Bioshock makes me appreciate Halo more (Gaming)

by davidfuchs , USA, Monday, August 12, 2013, 19:59 (4120 days ago) @ Jillybean

I want to talk about Bioshock Infinite.

This game didn’t appeal to me when it was first being advertised. But it did come highly recommended. It’s often mentioned in the same breath as GotY. And, though let’s not mention this one too loudly, Schooly and Cody both seemed to enjoy it. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be good, I still don’t understand that robot game thingy Schooly plays at LANs, but it’s still a recommendation.

It was, in fact, some judicious googling of Troy Baker after watching Last of Us playthroughs that had me deciding to pick Bioshock up a few weeks ago.

Let’s start with the good. The game is beautiful. It has some fabulous acting in it. That first long walk through Columbia, listening to anachronistic Barbershop and watching the ‘wrongness’ of a Bioshock world take shape was all wonderful. I’ve been playing that Tainted Love cover/original over and over. And I really appreciate what they tried to go through with the story. I appreciate the effort.

But let’s start with the story. Now a defence that people kept giving me while I was complaining about this game was that the story was great. I came to Bioshock completely spoiled. Not only completely spoiled, but I played Dishonored last year and watched a lot of Last of Us gameplay this year. (As an aside, I guess we’re fairly confident that gaming is reaching its middle ages as a medium). Remember that first time you see Emily draw a good Corvo? Or find the Fugue Feast book in her bedroom? How about when Joel tells Ellie “I sure as hell ain’t your dad?”

Even knowing the answer, I found a lot of Bioshock Infinite to be wilfully misleading. There was very little protectiveness in Booker, little paternal care. Maybe that’s supposed to be part of it, but it makes the big reveal feel disjointed. When Booker laces up Elizabeth’s corset after her little torture porn scene I was squirming. Even when she was revealed to be Anna in a very long walking sequence at the end, I still didn’t feel the game connecting Anna and Elizabeth. They are only the same person in a academic sense.

I did like layering Troy Baker’s voice over Comstock’s dire pronunciations, I liked the recurring misinterpretation of the baptism theme. I found “there is always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city” to be irritatingly smug, but hey, we’re using quantum physics.

But story wise I found Bioshock Infinite to fall woefully short of Dishonoured. If you want a game where a father chooses to sell his daughter, play a high chaos Dishonoured run. Even the Outsider will be surprised by you.

Bioshock also tries to couch all this in a backdrop of racial tension which I found to be laughable. Cody already linked to a very good article about that. To abandon that storyline halfway through for a half hearted “oh power corrupts” idea is just ridiculous.

There’s an additional mismatch between Booker and Comstock’s treatment of minorities which is not well explained. After all, losing a child and becoming and embittered gambler is not the usual prescribed method of dealing with deep seated prejudices, but this is a relatively small nitpick. Again, see Dishonoured for a wonderful contrast between the haves and have nots.

But lets talk about the fact this is a game. I finished it on hard mode after a week or so of playing, in between Fringe parties and impromptu DIY. I’m not that good of a player. Money is plentiful. Losing money is no big penalty (I doubt even losing 100 eagles at a time will upset me greatly if I do a 1999 playthrough) and so no horde of white or coloured bad guys will stop me from plunging onwards. I also never mastered the skyhooks it must be said, and quite often flung myself around again and again while desperately waiting for the fleeting aerial kill symbol.

When this game was fun it was aping Mass Effect. Lift, Charge, Shotgun was a favoured tactic. I also felt there were no real bosses in the game. Lady Comstock was a bit of a madam, the handy men liked to electrocute my skylines, the patriots were pretty unkillable, but all of these were neatly dispatched by random friendly version Elizabeth could call upon at will and if anything went wrong Elizabeth would throw some health kits or I’d die and be resurrected a little way away. The most frustrating part was the final zeppelin ride which relied simply on swamping you with enemies.

And if any game didn’t need choice, it was this one. And don’t give me bullshit about the futility of choice in a world of quantum physics or point at the coin toss with a smile. It’s nonsense. It has as much bearing as choosing to walk left or right out of the gate. But again, a small nitpick in comparison to endless irritation of hopping off of the world in an attempt to latch onto a skyhook.

Why is Bioshock Infinite so lauded?

But I’m still kind of excited about going back to Rapture in a few weeks.

I know tons of people who bemoaned the simplified gameplay of Bioshock 1 and even more sore the further reduced options of Infinite, but I mightily preferred playing Infinite compared to the first game, which I found an absolute chore. The vigors have a standard feel to them so you can intuitively pick up how to use them, you only have two weapons at a time so there's not as much of the "OH GOD AN ENEMY IS CHARGING ME I NEED ROCKETS CRUD I HAVE THE WRONG AMMO TYPE SO JUST FIRE EVERYTHING" crap that made firefights in Bioshock 1 a massive chore. You have actual sights, so you can approach enemies at range, and while Columbia is still pretty claustrophobic its leagues more open (see what I did there) than Rapture.

However...

the essential fun just wasn't there. The enemies become more bullet spongy and samey over time. The Heavy Hitters really didn't feel like they broke up gameplay or forced you to change tactics. Your screen is obnoxiously covered by the shield break effect (which happens all the time because your shields are so weak, even with infusions) and Booker is screaming from pain all the time that it's frankly awful to play through in instances. Even the weaknesses of previous Halo's sandbox or enemies were as nothing to what I felt playing Bioshock Infinite.

But I stuck with it, and that's because the story was good. Sure, it was a bit pretentious in places ("Will the Circle Be Unbroken Vignette" anyone, which is more irksome because you can't pick up this one damn apple like the rest of them because Elizabeth has to be nice with other people's food, GAH) and I think the end got a bit messy and Whovian with its "wibbly wobbly" approach to alternate universes... but I was invested in the world, despite its shortcomings and sermonizing (if you're expecting a theme beyond "all strident adherents to ideology are bad... well you haven't learned from Levin's playbook.) As weak as Columbia was in establishing a world... it still put more of an attempt into it than Halo has seen, and while Elizabeth still showed her seams in spots she was a companion who I genuinely cherished having (maybe if we'd had her instead of Kat, Reach wouldn't have fallen :P )

I read a lot of articles after the game came out accusing Levine of racism, which I thought was pure bullcrap; it's people reading into the game what they've already decided they're going to see. Fitzroy is a bad person not because of her skin color but because of Levine's simple approach to zealots. Hell, that ABC story linked above completely misses the point of the Native Americans being portrayed as cartoon savages, and once again shows his hand by the end that it's just a rant about "mainstream" game devs taking over indies. I *do* think there's merit to the argument that the over-the-top violence and blood in the game detract from the message; the opening assault on the police is wrenching in its gore, but the emphasis and gleeful focus on executions every time after that dilutes any meaning it had before. So I think Bioshock Infinite is just another example of a critically-acclaimed work of media that some people glom onto because they want to see smart, some people tear at because they want to be contrary, and a few good arguments can get lost in fanboy back-and-forth.

In short: the gameplay made me appreciate what every Halo, even Halo 4, gets right consistently. The story made me think about ways Halo could improve, as well as the genre as a whole.