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Bioshock Infinite |OT| No Gods, Kings, or Irrational Games

Melchiah

Member
I finished the game and I must say I'm perplexed at reception it got from the press. Maybe I'm simply stopping to enjoy the games but I found everything, outside of maybe the environments mediocre or simply alright.
I think plot was relatively predictable
(the moment Booker mentioned his daughter, my brain screamed"plottwist!"
and at least for me, mindfuck for the sake of mindfuck.
Gameplay wise the game is a straight up corridor shooter (not really a drawback for me) but with unfortunately uninspired combat, enemy variety and standard set of weapons.

Agreed. Long before the end,
I guessed that Elizabeth was Booker's daughter, and after the reality jumps began, I started suspecting that Booker = Comstock. It's quite obvious, when you know Levine loves his twists.
That being said, I still liked the ending
(the drowning scene in particular)
despite of them.
 
I've been playing this for a couple of weeks and I think I'm pretty near the end -
Songbird has taken back Elizabeth and I'm in Comstock's house/compound/whatever, running around finding what they're doing to her through the audio tears.
I've got mixed opinions on it overall; artistically and visually it is incredible, there's a hell of a lot of detail in the environment and the diaglogue is generally really good, but on the other hand I think it's not very well balanced or paced (too many Vigors come too late in the game), TWICE Booker and Elizabeth
have borded the airship to get them out of Columbia
but for whatever reasons the plot has deemed
they can't escape
yet, I found the whole
Fitzroy episode
completely pointless, and I'm not really convinced by the stuff based around
multiple dimensions
, although the plot point between
Liz and Lady Comstock
was an interesting twist. The combat falls kind of in the middle ground for me; I think the Vigors and fun and interesting, but I'm playing on Normal and usually the Vigors aren't particularly worthwhile as it's quicker and easier to shoot enemies. Similarly, darting around on the skylines is fun, but I find visibility while doing so isn't ideal so again, shooting is preferable for the most part.

Anyone know how near to the end I am? I'd like to polish it off and move on; it's been fun but unless the ending is wonderful I don't agree with all the perfect review scores it got.
 

Sullichin

Member
Clash in the Clouds isn't half bad. I don't like that you don't get to pick your loadout for the first wave though... that's kind of strange. I am enjoying it through.

I am running into the same thing as I did in the normal game, most noticeable on my 1999 run where a handyman will explode when he still has over 50% of his health left. I'm starting to think this is just normal behavior. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
 
I am running into the same thing as I did in the normal game, most noticeable on my 1999 run where a handyman will explode when he still has over 50% of his health left. I'm starting to think this is just normal behavior. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

I saw this a lot more with Firemen in the normal run-through. Not sure I ever saw it with Handymen. I was also only playing on normal, though. In Clash I've only fought one Handyman and I had to gun him all the way down.
 
I finished BioShock Infinite last night. I did enjoy it overall, although I rushed more and more towards the end as I felt it dragged on a little and I just wanted to complete it. While I really enjoyed the beautiful luxuriant world and the dialogue and the depth of the setting, I found the
infinite dimensions aspect a bit too silly with too much scope for unresolved plot threads or plot resolutions through cheating. For instance, how does Comstock have his prophet powers, but not Booker? How does the ‘resolution’ happen at the end of the game by Booker drowning and thus Comstock never coming into existence, when it’s established there’s an infinite number of dimensions and theoretically in any number of those Booker could still become Comstock, as he still took part in the Wounded Knee battle and will still be wracked with guilt etc. It was a clever ending, but didn’t strike me as especially neat. Likewise, I didn’t really buy the transition between dimensions when Booker & Liz were looking for Chen Lin; they just went into a different reality where Lin was still alive, but then went back to Fitzroy and said “We’re got your guns sorted” when they knew it was an alternate dimension, had no way of knowing that conversation had ever taken place with Fitzroy in this reality, and had no way of knowing that another Booker and Liz weren’t already running around there. We know their Booker died, but what about Elizabeth?
That was the part when the plot started to unravel for me. I think the stuff between the Luteces was clever
(especially the idea that they’re the same person from different dimensions), but what were they – ghosts? Echoes? Real people from another dimension who knew what Comstock was going to do?
It’s interesting that they made such a broad universe with a lot of interesting ideas and clever plot foreshadows, but in all honesty it was probably just a little too far-fetched for my tastes. I’m not really a fan of the
‘Butterfly Effect’ style of storytelling
.

As for the actual combat itself, I generally enjoyed it but I don’t think the game itself encouraged enough exploration (on Normal) of the different combat options. The Vigors are fun, but from a practicality point of view many are distributed too late in the game and I found myself relying on the first few throughout most of the game, as I’d already upgraded them by the time I received new ones. Usually it was quicker and easier to maybe use Vigors as a distraction while I just shot them in the face with the hand cannon. I felt like the combat was kind of interesting, but due to the abundant ammo and way the combat situations were structured there few chances to make the most of the varied combat options.

I've got to say, when I got into work this morning I was looking on YouTube and watched Videogamer.com's 'Everything BioShock Infinite gets wrong', and on the whole I agree with it.
 
I finished BioShock Infinite last night. I did enjoy it overall, although I rushed more and more towards the end as I felt it dragged on a little and I just wanted to complete it. While I really enjoyed the beautiful luxuriant world and the dialogue and the depth of the setting, I found the
infinite dimensions aspect a bit too silly with too much scope for unresolved plot threads or plot resolutions through cheating. For instance, how does Comstock have his prophet powers, but not Booker? How does the ‘resolution’ happen at the end of the game by Booker drowning and thus Comstock never coming into existence, when it’s established there’s an infinite number of dimensions and theoretically in any number of those Booker could still become Comstock, as he still took part in the Wounded Knee battle and will still be wracked with guilt etc. It was a clever ending, but didn’t strike me as especially neat. Likewise, I didn’t really buy the transition between dimensions when Booker & Liz were looking for Chen Lin; they just went into a different reality where Lin was still alive, but then went back to Fitzroy and said “We’re got your guns sorted” when they knew it was an alternate dimension, had no way of knowing that conversation had ever taken place with Fitzroy in this reality, and had no way of knowing that another Booker and Liz weren’t already running around there. We know their Booker died, but what about Elizabeth?
That was the part when the plot started to unravel for me. I think the stuff between the Luteces was clever
(especially the idea that they’re the same person from different dimensions), but what were they – ghosts? Echoes? Real people from another dimension who knew what Comstock was going to do?
It’s interesting that they made such a broad universe with a lot of interesting ideas and clever plot foreshadows, but in all honesty it was probably just a little too far-fetched for my tastes. I’m not really a fan of the
‘Butterfly Effect’ style of storytelling
.

As for the actual combat itself, I generally enjoyed it but I don’t think the game itself encouraged enough exploration (on Normal) of the different combat options. The Vigors are fun, but from a practicality point of view many are distributed too late in the game and I found myself relying on the first few throughout most of the game, as I’d already upgraded them by the time I received new ones. Usually it was quicker and easier to maybe use Vigors as a distraction while I just shot them in the face with the hand cannon. I felt like the combat was kind of interesting, but due to the abundant ammo and way the combat situations were structured there few chances to make the most of the varied combat options.

I've got to say, when I got into work this morning I was looking on YouTube and watched Videogamer.com's 'Everything BioShock Infinite gets wrong', and on the whole I agree with it.

You should check out the spoiler thread. A lot of answers to your questions there.
 

Sorian

Banned
I just saw this TV-commercial for the first time. How awesome is that?

Loved the game and the combat was fine for what it was but everything could have been so much better if there was just a "weight" to the combat. The best way I can describe it is during that video you see Booker use bucking bronco on a group and a handman who is in the air runs into someone which causes him to lose momentum and crash to the ground in an unexpected spot. Idk, it just looked nice, I feel like in the actual game, if you did that, there would just be some clipping through each other and that would be that. Ah well.
 
Loved the game and the combat was fine for what it was but everything could have been so much better if there was just a "weight" to the combat. The best way I can describe it is during that video you see Booker use bucking bronco on a group and a handman who is in the air runs into someone which causes him to lose momentum and crash to the ground in an unexpected spot. Idk, it just looked nice, I feel like in the actual game, if you did that, there would just be some clipping through each other and that would be that. Ah well.

My guess is that this won't happen until the next console-generation will be available.
 

Sorian

Banned
My guess is that this won't happen until the next console-generation will be available.

Eh, it doesn't really have much to do with the generation at this point. If they wanted things like that to happen, they have the power to pull it off. They chose to just go with a basic FPS design and I can dig that. Got a little bit lazy with bullet sponge enemies but thats always been a bioshock thing so I came in expecting that.
 

Ensoul

Member
Just finished this game last night and thought it was great. Loved the story and it sucked me in to its world. My only small complaint was that while the game was pretty easy all of a sudden during the last part the difficulty increased significantly. Took me 4 or 5 times to get past the last part of the game.

Overall great game. Hopefully we see another bioshock next gen!
 
Along with The Last of Us, this was my most disappointing game of the year. Not because they are bad games, but because I expected them to be great games, and they are not in my opinion. I absolutely LOVED the first 1/3 of the game, but it all went downhill from there. First, here is what I liked:

+The Lutece Twins... Funny, mysterious... The best characters in the game

+Story was interesting and I liked the ending

+Art direction for the outdoor areas

+Gameplay... The Skylines, Elizabeth, vigors, zeppelins, crazy enemies made for some good times, even if many of these concepts weren't taken as far as they were promised.

Now for what I didn't like:

-As beautiful as the outdoor environments were, the indoor ones were bland and unimaginative. I expected more from a city as extravagant as Columbia.

-Dissonance between the vigors and the city of Columbia. Plasmids made sense in Rapture, but vigors seem completely random.

-Large sections of the game shown earlier are completely removed. I felt the overall flow of the game was very poor after the first 1/3. It just seemed like it was revised over and over again until the team lost all objectivity and different environments and encounters were not well thought out.

-Removal of important gameplay mechanics involving tears and skylines. Nothing ever reached the level of that awesome E3 demo. That was the game I wanted to play.

-The
Sirens being scrapped for a horrible three part bossfight

-The
Boys of Silence
. Such a cool concept that they completely screwed up after hyping it up.

-
Where the hell was the epic fight against the Song Bird
? Again, such a cool concept when they were talking it up but ended up doing nothing interesting with it.

-The shortest and most linear of all the Shock games.


All that being said I still had a fun time with the game, I was just disappointed that after nearly six years, we got a good game instead of a great one. And then to top it off, the story DLC will be in Rapture rather than Columbia. I've spent enough time in Rapture while Columbia I feel like I've just barely scratched the surface.
 
There was no fight with Songbird because they just turned him into an element of the plot and representing inevitability, rather than an enemy that could be countered in any way.

I know this is an opinion, but omitting a potentially awesome gameplay sequence to serve your story is not the direction i like to see video games go. Why couldn't they have done both? Was six years not enough to do it? Was it not long enough to deliver on promises like with the Boys of Slience?
 

BizzyBum

Member
Just built my new PC and this game doesn't work!

At first I thought it was the PC but I can play other games like FFXIV and Metro Last Light flawlessly.

As soon as the game starts it freezes then crashes and it says something like "critical DirectX error"

I tried searching Google but got some generic solutions that didn't work for me like verifying game cache and turning off Steam interface.

Anyone know what might be causing this?
 

Apdiddy

Member
The "Command Deck" part is complete garbage. Why I wasn't given Robo Comstocks to help fight the battle, I don't know. The game was practically a walk in the park then I had to do THAT.

Up until that point, this was pretty close to topping SRIV & The Last Of Us for me as GOTY.
 

Deku Tree

Member
The "Command Deck" part is complete garbage. Why I wasn't given Robo Comstocks to help fight the battle, I don't know. The game was practically a walk in the park then I had to do THAT.

Up until that point, this was pretty close to topping SRIV & The Last Of Us for me as GOTY.

I loved the final battle personally. It is a big change up from what was happening gameplay-wise beforehand. But I thought that it was a good finish.
 

bremon

Member
I finished my 1999 playthrough this past week. Much easier than anticipated. It wasn't really any more difficult than what I remember Hard being (hadn't played it since the game was new). Between Possession and Murder of Crows, the game was more or less a cakewalk. I focused on getting maximum salt, then shield, then getting some health last. Seemed like a pretty sound strategy. Ended up with a fortune at the end of the game, and only paid for 3 revives through the entire game, and one was solely because I felt lazy and didn't want to replay a section.

Still loved the game just as much the second time around though.
 

Apdiddy

Member
I finally got past the part that I hated and wow....what an ending.

I'm not quite sure what to think of the story overall....it somewhat felt very disjointed to me. The first half of the game was basically walking through a far-right Republican Disneyland and when
it got to the Dr. Who-ian parts with Chen Lin, Vox Populi and "The Girl Who Waited" esque chase to find Elizabeth, the transition was a bit jarring for me.
There were quite a few hints throughout the game about the ending though. I guess playing this game after having played The Last Of Us, my expectations weren't that this would be better, just great in its own way. I tried also to compare the ending to this to the first BioShock and it makes the endings seem very interesting.

The BioShock Infinite's ending does indeed open up a lot of possibilities with BioShock but basically closes out any future games in the series as well.
Even if Elizabeth was basically a human TARDIS & Dr Who in one, how was Booker DeWitt able to operate a Bathysphere if he didn't share Andrew Ryan's DNA or wasn't an alternate version of Ryan? It could almost be said that Andrew Ryan and Jack are Booker DeWitt & Z.H. Comstock....since Elizabeth tells Booker "it's always one lighthouse, one man, and one city" (unless that was to throw us off). ADAM is the same thing as the powers given to Elizabeth from the Luteces' research except smaller and more concentrated. It would be really cool to see Big Daddy lumbering around in Columbia though.

I honestly don't want to see a BioShock 3 or BioShock Infinite 2. I really want a new game in the upcoming gen from Irrational Games that is not related to BioShock.
 
I finally got past the part that I hated and wow....what an ending.

I'm not quite sure what to think of the story overall....it somewhat felt very disjointed to me. The first half of the game was basically walking through a far-right Republican Disneyland and when
it got to the Dr. Who-ian parts with Chen Lin, Vox Populi and "The Girl Who Waited" esque chase to find Elizabeth, the transition was a bit jarring for me.
There were quite a few hints throughout the game about the ending though. I guess playing this game after having played The Last Of Us, my expectations weren't that this would be better, just great in its own way. I tried also to compare the ending to this to the first BioShock and it makes the endings seem very interesting.

The BioShock Infinite's ending does indeed open up a lot of possibilities with BioShock but basically closes out any future games in the series as well.
Even if Elizabeth was basically a human TARDIS & Dr Who in one, how was Booker DeWitt able to operate a Bathysphere if he didn't share Andrew Ryan's DNA or wasn't an alternate version of Ryan? It could almost be said that Andrew Ryan and Jack are Booker DeWitt & Z.H. Comstock....since Elizabeth tells Booker "it's always one lighthouse, one man, and one city" (unless that was to throw us off). ADAM is the same thing as the powers given to Elizabeth from the Luteces' research except smaller and more concentrated. It would be really cool to see Big Daddy lumbering around in Columbia though.

I honestly don't want to see a BioShock 3 or BioShock Infinite 2. I really want a new game in the upcoming gen from Irrational Games that is not related to BioShock.

About the
Bathysphere, you have to remember that ONLY the vita chambers were hard wired to work with Andrew Ryan's DNA, but not the bathysphere's.

One of the audio diaries in the orginal game mentions:

We're putting all the bathyspheres in lockdown until further notice. Ryan had us install some kinda genetic device into the things so only Ryan and his inner circle will be able to use 'em without dispensation. But the boys tell me the keys are pretty unreliable. Sisters, cousins-anybody in the ballpark, genetically, will be able to come and go as they see fit.
 

UrbanRats

Member
So, this game keeps crashing on the loading screen after the Monument Island level
(when you free Elizabeth)
.
Every time i have to replay the entire level, too, because it erases the checkpoints or something.

The fuck should i do?
 

Dakota47

Member
Checking in. Just bought the game on sale. Downloading now. I'm going in without expectations, having never been a great Bioshock fan.
 

UrbanRats

Member
So, this game keeps crashing on the loading screen after the Monument Island level
(when you free Elizabeth)
.
Every time i have to replay the entire level, too, because it erases the checkpoints or something.

The fuck should i do?

Still found no solution to this, what the fuck, i just can't play the game. :\
 

UrbanRats

Member
So it seems overclocked cards (even factory overclocked) can cause crashes.
I won't bother downclocking this one, but i'll try to download the game on the other PC, with a standard ati5850.
See if that works.

It's been a few months though, why didn't they patch it? Assuming that's even the problem, of course.
 

strafer

member
8zevPJQ.png
 

Anustart

Member
I know what that means.

Bathysphere Interior: A hulking big daddy has just rode down from the surface, a new kind of big daddy, Big Daddy 1000 if you will, liquid metal. He slowly lumbers out of the bathysphere and takes off his helmet to reveal his true identity: Reggie Fils-Aime. He's stalking you through a million alternate Rapture's with terrifying screams of "What's wrong with you?" echoing through the halls....
 
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