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Yoya posted:People who thought bioshock 1 was a brilliant masterpiece will still love the lovely story in infinite, right? I don't know, will the gaming press suddenly and violently reverse their pre-determined "This is an important game, a game that matters" narrative?
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Mar 21, 2013 00:13
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All of that, by the way, is clumsily dumped on the player in a 15-minute scripted sequence where Elizabeth turns into Jane Exposition. The only cool part was going back to Rapture for like, two minutes, because it reminded me of the bit in System Shock 2 where you go back to Citadel.
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Mar 21, 2013 00:32
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Spite posted:And I think it would be really hard to implement this twist well without making it feel like "whelp, I just did a bunch of stuff for nothing" - not to render final judgement, but I'm not too hopeful. I mean, I was watching it, so I'm one level removed, but this is exactly what the end of the game felt like.
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Mar 21, 2013 00:37
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CJacobs posted:I love how the guy playing in that Blip link just has his face in his hands for half the ending. I feel the same way, pal. I feel the same way. He was probably tired as poo poo, if you note the timestamps in the chatlog, he had started that final fight before midnight.
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Mar 21, 2013 02:39
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sebmojo posted:What does this even mean. That you're not allowed to have racism in a game without solving racism at the same time? Or that there are a few approved ways you can use it? Bioshock Infinite, at it's heart, isn't really about racism, or American exceptionalism, or Manifest Destiny. It is mechanically a game where you shoot people because they're trying to kill you, and are stopping you from reaching your next goal. Nothing in the gameplay mechanics attempt to communicate any deeper understanding of racism, any more than the gameplay mechanics of Bioshock communicated any deeper understanding of the failures of a Randian society. (Objectivism is bad because... people will start taking drugs and going insane?) The purpose of the racism is, instead, to morally justify the mass violence you commit. That's what I think the article's getting at. Bioshock is a game about shooting and stabbing a bunch of people, but it wants to be something more. So, the game dresses the enemies up as racists, and tries to qualify this as an anti-racist message.
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Apr 10, 2013 05:39
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sebmojo posted:It uses the emotional impact of being confronted with racism (plus a swathe of ideas and imagery, choice, peer pressure, let he without sin cast the first stone, baseball as american tradition, lynch mobs) to do specific things to your emotions. The scene does that with absolute economy. It does do that, and watching the scene for the first time, I wondered if the game was about to try to communicate the experience of living in an openly racist society. It doesn't do this, though, which turns the scene from a jarring curtain-lift into the equivalent of the scene where scientists turn into zombies in Half-Life. It's now OK to kill all these people.
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Apr 10, 2013 05:41
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N. Senada posted:^^^You are including the part where Booker is killing black people too, right? It's sort of the same thing, though. These seem less like natural events in the game's plot, and more like contrived excuses for every enemy in the game to be unable to be reasoned with. And, frankly, if you want to make a shooty game, that's fine to just handwave that away. Nobody (except EDGE magazine) wants to talk to the monsters in Doom, after all. The problem is that the game uses a serious topic like racism to justify juvenile violence, and then tries to pass this off as some kind of sincere examination.
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Apr 10, 2013 05:51
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MY ABACUS! posted:It's an FPS game. Did you guys think they were setting up a backdrop of racial conflict in order to have warring factions or so you could have quick time events where you press E to mediate fair wages and racial harmony? I agree, which is why I think that an FPS game is a really poor medium for communicating anything other than "let's kill a bunch of zombies/demons/Nazis/racists".
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Apr 10, 2013 05:58
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Trying to cram serious social issues with no easy answer into a game genre that makes a point of completely eschewing any kind of moral ambiguity is monstrously antithetical to good judgment.
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Apr 10, 2013 06:13
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N. Senada posted:^^^^^There's surely a better way to handle it then what Infinite did, but I'm still really happy that they tried to encounter those issues at all. MY ABACUS! posted:You could say the same thing about a novel or any kind of entertainment. There's always going to be a degree of exploitation when you fictionalize tragedy. At least by referencing actual historical events, it might inspire people to pick up a book about it. The article was kind of about this "giving points for effort" stuff. I don't think merely putting these themes into the game as window dressing count as effort; at least not enough effort. Any game can drop a name. The 10/10 GOTY reviews are suggesting that dropping names and buzzwords is enough, which I disagree with. sebmojo posted:We might have to just agree to disagree, I guess. There's definitely a fundamental difference with the way we look at video games, yeah.
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Apr 10, 2013 06:28
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CJacobs posted:So... did you guys miss the Hall of Heroes, where the Wounded Knee and Peking segments are huge nationalistic bastardizations of what actually happened, stereotypical characters and all? Because the bastardization and how it relates to the actual events is the whole point of the area; especially given that Elizabeth talks about most of the point of the pier/boardwalk area being to 'educate' young folk about what 'really' happened. But it doesn't really have much to do with anything at all in the game. It's a segment that gives you some backstory on the protagonist. Is this exposition necessary? Before the Hall of Heroes, you shoot everyone in the face, and after experiencing the Hall of Heroes, you... shoot everyone in the face. What exactly does this insight on Booker's character do?
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Apr 10, 2013 06:41
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Trick Question posted:That's pretty selective. By this logic, beyond the scenes where the hook, the vigors, and the special enemies are introduced, none of the scenes in the game are actually important. You just shoot people before and after. This is arguably true- and the reason it's so limited is because your actions are so limited; All you can do is shoot people. did any of the character beats, and the Columbia backstory ever factor into the decisions that you, the player made? That poo poo matters about as much as the plot summary in the Quake instruction book. bloodysabbath posted:If you want to make the game I described above, please, do so. But god drat, Irrational made a first person shooter, okay? That's what it is. Things will be shot. I'm perfectly fine that Irrational made a pure FPS. The problem is that they're using storytelling techniques and themes that are badly unsuited for a game where the only choices you can make involve finding the most effective way to kill someone.
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Apr 10, 2013 07:05
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bloodysabbath posted:This isn't an open world game with multiple endings. It's a linear action game. You do not have the agency to make choices, you are guiding a character created by someone else through a narrative created by someone else. In this narrative, this character is attempting what amounts to a hostage extraction from what amounts to a floating city full of armed Sky Klansmen. Yeah. It's a linear action game, your path is always clear, your enemies are always obvious, and your goal is clearly defined. That's really my point- this is not the type of game that lends itself well to meaningful examinations of the topics BS:I wanted to bring up. Take the Vox/Comstock conflict. The game clearly wants to set up some moral ambiguity between the two, with Comstock's horribly racist society, and the Vox's brutal methods. The problem is that as a player, you never have to deal with this ambiguity, because your enemies are always unambiguous: they're the ones trying to kill you. quote:Choices have nothing to do with whether or not technique or theme is "suited" for the game. A game can have you with a gun on the rails and still get its point across. Infinite did. "Wounded Knee was bad. Racism is bad. Whitewashing is bad. Wrapping racism and prejudices in religious piety and building a city in the sky to get away from people you're bigoted against? Bad. And my position isn't that I wanted BS:I to tackle racism differently, it's merely that BS:I doesn't meaningfully address it. Personally, I like my FPS games with minimal plot and an emphasis on gameplay.
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Apr 10, 2013 07:32
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Heavy Lobster posted:Do you take qualms with action movies that have more serious window dressing than "blow things up for fun and leisure"? Let's go ahead and treat Bioshock Infinite, as a AAA FPS game, as essentially equivalent to a big budget action movie. While the end goal of the product is much more visceral than cognitive, it attempts to engage the consumer in a way that is more challenging than its own limitations - is Transformers on the same thematic level as Mad Max? Genre pieces can vary in their expertise in presentation of a given topic, and Bioshock Infinite is certainly aware that it's a genre piece, and it knows its end goal is providing a mechanically satisfying shooter experience, which it does in addition to providing a clever and thematically developed backdrop for it to play out on. I had a longer thing written up, but it kinda gets into some "what IS art" BS that nobody would want to read, so I'll try to be quick. We interact with movies, and read into them, aesthetically. We read meaning into what we see on the screen, and we can put what we see into context. The Searchers and Taxi Driver have similar plot beats, but the western aesthetic of The Searchers lets us read the film as a subversion of traditional Hollywood westerns, and the start of the revisionist Western genre. We don't get this with Taxi Driver, the different setting gives a completely different context to whatever reading we take out of that film. When we interact with games, we interact with their mechanics. It's my opinion that a game is only ever "about" what you and I, as players, can do. I think narrative can be valuable in providing context to these actions, and even use them to explore themes, but the actions themselves are the most important thing. It's my position that the extremely limited set of actions you're allowed to take in BS:I make it difficult to communicate the themes BS:I wants to. It'd be my opinion that BS:I, translated into a different setting, but keeping the mechanics, would essentially be an identical game; in the same way that having a chess set of Star Trek characters don't suddenly give it the themes of Star Trek.
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Apr 10, 2013 08:02
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Decius posted:You get an extremely linear corridor turkey hunt shooter part with setpieces, that resemble nothing of the reality, taken from US wars, where what you see is an extremely nationalistic version colored in "USA, USA, #1"-tones. I wonder if that might be a critique of something. Like the whole "shoot brown people inside a brown world loosely based on some US war"-shooter genre or something? But instead of Wounded Knee or Boxer rebellion these shooters use Vietnam or WW II or Afghanistan or Iraq to do what you just criticized. Taking a real-life tragedy to vilify a fictional character. Bioshock is mechanically almost identical to said "shoot brown people in a brown world" games. Why does it get to be a criticism of them? I wish I had a dollar for every time a flaw about a Bioshock game was explained as a commentary about that flaw in other, much less clever games.
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Apr 10, 2013 16:37
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WampaLord posted:Yes, I remember all those times in the Modern Warfare series where I shot lightning at enemies, sent them flying into the air, or sent crows flying at them. Also all the skyhook rail riding I did as I shot dudes. "Identical" was probably too strong, yeah. What I'm trying to get across is that they're both games where your goal is simply to kill all the people the game tells you, until it's decided you've killed enough to advance, so I don't really see how BS:I can criticize that, while itself being that. And yeah, Spec Ops tried to be a criticism of modern war shooters, and it failed, exactly because it's identical to them. Spec Ops is a great example of the type of lazy writing I hate; it's precisely the thing it's supposedly criticizing, and tries to claim that it's a commentary on it's own flaws.
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Apr 10, 2013 18:21
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Bioshock had ironsights, it's just that a lot of people never used them because it was something weird like clicking LS.
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Apr 10, 2013 18:41
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sebmojo posted:It really doesn't. This is the nth time someone's said something to this effect, and I really hate it. The argument is "BS:I addresses it's topics in an extremely shallow way", this doesn't require someone to come up with a hypothetical game that does address topics deeply. That's not relevant.
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Apr 11, 2013 08:03
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