sea
inXile Entertainment
- Joined
- May 3, 2011
- Messages
- 5,698
There is no way to use any sort of stealth or subtlety. Enemies instantly know where you are as soon as you fire a shot or use a Vigor. While sneaking is technically possible, enemy patrols are not set up in such a way to really allow for it. You can't take out one guy and not alert everyone else, or effectively lose enemy aggro and alertness, but this was possible in the original BioShock.
If you think that melee-focused is a valid strategy in this game... uh, yeah, you haven't played on hard mode have you? It is possible, but the game is not at all designed for this play-style and especially on harder difficulties you will get completely creamed. Furthermore since the gear upgrades you get are semi-random there is a good chance you won't be able to effectively utilize this play-style until quite a ways into the game (you don't get charge until at least 2/3 in).
Abuse of skylines is not really a play-style, but it is basically something that enemies have little to no resistance against. The fact that you can hook, jump, hook, jump back and forth on the same enemies while avoiding most damage is more an exploit than anything else. So I guess I'll buy that even if I think it'd get really boring really fast, and it's much less effective overall than just shooting dudes.
The idea that you are drawing a distinction between using crowd control vigors and then finishing with damage vigors, vs. crowd control vigors and finishing with guns, is kinda silly in my mind. It's like saying you can shoot someone and then melee them to death or just shoot them and skip melee entirely. And even with infusions and pickups you often don't have enough salts for it to be a permanent play-style anyway - since you can't carry salts with you you rely on Elizabeth's random number generator or whether the designers remembered to include a tear with extra salts in the environment somewhere
That is something we are in agreeance with. Furthermore I think this colossally reduces the feeling that you do have lots of options in combat - because rather than figuring them out for yourself you are basically given a bunch of buttons to press (tears) that enable X, Y or Z, all on silver platters. By showing you the options you get the sense the game is more limited than it really is. It also means you often lack the choice of approaching combat encounters from different angles - a big strength of BioShock's combat was that you could decide the terms to engage the enemies on much more freely. In Infinite most of the time you are going to be walking into an area, ducking behind cover and running around in circles to regenerate your shields until it's safe to pop out again.
That's a fair point.
There's probably some hyperbole in there that I can rectify.
I am getting the distinct sense that right now you are using possession as kind of a catch-all way of saying"there are choices!" Yeah, you can possess the Handyman (for like 2 seconds, and of course he does not suicide afterwards) or you can possess standard grunts as distractions. But you could do that, and more, in the original BioShock using the hacking system. Furthermore you had significant time to prepare for the challenging encounters; you could come up with a strategy to tackle a Big Daddy or Little Sister in advance, lay your traps and tripwires, etc. In Infinite, most of the time you are going to be, as I said, entering into a combat arena not knowing what to expect and then running around in circles kiting as you search for resources to use your vigors and turning to shoot at enemies when you have a second free.
Note that a lot of this stuff probably also applies more on hard mode. I regret playing the game that way. I'm going through Infinite again right now and it is a far more pleasant experience on the normal difficulty because it feels like they actually balanced the game with this in mind, instead of simply inflating enemy health bars by 2-3x. Many of the tactics available are more reasonable because you won't use all your salts just denting a boss's health bar by 10%, and the minor enemies don't require a full clip each to take down.
Don't be so sure. The build I used relied mostly on guns because they were, in my experience, the most effective way of dealing with enemies. Specifically I found that, on hard mode, using vigors was rather frustrating because you ran out of salts much too fast. Comparatively, using guns is much more economical and ammo is much more common to come across. You also get weapon upgrades faster, which avoids the problem of enemy health bloat more readily.
I used every vigor at least during one or two encounters, and kept going back to my stand-bys because they were simply much more effective on the difficulty level I was playing on. It was a late-game realization that the sniper rifle was so effective however - I used the volley gun and RPG quite a bit, along with the carbine, but I started using the sniper rifle in a distance encounter and realized it was capable of bypassing the bloated health bars of enemies much, much more easily than anything else, and could take out heavy enemies very fast as well. Nothing else could compare to it, not so much for raw damage output, but for thinning enemy numbers quickly.
I said that all weapons are effective. I don't think they are equally effective, though. The late game combat arenas, again on hard mode, have so much incoming damage that it is almost impossible to close the distance with enemies. That's why you need to have a long-range weapon and a short-range weapon, and for my money the machine gun and sniper rifle did a better job than anything. You are forced to prioritize because if you drop a weapon there's no guarantee you can get it back until several levels later, and the two-gun limit means that everything redundant kind of has to go if you want to maintain your effectiveness. Maybe it's my min-max attitude showing.
Even if you take all this into account, and yes there probably are flaws in my analysis above (which I can rectify later), it still doesn't really change that Infinite has dumbed down combat compared to the original BioShock (and BioShock 2, which had better combat than both games). That's still not exactly something worth praising.
). I guess that forcing the THIS IS RACISM!!!! manipulative scenes all the time is enough to score a few extra score points with ignorant gaming journalists that didn't read a single book in their lives to know that slavery and racism are way more complex problems than the manipulative bullshit the game shows all the time. The leader of the Vox Populi is just boring, oppression, revolutionary cliche machine without any charisma. How this game gets so much applause by this superficial, manipulative, pretentious, cliche way of discussing fundamentalist, nacionalism and racism issues? Boy, everything seems so fake, the characters, civillians, the city. Where is my IMMERSSIUM?
