Bioshock Infinite - the $200 million 6 hour literally on rails interactive movie with guns thread

[Gelbvieh]

Guys I have a question (just finished the game):

As far as I know, all the dimension hopping is invented by the Lutece twin with quantum physics right? So did these two come from the future, or did they invent that stuff before 1912?

Columbia was cracking down the Chinese Boxers in 1900, which means the Lutece twins developed "quantum physics" in the 1800s. But quantum physics didn't even exist in the 1800s. How da fuck did they come up with all the dimension hopping ability and flying city stuff? Are we supposed to accept that they're simply so brilliant, or are they supposed to have gotten information from the future?

Seems like a contrived deus ex machina to me. And without the Lutece twins inventing "quantum physics magic" in the first place, the whole plot of the game cannot even exist.

They're supposedly such geniuses that they (individually) invented all of physics + dimension-travel circa 1890 (and then stole shit from other dimensions). It's totally contrived, but I suppose it's all about suspension of disbelief. It's just a means to an end - the setting juxtaposes future-tech and oldey-oldey and I guarantee that the idea came before the how . In the end, "quantum physics" is meant to be taken as "it's magic, it just works so forget about it."

 

[Average Manatee]

A painfully easy game is a game where you can do a shit ton of mistakes, and still never die. Period. It's really that simple, you don't need to come up with some contrived definition of "painfully easy" in modern shooters (bioshock:infinite has much more in common with the classical shooters than the modern ones). If you do a mistake, or something stupid in 1999 mode, you get punished by for it harshly. Thus, it's not a painfully easy game.

Or the game is both easy and painful to play (spend 90% of the time waiting behind cover). But thanks for explaining your objectively correct scale of difficulty descriptions. I'll make sure it's posted around the internet so we can all adopt the unquestioned Gaudaost scale. If you could go here and start filling out the paperwork we can get this internationally adopted ASAP.

 

[abija]

I think that's a big failing of the game's combat, they want you to run around using skylines and having Elizabeth open tears, but on the harder difficulties you pretty much just have to hunker down and pop some moles, then take anyone out who gets close with a shotgun or handcannon. Sometimes some fireguy or handyman will showup and fuck you up, but usually they come after a wave of cannon fodder.

You can happily use skylines on 1999 too, at least until the enemies get brain upgrades and start following you on them. And tears are very useful too. Many fights you can just troll your way through with tears and vigor usage casually headshoting disabled targets.
I guess the bad visibility is more annoying than the damage. I tried with 2 different setups and everything at ranged seems to be fogged out or hidden by hdr.

 

[sea]

I have some questions about htis game, which is obviously a triumph of narrative etc. etc.

So when you escape with Elizabeth from the tower, you fall down into the water out of the sky next to a collapsing bridge.

1. There does not appear to actually be a massive lake in the city, and the bridge is not in sight of the beach. How come nobody saw the collapsing bridge? Why is nobody running around screaming? Why is there apparently no collapsed bridge anywhere to be seen?
2. Wouldn't people notice that the gigantic statue that towers over the entire city has now been completely destroyed? You'd think that would sort of interrupt your quiet day at the beach.
3. If there is a massive lake, it'd likely be at the bottom of the waterfalls at the beach. How did Booker and Elizabeth get up the waterfalls?
4. How did Elizabeth get out of that massive fall without getting her clothes ruined?
5. Why does Elizabeth go from freaking out at Booker, to trusting him and treating him like an old friend within about 2 minutes?
6. I get that she is excited after getting out of the statue, but you'd think she'd kinda just... not run off like an idiot upon hearing music while Booker is obviously still extremely injured and has just nearly died? Considering almost immediately after she expresses concern for his health and says she will look out for supplies, this makes no sense.
7. Also, Booker has a full health bar after this incident. Just saying.
8. Upon being CPR'd by Elizabeth, Booker gets up and is standing next to two people sitting on the beach about 10 feet away. These people say nothing and do nothing. Did they just completely miss the two people falling into the lake, washing ashore, and then also miss the girl giving CPR to the man? Or are they so apathetic they just do not give a ☺☺☺☺? And I guess everyone else on the beach also just did not see? Uh, okay?
9. Furthermore, Booker clearly has the distinctive AD mark on his hand. You'd think that news of his rampage throughout the city would have spread, and that seeing a disheveled man who is basically the incarnation of the devil falling out of the sky and washing up on the beach, and then wandering around with a girl half his age and who suspiciously has the same name as the savior baby girl, would set off some alarm bells.
10. Why are there absolutely no police on the beach and boardwalk, yet previously we saw the city was completely full of them up to the point where you could reasonably call them a small army? Did Booker already kill them all? Actually, that'd make sense as to why the statue with Elizabeth is completely abandoned when Booker gets there. Because I'm sure the developers really thought about this and it all makes sense, and totally wasn't just a stupid oversight.
11. If Elizabeth was trapped in this tower her whole life, why does she behave like some sort of model ideal girlfriend wish fulfillment fantasy, instead of a socially stunted retard? Shouldn't she be a) very anti-social, b) completely lacking any social graces, knowledge of slang or even basic vocal communication, and c) terrified of everything?
12. Why isn't her skin completely pasty white, and why isn't she extremely physically weak or even atrophied?
13. Why did Comstock imprison her in a massive statue? Isn't that ludicrously impractical and an incredible waste, considering it has laboratories, housing etc.? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to have the statue as a monument and then house the lab in a building at the base?

Just wondering. I'm only an hour into the game and I can't wait to see things get better from here. Will it be 20 plot holes every scene? 30?

 

[Average Manatee]

I stopped questioning anything involving Elizabeth once she had a cutscene crying moment about me killing armed police shooting at us, yet in the very next area I shot up a bar full of unarmed civilians while she never skipped a beat talking about her life story.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

why isn't she extremely physically weak or even atrophied?

From the size of her butt I'd say that she did heavy squats every day. Anyway, you could spend hours overanalyzing this.

 

[Gelbvieh]

Those tear-spawned Mosquitoes/Animatrons refresh as well so if you're low on hp and ammo and don't want to spend money dying, you can just hide behind a crate. As long as you poke your head out every few seconds, I found enemies would just stay where they were and shoot at me (except for the special ones). If they do get close, skyline if there is one.

I have some questions.

So when you escape with Elizabeth from the tower, you fall down into the water out of the sky next to a collapsing bridge.

1. There does not appear to actually be a massive lake in the city, and the bridge is not in sight of the beach. How come nobody saw the collapsing bridge? Why is nobody running around screaming?
2. If there is a massive lake, it'd likely be at the bottom of the waterfalls at the beach. How did Booker and Elizabeth get up the waterfalls?
3. How did Elizabeth get out of that massive fall without getting her clothes ruined?
4. Why does Elizabeth go from freaking out at Booker, to trusting him and treating him like an old friend within about 2 minutes?
5. I get that she is excited after getting out of the statue, but you'd think she'd kinda just... not run off like an idiot upon hearing music while Booker is obviously still extremely injured and has just nearly died? Considering almost immediately after she expresses concern for his health and says she will look out for supplies, this makes no sense.
6. Also, Booker has a full health bar after this incident. Just saying.
7. Upon being CPR'd by Elizabeth, Booker gets up and is standing next to two people sitting on the beach about 10 feet away. These people say nothing and do nothing. Did they just completely miss the two people falling into the lake, washing ashore, and then also miss the girl giving CPR to a man? Or are they so apathetic they just do not give a shit? And I guess everyone else on the beach also just did not see? Uh, okay?

It makes no sense. I'm pretty sure the level design changed at some point, but they felt like the cutscene where the bridge collapses was too awesome to change.

With regards to Elizabeth, a little farther in that level you'll get to a point when

Spoiler

she notices they have segregated bathrooms for blacks and whites and goes "why do they have those? That just seems complicated". But separate bathrooms for men and women? She knows all about that. When you enter the men's (only the white folk's men's) she refuses to follow you in.

Her writing's all over the place, anyway. She goes through all sorts of stages without much logic. You shoot a few people, you get into an elevator, the game remembers that you're on a moving journey of self-discovery or something and she has some kind of a revelation. Booker runs the gamut from psycho to teddy and back again as well.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Heh, not really.

 

[Gelbvieh]

When you go intertextual it kinda moves into Hero with a Thousand Faces territory. I think it's only Levine putting a nonsensical nod towards BS into his game. Trying to create his own Mythos with a shoehorn.

 

[aris]

Yeah Bioshock infinite definitely took a cue from half life 2 with elisabeth. There is no doubt about it. I think the other similarities are coincidental though.

 

[Blaine]

In all seriousness though Azazel, why specifically is Reddit a shithole and why is it a good thing you left your window open? What happened?

I'd like to bring to the table example A:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEBwKO4RFOU

Please watch the above 15 minutes of gameplay from July 2011 and ponder how little of that actually made it into the game which shipped 16 months later:

- Non-aggressive NPC's that don't realize who you are until you do something drastic, and whom you an interact with in non-violent contextual circumstances.

- Elizabeth reacts to the environment prompting conversations which build depth and character.

- Very dense scenes with NPC setpieces creating a far richer tapestry of the world that you are exploring. Only the opening level of the shipped product is as rich as this scene.

- Vigors based on an inventory stock instead of a refillable mana bar.

- Very, very, very large environments with HUGE skyline segments, combat on the skylines, and "3D" combat (Ground, Skyline, Zeppelin)

- AI that is noticeably more advanced than the current, including flanking and shifting to different levels in the environment to gain an advantage.

- Dialogue that is present in the shipped product, but in dramatically different situations and context, implying that the story was scrapped and re-written VERY late in development (this is Q3 2011, remember). Elizabeths line in the trailer where she mentions asking Comstock for help escaping is itself a potent indicator that the story was vastly different.

After having gone back and watched several of these, I've come to the conclusion that the product which was shipped out to stores contains not even a fraction of the actual assets that were developed for this game. In comparison the AI is incredibly dumbed down, and the world is a sterile theme park which you are railroaded through.

It honestly feels like the Infinite which was released is either an earlier build than what is shown in these videos, or a patchwork of assets which was hacked together at the very end of the development cycle in order to ship a product by a specific date. This is supported by several jarring issues in the final game, primarily Abandoned Game Mechanics:


- Vox Cyphers & Crows Chests are both implied to be recurring elements, to the extent that they even feature voiced dialogue and in-game tutorials about them. Yet there are 3 cyphers and 3 crow chests, in the entire game.

- In the first level, after you find the first crow chest, you enter a mansion and are given a tutorial prompt which suggests "Try not shooting your gun and drawing attention to yourself" Clearly this is a remnant the 2011 build in the video above, where enemies were not instant-hostile zerglings, but is useless in the release build as all enemies shoot on sight.

- The previously inventory-based vigor system appears to have been changed very late in development, as the old pick-up bottles are still to be found scattered throughout levels, but now only act as salt refills.

- The design of many early levels, such as Soldiers Field, feel very odd and out of context, and not designed for Combat. I suspect these were originally built as the "hub" levels when the game was more open world, and then pared down when it was cut up into a linear shooter.

- There is an interview with Ken Levine, I believe from 2010, discussing an artist quitting after they axed the Shantytown segment because it made little sense on the context of a floating nationalist utopia. Mysteriously, Shantytown is back in the release build.

There are several instances in the course of the game which, upon reflection, are shoe-horning in assets that they had paid to develop and needed to justify the cost of, but which make very little sense when the whole cloth is examined.
When it comes down to it, comparing what was shipped to what was promoted leading up to launch, I actually do believe Ken Levines quote of having "Cut enough content to make ten games". Unfortunately, it's clear that they cut out the vast majority of what had made Infinite unique, and replaced it with a severely reduced linear shooter. It's like they took a finished game, pulled it apart into all the pieces, and then built a much smaller game out of them in a fraction of the time. Like making an Unreal mod using stock assets or something.

It is a testament to Irrational that they were able to pull together a very enjoyable product in what appears to be a very short span of time, but the shipped game is also clearly not the one that was in development for so long, and only a pale shadow in terms of depth in both gameplay and worldbuilding.

So again, the question, what the hell went wrong during development that caused this level of scrapping at the last minute?

 

[Gelbvieh]

Why limit yourself to IGN?

 

[MapMan]

I tried to play this game again. Wow, even more boring than the first try. Uninstalling. Welp.

 

[Blaine]

Gelbvieh

"THANKS FOR THE CHECK, 2K! 9/10!"

"FANTASTIC LAUNCH PARTY, IRRATIONAL! 5/5!"

"AMAZING REVIEW KIT, 10/10 MUST-BUY!"

"APPRECIATE THE AIRFARE AND HOTEL COMP, 2K! 9.5/10!"

"GOOD WORK BOB, SEE YOU AT QUIZNO'S NEXT MONDAY! 4.5/5!"

 

[Gelbvieh]

"PLEASE DON'T PULL YOUR ADS!"

 

[Blaine]

 

[waywardOne]

Got this game free with vid card. Even so, I should be asking for a refund.

I skipped BS1, and BS2 glitched before I could get into it. Still, I felt like I needed a longer intro as to why I'm being railroaded to Cloud City via rokkits when apparently rowboats are good enough for everyone else. I have yet to figure out why I give a shit about this girl I'm following (I won't say "looking for" because there's no option to not retrace her steps). Is this game finished?

 

[Gelbvieh]

 

[Toffeli]

In all seriousness though Azazel, why specifically is Reddit a shithole and why is it a good thing you left your window open? What happened?

http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/...inite_what_the_hell_happened_during/?sort=new
Original post was removed and now there's a "No Bioshock: Infinite topics/comments or spoilers for the next two weeks". Not familiar with Reddit, so no idea why it was removed...

 

[Average Manatee]

Looks like Reddit is definitely still a shithole. Might as well read "No talking about Infinite BS until it has sold all it could".

 

[Blaine]

Azazel Toffeli

Some parts of Reddit are fine, but there's something you guys ought to know about all of the popular gaming-related subreddits:

They are absolutely stuffed, and I mean fully stuffed like a done tom turkey or a bursting cornucopia, with casual console gamers who worship AAA games and developers. Agents of the incline abandoned those subreddits long ago because, thanks to improper use of the voting system, their opinions are immediately flooded with downvotes until they're at the bottom of the list and hidden from view.

If you're not fellating Assassin's Creed or whatever the latest popamole title is, don't even bother posting.

That said, it looks as though they may legitimately just be trying to avoid spoilers and a flood of Infinite topics in this particular case.

 

[Azazel]

Azazel Toffeli

Some parts of Reddit are fine, but there's something you guys ought to know about all of the popular gaming-related subreddits:

They are absolutely stuffed, and I mean fully stuffed like a done tom turkey or a bursting cornucopia, with casual console gamers who worship AAA games and developers. Agents of the incline abandoned those subreddits long ago because, thanks to improper use of the voting system, their opinions are immediately flooded with downvotes until they're at the bottom of the list and hidden from view.

If you're not fellating Assassin's Creed or whatever the latest popamole title is, don't even bother posting.

That said, it looks as though they may legitimately just be trying to avoid spoilers and a flood of Infinite topics in this particular case.

Oh I am so very well aware, I try and stay away lest I develop an ulcer. The hilarious thing is that post was gaining HUGE traction before it got shut down, it was the top post in the whole damn subreddit and quite a few people were agreeing with it. Feel sorry for the dude who put all the effort in.

 

[Blaine]

Well, let's ensure it finds its way back there at a later date... although the mods may still delete it, obviously.

 

[abija]

I stopped questioning anything involving Elizabeth once she had a cutscene crying moment about me killing armed police shooting at us, yet in the very next area I shot up a bar full of unarmed civilians while she never skipped a beat talking about her life story.

This. If they'd cut all the emotional engagement scenes the game would be better.

Wouldn't people notice that the gigantic statue that towers over the entire city has now been completely destroyed? You'd think that would sort of interrupt your quiet day at the beach

They will a bit later and the scene will be so dumb you'll wish they didn't.

Just wondering. I'm only an hour into the game and I can't wait to see things get better from here. Will it be 20 plot holes every scene? 30?

It gets better in the way that there are less scenes and more shooting. It's also set up in such a way that there are no plot holes, just "deeper meanings". Any retarded explanation you can come up for something, it would fit right in.

 

[Commander Xbox]

I just watched a couple of videos from a Walkthrough to see what the fuss is all about and already I'm confused.

Apparently, Booker goes to Columbia to find a girl and bring her to the surface to repay a debt. Why not just stay in Columbia and screw his debtors? Granted, I don't what and how much he owes exactly, but given how hard it seems to reach Columbia, I'd wager he'd be pretty safe up there, since Columbia probably wouldn't recognize any legal claims from some dude coming to collect. Also, they'd first have to find him, which seems pretty hard to do in such a big city.
How would anyone even know he broke the deal? Wouldn't they just assume he failed and possibly died if he didn't come back? Whoever sent him probably knows who Elizabeth is and how important she is.

The transition from meandering around to the actual gameplay is also pretty damn jarring. One minute you're walking around, playing games on a fair and the next you're ripping peoples heads off with your execution moves like a fucking savage. You then proceed to slaughter your way through dozens of police officers in various ways.
That seems a little extreme just to repay a debt. Booker can obviously handle himself, couldn't he have just kill his debtor(s) instead of fighting a war against an entire city? Or just stay in Columbia. I bet he could handle any collectors coming for him if it came to blows.

Reading through the thread though, I've picked up something about the debt not being the real reason he's there. Apparently something about a guilt trip involving his daughter or something?
Can someone sum up the story for me? I don't think I want to watch however many more hours of this mess.

try actually playing the game. fucking retard