Bioshock Infinite

[Mischief Maker]

playin' Mario 1 gold coin rules, basically.

I'm curious what these gold coin rules are when playing Mario 1. Please elaborate.

[ZellSF]

Found this.

1999 mode is basically a harder mode than Hard. Cost to respawn is $100 (in Hard it's $50), enemies deal 200% damage and take 50% damage (Hard is 170% and 60%), the delay on shield recharge and he rate at which it recharges is longer, you can't use the navigation arrow, aim assist is turned off, unlike other modes, if you can't afford the respawn price you won't respawn, and you can't change difficulty in game. As far as I can tell, those are the only differences.

I can see the rampant autosaving defeating the point of this mode, but I could see myself going through a second round and just not continue when I run out of money; playin' Mario 1 gold coin rules, basically.

Otherwise, artificial difficulty is stupid. I've lit enough people on fire and they just continue to fire at me with perfect accuracy. It's weird.

It's funnier when you shoot an unaware enemy in the back of his head, he turns around and the front of his face is all bloody and he still needs no time to think before hitting you with perfect aim. I think this game is needlessly violent and it's not the first game that made me think so (Dishonored was pretty bad too).

I restarted the game in 1999 mode, no reloading this time around. At battleship bay now (right after you meet Elizabeth), no expensive deaths so far. Combat definitely is a lot better than BioShock due to different weapons/vigors actually being way more useful. Not due to the new cover shooter mechanics, those are still terrible.

[Moniker]

I can see the rampant autosaving defeating the point of this mode, but I could see myself going through a second round and just not continue when I run out of money; playin' Mario 1 gold coin rules, basically.

Nah; only way to play Bioshock is to skip Vita Chambers completely and allow yourself a set number of saves per level. Unless you can't turn off autosave...

Makes the first 2 much more fun, anyway. Got pretty far and had lots of fun permadeathing Bs2.

[ZellSF]

Problem is it doesn't work in Infinite, since death actually punishes you quite a bit. Reloading is the easy way to play it.

Soon done with Hall of Heroes, I'm up to somewhere between 6-8 deaths now... Still better off financially than when I restarted the game though.

[Daigohji]

Finished it on Normal, which took about 12 hours. I enjoyed it more than Bioshock for a few reasons. I liked that it took place in a living environment rather than the gutted and decaying remains of one, and found Columbia a more interesting place to explore than Rapture. Bioshock's story had its moments, but blew its wad halfway through, and didn't offer much of interest after that. Infinite's story becomes more memorable as it goes along, and delivers some emotional gut punches towards the end. Finally, while the combat mechanics are virtually unchanged, it has been rebalanced with an emphasis on long range engagements. This isn't a cover shooter so much as a sniping game much of the time, which suits me just fine.

What Infinite isn't is scary, and it isn't trying to be. So if you associate the Shock series with horror, you'll be disappointed.

[AAA]

It's a great game - but too shooting-centric and not as atmospheric as the original title.

[DJ Incompetent]

playin' Mario 1 gold coin rules, basically.

I'm curious what these gold coin rules are when playing Mario 1. Please elaborate.

Mario: 100 coins = 1up
Bioshock 1999: 100 silver eagles = respawn

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

I beat this on normal the other day. I think the control is a little wonky on console. I got used to it, but the aiming seems to have some bounce to it or something. It's just not as smooth as other fps games. It also has some annoying slowdown sometimes on xbox. I really didn't enjoy having to search around for stuff all the time. Why not just let me pick up stuff by walking over it in every other fps? No you have to look right at the item and press x over and over and over. Waiting around for Elizabeth to unlock doors over and over got old to me too.

But I think this is probably one of the best campaigns in a fps game that I can think of. It has some memorable moments in the game. Good environments. The dialogue between the two main characters was pretty good. I thought the ending was great. I haven't got this hooked on a single player fps since half life 2. I'm not so sure if game play is good enough to keep me coming back to it. But I think it's really solid in most other areas though. Trying out 1999 mode now. Hopefully it gives the game some more replay value.

[Blackbird]

I think the game is aesthetically outstanding, the setting is interesting (if implausible) and the voice acting is great. However, the core FPS gameplay is pretty par for the course at this point. Get some weapons, shoot some hordes of mindless grunts, go hide behind some cover to recharge your shield... yawn.

Really, this game is being sold on the promised strength of the story. I find that story disappointing so far. Frankly, it's pretentious. I don't want to waste half an hour explaining why it's pretentious (I'll explain in more detail if you really care) but the biggest thing I hated about the story was how much it objectified Elizabeth. The prophet refers to her as his "seed" and is only concerned with her in the capacity that she is the continuation of himself. DeWitt, on the other hand, sees her essentially as currency. She's only useful in the sense that she's a bargaining chip that will get him out of debt. Even Elizabeth's function in combat is basically that of an item dispenser - she's a glorified, mobile vending machine. Here's a crazy idea - why not ARM her with the fuckton of guns that seem to be laying about everywhere in this "paradise" and let her actually help out? Moreover, why doesn't she do that herself without the protagonist's prompting? The writers let Elizabeth struggle here and there, but ultimately present her as helpless and dependant on Booker, which I find narratively repugnant.

The game probably would have been better if it had less mindless killing in it and more story driven action and puzzle solving. As it is, a lot of the ultraviolence seems really forced and shoe-horned into the plot, when the setting itself appears at odds with this level of violence.

My prediction is that this game will do extremely well, because a lot of players will be dazzled by how impressive the graphics and art design are. I don't think a lot of players will look past the curtain to notice how superficial the game is.

[mortified_penguin]

Too much shooting...on a shmups forum. That's priceless.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The writers let Elizabeth struggle here and there, but ultimately present her as helpless and dependant on Booker, which I find narratively repugnant.

Considering Bioshock is trying to be a spiritual successor to System Shock, that sounds rather absurd, especially considering in System Shock 2, the main support characters (Delacroix in particular) are generally the ones who got shit done. The protagonist only succeeds because of how much Delacroix literally cleared the way for him (as she details in all the logs she leaves behind, you're always one step behind her).

It seems odd for the series to have an ally alongside the protagonist only who is supposedly powerful and important only to have them constantly portrayed in a rather helpless state.

[Blackbird]

Too much shooting...on a shmups forum. That's priceless.

It's not so much a problem that there's too much shooting, so much as too much dumb shooting in a game that's nominally got a high-concept plot. It's stuck in an awkward middle ground between "blow away everything that moves" and "we need to go find the gun maker so that we can get the weapon supplies to appease our political ally of convenience". The gameplay wants to be a first person shooter, but the narrative wants to be an RPG. The RPG portion falls flat because the only way to meaningfully interact with anything in the game is to kill it. The FPS portion suffers because the player is made to keep a slower pace so that he doesn't miss the plot. Basically, it tries to do both and ends up being mediocre at both.

[O. Van Bruce]

relative to that RPG/FPS duality, how different is the quality of that mix compared to the other 2 Bioshock? I really liked the other but I want to know if the quality of that feature has gone down

[mesh control]

I wish there were demo versions of PC games so I could determine if it would run on my PC.

[ZellSF]

There's definitely less RPG features and more generic shooter ones.

Just finished the game on 1999 mode, I definitely think any PC gamers who has played a few FPS games should just start directly with that if they want a challenge. Ending got very predictable towards the end. Three of the main elements of it were very obvious to me. I like sudden plot twists that aren't foreshadowed so throughly

[system11]

I just finished it, I wish I'd paid more attention to the dialogue at the end instead of just taking it all at face value, I just wanted to quickly find out what would happen to Elizabeth, and ended up struggling to understand the ending (there are a few good sites that discuss it in detail). A lot of things I dismissed out of hand early on made a lot of sense.

As for the actual combat, I did find that a bit messy, particularly against the handymen. Shoot it in the chest for more damage? Good luck aiming at that part. Rail combat is something the developers obviously thought people would make more use of than I ever found reason to, leading to many pointless upgrade options. Last battle was a sudden difficulty wall - after walking through the game on normal, that fight took several retries and a googling. I don't think I'd have ever managed it without finding the trick.

Really Elizabeth is the star of the show, they crafted a very believable friend who doesn't get in the way all the time, usually the destiny of AI buddies. I enjoyed having her around, and one later level felt somewhat lonely as a result. The setting deserves top marks too, although I'd have liked to have had more of a chance to explore the blue sky areas before the clouds roll in for the later parts of the game, making the city feel like a piece of scenery instead of a place you can reach out and touch.

I'm not sure if I'd 10/10 it or not, it's not something I'd argue against - but the first Bioshock I'd 10/10 without hesitation.

[ZellSF]

I just finished it, I wish I'd paid more attention to the dialogue at the end instead of just taking it all at face value, I just wanted to quickly find out what would happen to Elizabeth, and ended up struggling to understand the ending (there are a few good sites that discuss it in detail). A lot of things I dismissed out of hand early on made a lot of sense.

As for the actual combat, I did find that a bit messy, particularly against the handymen. Shoot it in the chest for more damage? Good luck aiming at that part. Rail combat is something the developers obviously thought people would make more use of than I ever found reason to, leading to many pointless upgrade options. Last battle was a sudden difficulty wall - after walking through the game on normal, that fight took several retries and a googling. I don't think I'd have ever managed it without finding the trick.

There was a trick? I played on 1999 mode and didn't notice

I just spammed fireballs and possessions all over the place, it gives you tons of salts for that battle. Possession is FYI godly if you upgrade it, costs much less and it'll instantly kill the tougher regular enemies (guys with rocket launchers and such) and will turn patriots temporarily against their allies. Many of the battles I just possessed enemies and summoned allies through tears and didn't bother to do any shooting myself.

As for handymen, ravens disable them.

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

Yep, 1999 mode isn't really that much tougher than normal mode to me. I'm trading this off for Farcry 3.

[Formless God]

I have a few questions
- Can you turn off the damage, enemy status and enemy health displays? Covering your target in a flower of numbers and CRITICALS and VULNERABLES sounds like such a great way to improve accuracy.
- Can you take damage from a high fall?
- Can you die from falling off Columbia? From the Youtube videos I watched, you don't seem to be able to. Making an entire damn floating city feels like a huge waste if the player isn't able to interact with height.

[ZellSF]

1: Only thing I see is enemy health, there's an option for enabling more information, but it's actually off by default.
2: Yes, though you don't take much falling damage in this game jumping off buildings is not a good idea.
3: No it just moves you back up if you fall off the map. The way it does it is also very jarring and immersion breaking. Except invisible walls to prevent you from even trying in lots of places.

[ZellSF]

to say more about the PC port, despite being praised as an excellent port a lot of people seem to have stuttering issues with it. Something to do with how it does background streaming of content. Having the game randomly drop from 90 FPS to 30 FPS when there's no change in scene complexity is... not pleasant. I never once when playing through it thought it was a smooth and well optimized PC port.

Reminds me a lot of Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually, that game was praised as a good PC port too and at launch was a stuttering mess. I think people who make comments about PC ports being good generally has to have some of the laggiest LCD monitors on the planet

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was eventually fixed, hoping this will be too. If you can wait, I wouldn't recommend playing the PC version until a patch is released.

[mortified_penguin]

Or you could take two minutes and edit the pool size and be on your way. If you're going to play on PC you gotta learn your way around a config file.

[ZellSF]

It helps, but it definitely does not fix it on either of my computers (i5-750+GTX 580 on low settings and i7-860 (overclocked to 3.8ghz)+GTX 670 on low settings). It's an engine issue that needs a fix.

Disabling background streaming is the only way to get the performance the game should have... but that breaks the game.

[mortified_penguin]

Ah, fair enough then. Forcing adaptive vsync and the pool fix made it more than playable for me.

[Softdrink 117]

So I'm a month late to the party, but since I just started and finished my playthrough I thought I'd lay out my thoughts:

To be completely honest, it was a wonderful movie, and a very questionable game. There was nothing explicitly wrong with it-- on the contrary, everything was very well polished, and all the core mechanics worked well together. However, it's a far cry from the 'reinvention of the first person genre' that the early press sold it as, and I have to admit that the overall play experience was somewhat lackluster. The skylines are the only things I can think of that are necessarily praise-worthy, and even then, they began to feel gimmicky towards the end. The last area, in particular, was a very blatant OOOH, LOOK AT OUR SKYLINES, LOOK AT THEM AREN'T THEY PRETTY?

Setpiece moments were usually good, though, especially the Finkton zeppelin takedown. I think that what worked with Infinite is that the gameplay felt natural when (and only when) it was paired to the story. Otherwise, it felt like an overly linearized, CoD-ified version of the first Bioshock.

In terms of narrative it was great, and I have no complaints whatsoever about it (with the possible exception of the post-credits ending sequence; ever since Inception there seems to be a growing trend to add ambiguity to the ending of stuff SOLELY for the sake of getting people's attention in a 'wtf' kind of way. What writers seem to fail to understand is that Inception's ending worked because the entire plot was structured around it; you can't just tack a wtf moment on to the end of an otherwise self-contained story and then leave it. Or rather, you can, because apparently audiences are near-universally lemmings and love giving shit free publicity because *gasp* it made them think for once in their lives).

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

I think the skylines could have really been impressive and changed up the FPS genre a lot. I think they kind of hinted at what could be done with it at the zeppelin battle. But most of time they were just a way of getting from one place to another. I did appreciate the increased height of the maps. But they really could have done more with it.

Are PC players making any interesting hacks for this game?

[ZellSF]

However, it's a far cry from the 'reinvention of the first person genre' that the early press sold it as

They did the same with the original BioShock, thankfully I remembered their marketing is mostly based on lies and had low expectations for BioShock Infinite.

I still ended up disappointed

[DJ Incompetent]

Lady Comstock and the final battle were terrible designs.

[manatworks]

Lady Comstock and the final battle were terrible designs.

at least i think her part got really cool sound design.

[Rob]

the final battle

Was that the ship deck scene that went on forever and ever, solved by having that mechanical bird park its butt on everything?

Review: bad movie, bad game.