more space would it have taken to tweak these townsfolk a bit more? Given them different coloured hair and eyes at least.)
Apart from that, yes it all looks very pretty but also atmospheric in the right places and does a good job at portraying the impressions the developers want you have of the city in the sky.
Gameplay.
Before I talk about the gameplay, a couple of disclaimers which colour my view. I don’t normally play games where the emphasis is on combat. In fact, before I played Mass Effect last year, the last shooter I had played was Alien Trilogy waaaaaaay back in the 90s (and I loved that game so fucking much, it was awesome). In fact that was the last first person shooter I played so I was very rusty going into this. I’ve also started to develop RSI (in both wrists, woo), and since my job involves a lot of data input, I’ve switched from using the keyboard and mouse to play games to an Xbox controller. The last controller I used was a PSone controller and I didn’t use the analogue sticks, so that’s also taking me a bit of getting used to. In order to help me with the aiming system, I turned the look sensitivity right down for my run through, meaning that I didn’t overshoot where I was going with the aiming reticule, but looking where I was going was slow and did impact on gameplay in places. So with that said, let’s get on with it.
For the most part, gameplay was very good and it was a LOT of fun to play. I liked the system of having a vigour (the equivalent of plasmids from the first two games, so in other words, you have powers) in one hand and a weapon in the other and I also liked the skyhook, although when you’re not using it, where does it go? Does Booker hang it from his belt, because it covers his left hand or what? If he does, how does he get it back on his hand so quickly when you melee someone? These things preoccupy me because when I think about them, it breaks my immersion in the world and the story.
The vigours themselves are really intriguing, even if the effects when you first drink them are horrific, and different people with different play styles and chop and change the vigours equipped (you can have only two active at any one time, which is a bit limiting) to fit. I found that I stuck to three, (Shock Jockey (electricity), Devil’s Kiss (fire bombs) and Murder of Crows (a really gruesome one where you send a flock of murderous crows to peck at your enemy)), adding Possession (turning machines and later humans into allies) only occasionally. The weapons are varied, and again you find the ones that best fit your play style (as with vigours you can have only two equipped, unlike with vigours, you can’t change these unless you physically pick up a different weapon). I used the carbine most, keeping either a machine gun or rpg in reserve.
Melee combat was also fun, and the skyhook executions really brutal. Not that I saw many, because I was too quick on tapping the Y button and therefore by the time the icon had appeared over their head, I’d already whacked them again and killed them.
As for the skylines, well this is where the fact I was using a controller really had me at a disadvantage. For those of you who are not familiar with the game, the skylines run like monorail lines between the various parts of the floating city. As the game progresses, you get to ride these rails using the skyhook. As well as allowing you to move from area to area, they’re meant to add a new dynamic to fight scenes and on the playthroughs I’m watching on Youtube they are, but for my playthrough they led to only frustration. I said earlier that I had to put the look sensitivity right down to help with the aiming, well that meant it was very difficult for me to keep up with the speed I was moving on the skylines. I kept missing looking at the ground for dismount points. I kept missing looking at enemies to perform skyline strikes on dismounting. It got very frustrating. But if I put the sensitivity back up, I couldn’t aim, making the rest of the game frustrating. If I was playing with a mouse, I wouldn’t have found this (in fact I did have to resort to the mouse for one point, since the platform I had to get onto was fairly small and off to the side), but the point remains that the game shouldn’t suffer because I was using a controller on a setting that is present in the game menu.
Exploring the various part of the city was also fun, with each district having its own identity, whilst still feeling like part of a unified city. The only thing with exploring was that it was very easy to get too involved in the searching everything I came across mentality and miss what was going on with the plot. I wandered off several times before I realised that Elizabeth was talking to me and advancing the plot.
Despite being able to explore the world pretty thoroughly, the game (and the story) is actually very linear. Now I don’t mind playing linear games at all, (Tomb Raider is extremely linear but I’ve been enjoying the shit out of it, more than this game actually) but this one did do something that annoyed me a lot, and that was it gave me the illusion of choice, not choice itself.
I will try to keep this part free of spoilers by not going into specifics, and anything which I feel is going near the knuckle, I’ll put in spoiler tags, but you might want to skip it anyway. At several points in the story you are given a choice between two variables. Apart from one which gives you a piece of gear later (gear are special pieces of clothing which give you buffs and very easy to find anyway), none of the choices appear to have any bearing on the game beyond cosmetic choices. I’ll give you an example, and this needs a bit of context, so bear with me. Booker has a brand on the back of his right hand which reads A.D. Very early on in the game we learn that, according to the propaganda around Columbia, this marks him as the false shepherd who will lead the lamb (Elizabeth) astray. Given that your purpose as Booker is to take Elizabeth from Columbia to New York, that ain’t wrong. Now, one of the choices you are given results in Booker receiving an injury to his right hand. This is then bandaged later, and apart from the fact he now has this bandage on his hand, nothing changes. I’m watching ZombieCleo’s playthrough and she made the opposite choice to me, so her Booker’s hand isn’t bandaged, and her game has turned out the same as mine. What I think would have been cool was if this had an effect on gameplay, so that whether or not people could see the brand, affected how they reacted to you. (Of course, you’re also running through the city brandishing a firearm, but meh. I just want a decision to actually MATTER). If nothing I do is going to change the outcome of the game, then DON’T GIVE ME THE CHOICE!
[Spoiler (click to open)]I’ve read on the Steam forums that some people are saying that this illustrates the concept of variables and constants and how while some things can change, they don’t change the big picture, but I don’t care. Don’t allow me to make a choice during the game if the rest of the game is going to be the same no matter which one I choose. I don’t mind if choosing the bird over the cage doesn’t impact on the ending, but I’d like to see it impact on the game in some way. It makes me wonder why the hell I bothered getting invested in the character, role playing as him and making the decision I did in the first place
I’ve started a second playthrough already and will be making a couple of different decisions to see if they do impact on the game, but I’m not holding my breath.
The other gameplay thing that I think is really lacking, is the save system. I played this on the PC, and it is a console port, so as such it has and autosave and checkpoint system. I have nothing against such a system, as long as there is also an option to save when you want to, or a save on exit. This game doesn’t have either of these. Again on the Steam forums, I’ve seen people pointing out that the game autosaves frequently and the checkpoints are close together. I beg to disagree. They may be if you’re running through the game fairly quickly, but I don’t play like that. I’ve played too many adventure games not to explore every nook and cranny I can see, grab everything I can and loot every corpse, because you just don’t know when you are going to need to use that rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle to solve a puzzle. I therefore play games quite slowly (it took me about 20 hours to complete this game) and I like to be able to save when I want to. Case in point with this game, I was playing it last weekend, and I was exploring a later level which is pretty large with various buildings to go into (I was in Emporia for those who have played). It got to gone midnight and I decided to call it a night and head to bed. When I went to quit the game, it told me my last save point was forty-five minutes earlier. Now by this point I’d played the game enough to realise that if I headed to my destination, the game would definitely save, but I still had about a quarter of the level I hadn’t explored. I didn’t know if heading to my destination would cause me to leave the level, and not be able to head back to where I was, as had happened before. I had the choice to head to the destination and possibly miss out on important things in the rest of the level, or keep playing until I’d explored everything. I chose to keep playing for another twenty minutes to explore the level fully. As it turned out, going to my destination did save the game but didn’t cause me to leave the area, but I didn’t know that was going to happen. If I’d have had to quit the game when I first thought about it (say I was playing for a bit before I was going out or had an appointment, or even if I was playing during the week and I had work in the morning), then I would have lost a large chunk of gameplay. And I would not have been happy. A save on exit or save when you want system would have stopped that.
The game also has glitches, (including a really, REALLY annoying sound glitch with the firemen) which I’m not going to penalise it too heavily for, since all games have glitches, but it does mean it’s not perfect.
So that’s my opinion on the gameplay a few other things: enjoyable and fun, but lacking in some fairly big areas.
Characters.
I think the developers and Ken Levine did a good job with the characters in this game. They feel well rounded and their motivations make sense (even if you are drip fed these motivations with some of them, it doesn’t take anything away from the characters).
The character you play, Booker DeWitt is not a nice man. He knows it, he has no illusions about what he has done in the past and he makes no excuses for them. What he’s been tasked to do, isn’t a nice thing: essentially offering a girl’s life in exchange for saving his own skin. And yet as you play him, you start to see and feel his regret and remorse about his past and present actions. I did feel as if I went on a journey with him, and that was good.
Elizabeth is the other character you spend most of your time with and I rather love her. She’s the girl Booker has been sent to retrieve, and she’s a pretty important person in the city, since she is the one who is meant to lead the city to its destiny. I can’t really say any more about her character without spoiling the game horribly, so I won’t. What I will say, is that even though you are escorting her around the city as you try to get her back to New York, it never feels like an extended escort mission. In combat, she’s invulnerable, and so you don’t have to protect her. In fact, she is pretty handy since she finds and keeps you supplied with salts, health kits and ammo. She also has a rather neat trick, which I won’t say for fears of spoiling it for you if you’ve not played, but it does make quite a difference during combat.
I just wish she wasn’t as glitchy as she is. There were quite a few times when her walking animation wouldn’t play, leading to her gliding over the floor as if she was skating, her body perfectly still. She was also prone to teleporting away. One moment I’d be looking at her as she examined something or gave some exposition, the next, she’d be gone and when I turned round to look for her, she was leaning against a wall, or sitting down in one of her idle poses. I’ve seen both of these things happen in videos on Youtube too, so it’s not my system at fault. Oh and once she got stuck on a skyline, hanging there trying to go in the opposite direction to the one I’d gone in before I realised she was missing.
The other main characters in Columbia all have intriguing back stories and it’s quite fun getting to know them as the game progresses. The Luteces are my favourites. I love how snarky they are to each other and Booker, and although their conversations seem nonsensical on the first playthrough, it’s worthwhile paying greater attention to them on the second. I’ve also found out that Jennifer Hale, who provides the voice for FemShep, is the voice of Rosalind, and I part of me really can’t help wishing that I could hear some of Shep’s lines in Rosalind’s voice. If you can remember from my thoughts on Mass Effect, my Shepard is based on Sophia, and Rosalind sounds so much like Sophia at times, it’s scary.
Just listen to her lines at the beginning of this video. Isn't the talk of rowing just Sophia?
(Also, I really recommend Cleo's videos. They're a lot of fun, and if you've ever wondered what my accent sounds like, I sound a lot like her.)
Story.
This section will have more spoilers in it than the previous sections, although I’m still going to try to avoid telling you what actually happens. Anything I think is particularly spoilery will go under spoiler tags. I’m also going to throw up a warning too, since there are very graphic depictions of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia in this game, and I discuss them below.
The story itself is intriguing. I was given so little information at the start of the game, I couldn’t help but want to know more, and as I discovered the mysteries of Columbia, my curiosity grew. It becomes obvious very early on in the game that although pristine on the surface, Columbia is rotten to the core, and that rot is highly disturbing and deeply sickening to witness. I mean that sincerely, I felt nauseous witnessing several scenes in this game and questioned whether I wanted to continue playing. And yet, some of this rot (racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, which were all shown very graphically) didn’t seem to make all that much sense from a story perspective in places. I’m talking about the Crows (enemies who use the Murder of Crows vigour and can teleport) and the Brotherhood of the Raven or whatever the racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic fuckwits called themselves.
I’m spoilering the next bit because it contains specific discussion of the plot.
[Spoiler (click to open)]When I first met the Crows and the Brotherhood, near the beginning of the game, they are painted as a society who are prejudiced against everyone who is not white and/or not American, despite the fact Columbia seceded from the Union. (Their attitudes aren’t any different to the rest of the city we have seen thus far, by the way, apart from the inhabitants of one house). The members wear hoods and robes reminiscent of the KluKluxKlan, and there is a truly disturbing mural behind their podium, depicting other races and nationalities in horrible ways. The first Crow I came across murdered a man by tying him to a board and using his vigour to peck him apart, all because he was Chinese. And yet, we find out later, that these Crows are the former devotees of Lady Comstock.
I don’t get it. How does a society that venerates John Wilkes Booth because he assassinated the President who abolished slavery, have anything to do with the murdered First Lady of Columbia? Is it because Daisy Fitzroy, a lady of colour, was framed for Lady Comstock’s murder? Do they think that, if the slaves in the US had never been emancipated, then Daisy Fitzroy would never have been in a position to allegedly murder Lady Comstock? Are they seeing this murder as “proof” that non-white, and non-American people (even though Daisy is American) are less than they are? I just don’t get it and the connection is never made clear. In fact, it seems to be forgotten about later in the game. (And if anyone says, well that’s because you were in a different reality by the halfway point of the game, all I’m going to say is no. That’s just lazy storytelling. I get that things will differ reality to reality, that’s the point of them, but things were also fundamentally the same. The attitudes were the same, but we saw them at a different point on the scale due to what happened in the lead up to the events we witnessed. Not only that, the voxophone of the First Zealot found in the Brotherhood house, makes mention of the fact they are devotees of Lady Comstock.)
The Crows and Brotherhood left me feeling confused and very, very sick.
The racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia do explain, very graphically why the Vox Populi have come about and what their uprising is against. I’m a white Briton, and Britain has a very different history to America with regards to the ethnicities who call and have called these islands home. I also cannot understand being prejudiced against another human being just because they have a different amount of pigment in their skin to you, or worship in a different way to you, or have a different cultural background to you, or who love in a different way to you. To me, human beings are human beings and that is the only thing that matters. In fact people being different to one another, adds to the richness of life and should be celebrated. Because of that, I had a hard time, a really hard time, dealing with the images and attitudes presented in the game. I felt sick to my stomach every time I witnessed something.
Did it need to be shown this graphically to explain the Vox? Could the Vox’s rise been shown to be born out of poverty with a milder depiction of prejudice (because the people at whom this prejudice is aimed live in the slums in abject poverty)? Was it a fair representation of the sort of attitudes present in America at the time, or expanded upon thanks to Columbia’s isolation? I can’t answer that, because I honestly don’t know. All I can say is that it made me think about the subjects, and if it made me think about them, maybe it made others think about and reject them too. It also made me feel uncomfortable which as a white person, I think I should feel that way. And it made my, albeit very diluted, Irish blood boil with the depiction of Irish men as drunkards and the women as slatterns. It also made shooting the racist bastards inna face, or ripping their faces off with the skyhook far more satisfying, and that was the only reason I decided to keep playing the game after I first encountered these attitudes.
As I continued to play, the main mysteries I wanted to solve, were why did I as Booker have to fetch Elizabeth? (Because the “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt” explanation wasn’t enough once I’d been playing a while). How did the prophet, Father Comstock know about the brand on my hand? And just who were the man and woman who took me to the lighthouse and then kept appearing out of nowhere?
Of course the answers were all intertwined, and a lot of them were revealed by the voxophones, or audio diaries, that I picked up as I played. I have no real problem with imparting information that way, as long as you can find enough of the diaries easily to make sense of the plot, or that they are not the only means of telling the player the plot. I think the game gets the balance almost right, but I also like to hunt round my surroundings for things so I found quite a lot of the voxophones, not all of them, but a lot. If someone isn’t a thorough as me, maybe they would have a different perspective on it.
As for the main reveal of the story and the tears in reality, well although I’m not going to spell out what happens, I am going to put my thoughts in a spoiler just in case.
[Spoiler (click to open)]I’m not as baffled as some people have been. I’ve seen a lot of people saying that it’s a mindfuck and that they need time to process it. I … don’t. Maybe it’s because the entire resolution to the plot hinges on a theory I’ve been familiar with for a long time, but I don’t find it all that confusing. I’ve read books with the idea of the multiverse at the centre of them. I’ve watched TV programmes which deal with it. Heck, I USE the idea myself in my story, because the part of the simming community I belong to has come up with a version of the multiverse theory which can explain how sims can cross time and space to be in more than one neighbourhood at once, at different ages or married to different sims. I came up with some of those ideas myself to fit why my neighbourhood is stuck in a timeloop and how sims can cross into it, or out of it. The idea of an infinite number of multiple realities, where one decision or series of decisions can lead to very different outcomes, is not a new idea to me and it’s certainly not a confusing one.
The major reveal at the end, also didn’t shock me, because I saw the signs, and realising that the game was dealing with the multiverse, I worked it out very quickly. That doesn’t mean I didn’t find it enjoyable, because I did.
One thing though, I would question whether Elizabeth’s and Booker’s actions at the end, stopped the cycle, and if therefore the after credit sequence is a new reality starting, or the cycle repeating itself. But maybe the fact we never see if there is anyone in that crib makes that point for me. The player can decide what to think at that point. Myself? I think the cycle’s still going, and will do as long as I want to replay the game.
So that’s my thoughts on Bioshock Infinite. It is an enjoyable game which made me think and question what was going on, but it is also a flawed game, and not deserving of the perfect scores it’s been getting. There are things which could have been improved on, especially given that this game was delayed three times anyway. Will I play it again? I already am, since I’m determined to find the rest of the Voxophones and other collectables.
During my hiatus, I’ve been playing a couple of other games to take a break from TS2 and clear my head. I thought I’d jot down some of my thoughts on them here, just like I have with DAII and ME in the past.
The first game I’m going to talk about, is Bioshock Infinite, because although, it’s not the first game I picked up, it is the first one I completed.
The premise of the game is that you play Booker DeWitt, veteran of the US Cavalry and Ex-Pinterton Detective turned Private Eye. You’re an alcoholic and a gambler who has gotten into debt with some men you really don’t want to be in debt to. They’ve given you the task to travel to the floating city of Columbia in order to “bring us the girl (Elizabeth) and wipe away the debt.” It sounds simple enough, but of course it isn’t.
I wasn’t going to get this game: I haven’t played the first two Bioshocks, even though they were on my list of games to get (Widget kindly gifted me the first game the other week, and I’ve played through the intro now), and I didn’t know anything about this one, but a few of the youtubers I follow started playthroughs or did videos of it and it was getting very high scores (10/10s and 5/5s) so I was intrigued. I have to say I enjoyed the game a lot: it’s a good solid FPS, but did I think it was worth the perfect scores it was getting? No, I don’t, and I’ll explain why in this.
I guess I should point out that I’m a picky person, and as far as I’m concerned, for a game to get a perfect score, it has to be a perfect game, and I’ve not come across one of those yet. Even TS2, which as you all know I love to bits, to the point where if I was told I could only play one game for the rest of eternity, I would pick it with no hesitation, isn’t a perfect game to me. I have to use too many third party hacks to fix bits of the code, and there are too many game mechanics written into the very core of the game which will lead to your neighbourhoods becoming irredeemably corrupted, for it to be perfect. Bioshock Infinite is by no means perfect, either in the way it’s coded, the gameplay or the story, but it is a good game and worth playing.
Visuals
I’m going to start talking about the graphics first because I’m a sucker for the pretteh, and this game is pretty. My graphics card is a little aged now, and can’t cope with some of the new fancy post processing effects the newest games utilise, but after turning those off, I could play with textures and level of detail on ultra and still get a frame rate which didn’t affect gameplay.
The city of Columbia itself is beautiful, with well rendered buildings and little touches, even if some of the models for items are so low poly I wouldn’t even put them in TS2.
My biggest complaints are that the colours look a little oversaturated to me (but I can understand why the developers would make the decision to do this: it adds a real wow factor to the place when you first see it, and is a good contrast to not only the lighthouse where you start off, but with the city of Rapture in the first Bioshock), and there is far too much bloom. I don’t like bloom very much: it gives me the impression that my eyes are blurring because there’s something wrong with them and I can’t see the textures clearly. I really don’t like it. I would have preferred an option to turn the bloom down or off, but again I can see what the developers were going for with it, that it shows the impressive, bright quality of light in the city due to its altitude and gives everything a heavenly glow. The saturation and bloom also help to give the city a cartoony look, rather than a realistic look and I do think that works, especially with Elizabeth’s character model.
I also really liked the Steampunk elements present in the design, and they felt very natural, unlike some Steampunk where anachronistic elements are shoehorned into things because they create the effect of a futuristic design or look cool. (I’m thinking of vacuum tubes or valves turning up in decidedly 19th century settings for no real reason. *shudders*) The mechanical horses are especially great.
The story is set in 1912, but Columbia has been isolated since the turn of the century. I’m not an expert in the Edwardian era or pre-war years, and certainly not from the viewpoint of American history, but apart from one outfit that has me foaming at the mouth, the clothing of the townsfolk isn’t bad. It’s not 100% accurate, but it does the job of conveying that this is set in the early part of the 20th century. I mean, certainly the number of men in shirtsleeves would be unusual from an English standpoint (shirts still had connotations from when they were underwear at this time, and so it was not “polite” for a man to appear in public without a jacket), but I don’t know about from an American perspective so it could be fine. Likewise, the lady’s wear isn’t cutting edge Edwardian fashion, but the shapes and styles are of the time and look good.
The one outfit that leaves me foaming at the mouth? Well I’m going to put it into a spoiler because it doesn’t appear until after the halfway point of the game.
[Spoiler (click to open)]That outfit is the one Elizabeth changes into after Finkton. It commits a cardinal sin in my eyes: she wears an 1890s corset as a bodice! Ok, ok I know it’s justified by her saying that is all she could find to wear and the clothes she was wearing up until that point were ruined, but it is WRONG. Today’s equivalent would be a character going out wearing her bra as a top. In fact, even that isn’t a straight equivalent, because we have very different attitudes to nakedness and the human body today to 1912. It is one of the most scandalous things a girl in 1912 could have done. She would have at least tried to find some material, a sheet or something to wrap around herself to make it obvious that she was not wearing HER UNDERWEAR AS OUTERWEAR. *gnashes teeth* Oh and to make it worse, later in the game you come across a statue of Lady Comstock, whose clothes Elizabeth is wearing, (which is why the corset is dated: Lady C died in 1895) and the statue depicts HER as wearing a corset as a bodice too. In fact, she’s wearing it over a blouse! It’s just NOT RIGHT!
Ok, time to calm down and get on with the rest.
One thing which did annoy me hugely, was that the game reuses the same character models again, and again, and again and it is VERY noticeable. Just look at the pretty pictures below:
These screenshots are all from when you first enter Columbia proper at the start of the game and as you can see the faces of the townsfolk all look the same! Now I can understand reusing the same character models because it saves on space and resources, (every game I’ve played does the same, including TS2 with its face templates), but this so far too noticeable. There are maybe three different faces for female townsfolk in this section of the city, that is all, and the same for men, although the addition of facial hair can change the look of the face drastically. All the hawkers at the fair for the sideshows look the same, and all the hotdog or fruit vendors do too. Where is the variety? (And yes I know this is already a big game, taking up 13GB on my HD, but come on. How much more space would it have taken to tweak these townsfolk a bit more? Given them different coloured hair and eyes at least.)
Apart from that, yes it all looks very pretty but also atmospheric in the right places and does a good job at portraying the impressions the developers want you have of the city in the sky.
Gameplay.
Before I talk about the gameplay, a couple of disclaimers which colour my view. I don’t normally play games where the emphasis is on combat. In fact, before I played Mass Effect last year, the last shooter I had played was Alien Trilogy waaaaaaay back in the 90s (and I loved that game so fucking much, it was awesome). In fact that was the last first person shooter I played so I was very rusty going into this. I’ve also started to develop RSI (in both wrists, woo), and since my job involves a lot of data input, I’ve switched from using the keyboard and mouse to play games to an Xbox controller. The last controller I used was a PSone controller and I didn’t use the analogue sticks, so that’s also taking me a bit of getting used to. In order to help me with the aiming system, I turned the look sensitivity right down for my run through, meaning that I didn’t overshoot where I was going with the aiming reticule, but looking where I was going was slow and did impact on gameplay in places. So with that said, let’s get on with it.
For the most part, gameplay was very good and it was a LOT of fun to play. I liked the system of having a vigour (the equivalent of plasmids from the first two games, so in other words, you have powers) in one hand and a weapon in the other and I also liked the skyhook, although when you’re not using it, where does it go? Does Booker hang it from his belt, because it covers his left hand or what? If he does, how does he get it back on his hand so quickly when you melee someone? These things preoccupy me because when I think about them, it breaks my immersion in the world and the story.
The vigours themselves are really intriguing, even if the effects when you first drink them are horrific, and different people with different play styles and chop and change the vigours equipped (you can have only two active at any one time, which is a bit limiting) to fit. I found that I stuck to three, (Shock Jockey (electricity), Devil’s Kiss (fire bombs) and Murder of Crows (a really gruesome one where you send a flock of murderous crows to peck at your enemy)), adding Possession (turning machines and later humans into allies) only occasionally. The weapons are varied, and again you find the ones that best fit your play style (as with vigours you can have only two equipped, unlike with vigours, you can’t change these unless you physically pick up a different weapon). I used the carbine most, keeping either a machine gun or rpg in reserve.
Melee combat was also fun, and the skyhook executions really brutal. Not that I saw many, because I was too quick on tapping the Y button and therefore by the time the icon had appeared over their head, I’d already whacked them again and killed them.
As for the skylines, well this is where the fact I was using a controller really had me at a disadvantage. For those of you who are not familiar with the game, the skylines run like monorail lines between the various parts of the floating city. As the game progresses, you get to ride these rails using the skyhook. As well as allowing you to move from area to area, they’re meant to add a new dynamic to fight scenes and on the playthroughs I’m watching on Youtube they are, but for my playthrough they led to only frustration. I said earlier that I had to put the look sensitivity right down to help with the aiming, well that meant it was very difficult for me to keep up with the speed I was moving on the skylines. I kept missing looking at the ground for dismount points. I kept missing looking at enemies to perform skyline strikes on dismounting. It got very frustrating. But if I put the sensitivity back up, I couldn’t aim, making the rest of the game frustrating. If I was playing with a mouse, I wouldn’t have found this (in fact I did have to resort to the mouse for one point, since the platform I had to get onto was fairly small and off to the side), but the point remains that the game shouldn’t suffer because I was using a controller on a setting that is present in the game menu.
Exploring the various part of the city was also fun, with each district having its own identity, whilst still feeling like part of a unified city. The only thing with exploring was that it was very easy to get too involved in the searching everything I came across mentality and miss what was going on with the plot. I wandered off several times before I realised that Elizabeth was talking to me and advancing the plot.
Despite being able to explore the world pretty thoroughly, the game (and the story) is actually very linear. Now I don’t mind playing linear games at all, (Tomb Raider is extremely linear but I’ve been enjoying the shit out of it, more than this game actually) but this one did do something that annoyed me a lot, and that was it gave me the illusion of choice, not choice itself.
I will try to keep this part free of spoilers by not going into specifics, and anything which I feel is going near the knuckle, I’ll put in spoiler tags, but you might want to skip it anyway. At several points in the story you are given a choice between two variables. Apart from one which gives you a piece of gear later (gear are special pieces of clothing which give you buffs and very easy to find anyway), none of the choices appear to have any bearing on the game beyond cosmetic choices. I’ll give you an example, and this needs a bit of context, so bear with me. Booker has a brand on the back of his right hand which reads A.D. Very early on in the game we learn that, according to the propaganda around Columbia, this marks him as the false shepherd who will lead the lamb (Elizabeth) astray. Given that your purpose as Booker is to take Elizabeth from Columbia to New York, that ain’t wrong. Now, one of the choices you are given results in Booker receiving an injury to his right hand. This is then bandaged later, and apart from the fact he now has this bandage on his hand, nothing changes. I’m watching ZombieCleo’s playthrough and she made the opposite choice to me, so her Booker’s hand isn’t bandaged, and her game has turned out the same as mine. What I think would have been cool was if this had an effect on gameplay, so that whether or not people could see the brand, affected how they reacted to you. (Of course, you’re also running through the city brandishing a firearm, but meh. I just want a decision to actually MATTER). If nothing I do is going to change the outcome of the game, then DON’T GIVE ME THE CHOICE!
[Spoiler (click to open)]I’ve read on the Steam forums that some people are saying that this illustrates the concept of variables and constants and how while some things can change, they don’t change the big picture, but I don’t care. Don’t allow me to make a choice during the game if the rest of the game is going to be the same no matter which one I choose. I don’t mind if choosing the bird over the cage doesn’t impact on the ending, but I’d like to see it impact on the game in some way. It makes me wonder why the hell I bothered getting invested in the character, role playing as him and making the decision I did in the first place
I’ve started a second playthrough already and will be making a couple of different decisions to see if they do impact on the game, but I’m not holding my breath.
The other gameplay thing that I think is really lacking, is the save system. I played this on the PC, and it is a console port, so as such it has and autosave and checkpoint system. I have nothing against such a system, as long as there is also an option to save when you want to, or a save on exit. This game doesn’t have either of these. Again on the Steam forums, I’ve seen people pointing out that the game autosaves frequently and the checkpoints are close together. I beg to disagree. They may be if you’re running through the game fairly quickly, but I don’t play like that. I’ve played too many adventure games not to explore every nook and cranny I can see, grab everything I can and loot every corpse, because you just don’t know when you are going to need to use that rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle to solve a puzzle. I therefore play games quite slowly (it took me about 20 hours to complete this game) and I like to be able to save when I want to. Case in point with this game, I was playing it last weekend, and I was exploring a later level which is pretty large with various buildings to go into (I was in Emporia for those who have played). It got to gone midnight and I decided to call it a night and head to bed. When I went to quit the game, it told me my last save point was forty-five minutes earlier. Now by this point I’d played the game enough to realise that if I headed to my destination, the game would definitely save, but I still had about a quarter of the level I hadn’t explored. I didn’t know if heading to my destination would cause me to leave the level, and not be able to head back to where I was, as had happened before. I had the choice to head to the destination and possibly miss out on important things in the rest of the level, or keep playing until I’d explored everything. I chose to keep playing for another twenty minutes to explore the level fully. As it turned out, going to my destination did save the game but didn’t cause me to leave the area, but I didn’t know that was going to happen. If I’d have had to quit the game when I first thought about it (say I was playing for a bit before I was going out or had an appointment, or even if I was playing during the week and I had work in the morning), then I would have lost a large chunk of gameplay. And I would not have been happy. A save on exit or save when you want system would have stopped that.
The game also has glitches, (including a really, REALLY annoying sound glitch with the firemen) which I’m not going to penalise it too heavily for, since all games have glitches, but it does mean it’s not perfect.
So that’s my opinion on the gameplay a few other things: enjoyable and fun, but lacking in some fairly big areas.
Characters.
I think the developers and Ken Levine did a good job with the characters in this game. They feel well rounded and their motivations make sense (even if you are drip fed these motivations with some of them, it doesn’t take anything away from the characters).
The character you play, Booker DeWitt is not a nice man. He knows it, he has no illusions about what he has done in the past and he makes no excuses for them. What he’s been tasked to do, isn’t a nice thing: essentially offering a girl’s life in exchange for saving his own skin. And yet as you play him, you start to see and feel his regret and remorse about his past and present actions. I did feel as if I went on a journey with him, and that was good.
Elizabeth is the other character you spend most of your time with and I rather love her. She’s the girl Booker has been sent to retrieve, and she’s a pretty important person in the city, since she is the one who is meant to lead the city to its destiny. I can’t really say any more about her character without spoiling the game horribly, so I won’t. What I will say, is that even though you are escorting her around the city as you try to get her back to New York, it never feels like an extended escort mission. In combat, she’s invulnerable, and so you don’t have to protect her. In fact, she is pretty handy since she finds and keeps you supplied with salts, health kits and ammo. She also has a rather neat trick, which I won’t say for fears of spoiling it for you if you’ve not played, but it does make quite a difference during combat.
I just wish she wasn’t as glitchy as she is. There were quite a few times when her walking animation wouldn’t play, leading to her gliding over the floor as if she was skating, her body perfectly still. She was also prone to teleporting away. One moment I’d be looking at her as she examined something or gave some exposition, the next, she’d be gone and when I turned round to look for her, she was leaning against a wall, or sitting down in one of her idle poses. I’ve seen both of these things happen in videos on Youtube too, so it’s not my system at fault. Oh and once she got stuck on a skyline, hanging there trying to go in the opposite direction to the one I’d gone in before I realised she was missing.
The other main characters in Columbia all have intriguing back stories and it’s quite fun getting to know them as the game progresses. The Luteces are my favourites. I love how snarky they are to each other and Booker, and although their conversations seem nonsensical on the first playthrough, it’s worthwhile paying greater attention to them on the second. I’ve also found out that Jennifer Hale, who provides the voice for FemShep, is the voice of Rosalind, and I part of me really can’t help wishing that I could hear some of Shep’s lines in Rosalind’s voice. If you can remember from my thoughts on Mass Effect, my Shepard is based on Sophia, and Rosalind sounds so much like Sophia at times, it’s scary.
Just listen to her lines at the beginning of this video. Isn't the talk of rowing just Sophia?
Click to view(Also, I really recommend Cleo's videos. They're a lot of fun, and if you've ever wondered what my accent sounds like, I sound a lot like her.)
Story.
This section will have more spoilers in it than the previous sections, although I’m still going to try to avoid telling you what actually happens. Anything I think is particularly spoilery will go under spoiler tags. I’m also going to throw up a warning too, since there are very graphic depictions of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia in this game, and I discuss them below.
The story itself is intriguing. I was given so little information at the start of the game, I couldn’t help but want to know more, and as I discovered the mysteries of Columbia, my curiosity grew. It becomes obvious very early on in the game that although pristine on the surface, Columbia is rotten to the core, and that rot is highly disturbing and deeply sickening to witness. I mean that sincerely, I felt nauseous witnessing several scenes in this game and questioned whether I wanted to continue playing. And yet, some of this rot (racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, which were all shown very graphically) didn’t seem to make all that much sense from a story perspective in places. I’m talking about the Crows (enemies who use the Murder of Crows vigour and can teleport) and the Brotherhood of the Raven or whatever the racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic fuckwits called themselves.
I’m spoilering the next bit because it contains specific discussion of the plot.
[Spoiler (click to open)]When I first met the Crows and the Brotherhood, near the beginning of the game, they are painted as a society who are prejudiced against everyone who is not white and/or not American, despite the fact Columbia seceded from the Union. (Their attitudes aren’t any different to the rest of the city we have seen thus far, by the way, apart from the inhabitants of one house). The members wear hoods and robes reminiscent of the KluKluxKlan, and there is a truly disturbing mural behind their podium, depicting other races and nationalities in horrible ways. The first Crow I came across murdered a man by tying him to a board and using his vigour to peck him apart, all because he was Chinese. And yet, we find out later, that these Crows are the former devotees of Lady Comstock.
I don’t get it. How does a society that venerates John Wilkes Booth because he assassinated the President who abolished slavery, have anything to do with the murdered First Lady of Columbia? Is it because Daisy Fitzroy, a lady of colour, was framed for Lady Comstock’s murder? Do they think that, if the slaves in the US had never been emancipated, then Daisy Fitzroy would never have been in a position to allegedly murder Lady Comstock? Are they seeing this murder as “proof” that non-white, and non-American people (even though Daisy is American) are less than they are? I just don’t get it and the connection is never made clear. In fact, it seems to be forgotten about later in the game. (And if anyone says, well that’s because you were in a different reality by the halfway point of the game, all I’m going to say is no. That’s just lazy storytelling. I get that things will differ reality to reality, that’s the point of them, but things were also fundamentally the same. The attitudes were the same, but we saw them at a different point on the scale due to what happened in the lead up to the events we witnessed. Not only that, the voxophone of the First Zealot found in the Brotherhood house, makes mention of the fact they are devotees of Lady Comstock.)
The Crows and Brotherhood left me feeling confused and very, very sick.
The racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia do explain, very graphically why the Vox Populi have come about and what their uprising is against. I’m a white Briton, and Britain has a very different history to America with regards to the ethnicities who call and have called these islands home. I also cannot understand being prejudiced against another human being just because they have a different amount of pigment in their skin to you, or worship in a different way to you, or have a different cultural background to you, or who love in a different way to you. To me, human beings are human beings and that is the only thing that matters. In fact people being different to one another, adds to the richness of life and should be celebrated. Because of that, I had a hard time, a really hard time, dealing with the images and attitudes presented in the game. I felt sick to my stomach every time I witnessed something.
Did it need to be shown this graphically to explain the Vox? Could the Vox’s rise been shown to be born out of poverty with a milder depiction of prejudice (because the people at whom this prejudice is aimed live in the slums in abject poverty)? Was it a fair representation of the sort of attitudes present in America at the time, or expanded upon thanks to Columbia’s isolation? I can’t answer that, because I honestly don’t know. All I can say is that it made me think about the subjects, and if it made me think about them, maybe it made others think about and reject them too. It also made me feel uncomfortable which as a white person, I think I should feel that way. And it made my, albeit very diluted, Irish blood boil with the depiction of Irish men as drunkards and the women as slatterns. It also made shooting the racist bastards inna face, or ripping their faces off with the skyhook far more satisfying, and that was the only reason I decided to keep playing the game after I first encountered these attitudes.
As I continued to play, the main mysteries I wanted to solve, were why did I as Booker have to fetch Elizabeth? (Because the “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt” explanation wasn’t enough once I’d been playing a while). How did the prophet, Father Comstock know about the brand on my hand? And just who were the man and woman who took me to the lighthouse and then kept appearing out of nowhere?
Of course the answers were all intertwined, and a lot of them were revealed by the voxophones, or audio diaries, that I picked up as I played. I have no real problem with imparting information that way, as long as you can find enough of the diaries easily to make sense of the plot, or that they are not the only means of telling the player the plot. I think the game gets the balance almost right, but I also like to hunt round my surroundings for things so I found quite a lot of the voxophones, not all of them, but a lot. If someone isn’t a thorough as me, maybe they would have a different perspective on it.
As for the main reveal of the story and the tears in reality, well although I’m not going to spell out what happens, I am going to put my thoughts in a spoiler just in case.
[Spoiler (click to open)]I’m not as baffled as some people have been. I’ve seen a lot of people saying that it’s a mindfuck and that they need time to process it. I … don’t. Maybe it’s because the entire resolution to the plot hinges on a theory I’ve been familiar with for a long time, but I don’t find it all that confusing. I’ve read books with the idea of the multiverse at the centre of them. I’ve watched TV programmes which deal with it. Heck, I USE the idea myself in my story, because the part of the simming community I belong to has come up with a version of the multiverse theory which can explain how sims can cross time and space to be in more than one neighbourhood at once, at different ages or married to different sims. I came up with some of those ideas myself to fit why my neighbourhood is stuck in a timeloop and how sims can cross into it, or out of it. The idea of an infinite number of multiple realities, where one decision or series of decisions can lead to very different outcomes, is not a new idea to me and it’s certainly not a confusing one.
The major reveal at the end, also didn’t shock me, because I saw the signs, and realising that the game was dealing with the multiverse, I worked it out very quickly. That doesn’t mean I didn’t find it enjoyable, because I did.
One thing though, I would question whether Elizabeth’s and Booker’s actions at the end, stopped the cycle, and if therefore the after credit sequence is a new reality starting, or the cycle repeating itself. But maybe the fact we never see if there is anyone in that crib makes that point for me. The player can decide what to think at that point. Myself? I think the cycle’s still going, and will do as long as I want to replay the game.
So that’s my thoughts on Bioshock Infinite. It is an enjoyable game which made me think and question what was going on, but it is also a flawed game, and not deserving of the perfect scores it’s been getting. There are things which could have been improved on, especially given that this game was delayed three times anyway. Will I play it again? I already am, since I’m determined to find the rest of the Voxophones and other collectables.