From Shock to Awe: System Shock, Bioshock, and Infinite

hi I'm no j'avais in this video we're going to be looking at all the system shock in Bioshock games how they've changed over time and how each game has built upon the lessons learned in the last we'll be looking at the elements that made them such classics and the design choices that made them so innovative this is an extremely long video on account of the amount of detail that we're going to get into about the games but I've included a table of contents in the video description so feel free to jump around to just what interests you I also want to say right here that there's going to be major spoilers throughout to really talk about the games critically you really have to tear them apart and look at the endings so if you're sensitive to spoilers and you should especially be sensitive to spoilers for BioShock Infinite if you haven't finished it yet please stop watching now otherwise let's move back to where it all started in 1994 with the original system shock the first system shock sits at a remarkable intersection between the forces that are driven gaming from stays and coin-operated arcades and the forces that would reshape gaming into what we know it as today as one of the first 3d games to take a slow methodical plot-driven approach to design it stands out as being truly revolutionary it's bold and inventive by equal turns utilizing the cliches of science fiction horror and innovating upon them within the format but there's a lot that looks very foreign and quite alienating to contemporary players the impossibly large needlessly complicated interface the use of mouse without mouse look the maze-like levels with no seeming regard for realistic architectural design whatsoever the crushing difficulty on the game's regular settings how do you reconcile all the different often conflicting ways this game presents itself to the player the key is in seeing it for what it is a hugely influential bridge between two generations of game enthusiasts let's first talk about the foundation that system shock is built on the values of the arcade generation when gaming was young and I mean truly young in the 70s and 80s skill was King before he could play games at home you had to go out and feed quarters into the machine so to actually go through an entire game and beat it you had to have either tremendous skill or deep pockets either way you had to sweat anyway to sacrifice and put your initials on the high scoreboard was a true accomplishment to work towards now when PC gaming got started the opportunity for slower paced more methodical construction of games was possible since the player wasn't providing a profit to the developer every time they got a game over so games began their slow shift from pure art efficient tests of skill to a method of storytelling in early 2d PC gaming this is where you'll find titles like wasteland Zork day of the tentacle and others 3d gaming however was born out of Wolfenstein 3d a true arcade styled test of skill with nothing but quarters and bullets and patience keeping you going early 3d gaming is dominated by this aesthetic of arbitrary complexity and difficulty since the developers themselves were curious about how complex an environment one could make with the new technology System Shock was the first to say I don't want to make a level I want to make a real place the first to say it's not the statistics that should matter it's the motivation but as far as how the player actually interacts with the game the experience is confusing and hostile partly out of the newness of the medium and partly out of the deeply ingrained design perspective that it should be tough that the player should be pushed beyond the limits of their cleverness that if this game is too difficult to beat you are not deserving of finishing to come back to this game after BioShock Infinite and see the changes that nineteen years of development evolution in the same game format can do it's mind-blowing but a great deal of what's mind-blowing about it is how much of this game persists in modern gaming not just in Bioshock games but in dozens of others System Shock was so hugely influential that it's fair to say that pieces of it exists within the mitochondrial DNA of most contemporary first-person games it has audio logs genuinely well-done audio logs though some of the voice actors clearly also worked in the office it's got eluding an item's collection system that exists essentially unchanged outside of interface variation across all of the shot games and it's got an eye for mood lighting shadows and clever use of visual cues to establish a deeply unsettling tone it's got minigames for hacking into doors and other concerns it's got a multiple goal open-ended solution approached level design and all the levels form a coherent whole which you have to backtrack through several times showed an its villain was one of the best written ever at the time and she holds up as an enduring Lea entertaining antagonist it's amazing to see so many advances in one game like buying an album from band you're only vaguely familiar with and finding out that you've heard almost all the songs on the radio before but the game doesn't quite land in a way that I think is going to be enduring ly appealing for gamers the music is MIDI techno that's far from easy on the ears the levels are so labyrinthine as to be spiteful and the interface might God the interface is a completely impenetrable mess and before you think this is just the lazy 21st century gamer talking these are things that published reviewers from 1994 and magazines remember those complained about as well I've heard some gamers complain that move away from this sort of arbitrary difficulty is a dumbing down of sorts personally I think most players would agree that the shift towards more streamlined interface and streamlined level architecture has been a great boon to the industry put it another way to say that modern games are better at interaction and system shock is not like saying that an automatic transmission is better than a manual it's like saying that a turnkey ignition is better than a hand crank it's a brilliant game it's historically very valuable but it is hard to have fun with what's more impressive is that System Shock 2 managed to make an even deeper impact than the first game did released in 1999 System Shock 2 is so thoroughly cutting-edge for its time the player is only familiar with Bioshock would immediately feel at home if they went back to it it's not only the exact to get skeletal framework of design choices to keep bioshock's wheels turning it was so pitch perfect that other game franchises like dead space would be born of the gameplay it pioneered the game itself is mostly a crisper streamlined version of the first System Shock although the interface is still rather ponderous and confusing it's a hell of an improvement over the massive interaction menus that for me and I'm betting many other contemporary gamers make System Shock 1 so difficult to connect with using the game engine from theif System Shock 2 shifts the series into a more modern flow of play with true Mouse lifts driven controls directing the player quickly and seamlessly through the meticulously crafted environments and that's something to be grateful for since a responsive interface helps the player become immersed in what the game is rightfully most famous for it's fantastically inescapably creepy atmosphere and mood and let me be perfectly clear even after 14 years and an astronomical improvement in industry-wide graphical quality System Shock 2 is still deeply unsettling frequently startling and sometimes truly frightening the game can leave this impression even after so many years of growing expectations as a testament to the tremendous effort but into the atmosphere and pacing of the game of the staggering attention to detail given to it making games with simple graphics feel scary is a bit of a hat trick as we've seen with System Shock but we're System Shock the first had a habit of stepping on its own foot with regards to atmosphere system shock the second plays its hand much more deftly choosing to focus on two key things realistic densely plotted level design and sound design both which are the things that will float or sink any piece of visual horror media and make no mistake both system sharks are essentially haunted house movies set in space any low-budget horror director worth a damn knows that the cheapest way to scare an audience is through their ears many games especially today seem to forget how important a game sound design is for adding texture to the environment and for communicating with the player through subtle cues for system shock - it's not just a money saver it's a major reason why the game is persistently scary into the 21st century similarly for horror movie set design can be a true saving grace for a movie like say event horizon which tries to accomplish a similar aesthetic it's maddeningly inconsistent script is shielded from view behind the strange majesty of the ship the protagonists are stranded on for this game it's the von Braun and the Rickenbacker two ships with sprawling naturally branching levels that actually make a coherent whole when stacked on top of one another that draw you in in terms of putting you on a ship that feels like a real ship with realistic proportions you could guess at by knowing other areas it was revolutionary it also solved many of the problems of deliberately vague in labyrinthine level design that slow down the first game so much that goes a long way towards explaining the game's enduring appeal outside its most basic suspensions of disbelief System Shock 2 just feels so plausible the von Braun is divided into six decks and then it's military escort the Rickenbacker docked on top each deck has a theme and a purpose from medical and science labs to the engineering deck crew sections and I lasted the bridges of both vessels this segmentation of different aspects of the ship allows the designers to do some really fun things with pacing the narrative stacking the immediate concerns with survival and stopping the von braun's disintegration on top of the slower pleasures of telling the story of the ship's corruption by degrees and by thematic emphasis on the botanical decks the player learns about the mutants on the operation deck the player learns about the struggle between showdown and Xerxes to a eyes locked in digital warfare personal stories are revealed in the quarters of the crew themselves to use the levels as a natural series of locks for the player to sail through like this is brilliant and all subsequent games portion out their narratives in this fashion in addition to being a phenomenal storytelling convenience it also establishes expectations for the player the game can often feel overwhelmingly dense and hostile and have a general framework for the next few hours of play helps keep the player focused on the present tense experience System Shock 2 even frames the story putting the tutorial section of full three years before the events of the main game as you come in off the subway to a space Navy recruitment center it makes what comes after feel particularly awful after establishing this baseline of normality the game as far as balancing player expectations game expectations and mood the recreation deck is my favorite is a great example of these elements working in concert it's got a nebulous and time-consuming series of goals for the player but the whole deck is arrayed around an elevator to the bridge so if you'll both personal curiosity and a gameplay need to explore every familiar but wrong corner of the level before heading on to what will probably be a dangerous confrontation above you're given the chance to see the simple pleasures of the crew before they were corrupted into the worm filled monsters you encounter and you're given a massive catalogue of credits skill points here called cyber modules and game and items games work best when the arbitrary number goals of the game system mesh with the demands of the narrative and System Shock 2 excels in this excels beyond all reasonable expectations also to be commended is an incredibly strong showing of lighting and particle effects which were enormous ly groundbreaking at the time and stand is enduringly competent today the engine behind System Shock 2 can only do so much and to accomplish a game as creepy as the designers made this one is truly an example of squeezing blood from a stone shadows sparks glows streaks of gore and dents in the walls they all function in a way that blends well artistically and presents itself for realistically there's a really massive ambition towards realism throughout actually in almost every object in the environment holds up to scrutiny although the models for people are still rather cartoonish the first game saw this difficulty by ensuring that you never encountered another friendly being and the second doesn't push the bar very far forward you do encounter other survivors but always at arm's length forever out of reach far enough away for you not to notice so much that their mouths don't move even if the character models are dodgy the characters themselves are written with the same level of sharpness and competency that you see in the rest of the game the real stars of the show are the games two villains the contemptuous omnipotent a I showed an from the first game and a sort of hive mind called the many neither a particularly original troubs but genre writing especially for horror is less about coming up with an outlandish ly original idea so much as it is perfecting the cliches of the genre and putting a clever enough personal twist on them to make them feel fresh and this is the first game in the series to include what would eventually become the franchise's reason for being the big twist 499 it was a doozy of a moment for the first half of the game you're being directed by a scientist named Polly doe but something just doesn't feel right about it Plato is incredibly cold callous and irritable as a guide she's much more about the stick than the carrot the ship's AI Cirque C Zacks his kind of digital Butler for the concerns of the many is continually questioning the seemingly reasonable agenda of tasks Spoleto sends you to accomplish finally you reach Pulido's office and then this happens the Polito form is dead insect are you afraid what is if you fear the end of your trivial existence fling with me when the history of my glorious written your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence now the limitations of the game engine surely do take a little away from the well shocked at the moment but not as much as you'd expect if you felt invested in the game story at all so far it's still gonna knock you flat after that moment of Revelation show dan will taunt and criticize the player mercilessly dropping any pretense if you were anything but a patsy for her own ends to have the power dynamic shift right out from under the players feet like that is amazing and it establishes that stopping the mutants in the growing fleshy mash of the many are only step one of your survival plan and show Dan herself is written very well and voiced even better GLaDOS from the portal series is simply a contemporary version of the character with better comedic timing but even if show Dan sticks to the serious atmosphere her dialogue is very memorable and unsettling voice acting is big part of what makes immersion in this game so easy the quality is overall much improved over the first game and with a few notable exceptions all the audio logs and transmissions you receive feel very natural and right some production quality is hugely confident across the board actually from the shambling hulks of the crew who beg you to simply stop be submit to the brain worms to the beep of a security camera to the groans of the ship as is consumed by the tumorous mass growing along its home the only aspect of sound design that comes up short is the soundtrack which features some really obnoxious budget techno selections though notably less obnoxious than the first games the combat music isn't time to end on the completion of combat either so it starts playing and you're in it for the whole two minutes it's not enough to really bring down the immersion but it is one of the few reminders that you're playing a game from the late 90s it's not the only one there now I've painted the game in glowing terms thus far because overall that truly is how great of a game System Shock 2 is but it only plays that what consistently well up through the final deck with the von Braun as the end game kicks in and aboard the Rickenbacker the game feels like it's starting to come off its rails and although it seems to find its way again for a bit the quality of level design takes a serious nosedive in the last few hours and the ending is awful awful the Rickenbacker's level design is confusing and vague in a way reminiscent of the first game and it struggles to feel as compelling as previous levels lacking a central theme and presenting essentially a linear military theme the sci-fi maze besides the upside-down Chapel there's not much that's memorable here after the Rickenbacker you're ejected into the body of the many which is a great level disorienting in a way that's fun and interesting a truly foreign and hostile environment seldom have games captured a Jonah in the belly of the whale feeling as well as this level of System Shock 2 but then there's the teeth jumping puzzle may have a quick show of hands people who never beat the game because they were stuck here or if that didn't stop you then the impossibly huge difficulty spike in the final brain chamber of many where you put it against unlimited waves of the game's most powerful enemies until you figure out you have to escape instead of making a stand and escape through an exit it's not easily apparent in the middle of the stupidly difficult fight you're in every second figure in the chamber then there's a very brief cyberspace level which recreates some of the highlights from the games from the first game the boss fights and then the ending video now System Shock 2 thus far has been an incredibly well scripted thoughtful deep game so it's a little weird that the ending is so trashy after a way to long speech about your character joining the AI is digital rulers of the universe this is what your character has to say now that's dumb it is I wish there were a way around that but there isn't it's just dumb system shock 2 is an amazing game for 80% of its length but its struggle is pretty severely with wrapping itself up in a way that's consistent with the tone and quality of the rest of the game plus it sets itself up quite ham-fisted Lee for a sequel that would never arrive although I would personally argue that the first dead space game essentially is a System Shock 3 as that game takes the vast majority of system shock to skeletal framework from sequence and content of levels to the flavor of monsters right down to the delivery of narrative and gives it superb graphical polish and dead space is a great game not as thoughtful and System Shock 2 but a fine successor in terms of genre what would come next from the game developers behind System Shock however would be a setting more imaginative than anything in either system shot game the areas between 1999 and 2007 were tremendous for gaming the whole of gaming culture really came into its own during this period - spearheaded by a push towards console development that left PC gamers feeling like the industry was going through a bit of a malaise period Bioshock was supposed to be a refutation of that a true return to form for gaming it was right Bioshock keeps everything that's really innovative about System Shock 2 and builds upon it in a fantastical new setting that it is bold as it is innovative let's take a look just as the system shocks pushed to the limits of their game engines capacity for creating atmosphere to the absolute limit while layering in a rich tapestry of events and personalities so would Bioshock it's a genuine triumph of a game and when looking back on this era of gaming given years from now I think Bioshock will stand among the real Titans of creativity in the medium where System Shock was rooted in the perfection of the cliches of science fiction horror Bioshock took the as yet pretty unprecedented approach of juggling the extremes of varying philosophical viewpoints against a backdrop of majestic to pay it wouldn't be a ship this time but whole city an art-deco metropolis known as rapture created by one man with a nan Randian dream of absolute pursuit of individual will power with no ethical constraints putting the city under the ocean also cleverly meets a necessity of game design the levels are naturally segmented as different buildings connected by tunnels along and above the ocean floor it allows the developers to continue the thematic segmentation of the narrative they pioneered in System Shock 2 and do it in a way that's both exciting and effortless the decision to set the game in 1960s also on commonly brilliant for creating mood since exaggerating the architectural and consumer design cues of the era bring the player something that is at once wholly familiar populated with things commonly encountered in everyday life but also quite foreign in its presentation the player feels as if they know what to expect but it's always somehow not quite that way then they take this grand metropolis and trash it utterly leaving the player in a world that inspires and horrifies and equal strengths some people say the game is derivative of fallout in its pilfering of the mid-century aesthetic but I don't really feel like that argument holds up for fallout the emphasis was on cultural mood on holding destruction in one hand and smiling naivete in the other but it's the actual production aesthetic of films of the era that Bioshock draws most deeply from Bioshock has considerably more in common with the film's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the Fantastic Voyage than it does with fallout if you allow for a peculiar fascination with 40s vocal rhythm group the Ink Spots that both franchises share in a way that is truly thorough and meticulous Bioshock delivers itself to the player as if it really was a film of terror and adventure from that era its most obvious in the voice acting and soundtrack which takes the already high standards of sound design for shock games and pushes them even further some design for Bioshock series is my favorite in gaming as they truly understand the importance of oratory music and Pavlovian conditioning through sound effects for creating a really believable game world the characters you encounter and listen to are practically defined by the nuances of delivery voice actors give them and Orion particularly is one of the most absolutely beloved antagonists in the history of gaming almost solely on the basis of armin shimerman z' performance from his thunderous condemnation as to his fleeting incredibly tense moments of doubt Ryan is one of the most truly intimidating and nuanced villains written for gaming and then there's the madness take this wonderful scene of Ryan foiling a botanist plan to help you by reading other her the terms of her employment contract while filling the room with toxic gas its McCobb and it's fascinating but what's truly remarkable about it is how the flavor of the time period drips from every syllable the game's tactic of corrupting the familiar into something menacing and strange extends subtly and wonderfully in misdirection and I couldn't have played it any differently and ended up with a game anywhere near as memorable voice acting is even superb for the games monsters the splicers who have held on to their entitled privileged attitudes even as their bodies collapsed in their minds sunk deep into a delusional hatred the first time a woman in an evening gown with hideous boils erupt in from every inch of skin attacks you with a wrench screaming for you not to look at her is it once horrifying and sad and the slivers of humanity hidden underneath the tainted flesh keep confronting you making the acts of violence that the game requires feel morally suspect your killer and you feel it it's rather remarkable that even if all the killing you do is basically justifiable it doesn't decrease the tragedy of it or the disquieting stillness of rapture gunmetal the way the game weaves the players increasing skill and familiarity with the game as they play together with the narrative as you get closer and closer to the big twist is both revolutionary and brilliant the game mechanics of Bioshock aren't just similar to that of System Shock 2 they're basically identical drugging ammunition types upgrading weapons acquiring abilities using psionics now called plasmids a feature with deep plot significance it's all there the only things missing are player statistics skill requirements and inventory and I'm of the opinion that shaving off these features was a decisive and well-chosen push towards streamlining the experience just the system shock - shaved off so much of a system shock one's impenetrably dense interface I've read a lot from players who point this out as a dumbing down of the game and they often make a system shock equals smart Bioshock equals shallow argument on the foundation of these missing features I ask what are we really missing here without micromanaging requirements I might or might not be able to meet without juggling the space of grid based inventory systems like it find in dozens of other games without having a heap of numbers based concerns what does the player have left to focus on only the environment the story and the ways they can choose to interact with it which are the things that the game excels at and the things the developers most wanted to showcase to slim the concerns that the player faces down to the ones that deal with immersion and story is to tighten the focus of the game in a way that accentuates the cinematic nature of the game's design Bioshock even makes the player aware of how natural the game should come to feel by slowly suggesting that the players competency wasn't because they were in a place they didn't belong it was because rapture was the place they had always and forever belonged in the first place when he revealed to be a genetically conditioned construct made by Frank Fontaine to eventually topple Ryan from his seat of power it is a pretty huge moment and it's revealed that you never truly had free will in the first place as a character and as a player that's true too Bioshock is essentially linear outside of the freeform nature of its individual levels and the player cannot resist the demands the developer placed on them if they want to continue it's the same rug pulling move System Shock 2 breaks out when it reveals that Pulido has been dead all along but it's executed in a way that's deeply personal and unsettling it's also much more nuanced in its characterization than System Shock 2 s big twist when Andrew Ryan realizes that you'll kill him no matter what he seizes control of the situation one last time by giving you his own murder weapon himself and ordering you to kill him daring you to resist blow after sickening blow until it's just you and Fontaine and Fontaine don't need you no more even at the absolute last Andrew Ryan was a man who could only ever exist on his own terms it's masterfully done so then are you a man or a slave it's the last question that Andrew Ryan asks but it is the first question that the game asks the big ticket moral choice you make in Bioshock is whether to save or to exploit the little sisters young girls genetically corrupted into little factories for the substance that gives you your powers when he arrests one from their massive dangerous defenders the Big Daddies you can either restore them to health or rip out the parasite that lives within them killing them in the process it's pretty obvious good versus evil conundrum so why kill them for the points that's where the sutler moil chores can was in the choice between man or slave you're created to be part of the same sick ecosystem little sisters are part of and it is to the player to decide if they will participate and offer the girls up on the altar of self-interest or if they'll reject the system to hold that which is good above that which is necessary a man chooses a slave obeys the game is intensely clever in the way that it plays with binding together the morality of the player with the morality of the narrative but if you really want to talk about intensely clever let's talk about level design everything that was most pleasurable about System Shock 2 s level design finds afresh stronger role in Bioshock each level is themed wonderfully full of optional areas brimming with side plot conveyed through audio logs each with its own set of hostile personalities just as I feel like the recreation deck in System Shock 2 is its best level the shopping concourse of fort frolic and Bioshock is where the unique and wonderful signature design cues of the game shine the brightest originally when you reach the area you expect to be able to just pass through but instead the game throws you a total curveball blocking all transmissions from Atlas and Ryan in their titanic struggle take off your coat Bioshock says it's time for an evening with sander Cohen the level is a perfect layering of the majestic architecture smeared over with decay and madness and senator Cohen is one of the most charismatic ly insane characters you'll encounter in a game he gives you the kind of goals to accomplish in a level that only a madman would Cohen is deeply weird art is everywhere his preferred medium being plaster and the bodies of the dead there's not a single thing about fart frolic that isn't pitch perfect for the kind of aesthetic Bioshock was going for and it hits the sweet spot for gameplay difficulty as well as Bioshock goes on the splicers and Big Daddies you encounter get progressively tougher in a way that's conspicious ly obvious for such an otherwise subtle game enemies at the beginning of the game are quite easy and at the end they're quite tough and this level of falling squarely in the middle means that the pacing combat is also the most satisfying of all the levels most of the levels are extremely good though none and quite as offbeat and memorable away as fort frolic and a couple do fall a little flat notably the linear frustrating extremely damp slog through Neptune bounty but most succeeded verbally pushing the game engine to the limit with lighting and shadow effects that had an incredible atmosphere and beauty to the game that never would have been possible if they attempted this sort of setting back in 99 I'm really quite delighted that the first time gamers saw rapture was through the lens of a game engine capable of producing such great atmosphere graphics matter for games that rely on horror elements and Bioshock leverages his technology for all it's worth interestingly the quality of the character models is still pulling up the rear and aside from the scene with Andrew Ryan the game follows the tradition of the System Shock series by distancing friendly characters from you as much as possible the final tradition it follows is L so the least fortunate bioshock still cannot quite figure on how to wrap the game up although it does a hugely more competent job than System Shock 2 level design stays consistent right up to the end which is nice point prometheus the final large area is actually one of the best in the game but depending on how players have handled the little sister situation they get one of two endings and the huge difference between those two endings with no middle ground is where the problem lies if you have harvested even one little sister throughout the game you get the evil ending and the evil ending is the more entertaining of the two with its strong suggestion that you used the power of rapture to conquer the cold war world but a lot of people I knew back from when the game came out were frustrated that their kill only what you need to survive approach was not recognized with a kind of neutral epilogue the good ending goes so far the other direction that it isn't even really that satisfying you escape rapture with little sisters and make sure they lead full lives going to college getting married then they hold your hand is you one day pass from old age which is you know cute and all but even if I chose to behave ethically the little sisters it doesn't necessarily mean that I would wash my hands of the greatest cheat of engineering mankind has ever known right the way the game spends most of its length playing around in a very considered way with the ideas of exploitation and morality makes you think that they'd end on that note but the really superficial exaggerated tone of the two endings really does take away from the players investment and confidence in the choices they've made and the experience that they've had plus it spits you right back to the main menu afterwards no credits so you're left feeling for black of a better phrase kind of ripped off by Bioshock sending that they didn't deliver on the promises made during the whole of play it's a problem that Bioshock 2 would go out of its way to address the differences between system shocks 1 & 2 were huge the improvements obvious and staggering the differences between Bioshock 1 & 2 are much more incremental they share essentially the same engine with minor improvements the same level design with minor improvements and the same combat system with minor improvements Bioshock 2 wasn't a brand new direction for anything but it does refine the Bioshock experience to its sharpest edge both in the principal game and in its excellent piece of single player DLC Minerva's Den most people I talk to feel like Bioshock 2 is the lesser of the two games but while I disagree with that it is a less memorable experience than the first Bioshock the pacing of the first game how it slowly unrolled the story of what rapture is and how it got that way before the big twist brings it home and makes it personal it all left first-time players with the tremendous and lasting impression station when it came out in 2007 Bioshock was an especially big deal it was unlike anything on the market grander more creative the expectations for the next game were huge how can you top Bioshock Bioshock 2 doesn't really try to top it and that disappointed a lot of players but I feel like it was a smart move what Bioshock does try to do and excels at in every step is to identify weak areas from the first game and experiment with shoring them up with minor tweaks and use the already established tropes of The Rapture experience to play around with new game ideas now the BioShock Infinite has come out you can see how the game functioned as a proving ground for many of the core elements of infinite indeed I feel like the connection between infinite in this game both in terms of design and possibly even plot is more than they've been given credit for but first let's examine Bioshock 2 as a successor to the first the game takes place ten years after the events of Bioshock in a rapture that is almost completely yield into the ocean the extra 10 years led to fantastic things about the first game developed naturally in bold new directions the first being the strange ecosystem of rapture after 10 years of accelerated evolution and total isolation the city is darker and stranger than it's ever been with a dramatic emphasis being placed much less on what rapture was and more on what kind of horrifying horrifying thing rapture is slowly becoming the second is the environment without trying to highlight the story of the fall of rapture and with an additional decade of waterlogged decay the environments feel a little more naturalistic and less obvious in their aesthetic intentions Bioshock 2 is a game of slow paced exploration even more than the first and they have a little more nuance an environmental presentation is nice but again it's not the titanic struggle of Atlas and Ryan it's a much more straightforward Odyssey of your character one of the first Big Daddies and his journey to be reunited with little girl he was bonded to by raptures fowl science you know who you are pretty much right away and while the game has a number of very well executed minor twists there's no huge revelation that makes you see the rest of the game differently the pacing is slower and more methodical that way and less memorable because you're not revisiting all of your old assumptions with a new perspective but it is handled with great care and skill and the way the game handles moral choice and the consequences of moral choice is improved considerably Bioshock 2 layers in a whole new arena of moral choice for the player where the first game only paid attention to how you handle the little sisters the second game asked you to make a choice almost each level about how to handle the fate of a secondary character many of the choices have a real meaty depth to them giving you many valid reasons to make these characters suffer and reacting with shock to a thing so rare is mercy and rapture if you choose to turn the other cheek the characters like Grace Holloway the jazz singer turned a slum queen of rapture or Gil Alexander the brilliant scientist literally consumed by his own work some of the best drawn in the series the details of these levels provide as much insight as the audio logs do and instead of contributing to a historical and philosophical understanding of order raptures about like the levels of Bioshock do focusing bioshock's to levels around a new confrontation and moral decision with a new character each level helps out a depth and emotional realness to the setting that felt to me overwhelmed by the grandiosity of the plot in the first game how the game reconciles these decisions is even better Eleanor the little sister you're after has become a teenager in the 10 years between games and is watching and learning from the only authority she respects her daddy specifically her Big Daddy you and the game's final level Eleanor will choose herself whether to save or to harvest little sisters based on how you've treated them so far and will choose to save or drown the game's villain her mother based on the amount of mercy that you've shown to the secondary antagonists if you've played it cool and taking a neutral path the game will actually allow for you to choose how you wanted to go down but if you've shown strong preferences in either direction the game will take it from there it's a genius method of holding the player morally accountable to make them witness the choices they've made being made by an it's handled in a very considered way and you can tell that they were deliberately experimenting with making the ending feel more meaningful than the first games a lot of people still complain that Bioshock 2 feels less meaningful overall than the first game and there's a couple departments where that's true Sophia lamb the game's main villain is much less compelling than Andrew Ryan and the philosophical content is pretty light compared to the first and not handled as deftly these two games are structured so differently in their narrative and thematic focus though that I don't feel like these deficiencies matter very much Sophia lamb isn't ism as important a character as Ryan Ryan is rapture but Sophia is just a sad pretender lording over the wreckage a lot of reviewers have noted that Sophia's psychobabble is essentially meaningless fluff as opposed to a somewhat superficial but faithful use of philosophy in the first game but that works fine from the narrative his perspective says Sophia is a narcissist and a natural manipulator and whether she actually believes in anything beyond her own endless ambition is debatable she uses her position as raptures best psychiatrist the same way Fontaine used ad Alyssa's position as hero of the common man cynically and with genuine contempt for the true believers Andrew Ryan believed everything he said absolutely so to have him be more philosophically accountable to the narrative is very important Lam however just does not give that much of a [ __ ] about the words coming out of her mouth beyond how they can manipulate the listener plus the way Bioshock 2 is structured putting so much more emphasis on the supporting cast and on vignette style delivery of a narrative put slam had much more of a distance than Ryan she doesn't really become relevant as a villain until the last level where she is simply the last and most familiar in a chain of antagonists if you're just cruising through the game it feels a little weak in these areas but if you're really getting invested in the experience they're quite easy to forgive I've talked a little about how the levels are more expensive and thematically clever than the first games and I want to give a couple examples of what I mean by that let's take a look at the mid game levels sirens alley it's supposed to be the seedy part of rapture with many narrow winding streets in-between tall multi-level shops and restaurants living quarters in orphanage and the biggest brothel in all of rapture the amount of indoor exploration you do and the blend of indoor and neighborhood exploration is fantastic it's like the farmers market from the first game but twice as large and twice as dense the level also has a much greater emphasis on vertical exploration giving you about five total layers of stuff to explore Bioshock 2 simply has the most open-ended densely packed level design in the whole series infinite included and it delivers them to the player in a great order and with tremendous skill and confidence of presentation they even use level design to bring back Andrew Ryan for the player sending into raptures propaganda Laden vacation destination Ryan amusements ten years after his death the failed dream of rapture stays indelibly stamped with Ryan's initials on account of the early inclusion of this level and the entire Andrew Ryan's journey to the surface segment is flat-out brilliant it's essentially an it's a small world version of his polemic from the first games opener your shifted role from interloper to Big Daddy also affects how you interact with the levels the secondary goals of finding the atom infused corpses and then defending them while your little sister collects the atom forces you to explore the levels more thoroughly and think about them more strategically chokepoints Escape plan's the works you're expected to relate to the environments in a more complicated way than the first game and the levels are more complicated to facilitate that the final big change is that the game finally gives you a character to interact with who's not trying to murder the bejesus out of you in the lengthy final level you get an opportunity to meet and fight alongside Eleanor the game isn't quite yet comfortable having a believable face out there for you to see so Eleanor wears a helmet but in many ways the Eleanor segments of the game act as a dry run for figuring out the best way to do a companion character for BioShock Infinite just as the big-daddy proving ground from the first Bioshock acted as a dry run for the harvesting mechanic that appears so frequently in BioShock 2 after playing it you see why they decided to make Elisabeth Infinite's companion so much more in the background during combat Eleanor is improbably good in battle and having her there feels cheap plus she disappears and reappears with a plasmid which kind of dilutes the sense of realness you felt about the character thus far but simply previous games did well and keeping the cast of speaking characters so hidden from the player to turn an important character into a cheap game mechanic right at the climax is pretty poor design and it makes what should be the most memorable part of the game seem a little trite this disconnect certainly contributes to the feeling people have about Bioshock 2 is not being as impressive as the first game interestingly bomb shot - has one more story to tell about rapture beyond that of Delta and the Lambs it's the story for the first time the series of a good man in rapture cm Porter the brilliant engineer behind raptures computer systems and his ambition to save his greatest invention the thinker from the hungry ocean that's encroaching on rapture more and more every day it's the absolutely amazing single player DLC for Bioshock 2 Minerva's Den the strange thing is I don't personally know a single other person who's played this content it doesn't appear to have been marketed very much at all and I did the PC market way later than the Xbox Live Network hardly anyone knows about it hardly anyone talks about it and that's a damn shame because this little four-hour chunk of Bioshock is some of the best and sharpest Bioshock they ever made I've also seen a lot of people online saying they refuse to buy it on account of how you have to use games for Windows Live to access it which is admittedly a very stupid application and I can respect not wanting to encourage it but the DLC is just five bucks on top of being unreservedly wonderful and it provides a real sense of closure about the rapture experience so if you're a fan of the series and you've avoided it out of a petty dislike for games for Windows Live you owe it to yourself to come off your high horse and download this goddamned thing let me talk for a minute about the last-minute refinements and experiments you'll find in Minerva's damn Minerva's Den brings the big twist back to Bioshock 2 in a big way since so few people have played I'm not actually going to spoil it save to say that it is extremely well done and has a powerful emotional impact now as grand as rapture is and it's sad and fascinating is it stories so far have been none of them have had the clarity of focus and warmth of character that nervous den does the plots of Bioshock can get lost in the overarching philosophical themes in the deliberate construction of mood and gain pace the characters of Bioshock are wonderfully drawn but consistently boring when they're being kind to you Tenenbaum the series most familiar friendly face is mostly a functional character there to support the needs of the plot and the player Delta's relationship with little sister is complicated and not exactly warm when nervous den has two things that run counter to these trends and make the DLC outstandingly memorable memorable in a way that the whole of Bioshock 2 never quite achieved the first is that the pacing of gameplay and plot is lightning fast but densely packed starting you from the bottom and moving in close to the top over two huge levels in raptures computational districts followed by a smaller climactic area you find important things in every corner of the map audio logs and plasmids absolutely tumbling off the shelves as you explore the maps themselves are classic with huge thematic wings and multi-part goals to keep propelling you ever forward the second is the narrative central character CM Porter who comes across like famous astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson doing his best Morgan Freeman impersonation but in a good way a great way a way that embodies everything that's charismatic about both those masters exposition he's legitimately ethical and human person and he gets dealt too predictably bad hand by raptures more ambitious residents but the story of who he was what he was trying to accomplish and if something good can possibly come out of the endless waterlogged heartbreak of rapture is far from predictable executed with a razor sharpness that comes from the condensed format of DLC after the climactic battle you get a chance to walk through Porter's home on your way out of rapture and listen to one final audio log and it's a tearjerker seriously and legitimately the way Minerva's Den concludes itself doesn't just wrap up a story of Porter and the thinker it tries to wrap up the feelings of the player about the whole Bioshock experience Minerva's Den ends on a note that said delicate but ultimately triumphant some small good can come of a disaster and some of the pain that rapture caused can be undone however little however late and so this magnificent setting draws itself to a close a lot of players were very surprised that the next game in the series was not going to be Bioshock 3 but the sales and reception for Bioshock to show the gamers were generally pretty set on the rapture experience so the excellent decision was made to move the entire setting to a new place a city in the sky in 1912 called Columbia it would have different thematic focus different gameplay focus and a fantastically innovative new way of telling the story let's have a look BioShock Infinite is without a doubt one of the most cleverly constructed games I've ever played certainly the one whose cleverness I found the most appealing every design decision refers back to the themes of the narrative and only across a couple playthrough is does the unbelievable coordination of message and meaning start become plain before I get into it let me say one final time if you haven't played through to the end don't let me ruin this game for you because I'm about to if you haven't anyway the reason avoiding spoilers about this game is so damn important is because every single solitary detail comes back around to the game's big twist the biggest twist ever attempted by the developers and pulled off with a sort of skill that makes the fact that infinite is still just a game seemed somehow limiting let's take a look at how the game slowly builds up to the moment of big revelation the entire first segment of the game up through your baptism in Columbia plays like a strange alternate version of the beginning of Bioshock 1 you're given a package and left stranded at a lighthouse in the ocean a vessel propels you upwards instead of downwards lift it up from the dreary ocean into a world of sunlight in color but when you step out from your vessel you're confronted by the same sort of god-self statue as ryan's enormous bust in raptures lighthouse this time it's for Zachary Comstock as you move through this temple to Comstock flowing along with the water and all good things into the city you come upon a priest who happens to grieve you with the same exact words of the first splicer you meet in bioshock is it someone knew before I realize that this parallel was a major part of the narrative I just thought they were winking at the player but the connections are quite deliberate and very important coming to this game right after playing through the previous games the baptism scene really does feel like being born again into the new city wash clean of the sins of rapture it's brilliant and strange and memorable and only the first of many moments like it after setting up the connection to the old games you're traded to all the delights of the new and the glides are manifold as soon as you first really intrude a set foot in the city every single one of the 19 years in between this game and the original system shock come to sharp relief system shock was so basic that it had to figure out how to hide thinking feeling characters from the player completely and the progress from there had been glacial up until Eleanor and Bioshock - he almost never saw a friendly face that wasn't behind pretty glass held at a distance and Eleanor of course was hidden in that suit now here you are as booker dewitt surrounded by the most vibrant living city yet portrayed in gaming now calling it the most vibrant is a bit of a controversial stance a lot of people have thrown a heap of criticism at how the vibrancy of the city is essentially smoke and mirrors that if you appear too closely at the scenes the artifice of the game world shows through that's true but that's hardly something to take issue with it's actually one of the elements of infinite's game design genius is this game the most realistic human world that could have been produced by modern gaming no not hardly is the most realistic human world that could have been produced by modern gaming and still run smoothly on the xbox360 unequivocally yes as you wander around Colombia before the raffle where the game really starts to take off they'll find no wasted detail they spared no expense making this early carefree exploration of a resplendent impossible city enjoying a day of festivities in the Sun look good sound good you give the player just enough information to grasp the values and culture of Colombia but not enough information to see your role in it yet if we start deconstructing it like it was supposed to be some sort of realistic simulation of a city like Grand Theft Auto for his version of New York you won't leave satisfied these levels have an explicit purpose Drive and direction to them and everything you see is tailored to those ends it's not a shortcut that's great design they have made these levels any more expensive than they already are it would have severely taxed the gaming hardware they would have to be selling the game on and it would have slowed down the plot what they've done shows competency showmanship and craftsmanship cut down the details the bare minimum of what's most important about Columbia sharpen those points as much as possible and then deliver to the player in a tight hugely engaging well paced package and then the raffle Jesus Christ the [ __ ] raffle what a moment again makes an incredibly bold bet with a raffle scene and introduces three of its most controversial and interesting elements in one 90 second span this inclusion of some serious racism the shocking and messy violence of its combat and its new approach to choice and morality let's start with the most obvious there has never ever ever been a game that invites you to throw a baseball at a black woman tied to a post before and it's absolutely shocking when you're presented the choice completely out of blue like that I was absolutely unprepared for how unbelievably uncomfortable a game moment the designers had created and that's exactly the idea behind it whether you intend to throw the ball with a couple or not the ball will never leave your hand but you're still expected to make a choice why why give the player the option to do something so it is tasteful this is the players first real encounter with infinite's most fascinating and pervasive theme if the outcome is always the same what matter does freewill make the one player chooses to throw the ball with a couple maybe because they don't wanna make maze and call the tension themselves maybe because they want to choose the contrarian option whatever and one player chooses not to for obvious reasons the game won't distinguish the difference but the player will know and the player will have to live with it and by including such an unbelievably serious ethical choice without any pretense of game consequence the player is forced to make a decision based solely on the dictates of their conscience now this is one of the reasons why a lot of people feel like the game's approach to racism is far too casual it's presented without comment left for the players themselves to find repugnant shouldn't the game be telling you how wrong this is shouldn't the characters acknowledge the injustice of it more directly I say no not because those aren't valid points they are but because handling it on such an individual basis makes each player's personal discomfort much more strongly felt if we were to be told look at this abuse how terrible don't you agree player that it is terrible it would lessen the meaning of the fact that in all likelihood the player is already feeling a genuine disgust and discomfort without any input from the game at all additionally the game is very bold and having the characters themselves be so generally unperturbed by it in the America of 1912 why would they be I don't think enough people are acknowledging that the level of institutional racism seen at the game is hardly an exaggeration of what the actual America was like back then the goddamn clan wielded actionable political power in Washington through the 30s and that's as true as it is disgusting I've seen people accuse infinity of including the racial content just to be shocking but if they were truly just going for the cheap thrill they wouldn't have made the game's presentation of racism so damn uncomfortably passive in the city of Columbia much about America is blown out of proportion but not this vast majority of Columbia's seemingly strange values have true historical precedents is the city's obsession with destiny and countries so ridiculous when he considered that real people people with huge political power in the 19th century believed literally that manifest destiny explicitly meant that America had a mandate by God to spread itself across the North American continent this wasn't just a fringe idea it was pretty much accepted as the way things were God says take everything we should do it it's not that the game designers included is racism because they somehow forgot that audiences in 2013 wouldn't like that sort of thing they included it because they wanted the players to see and feel for themselves how far things have come how ugly things used to be and how even the most wonderful spectacular ambitions mean nothing without equality your first impression of Columbia said it really is a New Eden once you see what keeps the place running you're hardly sad to see it the raffle scene elsa begins the combat portions of the game and people have a couple pretty big problems with that - the first argument is one I think that's pretty interesting should this game have been a shooting game at all I read a great article on Kotaku by Kirk Hamilton where he complained that up until the raffle he felt like there was finally a game that he could show his friends and family who are dismissive of gaming and say see it's not all just trashy fun then once the violence erupts the sense of wonderment is shattered and the game becomes just a game and in sense of transcending format falls away that's a really goddamn good point so why is this game a shooter when it could be something grander the first time I used one of the skylines in infinite the thing that I immediately thought of and I think a couple veteran gamers out there might have felt the same is 1997 sequel to Myst ribbon isn't the skyline experience - fully realized implementation of the island hopping rails from that ancient and venerable adventure game the economy of these two games continues further both involve exploring exotic but somehow familiar worlds while learning the cultural history of the place and becoming invested in a family drama that unfolds across dimensions games are uniquely positioned to tell these sorts of universe spanning stories really well and when people ask what would infinite be like without the violence well I say that it would be a lot like Riven slow charismatic highly intelligent but ponderous and lacking in momentum the games that spun out from mist and ravine got crushed in the mid 2000s graphic malaise before the 360 and PlayStation 3 brought off the bar on visual design they went full 3d before full 3d looked remotely realistic and the games lost their edge people forgot about them but the kinds of criticisms people are leveling against the violence in BioShock Infinite show that there's still a customer base hungry for the sort of considered cerebral adventuring titles that were actually someone common on the market a little over a decade ago infinite is not one of those games however despite how well the story might function is an adventure game instead of a shooter but one thing people are not talking about is how useful being a shooter is to infants piecing ribbon doesn't take any longer supposing you don't get hardcore stuck than infinite does but the difficulty of its puzzles mean that pretty much every player will get stuck at least once possibly all the damn time there's a huge number of people who never finished the game or like me had to cheat and look up a couple solutions to get through using shooting mechanics instead of puzzles to draw the player along is ultimately a more populist design decision many more people are going to be able to figure out how to get from one area to the next an infinite is a game that desperately wants you to finish it to reach the big twist at the end and see it for yourself the shooting may be a morally hollow element to include but it is extremely functional and the combat is so smooth and fast-paced that it has its own thematic weight to it but it is shallow much more noticeably shallow on account of a depth and kerosene to the rest of the game and that's what our viewers who take issue with it are really asking why can't the gunplay be as exuberantly creative as the rest of the game why would infinite hedrick's bets in this way this is where the second big complaint comes in the accusation that combat isn't is complicated by half as previous Bioshock titles and furthermore that it's derivative of other franchises those are valid points but they miss the intentions of the shift from the kind of strategic combat you see in Bioshock 2 to the running gun that's emphasized an infinite by slimming down the combat system to something is basic and quick as we see in the game helps put the emphases right where the developers wanted on the narrative and on the environment don't think about the enemies the game says just get them the [ __ ] out of your way and see this next awesome thing every detail of the game is so carefully considered it's foolish to assume that the developers just got lazy about the combat system the simplification of it has to demonstrable a purpose and just speaking personally I really enjoy the rhythm of it Infinite has a pace of gameplay struggling between battle exploration and plot that feels very natural and extremely well balanced the combat system was any more complicated through too many extra arbitrary goals of the player the balance wouldn't be there the way it is the people who claim that the slimming down is just lazy incompetence are typically the same ones who say that the switch from having over a half-dozen weapons of your disposal to just having to carry two is cynically derivative of Halo and Call of Duty well I think that's bunk it's not like they forgot how to make an interesting combat system between 2008 and 2013 the two weapon focus just further serves the reduction of gameplay concerns that might otherwise slow down the game's pacing but it also pays tribute to the game's philosophical concerns you don't get to carry everything you must choose your Booker must be able to choose differently than other people's Booker's the weapons are very meticulously balanced so that none of them are really better or worse than any other excepting perhaps your starting pistol you simply have to give them all a try and figure out which one suit your own personal playstyle the best it's not exactly will you threw the ball at the interracial couple but it is an important element of choice after the raffle you're off to find the girl in the tower and this issue is less controversial by far pretty much everyone agrees that elizabeth is an outstanding character and a groundbreaking achievement in the digital portrayal of human expression as you move up moneyman island you wonder what kind of monster it is they've got locked up there and then you discover you're dealing with no monster but a girl the game introduces us to both Elizabeth and the terrors in reality and a great scene where frustrated with her painting of the Eiffel Tower she breaks down the barriers between worlds to get a look at the real one how strange and spectacular a moment it is the lines between ural and monster are not so clearly drawn after all the franchise is at last ready to not only take its characters out from behind the glass that's traditionally hidden them it's ready to make Elizabeth as believable as possible employing her as your trusty sidekick for almost the entire rest of the game in combat she fades into the background and occasionally tosses you needed supplies which is cool but out of combat will do a tremendous array of amazing little animations and routines that really make her feel human she leaned against a post shield flip through a book shell catch a foul smell and wrinkled her nose shell opine and she's voiced incredibly well by Courtney Draper who brings a real warmth and depth to the character especially in a very touching little scene where she sings sings for God's sake a short verse from will the circle be unbroken the only complaint really being voiced about Elizabeth is that she's somehow a construct primarily of the marketing department there to sell games to males aged 18 to 35 well I couldn't disagree more strongly Elizabeth does represent a deliberate move away from the sexualization of women characters and while I'll freely admit that some of her feminine empathy is played up for advertising purposes I would argue that it's extremely minimal especially considering the poor industry standard for handling its female characters the game truly does go out of its way to make a Lizabeth a strong determined individual first and the players cute sidekick a distant second I had my wanders at first but the scene in the blimp where she looks at the coordinates and calls you out for not setting of course to Paris was a pretty definitive rebuttal of any girlish weakness she doesn't just yell of you about it she hits you with a goddamn wrench and books it Papa didn't raise no fool anyway once you've got Elizabeth to accompany you the real bulk of the game begins unlike all of the previous titles however infinite is an incredibly linear experience with the exception of the Emporia level the streamlining that's been going on ever since system truck 2 ditched its predecessors terrible interface gets taken to a whole new level tossing out many of them can expand support structures that players of previous titles were probably expecting lock-picking minigames for instance are out elisabeth dozen for you when we won't encounter locked doors are able to get past when she's not there there is no player menu system just the regular game menu which is problematic since you can't go back and listen to previously collected voice recordings there's no research mechanic either but that's less of a surprise what's really strange about infinite is that in a desire to funnel players along in a swift and orderly way to the climax they left behind a lot of the design decisions that players were counting on them to deliver it's not just the obliteration of a complicated interface the level design itself is considerably more linear than anything president of the series thus far instead of the best branching urban areas that vo shock is known for you get a very direct a to be path through a large but simple area or building it makes sense why they choose to shave it down little the plot has much more of an urgency to it than previews bioshock's and it doesn't really make sense for you to be rummaging through every sky apartment on your way from place to place but often goes too far battleship Bay in the Hall of Heroes have great moments but they don't leave a strong impression from a design standpoint their greatest moment by far is absolutely when you're forced to choose between shooting the ticket who you know is setting you up for an ambush or if you mistakenly give him the benefit of the doubt this gives the game an opportunity to address the issue of how violent it is from Elizabeth's perspective and she is disgusted by it blood may grease the wheels have benefited but at least they do acknowledge the savagery of your actions vingt in' is the first large branching area you come to but the order you do it in is predetermined for the way they've arranged it this works well Elizabeth must do it in a certain order for narrative reasons she has to pull you through tears - several alternative Columbia's for you to progress and there's no way to gracefully handle that nonlinear way think 10 also brings in class warfare is a strong subplot and secondary concern and many people feel like the games handling of it is pretty superficial and it is somewhat but I genuinely believe that and paying any more attention to the struggle between Daisy Fitzroy and Fink than the game already does would be ponderous this game is about Elizabeth and it's about do it to the exclusion of almost everything else it's the direction they decided to go and to compromise on at mid game would be foolish many people also feel that Fitzroy becoming a villain as the only black character you really have any association with is a huge slap in the face after all the racial content that came before it I see where that's coming from but Fitzroy's reasons for turning the revolution sour are very personal she/her specifically was blamed for lady Comstock's death and demonized by the same people if she'd scrubbed the floors of for years her hatred doesn't stem from race as much as it stems from the righteous theory of the deeply betrayed it also touches on one of the game's other principal themes that absolute power corrupts absolutely the plot really kicks into high gear after faintin but the games a little more than half over at this point and the level design of the series is known for just hasn't manifested itself yet there's an architectural feature of the level design that appears over and over again throughout the entire game and while a lot of people found it irritating it's there for a ridiculously clever reason repeatedly you'll come across two paths leading to the same thing two staircases leading to a lower higher platform where two hallways wrapping around a pillar what's the deal again these developers didn't somehow forget how to make a game they did this very deliberately this architectural feature is actually subtly reinforcing the game's approach to choice overall if the conclusion is inevitable what mattered is the path you choose make writer left is no more or less an important choice than the one between burden cage but strategically it's even more important I was blown away when I worked at what they were up to with the staircases it shows a cohesion of design that have never really seen before the problem with it though is that longtime gamers are compulsive people they're not going to choose right left if they're going to go down right come back up left and double-check right on the way back down the two paths one platform feature only really functions if players are willing to play ball with it and most aren't when players finally arrived Emporia the last nonlinear portion of the game it's a breath of fresh air Emporia is everything the players were expecting infinite to be liked throughout full of gorgeous vistas winding streets and a heaping helping of locked doors and optional indoor exploration it's got a branching multi-part goal huge advancements in the plot and a lot of fascinating revelations about the characters in the history of Columbia plus has got an attention to environmental detail that rivals almost any other area in the game Emporia is everything that Bioshock fans wanted in more after Emporia the game separates you from Lisbeth for time and offers you a vision of the future where Elizabeth fulfills her destiny and brings the full might of Columbia to bear on an unsuspecting New York in the 80s it's handled in a way that's visually fascinating but it feels like the game leaves a lot of mysteries from the Comstock house deliberately unexplained did anyone else notice for instance that some of the unmasked guards you encounter are this very same blond man who's present at both of your baptisms it's a short but memorable experience and then you're sent back to 1912 to rescue Elizabeth and prevent the New York attack but it's not as simple as that the plot takes a very dark turn and you wonder whether for Elizabeth the lines between girl and monster exists at all then onwards to Comstock Zeppelin under the confrontation with the man himself after an argument DeWitt becomes enraged and drowns Comstock in a birdbath you're not given a chance to do a different light DeWitt is consumed by a strange compulsion a fit of dimension spanning madness and can't help but ground the bastard but it's not what I was expecting especially after being able to make so many other choices throughout the game I wanted so badly for Booker to stop while he's murdering Comstock it's brutal it feels truly awful and savage and the player is about as helpless about it is when Andrew Ryan handed you a 9-iron in the first Bioshock the scene is pretty amazing and how many emotions it can squeeze from the player deeper running emotions of discomfort and ethical murkiness that most games couldn't evoke with a budget twice the size it feels like the beginning of a whole new portion of the game but it's not it's pretty much the end at least the end of the game as we've known it so far there's an amazing scene where a songbird Elizabeth's protector and warden is brought to heel to help the player in Elizabeth and the climactic Zeppelin Zeppelin battle that caps off the game's combat sections then using songbird Booker and Elizabeth destroy the siphon that's held Elizabeth back from using her powers to their true extent as loose as Elizabeth recovers from the shock of it songbird breaks free of air control and comes to kill you another moment in Columbia and you're dead but you're not in Colombia you're in rapture instead and before you can even get time to appreciate that fact you have to watch Elizabeth comfort the bizarre creature who is nonetheless her only friend as she drowns him it's touching and weird in a way that all the shock games are truly skilled at delivering a complex emotional tone MIT's as sorrowful as it is full of savage wonder and until this point there had been absolutely no direct reference to rapture when you play through it a second time you'll notice many allusions to it but beyond the familiar but not quite cries of the vending machines not a very obvious the first time you go through so the sudden return to bioshock's original setting comes as an absolute surprise you wander backwards through the first part of bioshock's introductory level up and past the bathysphere to the lighthouse where something truly extraordinary happens both in terms of this game specifically and a gaming in general is ability to present a story differently than any other form of visual media the lighthouse opens not upon the great brass face of Andrew Ryan but on more lighthouses lighthouses stretching infinitely to the horizon stretching out far beyond even back well [ __ ] not what you were expecting wasn't at this point I really had no idea what I was in for and the next 15 minutes or so leading up to the very end of the game is what BioShock Infinite has spent all of its efforts preparing the player to experience carefully balancing the players access to plot information and character details so that you're both hungry for the revelations and shocked by their ramifications it sets up a player's expectations and then deliberately surpasses them and the impression of the vast majority people have afterwards is widely exuberantly positive how they pulled together the mystery of Elizabeth's missing fingers especially well executed and have such a small detail be the key to unlocking what's again special about Elizabeth in the first place was brilliant writing once the player understands what's going on between Booker and Elizabeth that she is his daughter that he sold her as a baby to pay his gambling debts that she was sold to Comstock because Comstock felt that she was needed to fulfill the destiny of Columbia it's time to understand what's going on between the player and Comstock and the game hesitates and tiptoes around it Elizabeth she knows what's up but she's hesitating to tell you and after everything you've both been through how terrible Kim the final truth of it be well here's how they played all game long you've gone through baptisms seen the same figures etham the figures who are with booker dewitt after the Battle of Wounded Knee in his cavalry A's before Columbia was even a dream when he refused a baptism to cleanse his sins for Booker the guilt of what he'd done at Wounded Knee was inescapable there was no getting past it but in another world another Booker was ready to wash himself of his wrongdoings and be born again a new man with a new name out with the DeWitt in with the Duke his new name would be Zachary Comstock you're the same man split into two on that long-ago afternoon consumed by guilt do it slipped into alcoholism and gambling racking up the debt and the indifference that he would eventually need to sell Anna do it Elizabeth to wipe away Comstock meanwhile free of guilt would use the brilliance of the scientist rosalind utaite blue test to forge columbia his city in the sky and peer into the void between worlds bottle of Tessa's machines left him sterile if he was going to have the child whose destiny he had seen among the many possible universes he'd have to steal her from another version of himself this cosmic impropriety caused limitless possible resolutions of this conflict been out manifest themselves you've only killed one Comstock burned down one Columbia so what the problem isn't solved the only way to truly solve it is to stop it at the source the afternoon where one man became two Elizabeth takes you back and with your permission grounds you presumably erasing all the universes of suffering born from your mistakes you die and one by one the Elizabeth's disappear roll credits now that's just what they actually take the time to explain to the player there are dozens of smaller mysteries and subplots that are left unresolved now some people are saying that this was done carelessly that's foolish there's not a single detail in this game that doesn't have a specific intention behind it wrapping up the game's biggest mysteries but leaving many of the smaller ones open has two exploring lis clever purposes the most obvious is that they're setting themselves up for more BioShock Infinite there's three pieces with DLC that we know are planned and I think it's plain that many of the Untied threads of infinite or foreshadowing for these DLCs so that when they have their smaller moments a big revelation you've got a background in it from the main game experience usually this is something I've get pretty heated about but I've said before that infinite is the story of Booker and Elizabeth to the exclusion of almost everything else and I think it works perfectly with that tightness of narrative focus I'd love to have the smaller mystery of scallop of Columbia explained but I don't want to slow down the narrative of infinite DLC gives the developers a golden opportunity to do just that when you think about how innovative an excellent Minerva's Den was how to use the vignette style delivery of DLC deliver a more emotionally mature experience than anything in the main game there's no reason to be anything other than excited about the upcoming DLC for infinite the second is that the developers understood how important a marketing tool it is to get people talking about your game having a handful of minor issues like that stay somewhat cryptically unresolved drives people to dig around for the answers talk to each other write about it I've never seen a game so adept at getting people to talk about it at the pizzeria I work the other cooks and I waited until we had all finished before we started discussing it and then it was pretty much all we talked about for a week the genius of the game is that each player is genuinely and factually their own Booker on their own lighthouse they are experiencing the game differently made different discoveries different choices but it all led to the same results similarly speculation about the unresolved issues is something that's fun for every player and I have no doubt we'll get some kind of official definitive answer to these questions later on maybe even in another game the thing is the idea they've built infinite around is endlessly versatile I've got a strong feeling that this is just the first of many games interconnected with one another through the alternate universe idea they already bundled the first two bioshock's into the narrative after all although the specific connections are still hazy and considering this game's commercial success so far the opportunity to explore this idea further will likely come around I can appreciate the desire not to have written themselves into a corner that they'd have to extract themselves from later on in upcoming titles it might not be perfect writing to play it that way but it is terrific business and it's executed with respect for its players not to sound to Andrew Ryan about it but I really don't feel like they need feel any shame over making good money from a brilliant of course there's plenty of controversy about the ending as well some people say the multiple universe ideas cliche and played out but so what they do it in a way that feels very fresh and there's never been a piece of media that presented the multiple universe trope in such a visceral and exciting way before and my opinion it's the system shot games that are the most rooted in cliche but even they transcend their formats through creativity of design and attention to detail BioShock Infinite does its players one better not only does it transcend the cliches of its chosen platform at it pushes the envelope of narrative presentation and gaming at large by a tremendous amount the game is so outrageously bold and its commitment to making the player feel uncomfortable and uncertain in their own shoes to using themes ideas and visual touches previously reserved for books or movies that you wonder if it wouldn't a flat-out worked better as a movie or a TV series the overwhelming competency of the plot brings the petty elements of gameplay to the fore in a really unpleasant way the game is about so much more than eating the sandwiches of the men you've killed but damned if you don't spend a stupid amount of time doing just that and the way infinite dials back the richness of exploration and combat they've refined in the first two bioshock's is bound to rub a lot of players the wrong way so how do you reconcile all the different often conflicting views this game presents itself to the player just as the original System Shock stands with one foot and values of 2d and arcade gaming and one foot so far in the future of 3d gaming that you can still see the footprint today infinite is a product of a very transitional time the construction of infinite game elements are all rooted in the lessons learned from the Xbox 360 Playstation 3 era of gaming but the plot and delivery of the narrative take advantage of all the values in production tricks of modern television and cutting-edge cinematic game design it's been said that 2013 is a flagship year for PC gaming and a lot of that is due to how this is the year in-between console generations soon there will be a new Xbox a new Playstation and the standards of the industry will change along with the new equipment as it always has and always will BioShock Infinite uses the cliches of yesterday's design to streamline your journey to the parts of the game that are truly unlike anything attempted in the major game released before is it a perfect game no is infinite the most important game of the last couple of years emphatically yes and I think beyond being simply a great game we can look to it as a weathervane to predict the next few years of game development not since the first system shock has a game shaken up so many industry conventions pioneered so many design features been so conflicted in its presentation to the player what is infinite ven if not another system shock for another time there's 19 years in-between System Shock and BioShock Infinite and in those 19 years you can not only see the game developers getting better at what they do you can see them pushing the industry forward as a whole each game has stood at the absolute forefront of design at the time of its release and each game is a classic but none would have been possible without the lessons learned from the preceding titles the growth of gaming from a closeted hobby for nerds to a pillar of pop culture has been gradual and no no one game can claim total responsibility but each shot game has done a tremendous amount towards pushing that bar forward it's a shame the Bioshock Youmans infinites release came so closely on the heels of the death of legendary film critic Roger Ebert who once famously commented that video games can never truly be art BioShock Infinite might not have changed his mind but I think he would have seen that the industry is truly changing in that direction thank you for watching

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 393,978

Rating: 4.732964 out of 5

Keywords: Bioshock, Bioshock 2, Bioshock: Infinite, System Shock, System Shock 2, Minerva's Den, DLC, Rapture, SHODAN, Andrew Ryan, Elizabeth, Comstock, Columbia, Review, Critique, BioShock (series), BioShock 2 (Video Game), Retrospective, Overview, Comparison, Let's Play, Infinite, Video Game (Industry), Game Design, Analysis, Plot Analysis, Ken Levine, Irrational games, Versus, Vs.

Id: s7DVOw1lIcM

Length: 75min 13sec (4513 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Bugger217]

Here are his thoughts on Clash in the Clouds and Burial at Sea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKt9g_uf7lw

[u/elscorcho91]

This video is seriously great, I recommend it for everyone.

[u/al3x094]

Any spoilers in this? Have yet to finish BioShock 2 and play Infinite.

[u/ColinZealSE]

This guy needs to learn more video editing... The aspect ratios are off and sound volumes are way too low. Suprised the videos don't require Real Media...

[u/CharlesLeeRay666]

System Shock is related to Bioshock? And minerva's den?