The story of Bioshock has always been told in a many-faceted manner. The story comes to us through the game play and cut scenes just like every other game. But Bioshock also enriched the story with the objects scattered throughout the game and in the background. Many games do this, but Bioshock did it especially well. The audio recordings were what set Bioshock apart form other games i have played. The audio recordings told us the stories of various characters in the universe, many of whom were never in the game with Jack or Delta. Those recordings made those characters real or at least not flat. But the recordings were never intrusive. They enriched the story but if you did not care they could be ignored for the most part and you'd still understand the story.
In Infinite the audio recordings tell the story and if you miss one then you may not get the story of Infinite. In my first play-through i was fairly diligent in getting the recordings but did not plan to get all of them the first time; I wanted to just enjoy the story. I missed two or three crucial recordings and as a result i missed some of the most important bits of information that made the story work. I was left very unsatisfied because these out of the way audio recordings were absolutely critical to understanding the story. This was a poor choice for the game and detracted from my experience.
The delays, we have to talk about the delays.The game was originally set to be released in October 2012. Of course this announcement was tentative i mean they were forecasting years down the road. No wait, that's not right. The October 2012 release date was announced in March 2012, a scant six months. In May, 2012, Irrational Games announced that they were pushing back the release date to February 26, 2013. Well quality is what counts and if the developers needed more time to polish the title then we could wait a little longer. Good thing we could wait, because we had to. In December 2012 there was a second delay. The new release date was March 26, 2013.
Delays are bad but Irrational never really told us what was going on. We were simply told the delays would allow them to polish the title or assure the quality of the delivered game. These are platitudes and meaningless. Why not tell us that the stars were not auspicious for October? That explanation would have been just as useful and informative. Given the number of people who still buy into astronomy inauspicious stars may have been just fine for a significant population of future Bioshock buyers. Instead Irrational lived up to their name and did not give reasons.
Delays were not thew sole problem though. Throughout the development of Bioshock Infinite we got trailers, the developers gave interviews, we saw game footage; there was info out there to be had. The smart fans ignored all that. Ignorance is bliss and they were able to savor the finished product and did not have to worry about what was missing.
Levine promised that we would get real choices this time. In Bioshock you had three choices, harvest all the Little Sisters, harvest none of them, or do a little of both. A lot of players and critics complained the choices didn't matter. The game still played out the same. Harvesting got you some extra ADAM. Not harvesting got you some interesting upgrades, The ending did change but you could go on Youtube and see the road not traveled so no loss there.
The critics were wrong. I played through Bioshock and never harvested the Little Sisters because you don't kill little girls. In Bioshock 2 i chose to do a run with all harvesting, no mercy. Irrational did not do 2 but 2K Marin understood what to do. Make you care. I barely made it though the harvest playthough. Watching those little girls cringe when i came near was tough, hearing them cry out in fear was tougher. 2K Marin made my choice matter.
Irrational thought you needed to make real choices. In one of the previews you the Vox Populi (Commies) preparing to execute a mailman. The player could avoid the mob and go about his business, at least that was an option presented. In the demo the player elects to intervene and mayhem ensues. In a shooter, mayhem is a good thing. Mayhem in a righteous cause makes for an outstanding story.
In the finished product this scene is deleted. You are give a total of three choices. You can pick the emblem on Elizabeth's cameo, a bird or a cage. The choice is cosmetic and most of the time you will never pay attention to the cameo again. You get a choice that will affect the appearance of your shooting hand which i will not spoil. In any event it does not do anything to affect gameplay. Finally you get a chance to confront the rampant racism of Columbia.
Twenty minutes in you are confronted with an interracial couple who is going to be pummeled (slain?) with baseballs and as the winner of the lottery you get the first throw. There are three options here although no one i talked to knew there were three. If you select X you bean the couple, A to throw at the MC. You also have the option of doing nothing and not throwing at all, this is the option most people miss although it is the one most in keeping with Booker's personality. Of course it does not matter what you do. In fact, you do not even get to throw the ball no matter what you chose. There were also no repercussions to any choice, not even a change to the ending like in 1 and 2. So much for making choice matter.
Wait wait some of you are saying you get to chose what Elizabeth brings though the tears. My Columbia is different from you Columbia because we get to chose what is in it. Well not so much. The tears let you have the option of a gun you probably don't want, med kits you probably will not need, cover that is not that useful, or a chance to get a higher vantage point. We were promised something else.
In multiple articles on multiple websites we were told pretty much the same thing s let me quote beefjack.com because they have a cool name:
Elizabeth also happens to have some special powers that will prove useful on your adventures – that is, if she can control them. She can manipulate objects, the weather, and windows into other worlds, known as tears. Booker and Elizabeth make a unique tag-team in a world where everyone wants to hurt, kill or capture them. While Booker will do the actual fighting, he can call on Elizabeth to conjure up train cars, ammunition, or even a doorway that can help or hinder you.
In the preview videos we see though damnable Vox Populi run over by a train car when Elizabeth pulls on though the tear. You will not have that happen in your playthough because it was removed from the game. We were never shown the doorways in the preview videos but in interviews the doorways were definitely part of the game leading to areas you may not be able to get to any other way. The doorways were removed and the areas were rendered almost completely straight lines.
Nostrums, remember nostrums? If you weren't following the development then you don't remember nostrums because they were removed from the game. Honestly i can't explain this better than Ken Levine did so let me just
THE BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VIGORS AND PLASMIDS
In the world of "BioShock Infinite," vigors are like your spells. In practice, they work a lot like plasmids in the sense that you can drink a vigor and send out burst of ravenous crows (Murder of Crows) or lift enemies up into the air (Bucking Bronco). Until I spoke to Levine, I assumed that they worked exactly like plasmids, where the player would select which vigors they wanted and would have a pool of energy (or Eve, in "BioShock 1") which would allow them to be cast.
"The big difference we're doing is that vigors have, essentially, charges," explained Levine. "One problem we had with Eve is that all the plasmids had to be roughly equally as powerful as all the other plasmids because they all ran from the same Eve system. You basically felt like 'Well, if I fire this plasmid versus that plasmid, I can only get one round, where here I can get 50 rounds, but it's much less powerful.'"
He's basically saying that you couldn't have a huge, overpowered plasmid because, so long as you had a ton of Eve hypos, you could just keep on casting it and the game would become broken. In "BioShock Infinite," Levine's solution is to have a limited number of uses, almost like you're picking up ammo.
"What's nice about what we're doing here is that, because you're finding X number of charges of a vigor, you can have super, super powerful ones that have like one charge or two charges. And ones that are much less powerful, but have 30 charges or 40 charges. That's a really interesting development for us, because that allows us to do these huge, epic vigors where we wouldn't have that before. We couldn't balance that before."He went on to explain that the number of vigor types you're carrying around is also limited. "The vigors function like the plasmids, but you pick them up more like weapons in a traditional FPS and they have a number of charges to them. So you go into combat and you'll have two of those available at any one time, but you can find more of those in the world. The same way you make choices about what weapons you carry around in 'Halo,' you're making that with vigors."
Which begs the question, where does the character customization come in? In the original "BioShock," much of your playstyle was determined by which plasmids you wanted to invest in. But if you're no longer investing in vigors, are you still building a character sheet or does "Infinite" just play out like a shooter with no permanent character choices? Worry not, that's where nostrums come in.
NOSTRUMS, THE SOUL OF YOUR CHARACTER IN 'INFINITE'
If vigors are similar to but not quite like plasmids, nostrums are similar to but not quite like tonics. If you'll recall, tonics in the original "BioShock" were passive upgrades for your character which would give you certain benefits. For example, one tonic might cause enemies to freeze when you hit them with melee attacks.
Nostrums are exactly the same, but the ways you encounter them are slightly different. There are two types of nostrums: stable and unstable. In the world of "Infinite," unstable nostrums are referred to colloquially as "potlucks." You might find a potluck in a crate or in a vending machine. Upon activating a potluck, you'll be given the choice of four possible character upgrades. Said Levine:
"You have to, at that moment, choose one of those. There's a thing in 'Heroes of Might and Magic,' if you ever played that game. That's where I was inspired/stole the idea from. You basically get to choose one of those powers, but you have to choose right then. Then that power goes in your character sheet. And you're making a lot of those choices throughout the game. That’s the direction we're trying to go. Give you a lot of choices that you don’t have to have that same kind of cumbersome management system because you're making the choice as it happens. As you find it."He went on to explain that there are also stable nostrums. Unlike potlucks, there's no mystery to a stable nostrum. You know exactly what upgrade you're going to get if you buy it. But that knowledge comes at a price. Stable nostrums in a vending machine, for example, would be much more expensive than potlucks.
So, for "BioShock Infinite," nostrums are the primary way to make permanent changes to your character according to your play style. Unlike tonics, there's no need to equip or unequip nostrums. You don't have a limited number of slots. You just keep building them up, making those upgrade choices, according to how you prefer to play.
"Basically we have all the same systems, we're just presenting them a little bit differently, so you can have a lot more stuff," explained Levine. "'BioShock' didn't have enough stuff. Power stuff, character growth stuff. Game design-wise we wanted more stuff, so these are ways of going about getting more stuff. It opens the pathway to allow us to have more stuff, which was limited in the first game."
The original plans for Vigors seemed new and exciting. In the game we got vigors were nothing more than plasmids with different animation. Nostrums are just gone. In their place we got equipment. Equipment is just a scaled down and less interesting implementation of the Tonic system for Bioshock.
The problems of Bioshock Infinite are a result of the failure of the game to live up to the promises of the developers. If you knew nothing about the development of the game it is possible to be happy with the final game. Adam intentionally avoided everything after the original trailer and was very happy with Infinite. When we discuss the game at the office he points out that my complaints are not with the game itself, but with my own expectations. He is right but my expectations we a result of taking what Levine said at face value and expecting to get what i was promised.
I started this review on May 15 and finished it on July 4. In the interim a number of sites have done stories compairing the demos and development versions of Bioshock Infinite to the final product. What truly surprises me is the lack of criticism. Most of the audience seems to accept the final version without any complaint. Many readers defend the changes and tout Levine's savvy, brilliance, skill, ect. I am not among them.
Bioshock Infinite is a failure. It fails on almost every level. The story is not very interesting and making the recordings so essential to understanding what was going on is a major mistake. Not everyone is going the track down all of them and some of the most important ones were out of the way. The gameplay was fine, but were we promised something greater. We were promised that our choices would actually matter. We were given a game with weaker gameplay than either of the first two games because the tonic system is so much more robust and interesting than the gear system despiter there being almost no mechanical difference. As for choice, you literally had one choice to make at every stage of the game-- play or not. No other choice had any impact at all. The maps are all little more than straight line tunnels with a small branch here or there so there was no exploration to do. No option you were given had any effect on the ending or how the game played out. The only choice you could make that mattered at all was to not play the game. I learned that lesson in 1983 when i saw War Games.
On a final note it is July 4th. I bought the season pass on day one. I still have nothing i can do with it. No DLC. In November X-Box One comes out and most people will be moving on the the next gen. I seriously doubt that we will have three quality DLC add-ons by then. I will be impressed if we have one. I do not think Bioshock Infinite was bad in an absolute sense. It's failure is measured against what it should have been. The failure to deliver the DLC is just another example of such. Regardless of how good it might be, it is late and not given to us in the manner were were led to expect.
Later
Bob
The problems of Bioshock Infinite are a result of the failure of the game to live up to the promises of the developers. If you knew nothing about the development of the game it is possible to be happy with the final game. Adam intentionally avoided everything after the original trailer and was very happy with Infinite. When we discuss the game at the office he points out that my complaints are not with the game itself, but with my own expectations. He is right but my expectations we a result of taking what Levine said at face value and expecting to get what i was promised.
I started this review on May 15 and finished it on July 4. In the interim a number of sites have done stories compairing the demos and development versions of Bioshock Infinite to the final product. What truly surprises me is the lack of criticism. Most of the audience seems to accept the final version without any complaint. Many readers defend the changes and tout Levine's savvy, brilliance, skill, ect. I am not among them.
Bioshock Infinite is a failure. It fails on almost every level. The story is not very interesting and making the recordings so essential to understanding what was going on is a major mistake. Not everyone is going the track down all of them and some of the most important ones were out of the way. The gameplay was fine, but were we promised something greater. We were promised that our choices would actually matter. We were given a game with weaker gameplay than either of the first two games because the tonic system is so much more robust and interesting than the gear system despiter there being almost no mechanical difference. As for choice, you literally had one choice to make at every stage of the game-- play or not. No other choice had any impact at all. The maps are all little more than straight line tunnels with a small branch here or there so there was no exploration to do. No option you were given had any effect on the ending or how the game played out. The only choice you could make that mattered at all was to not play the game. I learned that lesson in 1983 when i saw War Games.
On a final note it is July 4th. I bought the season pass on day one. I still have nothing i can do with it. No DLC. In November X-Box One comes out and most people will be moving on the the next gen. I seriously doubt that we will have three quality DLC add-ons by then. I will be impressed if we have one. I do not think Bioshock Infinite was bad in an absolute sense. It's failure is measured against what it should have been. The failure to deliver the DLC is just another example of such. Regardless of how good it might be, it is late and not given to us in the manner were were led to expect.
Later
Bob
