- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,442
The Bioshock series has traditionally been viewed by hardcore gamer grognards as one of the great symbols of video game consolization and decline in the late 2000s. Marketed as part of the continuum of sophisticated immersive sims and elaborate first person shooters of the 1990s, Bioshock failed to measure up to those games in important ways, becoming in a way a stepping stone from the likes of System Shock 2 & Doom to the full-on linear cinematic experience of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare single campaigns that were so popular around the 2010s. Bioshock Infinite was the end result of this process, dumping the System Shock exploration/survival horror framework entirely.
However, we no longer live in the era of the linear cinematic story-driven shooter. We now live in the era of the open world first person RPG, a genre that seems to be characterized by an inability to maintain any sort of interesting game balance. My contention in this post is that the Bioshock series and Bioshock Infinite in particular, in its retention of simplified RPG elements in conjunction with standard action-shooter conventions, actually compares favorably with these modern games in important ways.
For example:
- In so many open world RPGs, you will never run out of ammo or come close to running out of ammo if you've been paying any attention to scavenging your environment. You'll walk around with thousands of rounds. Ammo weight? Too annoying and inevitably dummied out. Classic shooters offer a solution so obvious it's amazing nobody ever talks about it - maximum ammo caps. Sorry, you can't have more than 100 rounds for that assault rifle. You'll probably find more later, but that's all you have for this fight. Good luck.
- Perhaps the most important characteristic of open world games in terms of balance is that they offer you complete control over the battlefield and always let you pick your battles. You wander around the world, spot an encampment of bad guys and plan the optimal approach from the optimal direction. Generally, if you have a powerful enough long range weapon, they don't really have a chance. You wipe them out and move on the next encampment, rinse and repeat. Again, these games usually just completely give up on using time-tested shooter conventions. Ambushes, multiple wave attacks, long range enemies who are actually threatening instead of being that one dude you kill first, and even, god forbid, constrained environments that don't always let you hang back and pick the perfect approach.
- In the typical open world FPS RPG, you have a standard set of weapons, some stats that make you better at using those weapons when you increase them, and maybe a handful of perks that add a few extra twists. As far as combat goes, that's what your character build is defined by. In Bioshock Infinite, your character build is defined by 1) the weapons that you choose to carry (you can only have two at a time plus your melee attack), 2) the gear you choose to equip (essentially a set of swappable perks that you collect over the course of the game, you have four slots) and 3) the weapon and plasmid upgrades you've chosen to purchase over the course of the game.
As a character building implementation (again looking only in terms of combat) I honestly found this to be better and more impactful than that of any first person RPG. The gear perks are *all* impactful and let you build a character with a real edge in a certain approach to combat (melee, plasmids, sky-line air attacks, etc). Unlike every RPG ever, the economy is actually controlled and you can't buy all the upgrades. And in what may be viewed as a heresy, I found the Call of Duty-inspired two weapon limitation to actually be kind of good. Yes, good. Why? Because the combination of the aforementioned ammo cap and the lengthy, multi-wave ambush battles means you can run out of ammo for your weapon and be forced to scramble across the battlefield to pick up a different one. I think that's awesome - anything that forces you out of your comfort zone in these games is worthy of praise. So the two-weapon limit actually provides two functions here - it's both a roleplaying choice ("I'm a sniper who carries a shotgun for short-range encounters, and I'll upgrade those weapons exclusively") and a mechanic that forces you against the limits of that choice.
* * *
Now obviously, open world first person RPGs can't replicate this formula exactly. They are by definition non-linear and can't control player progression and force you into ambushes all the time. They have a broader focus with dialogue and non-combat approaches and so on. But I do think they can try to do some of this stuff more often.
Because what we're seeing now is that the latest open world RPGs are being streamlined in certain ways. They're increasingly giving up the adherence to simulationism that would prevent them from adapting some of these shooter conventions. Eg, "Why shouldn't I be able to carry as much ammo as I want? That's not realistic." Well, you're already playing a game where ammo is weightless, so realism is already out the window here. So what I'm saying is if designers are already streamlining their games, they might as well consider streamlining them in ways that make combat better. What was a decline going from System Shock 2 and Doom to Bioshock, might just be an incline going from Fallout 4 and The Outer Worlds back to Bioshock Infinite.
However, we no longer live in the era of the linear cinematic story-driven shooter. We now live in the era of the open world first person RPG, a genre that seems to be characterized by an inability to maintain any sort of interesting game balance. My contention in this post is that the Bioshock series and Bioshock Infinite in particular, in its retention of simplified RPG elements in conjunction with standard action-shooter conventions, actually compares favorably with these modern games in important ways.
For example:
- In so many open world RPGs, you will never run out of ammo or come close to running out of ammo if you've been paying any attention to scavenging your environment. You'll walk around with thousands of rounds. Ammo weight? Too annoying and inevitably dummied out. Classic shooters offer a solution so obvious it's amazing nobody ever talks about it - maximum ammo caps. Sorry, you can't have more than 100 rounds for that assault rifle. You'll probably find more later, but that's all you have for this fight. Good luck.
- Perhaps the most important characteristic of open world games in terms of balance is that they offer you complete control over the battlefield and always let you pick your battles. You wander around the world, spot an encampment of bad guys and plan the optimal approach from the optimal direction. Generally, if you have a powerful enough long range weapon, they don't really have a chance. You wipe them out and move on the next encampment, rinse and repeat. Again, these games usually just completely give up on using time-tested shooter conventions. Ambushes, multiple wave attacks, long range enemies who are actually threatening instead of being that one dude you kill first, and even, god forbid, constrained environments that don't always let you hang back and pick the perfect approach.
- In the typical open world FPS RPG, you have a standard set of weapons, some stats that make you better at using those weapons when you increase them, and maybe a handful of perks that add a few extra twists. As far as combat goes, that's what your character build is defined by. In Bioshock Infinite, your character build is defined by 1) the weapons that you choose to carry (you can only have two at a time plus your melee attack), 2) the gear you choose to equip (essentially a set of swappable perks that you collect over the course of the game, you have four slots) and 3) the weapon and plasmid upgrades you've chosen to purchase over the course of the game.
As a character building implementation (again looking only in terms of combat) I honestly found this to be better and more impactful than that of any first person RPG. The gear perks are *all* impactful and let you build a character with a real edge in a certain approach to combat (melee, plasmids, sky-line air attacks, etc). Unlike every RPG ever, the economy is actually controlled and you can't buy all the upgrades. And in what may be viewed as a heresy, I found the Call of Duty-inspired two weapon limitation to actually be kind of good. Yes, good. Why? Because the combination of the aforementioned ammo cap and the lengthy, multi-wave ambush battles means you can run out of ammo for your weapon and be forced to scramble across the battlefield to pick up a different one. I think that's awesome - anything that forces you out of your comfort zone in these games is worthy of praise. So the two-weapon limit actually provides two functions here - it's both a roleplaying choice ("I'm a sniper who carries a shotgun for short-range encounters, and I'll upgrade those weapons exclusively") and a mechanic that forces you against the limits of that choice.
* * *
Now obviously, open world first person RPGs can't replicate this formula exactly. They are by definition non-linear and can't control player progression and force you into ambushes all the time. They have a broader focus with dialogue and non-combat approaches and so on. But I do think they can try to do some of this stuff more often.
Because what we're seeing now is that the latest open world RPGs are being streamlined in certain ways. They're increasingly giving up the adherence to simulationism that would prevent them from adapting some of these shooter conventions. Eg, "Why shouldn't I be able to carry as much ammo as I want? That's not realistic." Well, you're already playing a game where ammo is weightless, so realism is already out the window here. So what I'm saying is if designers are already streamlining their games, they might as well consider streamlining them in ways that make combat better. What was a decline going from System Shock 2 and Doom to Bioshock, might just be an incline going from Fallout 4 and The Outer Worlds back to Bioshock Infinite.
Last edited:
