Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Infinite… but minimal need for me as a player

cliffski

I bought Bioshock Infinite yesterday. It’s a big budget game that looks intriguing, I enjoyed what I played of Bioshock, and I saw floating cities and thought it could be cool. I also like to ensure I’ve played a few AAA games now and then to remind me how they work :D

I’ve played about 2 hours of it, and it’s kinda cool, very ‘impressive’ and clearly cost a lot. I’m not sure it’s genuinely fun for a player like me, for various reasons. Firstly I’m not a chisel jawed wisecracking American who punches lift buttons with his fists, so I already feel like it’s not really me playing, by my voice and my actions. Secondly, everything seems to be glowing. Nice bloom effect, but give it a rest please. These are fairly minor things though, that I’d happily overlook to experience adventure in what is a very interesting world.

bioshock

The problems that put me off are more fundamental. Firstly, I don’t really feel like any skill is involved. I picked medium difficulty, but I haven’t run out of ammo, salt or health once, and that’s with me bouncing around like a hyperactive squirrel spraying bullets everywhere. I think I died twice, but it really didn’t matter. As a result, I don’t feel scared, or excited. I basically can’t lose, and am not challenged. I can burst into peoples homes and rummage through their house for money without a second thought, and nobody I’ve encountered has posed any real threat whatsoever.

Maybe that’s fixed on higher difficulty, at least for shootouts, but it certainly doesn’t require any stealth in the way the old thief games (or even dishonored, to a very superficial extent) did.

More fundamentally, there is no real sense of sandbox or player control. They have created an amazing world, but they then wrote a movie script for it, gave me superficial control of a character at certain moments, and spun me around like a puppet on a scriptwriters strings for the majority of the predetermined story. I say things I wouldn’t say, do things I wouldn’t do, and spend a lot of the game running predictably forwards as things fall down just behind me, or to one side. I know I could go slower and it wouldn’t matter. I know the pillar that hits me as it falls is scripted to and I can’t avoid it. I may as well just hold down the W key with one hand and play the game blindfold.

I see games like this as a missed opportunity. I know they appeal to a certain crowd, and are very well made for it. I just wish they could take that same awesome world, awesome design and huge budget and make a free-form sandbox game where I could adventure in that world with entirely emergent gameplay. Apparently GTA games do a lot of it. Thief did it better. Just Cause 2 did it exceptionally well.

To me, this is a horribly expensive use of art assets to just wheel me past amazing vistas as they explode. I know it sells, I just wish we could have true, challenging sandbox games set in such a world. No quests. Just free-form experimentation within systems. basically i want ‘sir you are being hunted’ with Bioshock infinite’s budget.

9 thoughts on Infinite… but minimal need for me as a player

  1. Just started State of Decay (soon on PC I hear), it has a lot of the things you mention, shares a bit with Sir you are being hunted. Permadeath, no fake respawning items, emergent gameplay. Ropey graphics ;)

  2. I think there’s very much a place for interactive stories with high budgets, and it’s okay that not every protagonist is a blank slate for the player. I haven’t played Infinite yet, so I’m not sure if it’s good for that category, but I think it’s a little unfair to ask it to be something that it’s not.

    1. Just one point, you might not punch buttons, but it is very important to the game that you roleplay Booker DeWitt, who happens to be a brute. This has a lot of meaning later on, specially in the relationship with the little girl. It is also a good mechanism to explain the amount of violence the game has, you might want to be a stealth hero admiring the view, but Booker is not and he is characterized quite well.

  3. “More fundamentally, there is no real sense of sandbox or player control. They have created an amazing world, but they then wrote a movie script for it, gave me superficial control of a character at certain moments, and spun me around like a puppet on a scriptwriters strings for the majority of the predetermined story. I say things I wouldn’t say, do things I wouldn’t do, and spend a lot of the game running predictably forwards as things fall down just behind me, or to one side. I know I could go slower and it wouldn’t matter. I know the pillar that hits me as it falls is scripted to and I can’t avoid it. I may as well just hold down the W key with one hand and play the game blindfold.”

    The irony here being that you have stumbled upon one of the themes of Bioshock Infinite and decided it’s a flaw. It’s a game about fatalism (among other things), and about the story of a particular character who is not meant to be a blank slate, who has their own personality. Overall, I would say it sounds you prefer more sandbox games, which is fine, but I don’t think every game needs to do that. Bioshock Infinite does what it does really well, I think it’s an truly excellent example of interactive story-telling. Further, if it were a sandbox game in which you could approach the story and world any way you like or even ignore it entirely, it would completely defeat the purpose of the story. It would destroy the game by undermining the things that make it excellent. Ultimately, you’d just be better off playing a different game, I think.

    (Additionally, I’d say try it on hard if medium is too easy. Hard does get properly difficult).

  4. Do you ever find yourself playing a AAA title as a developer and thinking about the code that makes up certain elements of the game as you play because of your working knowledge?

    Regarding your post, it seems the game industry is moving towards a play the movie model. I’ll admit it works in some games, but i’m sure quite a few of us remember Dragon’s Lair. Watching a game play out like a movie with reaction button prompts just seems like DL, but which I believe didn’t have the prompts.

  5. I just don’t think fatalism and the on-rails model works for games. It works for movies, books and rollercoasters, but not games, because the whole *point* of a game is to have interaction and choice, beyond just limited mouse-look during what amounts to a cutscene.
    It’s very well done, and very pretty, but I do feel like I’m watching a game, not playing it.

  6. But I would say that Bioshock Infinite still uses its interactivity, and does it very well. It gives you some choices, about your style of play, about some ultimately unimportant aspects of the plot (do you pull your gun or be patient, bird or cage necklace, etc.) and uses all of those small choices about how they ultimately don’t matter on the scale of the larger story. It’s restricting your choice very deliberately, and to make a point.

    If you were saying this about CoD:BlOps, I would totally agree with you. But Bioschock’s rails aren’t brainless in the same way. It’s plays with choice and interactivity in clever ways, and wouldn’t be as effective if it were a book or a movie. There’s an argument to be made that the ending itself is about linearity in games and the false promise that most ‘non-linear’ games give. Far Cry 3 is a great example of the kind of game it’s criticizing, in which you have all this freedom and choice and you can explore how you like, but the plot completely linear and always ends the same way (or one of two ways, which you decide right before the ending you choose happens). It’s commenting on games themselves, which wouldn’t come across at all if it weren’t a game.

    Again, I accept that you don’t like it and it’s not your cup of tea, and that’s perfectly valid, but I think it’s incorrect to just label it as ‘bad’, or say that all games should aim to do one particular thing. If you want some really short, free and impressive examples of how limiting player choice can be used to make a narrative point in a game, I would check out ‘Depression Quest’ and the interactive fiction ‘The Baron’. The former cuts off choices and makes that very apparent as part of a strong metaphor, and the latter has only one meaningful choice that comes right at the end, buts packs an incredible punch with it.

  7. I’m certainly not saying the game is bad. I just find it to be a missed opportunity. I’d love them to happily release bioshock infinite as it is, then re-use the setting and the artwork and the engine to make a more freeform sandboxy game in that setting.

  8. “I just don’t think fatalism and the on-rails model works for games. It works for movies, books and rollercoasters, but not games, because the whole *point* of a game is to have interaction and choice, beyond just limited mouse-look during what amounts to a cutscene.”

    But by conceding this, you’re effectually admitting that games cannot equal other forms of artistic expression in terms of symbolism and depth of meaning, which is exactly what the developers of Bioshock were trying to do. Bioshock Infinite is absolutely loaded with symbolic meaning that extends from the story of the game to the actual technical design. If you ask me, that is pretty brilliant. I play sandbox oriented games that are focused on freedom and choice. I also play games that tell a story first and I enjoy both types and I think that most gamers probably do as well.

Comments are currently closed.