I’ve got incredibly strong feelings about Bioshock: Infinite. On the one hand, Ken Levine is a truly
amazing storyteller, arguably the single most adept designer in the world at
telling a story through the medium of games.
To use the phrase “genius” is trite, but it fits: he’s a virtuoso, a
creator who truly gets what makes stories compelling and understands how to use
the mediums he works in to tell them as well as possible. It’s sort of infuriating to watch him do it,
because I know that no matter how hard I try, I could never use the constraints
of video games to flesh out my tales as well as he could. Bioshock:
Infinite expands the confines of storytelling in games in some very, very
compelling ways, ways I’d like to investigate in a few more pieces down the
road.
On the other hand, Bioshock:
Infinite is essentially a regression of game design. Many of the decisions that were made to alter
the gameplay represent steps back, not forward, steps towards a limiting,
ungainly game design ethos that the other Bioshock
games thoroughly eschewed. This is
obviously complicated by the strength of the game’s narrative, but overall Bioshock: Infinite is not a good game so
much as it’s an exceptional story contained within a mediocre or middling game.
The Extra Credits
series over at Penny Arcade has some
pretty interesting things to say on this subject in the form of a video
critiquing Infinite’s problems as the result of an attempt to remain “true
to the brand of Bioshock,” and while they
make some excellent salient points, about both the integration of vigors into
the game and the way loot works, I actually have bigger problems that go beyond
the root of what the EC crew
discussed and into a larger criticism of the combat system at work in Bioshock: Infinite.
The first two Bioshock
games, as well as their spiritual predecessors, masterfully balanced
exploration and combat. The former was a
constant enticement: the best way to find supplies and improve your character
was exploring the game world, and you could always come back and do it more
after a little had gone by. The latter
was a constant threat: combat could occur at any moment, and it would be
punishing. There were action set pieces,
sure, where you’d have to do things like fight your way out of a room or defend
an area or a target, but the bulk of the combat you’d run into would happen as
a result of exploration, either because you encountered a scripted enemy spawn,
or because a random enemy spawned while you were exploring. Exploration and combat were integrated
systems, and that integration never resolved.
Even after clearing an entire level, you’d still find Big Daddies and
Splicers wandering the halls of Rapture, looking for Little Sisters to protect
or hunt. The Von Braun never stopped
spawning horrors, even after you’ve poisoned The Many’s primary hive clusters
and taken some measure of control over the bulk of the ship.
This system presented exploration as a risky but rewarding
practice that the game allowed you to opt into.
The tension never stopped, and simply moving through the game world was
a challenge. In Bioshock: Infinite, traversal through the world is more of a
chore. Enemies don’t respawn, unless
they’re part of an endless sequence of respawns. They emerge in streams from specific spawns
at specific plot points, and sometimes they disincentivize exploration, but for
the most part they’re just between you and where you’re going. Combat
in Bioshock: Infinite is an
obstacle. What’s more, it’s the game’s
primary obstacle. Combat is, more often
than not, the only thing standing between you and your goal. Sometimes you get a break from it, usually to
walk through an area you’ll be fighting in later. But it’s never a spontaneous risk. You’ll never, having just cleared an area,
settle in to explore and find a random, wandering mob of monsters. Scripted encounters will happen, but there’s
no randomness to speak of. Combat is a
set piece, and only a set piece. In a
world this sprawling and rich, that can make exploration more than a little
tedious. There’s no danger while
wandering around, so things can get boring.
This also means that resources like ammo, health, salts and
cash are actually relatively finite within the game world. Without respawning foes, there’s no ability
to grind resources, or even acquire some additional resources as needed. That means that combat isn’t just about
surpassing an obstacle: it’s about managing resources while you do so.
That’s actually a pretty cool concept, in and of
itself. But there are two problems with
it. First, Bioshock: Infinite’s shooting is sloppy. Like the original Bioshock, it’s a little shaky and uneven. The guns almost all handle a little clumsily,
and unlike Bioshock, which set melee
attacks aside as their own thing, Bioshock:
Infinite has made the ability to gun butt your foes ubiquitous, but
stripped some of the power of the movement away. That means that your resource management is
going to come down to finding a way to manipulate a sloppy and imprecise
system, which I found frustrating. Enemy
movements and the damage done by my own weapons fire varies according to a
seemingly inscrutable formula that the game randomly inserts when it sees fit. The other half of the problem comes from the
randomized resources you occasionally receive in combat. The nice little gifts from Elizabeth, your
companion, intended to ease gameplay, upset the apparent conservation ethos:
the designers don’t seem to want you to be finishing each fight with finite
resources, they want you to be finishing each fight with a set of finite
resources plus some randomly generated materials tossed your way by possibly
the most interesting AI companion of the 2010 decade. That means any kind of “puzzle battle” system
is out of the window: if Bishock:
Infinite wants you to have nearly unlimited resources, they should give
them to you. If they want to have you
solve each fight like a brain busting puzzle, that’s awesome too. Trying to walk a line between the two problemitizes
any sort of balance or retooling, and makes arena fights into exercises in
finger crossing, where you hope to receive a particular item from Elizabeth when
you need it.
This confusion seems to extend to the combat itself. Bioshock:
Infinite moves fights into breathtaking, open arenas, which is a bold
choice, but then it makes those fights frenetic panic fests where the most
effective tactic is actually moving around erratically and hoping that the AI
commits suicide in some interesting way (fun fact: I beat one of the more
challenging boss fights I ran into later in the game by making a Handyman leap
off a barge accidentally). There’s cover
too, but using cover is an iffy proposition: the game doesn’t have a cover
system, and without leans, it’s actually slightly worse than say Modern Warfare at integrating cover into
combat. The end result is a shooter that feels a great deal like the original
Halo, right down to the recharging shields and the two weapon system. Of course, Halo was built around this ethos from the ground up, and it really
did make its fights into combat puzzles of sorts (how do you kill two Hunters
without dying using only a pistol?) whereas the frenetic, randomized pace of Bioshock: Infinite undermines this
decision. Halo also had a (somewhat)
plausible narrative behind it: you’re a super soldier who fights his way
through an army of enemies because that’s what you’ve been born, bred and
modified to do. The horde of enemies
fighting you are on a campaign of religious motivated genocide, so there’s some
solid motivation for them to stand proud and try to take you out, and to see no
possible resolution aside from violence in killing you.
Bioshock: Infinite
has you fighting, for the most part, cops and average citizens. Somewhat brainwashed, but mostly just normal
folk, folk who were born and raised outside of the floating city of
Columbia. That means, as Extra Credits so deftly pointed out, you’re
killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of police officers and citizens. You’re murdering people. People with families, normal-ish people who
have apartments and lives. And these
people throw themselves at you, a random everyman who shows up in their city,
because of a marking on the back of your hand and a penchant for racism. There’s some remarkable world-building going
on in Bioshock: Infinite, but it’s
totally divorced from the Halo-esque
combat.
And that’s where the game failed for me: this amazing story
I wanted to see was largely disconnected from its delivery system. The play wasn’t something I felt compelled to
engross myself in, it was a deeply uneven experience that I forced myself to
play through to see the next story chunklet.
And what a story it is! It
warrants a much, much better game behind it, a game that expresses a consistent
ethos of play, a game that understands its systems and tries to make sure you
get them too. Instead, there’s a
confused mass of design notes, interesting concepts and odd backpedals that
make Bioshock: Infinite feel less
like a polished intellectual successor to a venerable franchise and more like a
cobbled together artifact out of various anachronistic sections of gaming
history.
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