Yeah, if that's the way it works, and checkpoints are too far apart I agree it's shit design. 

Checkpoints were indeed too far apart in BInf. Partly this is because the nature of the game encouraged certain player types (me) to squirrel around for a while within a given area, exploring and looking for consumables to hoover up.

To add insult to injury, that's the only game I've had technical issues with... it was a random crasher.

I'm still glad I worked my way through it, but at least having a save-on quit option would have been great. 

(P.S. obviously not the only game I've EVER had issues with, but the only one on my current game system that I've had for several years now. Frustrating.) 

yeah if you haven't played it can seem kind of of a silly complaint but it's not just a straight up shooter. there is a lot of detailed areas to explore so while a checkpoint may only be 10 minutes away, for myself it can be 30 to 45 minutes depending on how much time i spend exploring and picking up items and such.
restarting from a checkpoint means having to go back and pick up everything again which is just tedious and has nothing to do with gameplay.

i've been lucky so far and haven't gotten any crashes, but i've heard there are some bugs too and since you can't have more than 1 save, you can get to a point where a bug is present in your save game and you can't revert to an earlier save. 

it saves frequently, there's a lot of checkpoints and if you exit in an area you will pick up at that exact point the next time you boot up... although the lack of a pause function is a bit annoying it makes sense as the game is actually perpetually online. 

there's a big difference though. dark souls is celebrated for it's extreme difficulty and the save system is a given for this type of game.

bioshock infinite is not marketed as that type of game yet it has the same hardcore saving scheme. 

that aspect in Dark Souls is explicable and contributes to the project. I get it, and it has conditioned me as a player.
I felt similar to Necros. Along with other issues I had with the game, there were definitely times when I was frustrated, where my immersion was hindered, and where my interest in progressing was at least partially undercut by the situation. 

A great bundle of free games (in your face, "without money there is not art" %$%�s): http://odditie-s.tumblr.com/post/81109325064/the-pirate-bay-bundle 

 

excellent story, not that great of a game (but not bad either).

still don't know why i can't save whenever i want as the game isn't even that difficult and if you do die, you just respawn a short distance away. in fact, it would be harder to reload a save than it would be to just continue playing because you can just zerg an area down by repeatedly charging if you suck that much. (yes, i am still stuck on this, it's just needlessly annoying!)

miniboss monsters have weak spots, but i usually just opted to use explosives on them or i couldn't tell when i was actually hitting the weak spot? i know i scored a few solid hits with the hand cannon on handyman weak spots, but they didn't seem to react? this needed more visual feedback (or if there was feedback, it needed to be highlighted more the first time).

also, hand cannon is my favourite gun ever. feel like clint eastwood with that thing.

really liked how the limitations of the medium are used to highlight the story.

really hate how the limitations of the game are taken to an extreme because of the story, but can forgive it because the story was worth it.

i can tell they spent a lot of time coding elizabeth, but it wasn't enough. some really silly stuff still happens like booker delivering this very dramatic line and elizabeth replying with 'i found some money!' with a big bright smile.
she's also on an extremely short leash and routinely teleports all over the place.
otoh, elizabeth is extremely dynamic (unlike hl2 alyx which is mainly the illusion of dynamic) so maybe i'm just being too hard on irrational.

playing again on hard now... want to see the story from a different perspective. 

Agree completely re saving/zerging technique (I sucked at bioshock infinite for some reason).

I'd be interested in hearing more re limitations of medium highlighting story, and exacerbation of said limitations due to narrative prioritization. 

funny aside to that: i started getting really self-conscious about which side of twin symmetrical hallways i entered an atrium through. there are two paths but they both take you into the atrium. 

!!SPOILERS!!

I'd be interested in hearing more re limitations of medium highlighting story, and exacerbation of said limitations due to narrative prioritization.

Fate/Determinism is a huge theme in this game and it is done better than it could have been in any other medium. Games are an interactive medium and by forcing the player down a single path, you make the player feel determinism more than any book or movie could ever hope to do.
You are forced to play Booker as he moves through the game towards his inevitable demise.
The choices don't matter in the game, but they matter to you because you made them. They just happen to have the same outcomes.
Something I noticed in my second playthrough is that the key you give Elizabeth when you first meet her have the same Bird and Cage icons on them. When she takes the key in her hands, she spins it around in her fingers and you see the bird and cage flip back and forth. The second time I got to the brooch scene, I didn't want to pick at all.
(fyi: I picked the cage on my first playthrough because I felt the bird was the obvious choice. this was before I understood what was going on.)

The FPS genre itself is about shooting things. That is the point of them. In a Quake map, I try to dress it up a bit with maybe some puzzles or nice scenery but at the end of the day, players are loading the map up to blow up some fiends.
In Infinite, it is the only really meaningful way the player has of interacting with the world. In this way the game forces the player to 'role play' Booker's character who we know is no stranger to a little bit of the old ultra violence.
With most shooters set in realistic worlds, the body counts you might accrue towards the end of the game are usually ridiculous, but here it actually makes sense.

On the flip side, it feels like Irrational used determinism as an excuse not to bother with choice and to cut costs and development time as is the trend with basically everything out there these days. Even if my choices ultimately don't mean anything, I still like to have that illusion in a game, to feel like I can influence the outcome a bit.

As for the shooty bits, as I said, the narrative is dictating that Booker really only has one response to any situation, ultra violence. There's no talking your way through anything, there's no stealthy non-violent solutions. Inevitably, the npcs will start shooting at you and you will need to take them out.
The skyhook executions are kind of the punctuation to the whole thing: they are a very efficient way of taking out enemies, but oddly enough a bit too brutal for me. I actually stopped using them later on.
If you listen, you can hear a musical stinger every time you get a skyhook kill or headshot, but the stinger isn't celebratory or triumphant like you pulled off a great kill in any way and sounds like it belongs in a horror film hinting that you are the villain.

Or at least... that's what I see when I play. :) 

Sums up everything I didn't like about the game but couldn't put my finger on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzkS0mt3B50

Not sure if I already posted it... 

the fucked up voice was annoying...
anyway, I agree completely with the first half of that video.
I didn't even mention it because it's so stupid. Especially how Booker just eats everything he sees even right out of the trash. wtf.

Re: the violence though, I disagree with what's being said in the video. It's why you die at the end; Booker is a villain. You are a monster roaming through the streets of the city gunning down everyone. That's why I said it actually makes sense in this game. 

At the start you still believe you're the hero. It's a good point though. I'd say more about the resolution but spoilers.

Maybe the fix would have been simple. As soon as you start eating out of dumpsters or stealing the people should have run in horror, realising that you are the one. Or even just when you enter an area brandishing a gun.

For the enemies I sort of suspect they just went out of scope (or passion?) and didn't add more types.

There were lots of versions of 'guy with a gun' but that's not very interesting. The game would have been a lot more entertaining if it had featured more steampunk style enemies - robots, guys in loading suits, guys flying with gyro copters etc. any reasonable image search on deviant art would produce more engaging enemy designs. The handyman was cool, but yeah he should have reacted to being hit in the red ball. Was that even a weak point? The patriots as well I just bombed.

Instead we got the same enemies from bioshock1. I was confused by the firemen and crow guys. The turret was especially disappointing. It felt like going to a restaurant (slightly cheaper) and being served reheated leavings.

The story and it's presentation is excellent though. I don't play many AAA games so maybe I'm blinkered, but I can't think of a better story in another game.

On that note, here's a bioshock 1 thing...

http://www.pentadact.com/2009-04-15-ending-bioshock/ 

yeah monster design was boring as hell. crows were somewhat interesting, firemen less so.

but crows can be easily taken care of, just throw a fire or lightning trap at your feet and wait. crow eventually tries to teleport behind you and triggers the trap. done.

patriots are supposed to have a weakpoint on their backs (the gears) but i never figured out how to get a clear shot at their backs to exploit it. lightning shock stun doesn't last long enough and they can turn quickly enough to always stay facing you.

turrets were just boring. usually just shock stun them and a couple of shotgun blasts. nothing interesting there.

there's also some funny tethering going on in the AI such that they will refuse to follow you too far from their spawn points. you can easily exploit this because you can duck in and out of cover and the AI will just stand out in the open as it repeatedly tries to run at you, then decide to pull back. 

come to think of it, there should just have been one enemy of each vigor type.

the charge, bullet shield or force pull effects could have made interesting enemies. 

I agree with most of what was said here.

- World and story were engaging

- Elizabeth character well done

- But there were serious tone-breaking moments where she'd find out some super heavy information about her past, then 2 seconds later "I can pick that lock for you!" cheerfully.

- Rich, interesting world, but the only way I can interact with it is shooting and looting. I don't mind shooting but this game world made me want to inhabit it in a richer way. Sure my character is a violent guy but my desires as a player don't align with that. I don't have a proposal for what should have been there instead; I don't think this should be a pure adventure game either. This points to a general problem with AAA video games; we don't have a lot of good game mechanics that aren't centered around violence. I like violence but it limits the types of stories, worlds, and protagonists you can have.

- Looting system isn't supported by the fiction of the world or the character. why is Booker DeWitt digging through trash cans for hot dogs and spare change? Why don't the NPCs react when I do that? Contrast with The Last Of Us where the looting/crafting system directly feeds back into the world's fiction (a blasted ruin where people are scraping to survive.) I'm also pretty tire of searching my surroundings for tiny trinkets in every game. It's not a bad design tool to have things in the world for players to find, but a lot of games have polished it down to meaningless, unrewarding abstraction. In The Last Of Us maybe it was better because I usually needed a specific type of loot to craft something I needed. (But even in there I got pretty tired of mashing the X button around every medicine cabinet and supply room. Fewer, more valuable loot objects would have been an improvement in both games, I think.)

- In addition, the clever idea of having 8-10 reusable furniture pieces that have looting animations built in probably saved a ton of production time. But this had a negative impact for gameplay because: Typically you use collection systems to encourage the player to slow down and look at the expensive environment art you created. However, the loot almost always is in the same 10 props so you end up only looking at those boring desks and dressers instead of the unique statues and murals and grand ceilings and so on that are actually a pleasure to look at. Contrast Beyond Good and Evil, where your collection goals are about photographing unique creatures, so your incentive is to find and look at the unique content that the game has to offer, instead of looking past the unique content to find the most reused, bland content.

- Looking at the combat in isolation -- I felt that it was acceptable combat except that there wasn't anything really interesting about it. The more challenging it got the more tedious/annoying it felt to me. Bosses felt like bullet sponges. I didn't develop a lot of tactics. Each gun had strengths and weaknesses so that part did work for me. Halfway through they introduce red "Vox Populi" versions of each gun which had no clear gameplay advantage to me (and you'd have to start over on upgrading them.) Vigors were interesting but I never figured out how to swich between them (i.e. once I got #3, it seemed that I lost #1 forever.) Since some of the vigors weren't that useful to my play style, it meant that i would lose something useful and get nothing in return for a while, and therefore I would just revert to using my guns.

- My one negative comment about the story was there seemed to be too many big revelations piled up at the end, without time in between for me to process them. I think there should have been a little more space between each big reveal so that I could get used to the ramifications of it, before laying another one on me. 

Vigors are accessed with 1 to 8 keys. There's also a pause + circular menu command but i never used it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3DHGGBCSdw 

ah, so i was missing out on something. It seemed odd that i couldn't get to the older vigors but i never bothered to read the manual.

^^^ played xbox 360 version btw. 

and i know, i should have posted my review in the "Console Games" thread. Oops. 

yeah, the new system was better than bioshock because you could actually choose the right vigor for the right situation. sadly we got the 2 weapons only system.

the alternate gun versions have slightly different stats, the vox machine gun fires slower but does more damage and seems to have higher accuracy. the vox 'carbine' shoots 3 bullets in a row and does more damage, but seemed to be for slightly closer range...

the fact the upgrades are reset however makes it silly because by this point in the game, you may already have almost all the upgrades on the weapons you like the most.