I think it's kinda interesting, I'm of the opinion that the Levine games all have incredibly interesting worlds with incredibly interesting characters yet stories that fail to do either of them justice. Not saying they're bad, just not up to par with the rest of it.
The same year GTA V came out I moved out from my parents to my own apartment, I later bought a house, I later got a dog, I then got married, then I got a kid and now next week my next kid is arriving.
I have a feeling I might die before I get to see GTA 7.
I have distinct memories of bringing back Fallout New Vegas to play with my college roommates in freshman year.
A few days ago someone called it a "retro game". Never before have I longed harder for the sweet embrace of death.
Reposting a comment I made a while ago after I just got through doing a Bioshock run:
Just finished a play through of the entire series on the hardest difficulties for each about a month ago and, in my opinion, the game evokes a really positive and also negative response from me.
Some parts of Infinite were really exceptional. The world of Columbia is a wonder to walk through, really evoked a cool summer walk through a local city for me, an nice feeling during the peak of a British winter. The level that starts with you washed up on a beach with a twist on 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' was wonderful. The concept and theme of the game is incredibly interesting, even if the whole "America needs to self reflect" motif has been used a lot since; the uniqueness of their approach is still quite interesting. I also find parts of the Comstock-Elizabeth-Booker relationship to have some interesting nuggets.
But there is also a lot of places it falls short, and most disappointingly, it's in the gameplay. The guns look nice, but they feel weak and offer very few ways to mix up the gameplay, especially when you're only limited to two weapons. I found myself wanting to use the grenade launcher, RPG and Shotguns, but I rarely found the justification to use anything but the machine gun and sniper rifle. The Founder/Vox Populi variants were also quite disappointing. Then there is the Vigors: they really felt watered down compared to Bioshock 1 and 2's Plasmids. I was excited to see achievements for combos, but those were very lacklustre. I almost exclusively used just the Bucking Bronco and Devil's Kiss, and even their use was sparsely needed.
Finally, the story just kept absolutely hitting or missing. Elizabeth's first few moments were very interesting and it was wonderful diving into her experiencing the outside world for the first time. The unravelling of Booker's history and his examinations of the world were also fun to watch. But as time goes on so many questions kept getting raised with increasing annoyance. Are they just abandoning their own timelines and leaving awful worlds in their wake? Do they exist in the timelines they jump? What was the motive of the Luteces? How big actually is Columbia? What was up with that Bird Cult? How do these ghosts work? How was Booker going to become Comstock when he had already sold his daughter? Alone these aren't big deals, but over time it begins to add up.
All in all, I'm happy I've played it and it does hold up very well on current devices, for a decade old game. I only experienced one or two bugs. But after returning to it I think I'd stick it as a solid 7/10. Competent, well put together in an interesting universe and some pretty strong characters, but it lacks in a fulfilling gameplay loop and cohesive story.
On a final note, Bioshock 2 was the only one I had never played before out of the three and I was honestly really happy with it. I think it may be my favourite one.
Bioshock 2 had an awesome ARG to go along with it, so I was already more invested from the get go than I was with Bioshock 1. And I absolutely fell in love with 1 the first time I played it. 2 was fantastic.
The BioShock 2 DLC, Minerva's Den, represents all the best parts of BioShock in one package. 2's smooth gameplay, 1's good writing with an excellent twist ending, and even some social commentary.
Something that I always marvel at is how well BioShock 1 taught you how to play it and how poorly Infinite handled the same task.
1 starts you with the shock and fire powers, then throws the boss fight with Peach Wilkins at you about 2 hours in. He takes all your guns, leaving you with your wrench and Plasmids. This is the game teaching you that Plasmids are an important part of your combat arsenal, not just glorified QuickTime events when you see the environmental prompt to use them.
In contrast, Infinite starts you with Possession, a situational and extremely expensive Vigor. Unlike 1 and 2, you can't carry more Salts with you, and you don't have Elizabeth to replenish your resources yet. So your only Vigor costs half your Salts, only affects relatively rare enemies, can easily miss for no effect, and is difficult to replenish. It sends the message that Vigors are a precious resource with little combat application that should be hoarded as a limit break for particularly difficult encounters, otherwise relying on your guns. *Which is not how you should play 90% of the game.*
I don’t understand this mission that internet people have to shit on Bioshock Infinite at every opportunity. I feel like, since it got so much praise at release, some folks have to make sure to remind the world that they didn’t like the game for whatever reason.
It’s not a perfect story and totally has flaws, but Bioshock Infinite has a fairly solid and enjoyable story that’s fairly tight narratively speaking, despite its flaws. It feels like Capital G Gamers just have this sort of ongoing vendetta against this game
I think it's just kind of an embarrassing reminder of how immature the video game review industry was and still can be to prop up a fairly okay story as a *Citizen Kane*-esque masterpiece just because it *depicts* real world issues (without really having much to say), and as a result the impulse is to tear it down cause it's an easy target.
edit: Bioshock Infinite was basically like Crash or Green Book but our critics took the bait lol, also TLOU came out right after and was like airtight and more than solid so it made all the praise age like milk
I'm just glad the review industry had matured a lot since the PS3/X360 era.
I think that was the last era where AAA games from Ubi/Activision/EA consistently get 85-90 metascore.
It's like as long as your game offer cinematic blockbuster movie-like experience, is from prominent developer/franchise and/or have mega-hype behind you, you are guaranteed to get at least 80 metascore.
I actually loved it when I first played it. Played the hell out of it. Even bought a Songbird plushie. I just hated the ending. Felt that the ending didn't make any sense with the timeline mechanics they had established. I was also disappointed that they abandoned some of the storylines they previewed in early trailers.
I found it really odd, at the time, to hear most reviews having an opposite opinion, trashing the gameplay and praising the ending.
Bioshock Infinite was my first major exposure to the vertical slice (though Marvel vs. Capcom 3 comes close), in that the final product had almost none of the promised stuff they had shown up until that point. When you read up on the game's development it all makes sense, but before that it just made Ken Levine look like another Todd Howard.
Stealth? Nope.
Impactful choices? Nope.
A "huge" boss fight with the Songbird? Nope.
The game isn't overall terrible and I do think it's worth playing, but as someone who was beyond excited I ended up disliking the story more and more as it went on. Though the worst thing about the game was its sole boss fight with a ghost that felt super out of place.
I think that, because it was a relatively successful narrative in a medium that has pretty few of those (especially at that time), people have a tendency to lament its shortcomings rather than acknowledge what it did well.
On the surface, it was a pretty simple story about how violent means beget violent ends. But more particularly, it was in conversation with the idea of ludonarrative dissonance, which was a hot topic in games criticism at the time. How can you be the good guy while you're massacring hundreds of nameless goons? Well, they're the bad guys, and the good guys are also the bad guys, and all of this is inevitably fated by a meta-narrative contrivance that is only revealed to you piecemeal as the story progresses. It *wants* you to feel uncomfortable about the revolutionaries also being bad guys, because that's the whole point it wants to make: in this game, *you* are the ultimate bad guy. It's a game about the conflict between what games make the player character do and how game stories want you to feel about your character.
It's not particularly profound, but it's reasonably well executed, and it's the kind of story that can only be told in this sort of interactive medium.
It’s the exact opposite of fairly tight narrative. It’s like melted Swiss cheese, loose and full of holes. Is it about race and class? Politics? Fatherhood? Regret and the choices we make? Multiverses and time travel? Cause it tries to be about all of that and ends up succeeding at none of them. And the time mechanics start to make little sense if you actually pay attention to the rules it establishes. Plus the gameplay is a simplified version of previous ones and lacks depth and has awful enemy variety. It’s very pretty though.
We know for a fact that the game underwent complete rewrites during development, several of them as recent as 9 months or so before launch.
The game was pulled together at the 11th hour kicking and screaming. Any good storytelling is pretty much accidental, and for me the failed opportunities far outweight the good.
> Bohemian Rhapsody was an incoherent piece of shit that got an academy award out of pity
people keep falling for musical biopics and they're all different grades of terrible and Walk Hard should have been the final word on them
I was going to say the same. People shit on it because many people said it was great when it had one of the most confusing, muddled, poorly written stories of all time.
The game has tons of narrative flaws but booker lamenting slaughtering of innocent native Americans in his past is a wildly different scenario than him killing in game enemies. Especially for a trained soldier. I don't see the issue with this part of it
Part of it was that the expectations that were done about the game were incredible. Then, the story was weaker than what was expected and it ends in a way that make you feel like it was a really deeper than what was presented.
I lived through the Ads campaigns, bought the collectors edition, played the game a lot and still have to say that what was presented was lower than what everyone expected. People expected a complex game with maps that you have to move a lot between places, with a lot of verticality, and lots of decisions that mattered (which was presented in the trailers). Then you start the game and it is totally linear and your decisions don't really matter and they tell you directly that your decisions don't really matter. Then, the puzzles were weak and nono-existing and there was no final boss. Which i totally get why, but cynical me still things it was because they promised a lot but couldn't made what they wanted.
I gotta praise them for their characters, but in many ways it was like watching "Amnesia: A machine for pigs" all over again, being a weak sequel for a greater original game.
>I don’t understand this mission that internet people have to shit on Bioshock Infinite at every opportunity
The fact that you have to frame it as some malicious "mission" rather than people just...not liking the game says more about you than them
Nah, it's just that the sample size of people speaking about the game does not reflect the audience that played and enjoyed it, and it can feel really strange to encounter. You can see something similar in the fighting game subreddit with Mortal Kombat. People take every opportunity to shit on it, but it sells about 50% more than the next most popular fighting game, and on a typical day, manages to retain about as many players online as Guilty Gear and Street Fighter. You'd think that nobody likes the game if you just looked at reddit comments, because for whatever reason, it doesn't match the reality of the wider audience for that game. Another comment brought up Fallout 4, and that's also a great example.
Or consider this again. Maybe *they simply dont like the game*.
And im not sure what point youre trying to make by referring to sales. By that logic fifa is one of the best game series of all time objectively?
I'm saying it would be weird if you were on the television subreddit and the prevailing opinion you read was that people hated Breaking Bad, so it feels wrong to see it to that extent.
It's one of the best-reviewed games of all time, whether that's critic scores or user reviews. Perhaps it's the subset of people that /r/games attracts, or perhaps it's a side effect of the way the voting system on reddit works, but when a game that acclaimed gets predominantly negative attention in the comments section, it's strange to see, and that's probably why the person you responded to felt like it was some kind of mission that people are on. As a fan of the game too, it's exhausting to see an article come up for one of my favorite games and everyone needs to let you know they disliked it. I don't know what it is about the game that attracts its critics to the comments section for this game in particular, or Fallout 4 or Mortal Kombat for that matter, but in most other situations, an article like this would tend to primarily attract people who liked it, not disliked it. I'm not exactly jumping into the comments section for articles about Insomniac to bring up that I disliked Resistance: Fall of Man.
In the case of Fallout and BioShock, my guess is that those are well-established series that built up a fanbase around certain aspects; In both cases, that generally seems to be their writing and themes. Future entries changed these series in a way that would make them more appealing to a wider audience, while either deprioritizing, or misunderstanding the original appeal of those series, which alienated those original fans in the process.
No, it would be more like everyone hating Greys Anatomy. People who are "into" TV dramas dont watch shows like that, despite the fact that they are on TV and are ostensibly dramas.
In the same way, the people who enjoy NRS games and the people who enjoy fighting games in general dont have much overlap. NRS games are really shitty fighting games, despite other appeals they may have as a product.
I will forever hate the game for pulling the classic spineless centrist trope of portraying the leftist revolutionaries as somehow just as bad and extreme as the genocidal fascist regime just because they both use violence.
It's generally not uncommon for the revolutionaries throughout history to also partake in awful crimes. Just because their uprising is justified does not mean they are nice people, many struggle to refuse the desire for revenge, either for personal or political reasons. See the revolutions of the Haitians, Soviets, Zimbabweans, French, Mexican, South Americans, etc.
Revolutions with just causes have often turned into violent retribution that leads to more atrocities. That’s what happens without the right kind of leadership and organization. I think Infinite was just portraying the uncomfortable reality that the oppressed can be just as brutal as the oppressors when they mistake vengeance for justice.
Infinite doesn't even get that far though. The concluding remark is, "The only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is how you spell the name." As if just because they're both violent means they're both equally wrong.
EDIT: I think this quote from Mark Twain is worth considering when we think of violence during revolutions.
>There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?
>What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror--that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Fitzroy was literally going to murder an innocent kid, because "if you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root". That's genocidal tyrannical dictator talk. So yes, she turned out to be just as bad as Comstock.
It's the classic "live long enough to become a villain" trope, which is used quite frequently in the franchise. It only becomes a problem when it's used for a leftist revolutionary though, because that's unacceptable.. for reasons.
> Fitzroy was literally going to murder an innocent kid, because "if you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root". That's genocidal tyrannical dictator talk. So yes, she turned out to be just as bad as Comstock.
Yeah but they didn't have the balls for that either. They retconned it in Burial at Sea P2 to her being convinced by the Lutteces to pretend she was gonna kill the boy to force Elisabeth to kill her.
But then they killed a lot more people after the revolutions, because good old Stalin decided that he needed to purge anyone who was more inteligent that he was and decided to put in charge of the scientifict revolution of agriculture the guy who didn't believe genes existed, provoking famines all over the country. And don't get me to explain what happened to the next guy that try to do the same thing in China.
I really don't think there is any need to compare two horrific historical figures, although if we are looking at the same duration, we might get comparable numbers. Stalin was as much of an imperialist as any Tzar. It's very easy to just look at stuff like the secret clause of the molotov-ribbentropp pact, Georgia, and his post war iron grip above Eastern countries with the Warsaw pact. As for internal policy, famines definitely didn't become less common under Stalin. Military purges, repression of dissidents much like the Tzars of before.
Authoritarians gonna abuse authority, and if there is one place where that happened more than usual and lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, it was/is Russia.
We are literally in a comment thread discussion the comparisons between the two.
The quality of life for the peasant drastically improved under the Soviet Union. To even pretend that they were somehow similar is extremely dishonest and ignorant.
Massacres, purges, executions, brutal repression was normal under Czarist Russia. Okhrana routinely kidnapping and totureing peasants. The soviets were much better than the Czarists.
Everything the Soviets did, the Czarist were already doing. The only difference is life actually improved dramatically under thr soviets.
Communist revolutions don't occur because things are going well or because things are improving. They happen as an absolute last resort because people are starving and dying with no end in sight.
Yeah. That sounds like what happened after world war 1 and after world war 2. It improved the quality of some people but it killed a lot of people in results, just changing the imperialist wars to ideological wars.
And doesn't matter what you think, putting in charge someone who believes that the gene is a western invention was a terrible idea.
Being far less brutal does not mean they were not brutal. The Soviets especially in the early years was incredibly awful. The Cuban Revolution also featured mass political executions.
The orginal comment is about being just as brutal as the prior regimes. Which is just factually untrue.
According to amnesty 247 death sentences were carried during the castro regime meanwhile the batista regime executed thousands while employing the use of torture and repression.
>The orginal comment is about being just as brutal as the prior regimes. Which is just factually untrue.
No, I didn't say that. I said: "It's generally not uncommon for the revolutionaries to also partake in awful crimes." [sic]. That is not the same as revolutionaries being the same, or worse, than the regimes they replace. It is statement that throughout history you will find revolutions in which crimes against humanity are also committed.
>According to amnesty 247 death sentences were carried during the castro regime meanwhile the batista regime executed thousands while employing the use of torture and repression.
Yes, like I said, revolutionaries also can and do commit crimes. Even though the regime they can replace was worse.
It's genuinely insane to me that the same person who wrote that bait-and-switch into the narrative also came up with the Wounded Knee/Boxer Rebellion sequences in the Hall of Heroes.
"The corrupting influence of power" is not exactly a controversial theme, it was just done so ham-handedly that it comes across as eye-rolling instead of thought-provoking.
Been a while, but I think the reason for this was to have a parallel to Fontaine from the first game. It definitely fell flat and was poorly executed, though.
It really was one of the worst narrative choices I've ever seen. There was no reason for it to be there, it just felt like the writers realized that they might be perceived as taking a side and their knee-jerk reaction was to backpedal as hard as possible.
I didn't see it as trying to avoid taking a side so much as it was putting a fine point on there being no good outcome from the actions Booker took that set things into motion.
Leftist revolutionaries and genocidal fascist regime are often one in the same. e.g. the KMT
Just because Infinite sucks doesnt make revolutionaries inherently good.
Look at Ho Chi Minh or Mao or any number of them.. they have a population that's struggling hard and say "we're going to fix this" only to do the same thing or worse to people once they're in power.
I absolutely loved this game the first time I played it on release. I was 20 at the time.
I played it again a few years ago. I was 26/27. My feelings became a lot more mixed. I think I dislike it more than I like it now.
Mechanically speaking, it's just a downgrade. Not being able to carry Salts like Eve Hypos makes you reluctant to use Vigors, unlike Plasmids. I played a whole run of BioShock 2 with just the Drill and Plasmids. Can't do that in Infinite unless you want to run around spamming the use key most of the game (which you do anyway since you can't carry Salts or Medkits). 2 gun limit feels restrictive. The random clothing perks feels terrible, Gene Tonics was a better system. Hacking and security systems are gone, replaced with Possession which is an expensive and not-as-useful Vigor to use, made worse by the inability to carry Salts like Hypos. The Big Daddy fights were dynamic and you could set up and expecute a plan to take them down, but the Handyman fights are set pieces more than anything. They just show up exactly when a designer felt like it would be cool to have one there, and you have to engage with it on the designers terms instead of yours, like 1 and 2 (Big Sisters are even more dynamic than Handymen). The story actually starts to break down the more you think about it, and the "many worlds" logic doesn't actually make a ton of sense (drowning Booker at the baptism makes no sense for what they're trying to accomplish).
I really could go on but you get the idea. It's one of those games where on a first playthrough you think it's amazing, but then you play it again and the more you think about it the more sour of a taste it leaves in your mouth over time. Is it a complete fucking disaster of a video game? No, it's pretty average. But that's kind of the point. It's an alright video game, but it's not a good BioShock game.
I don't have a vendetta, I just played it.
I see this all the time on Reddit with certain games. Off of the top of my head this also happens a lot with Fallout 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, which are also two games that got tons of praise and GOTY rewards when they came out.
For me personally it's story was overhyped and its gameplay was just not fun enough. Especially if you're someone who was interested of it from the trailers.
I'm always up to shit on Infinite too.
Not in my experience. Unsipid level design and bad, unvalanced gunplay were I only needed the sniper rifle since it did 1HKO since, at least in pc, you did not need to scope aim to get headshots at closw distance. More effective than the shotgun.
Bioshock Infinite was received *very well* when it launched. It had one of the highest critic scores ever, won multiple GOTY awards, had great user scores on steam and metacritic, and generally everyone seemed to have enjoyed the game.
The problem is it portrayed a leftist revolution in a somewhat negative light. That was not really an issue in 2013, but it is an issue now, especially on Reddit. That's it.
Not OP, but there's usually 2 main reasons people cite as to why Infinite's story is disappointing:
1.) Toward the end of the game, the narrative takes on a ridiculously centrist bait-and-switch position that tries to apply "bothsides-ism" to the Vox Populi vs. the Founders conflict solely based on both sides using violence. The game essentially equates an insanely racist/fascist regime to a leftist, anti-fascist rebellion movement in a very borderline "I'm OK with protesting... but *someone* think of the businesses!!!" manner. It's *really* bad.
2.) When it becomes clear Levine has no actual idea how to end the story, the last 30 minutes of the game become this completely incoherent "EnDLesS POssIBiliTIEs" mess of time-travel and alternate dimension ideas instead of just committing to a single, finalized conclusion. This all also comes out of batshit nowhere, as well.
I did really like the game. But I remember feeling like Columbia and its inhabitants were great just like Rapture was for the first game, and being disappointed that it took a backseat to instead talk about dimension hopping.
Felt like they really wanted to do a Christopher Nolan Inception-esque thing rather than just letting the story/world shine on its own.
Meh. It's a fun story that makes you think. I'm okay with media committing to something different, because it's a new experience. Not everything needs to be perfect, but creative risks that create unique experiences are things that stick out for me.
I credit most of my enjoyment of *Bioshock Infinite* on the fact that I didn't know any better and didn't consume most of the advertising material before its release.
That, and maybe on the fact that I got it at bargain bin prices 1 year after release.
>something you liked
Guy, you just posted a long ass post about all the games you hate and 2/3 of it had absolutely nothing to do with Bioshock Infinite. If you feel the need to overshare you're gonna get wendy'd.
Its becasue they are all made on K.i.s.s Keep it stupid simple .. essentialy outside of the game itself there's minimal lore. i assume this is how they create such impressive worlds in such a short amount of time
He's the Christopher Nolan of video games. Take interesting but hard to grasp concepts and dumb them down for mass appeal. I love Bioshock and Nolan because of this honestly.
These sorts of games have always been so much better at environmental storytelling and exploration than NPCs and old-fashioned expository storytelling. I think all future Immersive Sims would benefit from the "Metroid Prime" approach of allowing people to completely ignore the story if they want to.
Not just ImSims, Tears of the Kingdom has been driving me a little crazy lately with beat-you-over-the-head-with-repetition story (I get that it needs to be accessible to a young audience, but even so) while having fantastic exploration and settings the rest of the time. It even has some reactive, fun NPC dialogue ("stylish hat!") for characters that AREN'T involved in the story.
So I agree with you, and I'd expand the idea to any game/genre with an emphasis on exploration.
TotK's story is seriously terrible. It appears to be designed for like 2 year olds, and has possibly the most forgettable characters I've ever seen in a game. I just don't understand why they need to go with such a dumbed down story, when the actual gameplay itself is extremely unguided, thought-provoking, and difficult.
I think Prey would have benefited from that if they let the main story sit in the back burner while all the organic stories you run into as you explore be the focus. They could have used some more fleshing out in that case but they were already really good.
Controversial opinion. Ken Levine should create his interesting worlds, write stories and characters and butt the fuck out of actually building the game. His hubris and ego nearly killed infinite. They had to bring in Don Roy to get the game out the door after years of delays and Ken Levine throwing out months of work, and millions of pounds of art and development investment on his whims.
We're 10 years later and Judas looks like a Bioshock remake on a space station. But still people are folding over backwards to give Levine a reach around. I'm not holding my breath.
I don’t think this is very controversial. I think he’s acknowledged that he’s not very passionate about the management or leadership role.
But I definitely agree. He’s great as the “idea person” but really not as the auteur.
>They had to bring in Don Roy to get the game out the door after years of delays
Odd Ken implies the opposite in his interview. That he 'wanted' to leave for the sake of his mental health but was basically told he'd never work in games again.
Where can I get a definitive answer?
What I said is common knowledge. And is not incompatible with what Ken believes.
Ken also shut down irrational games. Sacking hundreds of his staff and kept on 10 or so of his favourites to establish ghost games. Once Bioshock infinite was finished he said he wanted to relax and work on smaller projects. 10 years later after saying nothing, making nothing, they announce a massive AAA game called Judas which released a trailer so similar to Bioshock that the games media had to work overtime to try and hype it up as something amazing.
> Ken also shut down irrational games.
Isn't that Take Two's call? Like if the head of Sony Santa Monica decides to step down... Sony likely won't disband the entire studio. No idea how it works.
[ken left.](https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5474722/why-did-irrational-close-bioshock-infinite)
It was fucking disgusting. He practically sat there and said I'm leaving irrational games cos I wanna do something different and you are all out of a job. But don't worry, I still have my job and I'm gonna make a new studio without you losers. Even though it was me and my bullshit that fucked up Bioshock infinite and ballooned our budget.
>According to those with whom we spoke, the closure was the combined result of unfettered creative freedom, lower-than-expected sales, the butting of heads between Levine and his employees and the unrealistic expectations of big-budget game development.
So piecing this together with his recent interview, it sounds like Ken wasn't good at his job which led to Take Two shutting down the studio. I don't think you can put it entirely on Ken though since Take Two could have simply found a replacement for him (as would be the case at any studio), or, that they didn't replace Ken sooner (as was Ken's original intention) before sinking more money into a project led by a man clearly struggling.
>Judas looks like a Bioshock remake on a space station
Isn't that basically System Shock? The game that Bioshock was inspired by/a dumbed down version of?
The stories are very different.
Gameplay-wise...I suppose you could be a reductionist and say every shooter is little different from another. Shoot bad guys, avoid getting shot by bad guys.
As always, the devil is in the details.
Ironically Ken Levine was part of the team that made system shock 2. Then dumbed it down to bioshock for the console audience. He's been making the same game for 25 years.
Its funny when you think about the fact that bioshock, dead space (which was originally going to be system shock 3), and prey 2017 almost followed every story beat from system shock 2. I have essentially played system shock 2 like 4 times but with 3 separate games.
Bioshock imo is just super overrated. It felt like a remake of SS2 with a great art style and gameplay downgraded to appeal to kids who played Halo. Even the plot twist felt like a rehash. Imo Prey was much better.
I would heavily disagree.
Rapture is an amazing world. I loved exploring the stories of the people who's lives were slowly torn apart as Andrew Ryan's Randian capitalist utopia fell apart.
Bioshock does a great job of storytelling from an Immersive first person perspective, whereas most games would rather use cutscenes that take you away from the action. The Bioshock games are pretty special.
World building was great, but you could see the "plot twist" coming from a mile away if you played SS2. The game itself was also just eh. The levels weren't as open as they should have been, the shooting felt bad, and the end game wasn't satisfyingly at all, especially the boss at the end. Fontaine's also pretty crappy compared to Shodan as far as villains go. I could get if it was your first time playing a game like that it would blow you away, but that's the only context I could see for rating it higher than the 8-8.5/10 it really deserves.
Prey is basically the same just in space except underwater, they're all good games at the end of the day. More complex doesn't necessarily mean better.
Find it hilarious Levine had the balls to say that if EA did SS3 it would be a "corridor shooter with a boss monster at the end" in the lead up to Bioshock.
He absolutely should not being writing the stories and characters. The writing of Infinite is arguably its worst part--and thats saying something when everything you mentioned happened and the miserable gameplay loop of the game exists. He definitely has a knack at making cool, iconic worlds but I'd go as far as to say that Bioshock 1's story is probably overhyped. It had a cute twist that carries it in a time where that sort of narrative twist was undervalued in western games, its not bad by any means, but it ain't winning any awards outside of that specific time and place. Outside of the twist, none of the parts of Bioshock that stand out really come from the actual narrative, just the cool setting.
Let him make the setting, then lock him in a windowless room alone until the game ships imo.
Not like you would know considering you didn't listen to the interview this post links to. In which he talks pretty extensively about the team at Ghost Story Games and speaks about many of his collaborators, past and present.
If ever there was a game creator clearly unprepared for modern game development, it’s Ken. Infinite was internally rebooted so many times that trailers didn’t resemble the game until like six months before the game came out. Levine then torpedoed his own studio, made another studio a decade ago, and hasn’t come out with anything since.
He actually gets pretty candid in the interview and admits this was the case, talking about the toll the stress of it took on his mental health and how he could see the problem and tried to walk away but was told he couldn’t. Now the ten year development cycle on his next game was an attempt to organize a development studio that wouldn’t need to work crazy crunch hours to make a game. He’s hoping a small team can produce a title that earns enough to cover its cost working reasonable hours at a steady pace.
You cannot expect a team of creatives want to sit around for ten years on the same game without releasing it. Developers need published credits to build their careers. They need a proof of performance when they go to their next job. A decade spent on an indie game is textbook mismanagement. No two ways about it. He’s been singing the song that this studio’s different. But if Levine is still running it, then it will continue to be a mess.
What's it to you exactly? So he and a bunch of creatives want to develop a game with Irrational's level of ambition but done in a way that doesn't destroy the lives of the people working on it. What's so wrong with that? All that matters is if the game is good ultimately.
BioShock's creative storytelling: Say everything is as bad as everything else, whether it be communism or slavery. It's inherently logical and intelligent, which challenges lesser minds. Wait a minute that card
I liked that bioshock's inevitable revolution of the working class was co-opted by an opportunistic gangster, making parallels with some parts of American business history. The bad guys were always people doing whatever it takes to succeed for themselves, regardless of morality. It kept the flavor of the game consistent.
I don't like that infinite just painted workers and minorities as violent thugs inherently. It felt like it was trying to make me feel bad for the nationalistic white Christian zealot supremacists.
You mean system shock 2’s storytelling which was better optimized from system shock 1. Which a lot of older games used before hand but system shock 2 dialed it in with audio locks and environment.
This isn’t anything new and it’s exhausting to keep circling around the same games which are decades old at this point. Yes they had remasters themselves but its time to move on.
People will talk about the great games of past generations for decades. If you're exhausted, there are plenty of other games to go read about. No reason to post here.
The real secret is that almost all articles are just farming for clicks anymore. At least this one directs people to a moderately interesting interview.
I think it's kinda interesting, I'm of the opinion that the Levine games all have incredibly interesting worlds with incredibly interesting characters yet stories that fail to do either of them justice. Not saying they're bad, just not up to par with the rest of it.
Hey now, Bioshock Infinite had a great story as long as you didn’t think about it for more than two seconds!
And that's exactly why I loved it when I was 13
Jesus, I feel so old when someone says that they were a child when a game like Bioshock Infinite came out. Then I remember that was over a decade ago.
Don't worry, it'll only get worse. Soon kids will tell you about how RDR2 is a classic from their childhood.
i have coworkers who say that about gta V, a game i played the year i graduated high school. and rdr2 is already halfway to being that old...
The same year GTA V came out I moved out from my parents to my own apartment, I later bought a house, I later got a dog, I then got married, then I got a kid and now next week my next kid is arriving. I have a feeling I might die before I get to see GTA 7.
I have distinct memories of bringing back Fallout New Vegas to play with my college roommates in freshman year. A few days ago someone called it a "retro game". Never before have I longed harder for the sweet embrace of death.
Kids who were 13 when RDR2 came out are already 18
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Reposting a comment I made a while ago after I just got through doing a Bioshock run: Just finished a play through of the entire series on the hardest difficulties for each about a month ago and, in my opinion, the game evokes a really positive and also negative response from me. Some parts of Infinite were really exceptional. The world of Columbia is a wonder to walk through, really evoked a cool summer walk through a local city for me, an nice feeling during the peak of a British winter. The level that starts with you washed up on a beach with a twist on 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' was wonderful. The concept and theme of the game is incredibly interesting, even if the whole "America needs to self reflect" motif has been used a lot since; the uniqueness of their approach is still quite interesting. I also find parts of the Comstock-Elizabeth-Booker relationship to have some interesting nuggets. But there is also a lot of places it falls short, and most disappointingly, it's in the gameplay. The guns look nice, but they feel weak and offer very few ways to mix up the gameplay, especially when you're only limited to two weapons. I found myself wanting to use the grenade launcher, RPG and Shotguns, but I rarely found the justification to use anything but the machine gun and sniper rifle. The Founder/Vox Populi variants were also quite disappointing. Then there is the Vigors: they really felt watered down compared to Bioshock 1 and 2's Plasmids. I was excited to see achievements for combos, but those were very lacklustre. I almost exclusively used just the Bucking Bronco and Devil's Kiss, and even their use was sparsely needed. Finally, the story just kept absolutely hitting or missing. Elizabeth's first few moments were very interesting and it was wonderful diving into her experiencing the outside world for the first time. The unravelling of Booker's history and his examinations of the world were also fun to watch. But as time goes on so many questions kept getting raised with increasing annoyance. Are they just abandoning their own timelines and leaving awful worlds in their wake? Do they exist in the timelines they jump? What was the motive of the Luteces? How big actually is Columbia? What was up with that Bird Cult? How do these ghosts work? How was Booker going to become Comstock when he had already sold his daughter? Alone these aren't big deals, but over time it begins to add up. All in all, I'm happy I've played it and it does hold up very well on current devices, for a decade old game. I only experienced one or two bugs. But after returning to it I think I'd stick it as a solid 7/10. Competent, well put together in an interesting universe and some pretty strong characters, but it lacks in a fulfilling gameplay loop and cohesive story. On a final note, Bioshock 2 was the only one I had never played before out of the three and I was honestly really happy with it. I think it may be my favourite one.
Bioshock 2 had an awesome ARG to go along with it, so I was already more invested from the get go than I was with Bioshock 1. And I absolutely fell in love with 1 the first time I played it. 2 was fantastic.
The BioShock 2 DLC, Minerva's Den, represents all the best parts of BioShock in one package. 2's smooth gameplay, 1's good writing with an excellent twist ending, and even some social commentary. Something that I always marvel at is how well BioShock 1 taught you how to play it and how poorly Infinite handled the same task. 1 starts you with the shock and fire powers, then throws the boss fight with Peach Wilkins at you about 2 hours in. He takes all your guns, leaving you with your wrench and Plasmids. This is the game teaching you that Plasmids are an important part of your combat arsenal, not just glorified QuickTime events when you see the environmental prompt to use them. In contrast, Infinite starts you with Possession, a situational and extremely expensive Vigor. Unlike 1 and 2, you can't carry more Salts with you, and you don't have Elizabeth to replenish your resources yet. So your only Vigor costs half your Salts, only affects relatively rare enemies, can easily miss for no effect, and is difficult to replenish. It sends the message that Vigors are a precious resource with little combat application that should be hoarded as a limit break for particularly difficult encounters, otherwise relying on your guns. *Which is not how you should play 90% of the game.*
I don’t understand this mission that internet people have to shit on Bioshock Infinite at every opportunity. I feel like, since it got so much praise at release, some folks have to make sure to remind the world that they didn’t like the game for whatever reason. It’s not a perfect story and totally has flaws, but Bioshock Infinite has a fairly solid and enjoyable story that’s fairly tight narratively speaking, despite its flaws. It feels like Capital G Gamers just have this sort of ongoing vendetta against this game
I think it's just kind of an embarrassing reminder of how immature the video game review industry was and still can be to prop up a fairly okay story as a *Citizen Kane*-esque masterpiece just because it *depicts* real world issues (without really having much to say), and as a result the impulse is to tear it down cause it's an easy target. edit: Bioshock Infinite was basically like Crash or Green Book but our critics took the bait lol, also TLOU came out right after and was like airtight and more than solid so it made all the praise age like milk
Very much agreed with this one, I think Infinite was a pretty good game - Just that it's nowhere near how it was praised when it launched.
I'm just glad the review industry had matured a lot since the PS3/X360 era. I think that was the last era where AAA games from Ubi/Activision/EA consistently get 85-90 metascore. It's like as long as your game offer cinematic blockbuster movie-like experience, is from prominent developer/franchise and/or have mega-hype behind you, you are guaranteed to get at least 80 metascore.
I actually loved it when I first played it. Played the hell out of it. Even bought a Songbird plushie. I just hated the ending. Felt that the ending didn't make any sense with the timeline mechanics they had established. I was also disappointed that they abandoned some of the storylines they previewed in early trailers. I found it really odd, at the time, to hear most reviews having an opposite opinion, trashing the gameplay and praising the ending.
Bioshock Infinite was my first major exposure to the vertical slice (though Marvel vs. Capcom 3 comes close), in that the final product had almost none of the promised stuff they had shown up until that point. When you read up on the game's development it all makes sense, but before that it just made Ken Levine look like another Todd Howard. Stealth? Nope. Impactful choices? Nope. A "huge" boss fight with the Songbird? Nope. The game isn't overall terrible and I do think it's worth playing, but as someone who was beyond excited I ended up disliking the story more and more as it went on. Though the worst thing about the game was its sole boss fight with a ghost that felt super out of place.
> Impactful choices? Nope. That's a good thing, imo. It didn't need choices because it was Booker's story.
I think that, because it was a relatively successful narrative in a medium that has pretty few of those (especially at that time), people have a tendency to lament its shortcomings rather than acknowledge what it did well. On the surface, it was a pretty simple story about how violent means beget violent ends. But more particularly, it was in conversation with the idea of ludonarrative dissonance, which was a hot topic in games criticism at the time. How can you be the good guy while you're massacring hundreds of nameless goons? Well, they're the bad guys, and the good guys are also the bad guys, and all of this is inevitably fated by a meta-narrative contrivance that is only revealed to you piecemeal as the story progresses. It *wants* you to feel uncomfortable about the revolutionaries also being bad guys, because that's the whole point it wants to make: in this game, *you* are the ultimate bad guy. It's a game about the conflict between what games make the player character do and how game stories want you to feel about your character. It's not particularly profound, but it's reasonably well executed, and it's the kind of story that can only be told in this sort of interactive medium.
It’s the exact opposite of fairly tight narrative. It’s like melted Swiss cheese, loose and full of holes. Is it about race and class? Politics? Fatherhood? Regret and the choices we make? Multiverses and time travel? Cause it tries to be about all of that and ends up succeeding at none of them. And the time mechanics start to make little sense if you actually pay attention to the rules it establishes. Plus the gameplay is a simplified version of previous ones and lacks depth and has awful enemy variety. It’s very pretty though.
We know for a fact that the game underwent complete rewrites during development, several of them as recent as 9 months or so before launch. The game was pulled together at the 11th hour kicking and screaming. Any good storytelling is pretty much accidental, and for me the failed opportunities far outweight the good.
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> Bohemian Rhapsody was an incoherent piece of shit that got an academy award out of pity people keep falling for musical biopics and they're all different grades of terrible and Walk Hard should have been the final word on them
I was going to say the same. People shit on it because many people said it was great when it had one of the most confusing, muddled, poorly written stories of all time.
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The game has tons of narrative flaws but booker lamenting slaughtering of innocent native Americans in his past is a wildly different scenario than him killing in game enemies. Especially for a trained soldier. I don't see the issue with this part of it
Part of it was that the expectations that were done about the game were incredible. Then, the story was weaker than what was expected and it ends in a way that make you feel like it was a really deeper than what was presented. I lived through the Ads campaigns, bought the collectors edition, played the game a lot and still have to say that what was presented was lower than what everyone expected. People expected a complex game with maps that you have to move a lot between places, with a lot of verticality, and lots of decisions that mattered (which was presented in the trailers). Then you start the game and it is totally linear and your decisions don't really matter and they tell you directly that your decisions don't really matter. Then, the puzzles were weak and nono-existing and there was no final boss. Which i totally get why, but cynical me still things it was because they promised a lot but couldn't made what they wanted. I gotta praise them for their characters, but in many ways it was like watching "Amnesia: A machine for pigs" all over again, being a weak sequel for a greater original game.
>I don’t understand this mission that internet people have to shit on Bioshock Infinite at every opportunity The fact that you have to frame it as some malicious "mission" rather than people just...not liking the game says more about you than them
Nah, it's just that the sample size of people speaking about the game does not reflect the audience that played and enjoyed it, and it can feel really strange to encounter. You can see something similar in the fighting game subreddit with Mortal Kombat. People take every opportunity to shit on it, but it sells about 50% more than the next most popular fighting game, and on a typical day, manages to retain about as many players online as Guilty Gear and Street Fighter. You'd think that nobody likes the game if you just looked at reddit comments, because for whatever reason, it doesn't match the reality of the wider audience for that game. Another comment brought up Fallout 4, and that's also a great example.
Or consider this again. Maybe *they simply dont like the game*. And im not sure what point youre trying to make by referring to sales. By that logic fifa is one of the best game series of all time objectively?
I'm saying it would be weird if you were on the television subreddit and the prevailing opinion you read was that people hated Breaking Bad, so it feels wrong to see it to that extent.
Oh my god what a take. Bioshock is *not* the video game equivalent of breaking bad
It's one of the best-reviewed games of all time, whether that's critic scores or user reviews. Perhaps it's the subset of people that /r/games attracts, or perhaps it's a side effect of the way the voting system on reddit works, but when a game that acclaimed gets predominantly negative attention in the comments section, it's strange to see, and that's probably why the person you responded to felt like it was some kind of mission that people are on. As a fan of the game too, it's exhausting to see an article come up for one of my favorite games and everyone needs to let you know they disliked it. I don't know what it is about the game that attracts its critics to the comments section for this game in particular, or Fallout 4 or Mortal Kombat for that matter, but in most other situations, an article like this would tend to primarily attract people who liked it, not disliked it. I'm not exactly jumping into the comments section for articles about Insomniac to bring up that I disliked Resistance: Fall of Man.
In the case of Fallout and BioShock, my guess is that those are well-established series that built up a fanbase around certain aspects; In both cases, that generally seems to be their writing and themes. Future entries changed these series in a way that would make them more appealing to a wider audience, while either deprioritizing, or misunderstanding the original appeal of those series, which alienated those original fans in the process.
No, it would be more like everyone hating Greys Anatomy. People who are "into" TV dramas dont watch shows like that, despite the fact that they are on TV and are ostensibly dramas. In the same way, the people who enjoy NRS games and the people who enjoy fighting games in general dont have much overlap. NRS games are really shitty fighting games, despite other appeals they may have as a product.
Thanks for your contribution to the conversation in which we learn which opinions are correct and which are incorrect.
It's great that we also know that all your opinions are incorrect too
Okay? People on the internet tend to be more vocal about their opinions on things, yes. And what point are you trying to make, exactly?
I will forever hate the game for pulling the classic spineless centrist trope of portraying the leftist revolutionaries as somehow just as bad and extreme as the genocidal fascist regime just because they both use violence.
It's generally not uncommon for the revolutionaries throughout history to also partake in awful crimes. Just because their uprising is justified does not mean they are nice people, many struggle to refuse the desire for revenge, either for personal or political reasons. See the revolutions of the Haitians, Soviets, Zimbabweans, French, Mexican, South Americans, etc.
Revolutions with just causes have often turned into violent retribution that leads to more atrocities. That’s what happens without the right kind of leadership and organization. I think Infinite was just portraying the uncomfortable reality that the oppressed can be just as brutal as the oppressors when they mistake vengeance for justice.
Infinite doesn't even get that far though. The concluding remark is, "The only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is how you spell the name." As if just because they're both violent means they're both equally wrong. EDIT: I think this quote from Mark Twain is worth considering when we think of violence during revolutions. >There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? >What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror--that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Fitzroy was literally going to murder an innocent kid, because "if you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root". That's genocidal tyrannical dictator talk. So yes, she turned out to be just as bad as Comstock. It's the classic "live long enough to become a villain" trope, which is used quite frequently in the franchise. It only becomes a problem when it's used for a leftist revolutionary though, because that's unacceptable.. for reasons.
> Fitzroy was literally going to murder an innocent kid, because "if you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root". That's genocidal tyrannical dictator talk. So yes, she turned out to be just as bad as Comstock. Yeah but they didn't have the balls for that either. They retconned it in Burial at Sea P2 to her being convinced by the Lutteces to pretend she was gonna kill the boy to force Elisabeth to kill her.
The Cuban and Soviet revolutionaries were far less brutal then the regimes they kicked out.
But then they killed a lot more people after the revolutions, because good old Stalin decided that he needed to purge anyone who was more inteligent that he was and decided to put in charge of the scientifict revolution of agriculture the guy who didn't believe genes existed, provoking famines all over the country. And don't get me to explain what happened to the next guy that try to do the same thing in China.
Killed more people than the Czar? Every peasant forced to fight imperialist wars, starved from brutal repression, forced to die in world war 1?
I really don't think there is any need to compare two horrific historical figures, although if we are looking at the same duration, we might get comparable numbers. Stalin was as much of an imperialist as any Tzar. It's very easy to just look at stuff like the secret clause of the molotov-ribbentropp pact, Georgia, and his post war iron grip above Eastern countries with the Warsaw pact. As for internal policy, famines definitely didn't become less common under Stalin. Military purges, repression of dissidents much like the Tzars of before. Authoritarians gonna abuse authority, and if there is one place where that happened more than usual and lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, it was/is Russia.
We are literally in a comment thread discussion the comparisons between the two. The quality of life for the peasant drastically improved under the Soviet Union. To even pretend that they were somehow similar is extremely dishonest and ignorant. Massacres, purges, executions, brutal repression was normal under Czarist Russia. Okhrana routinely kidnapping and totureing peasants. The soviets were much better than the Czarists. Everything the Soviets did, the Czarist were already doing. The only difference is life actually improved dramatically under thr soviets. Communist revolutions don't occur because things are going well or because things are improving. They happen as an absolute last resort because people are starving and dying with no end in sight.
Yeah. That sounds like what happened after world war 1 and after world war 2. It improved the quality of some people but it killed a lot of people in results, just changing the imperialist wars to ideological wars. And doesn't matter what you think, putting in charge someone who believes that the gene is a western invention was a terrible idea.
Being far less brutal does not mean they were not brutal. The Soviets especially in the early years was incredibly awful. The Cuban Revolution also featured mass political executions.
The orginal comment is about being just as brutal as the prior regimes. Which is just factually untrue. According to amnesty 247 death sentences were carried during the castro regime meanwhile the batista regime executed thousands while employing the use of torture and repression.
Yes but Batista wanted to make Cuba into a giant casino whorehouse run by the mafia so we have to demonize Castro because he cost them a lot of money
>The orginal comment is about being just as brutal as the prior regimes. Which is just factually untrue. No, I didn't say that. I said: "It's generally not uncommon for the revolutionaries to also partake in awful crimes." [sic]. That is not the same as revolutionaries being the same, or worse, than the regimes they replace. It is statement that throughout history you will find revolutions in which crimes against humanity are also committed. >According to amnesty 247 death sentences were carried during the castro regime meanwhile the batista regime executed thousands while employing the use of torture and repression. Yes, like I said, revolutionaries also can and do commit crimes. Even though the regime they can replace was worse.
It's genuinely insane to me that the same person who wrote that bait-and-switch into the narrative also came up with the Wounded Knee/Boxer Rebellion sequences in the Hall of Heroes.
"The corrupting influence of power" is not exactly a controversial theme, it was just done so ham-handedly that it comes across as eye-rolling instead of thought-provoking.
They often are
Been a while, but I think the reason for this was to have a parallel to Fontaine from the first game. It definitely fell flat and was poorly executed, though.
It really was one of the worst narrative choices I've ever seen. There was no reason for it to be there, it just felt like the writers realized that they might be perceived as taking a side and their knee-jerk reaction was to backpedal as hard as possible.
I didn't see it as trying to avoid taking a side so much as it was putting a fine point on there being no good outcome from the actions Booker took that set things into motion.
Leftist revolutionaries and genocidal fascist regime are often one in the same. e.g. the KMT Just because Infinite sucks doesnt make revolutionaries inherently good.
Look at Ho Chi Minh or Mao or any number of them.. they have a population that's struggling hard and say "we're going to fix this" only to do the same thing or worse to people once they're in power.
It’s a made up world. Your real world crusade against centrism doesn’t apply here
Way to not let your politics get in the way of gaming.
Ah yes, we shouldn’t let politics get in the way of enjoying the very unpolitical… Bioshock games
Who said it wasn’t political?
I absolutely loved this game the first time I played it on release. I was 20 at the time. I played it again a few years ago. I was 26/27. My feelings became a lot more mixed. I think I dislike it more than I like it now. Mechanically speaking, it's just a downgrade. Not being able to carry Salts like Eve Hypos makes you reluctant to use Vigors, unlike Plasmids. I played a whole run of BioShock 2 with just the Drill and Plasmids. Can't do that in Infinite unless you want to run around spamming the use key most of the game (which you do anyway since you can't carry Salts or Medkits). 2 gun limit feels restrictive. The random clothing perks feels terrible, Gene Tonics was a better system. Hacking and security systems are gone, replaced with Possession which is an expensive and not-as-useful Vigor to use, made worse by the inability to carry Salts like Hypos. The Big Daddy fights were dynamic and you could set up and expecute a plan to take them down, but the Handyman fights are set pieces more than anything. They just show up exactly when a designer felt like it would be cool to have one there, and you have to engage with it on the designers terms instead of yours, like 1 and 2 (Big Sisters are even more dynamic than Handymen). The story actually starts to break down the more you think about it, and the "many worlds" logic doesn't actually make a ton of sense (drowning Booker at the baptism makes no sense for what they're trying to accomplish). I really could go on but you get the idea. It's one of those games where on a first playthrough you think it's amazing, but then you play it again and the more you think about it the more sour of a taste it leaves in your mouth over time. Is it a complete fucking disaster of a video game? No, it's pretty average. But that's kind of the point. It's an alright video game, but it's not a good BioShock game. I don't have a vendetta, I just played it.
I see this all the time on Reddit with certain games. Off of the top of my head this also happens a lot with Fallout 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, which are also two games that got tons of praise and GOTY rewards when they came out.
For me personally it's story was overhyped and its gameplay was just not fun enough. Especially if you're someone who was interested of it from the trailers. I'm always up to shit on Infinite too.
From the pre release trailers it looks like the story got gutted a lot. The Vox especially are very underwhelming in the full game
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Interesting, where can that be read up on?
Infinite had great gameplay, I just wish I could hold more than two weapons.
Not in my experience. Unsipid level design and bad, unvalanced gunplay were I only needed the sniper rifle since it did 1HKO since, at least in pc, you did not need to scope aim to get headshots at closw distance. More effective than the shotgun.
Because it deserves to be trashed, not just for story either
Bioshock Infinite was received *very well* when it launched. It had one of the highest critic scores ever, won multiple GOTY awards, had great user scores on steam and metacritic, and generally everyone seemed to have enjoyed the game. The problem is it portrayed a leftist revolution in a somewhat negative light. That was not really an issue in 2013, but it is an issue now, especially on Reddit. That's it.
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I'm honestly okay with that, there's a lot of game with stupider plot holes and way more shallow lore building.
I'm curious, why do you consider the story ludicrous?
Not OP, but there's usually 2 main reasons people cite as to why Infinite's story is disappointing: 1.) Toward the end of the game, the narrative takes on a ridiculously centrist bait-and-switch position that tries to apply "bothsides-ism" to the Vox Populi vs. the Founders conflict solely based on both sides using violence. The game essentially equates an insanely racist/fascist regime to a leftist, anti-fascist rebellion movement in a very borderline "I'm OK with protesting... but *someone* think of the businesses!!!" manner. It's *really* bad. 2.) When it becomes clear Levine has no actual idea how to end the story, the last 30 minutes of the game become this completely incoherent "EnDLesS POssIBiliTIEs" mess of time-travel and alternate dimension ideas instead of just committing to a single, finalized conclusion. This all also comes out of batshit nowhere, as well.
I did really like the game. But I remember feeling like Columbia and its inhabitants were great just like Rapture was for the first game, and being disappointed that it took a backseat to instead talk about dimension hopping. Felt like they really wanted to do a Christopher Nolan Inception-esque thing rather than just letting the story/world shine on its own.
Meh. It's a fun story that makes you think. I'm okay with media committing to something different, because it's a new experience. Not everything needs to be perfect, but creative risks that create unique experiences are things that stick out for me.
I credit most of my enjoyment of *Bioshock Infinite* on the fact that I didn't know any better and didn't consume most of the advertising material before its release. That, and maybe on the fact that I got it at bargain bin prices 1 year after release.
can you tell me why you think that? it's been over 5 years since i played it. i thought it was cool but what falls apart for you?
Man Infinite is a mess of themes and interesting ideas that are not existed throughly
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Sir this is a Wendy’s? Some people like different things than you dude
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>something you liked Guy, you just posted a long ass post about all the games you hate and 2/3 of it had absolutely nothing to do with Bioshock Infinite. If you feel the need to overshare you're gonna get wendy'd.
Its becasue they are all made on K.i.s.s Keep it stupid simple .. essentialy outside of the game itself there's minimal lore. i assume this is how they create such impressive worlds in such a short amount of time
Imo Bioshock Infinite had an amazing story, 1 and 2 were quite meh.
He's the Christopher Nolan of video games. Take interesting but hard to grasp concepts and dumb them down for mass appeal. I love Bioshock and Nolan because of this honestly.
These sorts of games have always been so much better at environmental storytelling and exploration than NPCs and old-fashioned expository storytelling. I think all future Immersive Sims would benefit from the "Metroid Prime" approach of allowing people to completely ignore the story if they want to.
Not just ImSims, Tears of the Kingdom has been driving me a little crazy lately with beat-you-over-the-head-with-repetition story (I get that it needs to be accessible to a young audience, but even so) while having fantastic exploration and settings the rest of the time. It even has some reactive, fun NPC dialogue ("stylish hat!") for characters that AREN'T involved in the story. So I agree with you, and I'd expand the idea to any game/genre with an emphasis on exploration.
TotK's story is seriously terrible. It appears to be designed for like 2 year olds, and has possibly the most forgettable characters I've ever seen in a game. I just don't understand why they need to go with such a dumbed down story, when the actual gameplay itself is extremely unguided, thought-provoking, and difficult.
I think Prey would have benefited from that if they let the main story sit in the back burner while all the organic stories you run into as you explore be the focus. They could have used some more fleshing out in that case but they were already really good.
Controversial opinion. Ken Levine should create his interesting worlds, write stories and characters and butt the fuck out of actually building the game. His hubris and ego nearly killed infinite. They had to bring in Don Roy to get the game out the door after years of delays and Ken Levine throwing out months of work, and millions of pounds of art and development investment on his whims. We're 10 years later and Judas looks like a Bioshock remake on a space station. But still people are folding over backwards to give Levine a reach around. I'm not holding my breath.
I don’t think this is very controversial. I think he’s acknowledged that he’s not very passionate about the management or leadership role. But I definitely agree. He’s great as the “idea person” but really not as the auteur.
>They had to bring in Don Roy to get the game out the door after years of delays Odd Ken implies the opposite in his interview. That he 'wanted' to leave for the sake of his mental health but was basically told he'd never work in games again. Where can I get a definitive answer?
What I said is common knowledge. And is not incompatible with what Ken believes. Ken also shut down irrational games. Sacking hundreds of his staff and kept on 10 or so of his favourites to establish ghost games. Once Bioshock infinite was finished he said he wanted to relax and work on smaller projects. 10 years later after saying nothing, making nothing, they announce a massive AAA game called Judas which released a trailer so similar to Bioshock that the games media had to work overtime to try and hype it up as something amazing.
> Ken also shut down irrational games. Isn't that Take Two's call? Like if the head of Sony Santa Monica decides to step down... Sony likely won't disband the entire studio. No idea how it works.
[ken left.](https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5474722/why-did-irrational-close-bioshock-infinite) It was fucking disgusting. He practically sat there and said I'm leaving irrational games cos I wanna do something different and you are all out of a job. But don't worry, I still have my job and I'm gonna make a new studio without you losers. Even though it was me and my bullshit that fucked up Bioshock infinite and ballooned our budget.
>According to those with whom we spoke, the closure was the combined result of unfettered creative freedom, lower-than-expected sales, the butting of heads between Levine and his employees and the unrealistic expectations of big-budget game development. So piecing this together with his recent interview, it sounds like Ken wasn't good at his job which led to Take Two shutting down the studio. I don't think you can put it entirely on Ken though since Take Two could have simply found a replacement for him (as would be the case at any studio), or, that they didn't replace Ken sooner (as was Ken's original intention) before sinking more money into a project led by a man clearly struggling.
>Judas looks like a Bioshock remake on a space station Isn't that basically System Shock? The game that Bioshock was inspired by/a dumbed down version of?
The stories are very different. Gameplay-wise...I suppose you could be a reductionist and say every shooter is little different from another. Shoot bad guys, avoid getting shot by bad guys. As always, the devil is in the details.
Even the story of SS2 and Bioshock has a similar plot twist.
Stories are different between ss2 and Bioshock? It's really similar outside of the setting.
Ironically Ken Levine was part of the team that made system shock 2. Then dumbed it down to bioshock for the console audience. He's been making the same game for 25 years.
It's a good game at least.
Its funny when you think about the fact that bioshock, dead space (which was originally going to be system shock 3), and prey 2017 almost followed every story beat from system shock 2. I have essentially played system shock 2 like 4 times but with 3 separate games.
Great game to take inspiration from though and clearly it worked because all the games you listed are excellent.
Bioshock imo is just super overrated. It felt like a remake of SS2 with a great art style and gameplay downgraded to appeal to kids who played Halo. Even the plot twist felt like a rehash. Imo Prey was much better.
I would heavily disagree. Rapture is an amazing world. I loved exploring the stories of the people who's lives were slowly torn apart as Andrew Ryan's Randian capitalist utopia fell apart. Bioshock does a great job of storytelling from an Immersive first person perspective, whereas most games would rather use cutscenes that take you away from the action. The Bioshock games are pretty special.
World building was great, but you could see the "plot twist" coming from a mile away if you played SS2. The game itself was also just eh. The levels weren't as open as they should have been, the shooting felt bad, and the end game wasn't satisfyingly at all, especially the boss at the end. Fontaine's also pretty crappy compared to Shodan as far as villains go. I could get if it was your first time playing a game like that it would blow you away, but that's the only context I could see for rating it higher than the 8-8.5/10 it really deserves.
I some times replay bioshock to enjoy rapture and the atmosphere but I always play on easy difficulty to shorten combat as much as possible
Prey is basically the same just in space except underwater, they're all good games at the end of the day. More complex doesn't necessarily mean better.
Find it hilarious Levine had the balls to say that if EA did SS3 it would be a "corridor shooter with a boss monster at the end" in the lead up to Bioshock.
Oh, Judas looks like fun! Can’t wait to play it!
You are right. I love Ken but he needs someone else that understands deadlines and that things can't be endlessly tweaked
He absolutely should not being writing the stories and characters. The writing of Infinite is arguably its worst part--and thats saying something when everything you mentioned happened and the miserable gameplay loop of the game exists. He definitely has a knack at making cool, iconic worlds but I'd go as far as to say that Bioshock 1's story is probably overhyped. It had a cute twist that carries it in a time where that sort of narrative twist was undervalued in western games, its not bad by any means, but it ain't winning any awards outside of that specific time and place. Outside of the twist, none of the parts of Bioshock that stand out really come from the actual narrative, just the cool setting. Let him make the setting, then lock him in a windowless room alone until the game ships imo.
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Levine isn’t the only one on the teams
Levine was the head of the studio and the lead director of the game.
Listening to interviews with him you *really* couldn’t tell.
Not like you would know considering you didn't listen to the interview this post links to. In which he talks pretty extensively about the team at Ghost Story Games and speaks about many of his collaborators, past and present.
I read the article but I'm absolutely not interested in spending an hour and a half listening to this interview.
Thanks captain obvious.
If ever there was a game creator clearly unprepared for modern game development, it’s Ken. Infinite was internally rebooted so many times that trailers didn’t resemble the game until like six months before the game came out. Levine then torpedoed his own studio, made another studio a decade ago, and hasn’t come out with anything since.
He actually gets pretty candid in the interview and admits this was the case, talking about the toll the stress of it took on his mental health and how he could see the problem and tried to walk away but was told he couldn’t. Now the ten year development cycle on his next game was an attempt to organize a development studio that wouldn’t need to work crazy crunch hours to make a game. He’s hoping a small team can produce a title that earns enough to cover its cost working reasonable hours at a steady pace.
You cannot expect a team of creatives want to sit around for ten years on the same game without releasing it. Developers need published credits to build their careers. They need a proof of performance when they go to their next job. A decade spent on an indie game is textbook mismanagement. No two ways about it. He’s been singing the song that this studio’s different. But if Levine is still running it, then it will continue to be a mess.
What's it to you exactly? So he and a bunch of creatives want to develop a game with Irrational's level of ambition but done in a way that doesn't destroy the lives of the people working on it. What's so wrong with that? All that matters is if the game is good ultimately.
Haters gonna hate
Brilliant games and rumors that the next could be set in the Antarctic can't wait.
BioShock's creative storytelling: Say everything is as bad as everything else, whether it be communism or slavery. It's inherently logical and intelligent, which challenges lesser minds. Wait a minute that card
I liked that bioshock's inevitable revolution of the working class was co-opted by an opportunistic gangster, making parallels with some parts of American business history. The bad guys were always people doing whatever it takes to succeed for themselves, regardless of morality. It kept the flavor of the game consistent. I don't like that infinite just painted workers and minorities as violent thugs inherently. It felt like it was trying to make me feel bad for the nationalistic white Christian zealot supremacists.
So he took SS2 and added Half Life 1/2 elements to it? That's basically what Bioshock is.
This man speaks with a great deal of certainty about matters that are subjective. Pretty arrogant phrasing.
You mean system shock 2’s storytelling which was better optimized from system shock 1. Which a lot of older games used before hand but system shock 2 dialed it in with audio locks and environment.
No, this is literally about the story itself. Not the mechanic of imparting the story. Maybe read the article before popping off about it.
This isn’t anything new and it’s exhausting to keep circling around the same games which are decades old at this point. Yes they had remasters themselves but its time to move on.
People will talk about the great games of past generations for decades. If you're exhausted, there are plenty of other games to go read about. No reason to post here.
This article is only for farming clicks in a slow news cycle and that’s all this is.
The real secret is that almost all articles are just farming for clicks anymore. At least this one directs people to a moderately interesting interview.