PLAYER COMMENTS ABOUT BIOSHOCK INFINITE 2

* See also Rapture Bioshock Player Commentaries 
* See also Infinite_BS & Infinite Stupidity
* See also PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BURIAL_AT_SEA
* See also Infinite_BS_Unlove
PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BIOSHOCK_INFINITE (Continuing)
PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BIOSHOCK_INFINITE_3 (Continuing)
== COMMENTS FROM PLAYERS AND ONLINE REVIEWERS FOR BIOSHOCK INFINITE ==
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"Fail" Is A Name For It :
Infinite just has a ton of basic failings in worldbuilding and lack of internal consistency.
Excluding Burial at Sea, since that just royally f%&^s with established canon:
Where do vigors come from? How the f%&^ does Fink have enough ADAM to make them drinkable when Rapture, which is a city right on-f%&^ing-top the world's only known source of the stuff had massive issues with its limited supply? Why does hardly anyone in Columbia use them? Why are their effects hardly elaborated on?
Why do Booker and Liz just start frantically hopping timelines for the whole bit in Finkton when there's no reason for them to assume the same deal was made there?
Why the f%&^ would a baptism turn Booker into a psychopathic hyper religious racist?
Why the f%&^ does killing Booker at the baptism do anything for any other timeline? The whole point is that it's infinite so why does killing him here do anything anywhere else?
It's just chockfull of made up bullshit like this that is never expanded upon or just straight-up goes against its own established rules.
AKA: a goddamn mess.
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Commenting about Commenting : 
"The criticism has always been there. Bioshock one and two moved the Immersive sim genre forward while infinite has barely if any elements. 
The infinite pregame demonstrations people hold up as a complaint had immersive sim elements front and center and advertised the game as being an immersive sim. Yes, demo material and final game material are different all the time. But advertising a game as the same style game as the others in the series when in reality it’s just an average shooter is not OK and a valid criticism. 
The advertising material focused on how choice would be a major factor where as the only “choice” in the final game was which pendant to choose and that didn’t effect the game at all. 
The final boss battle was aim at blimp and press 'E'. 
To say that the story and ending doesn’t hold up is an understatement. To ignore the criticisms as invalid is dishonest. Yes there were interesting things in infinite, but they sold it as one thing ( an immersive sim in the vein of Bioshock ) when it’s very clearly another ( a shooter that takes place in an interesting environment ). 
All the criticism isn’t sudden. The criticism is valid. When you buy a game called Bioshock, which is advertised as an immersive sim, you are allowed to complain when they deliver an average shooter."
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Levine-itus
Criticism of Bioshock Infinite is honestly deserved. Ken Levine screwed that game due to his constant mind changing and wanting to add/remove entirely new mechanics deep into development. His writing about the game really didn't help either. The development documentaries that had been made are interesting, but Infinite ended up being an abomination of disjointed ideas, themes, and narratives. It became comprised of several different rewritten versions. They had used up their very long development time and then just had to ship what they had.
Others were brought in to patch it together. It could've been worse, but it definitely deserves the criticism for being half baked, which the devs admit themselves. Adjustements do happen in game development, but the size and frequency of the changes made by Ken really scrambled it up from what it was supposed to be.
It's a bit far to say critics were too harsh on it.
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"The open ended magic science took over, instead of having better Worldbuilding"
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"Infinite’s deadly sins are side stepping the racism issue, the sloppy multiverse mechanics, Columbia’s threadbare lore, and all of the weird contrivances and retcons that the integrated BaS DLC later makes to fit Elizabeth into BioShock's backstory. All these work together to make sure the whole of it does not work."
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"Levine's excuse for hiding the 1999 Mode til after you play once through was to not discourage players with something too hard. So, he is basically calling his customers retards."
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"It doesn't feel like a world at all, more like a set of props."
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"I didn't think it was possible to dumb down BioShock. AAA industry hits new lows every day."
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"This is one of the most pretentious game endings I've ever had the misfortune to witness. Can we go back in time and drown Levine?"
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"BioShock Infinite among most expensive games of all time" 
( So little for so much money )
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"Cheap, railroaded synthetic drama, all that wrapped in gameplay full of boring violence happening in a world filled with expensive art assets but which does't make any fucking sense."
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"The game had a lot of problems with character consistency and overall setting's premise wasn't very well established (did the protagonist know about the fairy tale city before he was sent there? Did he know about the Vigors? Why was he so casual about such things but went full 'wtf' when Elizabeth's powers were revealed?)"
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"Would probably be a good game if you could take the world seriously, it is just really hard to do it. You go from one extreme to another waaaay too fast and too often. 10 min of gameplay for the debate class, 10 for the jocks, 10 for the drama club, then mix them up for the greater good. Racism is bad, brutal slaughter, "Oh how could you kill those people", back to brutal slaughter, step behind a register alerts police, slaughter everything in sight a bit later and nothing happens. The new trademark of AAA titles, throw everything into the mix, and don't focus on anything properly because you might alienate some part of the audience."
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"In the closing 20-minutes the player does little except get an extended “explanation”, and I'd dispute the notion that this is somehow the pinnacle of video games because there's enough that's simply average, like the actual layout of the levels (aside from sky-lines), that those making this claim are simply seeing something that isn't present in this dimension."
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"The game is entertaining, but it is also tragically marred by the unshakeable sense that it could have been so much more and simply got lost along the way."
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Quote of one of the Game Reviewers : "There’s a difference between plot holes, which are excusable, and a disregard for internal logic." (( That is Infinite BS (and its DLC) in a nutshell ))
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Review Nuggets About Combat in Infinite BS :
"There are people everywhere, yelling, and I just sort of fire off Murder of Crows in a direction and shoot where I see the 'vulnerable' signifier."
"I jump onto a skyline and keep getting nailed by bullets—I have no idea where the enemies are, but I rely on the auto-aim from skylines to find someone to shoot at."
"To provide difficulty, designers overwhelm your Shields all the time, which means designing situations that are Spammy ( get hit from all directions so you can't process what's going on ). It is confusing and not fun. It feels messy to play and happens all the time because they have to. Infinite then has super attacks which take away all your Shields at once, AND a third of your health, which feels steeply unfair. These Shields train the player to ignore getting hit most of the time, which becomes grating at the end when opponents start hitting hard. ( the players are trained for one thing, but then get attacked differently ! ) Shooters are much stronger experiences when it matters when you get hit. In Shield games you get hit all the time, like flies buzzing."
"To me that's piss-poor combat gaming." 
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BioShock Infinite, What It Is, Unfortunately :
"The world itself is kind of thin — characters stand stock-still, repeating the same animations over and over, everyone looks and speaks the same way. The game only comes to "life" when it is time to start blowing shit up. How remarkable it would have been, had the focus instead been on building AI that acted believably in the world, rather than simply AI designed to shoot and dodge. The piss-poor combat took all the effort and left the rest of the game ever poorer."
"It is possible to like the game for all it tries to do, but still feel smothered by its insistence that so much of my experience is delivered staring down the barrel of a gun or other destructive weapon. The game's story isn't really about shooting at all, but the player's lived story is, and that alienation is hard to overcome."
"The original BioShock was praised so highly because it was so unique. BioShock Infinite retreads a lot of the same ground, at least mechanically, but with parts that aren’t nearly as diverse or varied as its predecessor ... Its enemies are uninspired and its world not nearly as rich."
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"If violence wasn't the chief aim of the game then why have an action called "Execution" ?" 
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"Even in 2013 with US$200,000,000, Ken Levine cannot make decent character models. The less-well-bribed AAA reviews indicate that the story becomes completely retarded after a point."
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"Really bog-standard Combat. Fans would forgive the game for its mediocre combat. Unfortunately, the story which was supposed to counterbalance that deficit was not delivered, no matter all the yada-yada about it being exceptional contained in the developer interviews."
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"The worst culprit is the ending. The plot's final emotional sting is an action that just doesn't seem like it would achieve anything. It seems to be assuming some new rule about how this world works – but since those rules were never established, any drama that hinges on them feels arbitrary. That completely deflates the ending's potentially enormous impact."
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"Infinite’s biggest issue is that the stiff nonplayer characters really dampen the impact of the social themes. Irrational worked so hard building this world filled with terrible racial imagery, but it is difficult to feel the effects of that when I can’t relate to the mechanical mannequins that populate Columbia."
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Comment : Redneck Rampage's levels were more realistic than Columbia
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"Took me over an hour to get to combat... it is a video game, not a god damn virtual museum."
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"You're on a flying city of magical racists in 1912, and that soon drops to being only the fifth or sixth most puzzling thing about your situation. Who are those two? Why are they talking about me? What's with the giant cyborg bird? What does AD stand for? How does he know... why does she think... when did they... why can I shoot crows from my hands? And how do these pants help me reload?"
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"The violence in the game is jarring. One moment you arrive in a floating city and walk amongst its inhabitants, seeing how they mingle and live and the next you're drenched in blood murdering them by the dozen. Even the devs commented how you're basically a psychotic mass murderer when it really boils down to it."
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"Where the fuck did they wasted so much money, on Elizabeth boob simulation? Is the mainstream gaming industry becoming a scheme to milk clueless investors? What crazy investor would think that it is a good idea to waste 200 million dollars on a popamole shooter with 8 hours of gameplay? If this thing was a open world game, you could explain the budget."
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"The strange religion in Columbia may have been more interesting if it had been based on some Jewish cultism, and the story set in a flying Communist dystopian state. No matter, as the combat was rather poor which made it far less interesting to play between the cutscenes."
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"I'm sure it would be decent for $5. The problem is that it gets a 95% because it is shit easy and panders to the generic sensibilities of hipsters who can't play games."
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It is a spectacular ending. It is just a shame it doesn't make a lick of sense.
"The plot really does jump the shark. It jumps a lot of sharks. It jumps BioShark Infinisharks"
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"In cheerful contrast to the original BioShock's deep-sea madhouse, the flying city of Columbia is still thriving, still beautiful, and still populated – albeit with magical racists." 
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"Setting in Infinite: Boring Supermario cloud world. Can't interact with the populace, feels fake and rigid. Loot = gold and ammo. Follow the arrow, shoot hp-bloated badguys. Tons of cinematics interrupting the game. Graphics : Hidden behind tons of flares and layers of spectacular lightning are relatively unimpressive graphics. Just look at booker's hands, or any character model. Story : One singular storyline, pretty straight-forward with a predictable incoming twist. A Non-reactive world."
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"The AI is incredibly dumb, and the world is a sterile theme park which you are railroaded through."
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"Too many themes blended together turned into forgettable muck."
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 BioShock - The Player Embracing the Setting - NOT !!! :
"In the game’s fiction I do not have the freedom to choose between helping Atlas or not. If I accept to adopt an Objectivist approach (self-serving), I can Harvest Little Sisters. If I reject that approach, I can Rescue them. Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan, but if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach – well too bad... I can stop playing the game, but that’s about it." 
(( The game was not versatile enough to allow the player any real freedom. As it turned out the 'Rescue' of Little Sisters rewarded you pretty much the same as Harvesting them. ))
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" The problem with Sequels is that they just copy the originals, badly. This holds true for BioShock : infinite. "
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"There was clearly something wrong, because the game has a totally disjointed feel. The "lol multiverse" plot was shoehorned into the game because it provided a convenient way to wrap it together. Obviously, from Levine's statements and pre-release footage, Infinite is not even close to what it started as. 
I have a very hard time believing they set out to make a game about M-theory. BioShock was praised for critiquing a social/political/economic system, so in order to one up that, they set out to make some time travel/multiverse story? No way. The game does not make any deep commentary on anything, which is a far cry from BioShock, and something that Levine could not have set out to intend. The Class Warfare, American Exceptionalism, and other themes are simply abandoned and never resolved. Now I'm fighting a ghost? Oh, look, an Insane Asylum that has nothing to do with anything? Fitzroy, whose entire existence is premised on equality and not judging people superficially, decides she has to kill a totally innocent child whose only crime is being related to someone she dislikes?
Booker's choices effectively do not matter because he has made every choice across the multiverse(s), so why even rescue Elizabeth? There are an infinite number of universes where Booker does not sell Elizabeth, so what makes this one special? Moreover, if drowning himself "kills" Comstock, are there not an infinite number of universes where he never drowns himself? How in the hell could that possibly kill Comstock for good across all realities under the guise of the multiverse? It can't, and it makes no sense.
That is the problem with these multiverse stories--they trivialize this reality by making everything reality. Booker's actions are meaningless because he has taken all roads across all multiverses. I'm sorry, but this story is not deep in anyway, and it cannot have any deep meaning because of resolving it with multiverses. It is a pseudo intellectual deus ex machina, and people seem to be eating it up for reasons unknown."
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"At the end right after Booker says, "Why are you still upset / Let's just open a door to Paris" (paraphrasing here), Elizabeth replies with, "No, just THAT Comstock is dead. He exists in an infinite number of universes." ... So... your plan is to kill him an infinity number of times? Or do you think that by lecturing your dad before he knows he's your dad just to mind-fuck him JUST before you drown him will somehow kill EVERY OTHER universe that exists where he's still alive / you didn't drown him? Ceremonially drowning our instance of Booker does NOT "close the loop". Nor would it cause all those other instances of Elizabeth to "not be" / pop out of existence; JUST the one from our game would have."
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A List :
* The criminally underdeveloped villains and side characters ( Fink, Slate, Fitzroy, etc ... )
* The "Carrot on a Stick" plot device that made up the entire middle section of the game.
* The complete abandonment of all the themes they built up for the first half of the game once the tear stuff really got rolling.
* The very average gunplay which runs out of ideas halfway in.
* The dumb as rocks, bullet-sponge enemies who's general AI pattern appears to be running at you.
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"For a game supposed to be about story, so many character elements are poorly explained in their stories."
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"The game is haphazard, full of holes, not many connections to tie together. They make a half-assed attempt at the end to answer some questions, and all you are left with at the end of the game is, 'What the f*ck?' "
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"As purely a gaming experience, BioShock Infinite cannot quite match up to its illustrious predecessor. Combat is not particularly varied or customizable, and neither the large number of guns and ‘Vigors’ ( magic powers, a la BioShock’s Plasmids ) or the Skyrail system compensate for this. Although the last quarter introduces some welcome variation in play, most of the game shooting is the sole method of progression. The hacking sub-game, an enjoyable diversion in the original’s games main action and a way to access additional resources, is replaced by a ‘Possession’ Vigor, giving control of opponents merely on a simple point and click basis."
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"Infinite seemed like a completely different franchise. I found the game lacked direction at times and a lot of the game consisted of walking around."
(( Yep, recycled the branding, carelessly took it to Fantasy Lala-land, and tried to reuse many of the game elements no matter how much they didn't fit. ))
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Infinite BS : "A Little Too Twee"
"Twee" - As a derogatory descriptive, it means something that is affectedly dainty or quaint, or is way too sentimental.
(( As long as there are gun-battles and splashing blood, it might as well have been muppets and cute ponies thrashing about in candyland Auschwitz, while Audio Diaries and 'signs' proclaim some absurd philosophy ... "WORK WILL TAKE YOU TO VALHALLA" ))
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"The lobotomized god collapses the quantum supposition, so all the crap experience mixes together and flows into one insanity" 
(( Yeah that's about what Infinite BS was, a massive in-flowing of Bullshit. ))
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"The pace of the game is so fast, the shooting so continuous, the push to “GET TO THE NEXT THING” so frantic, that it somehow feels like you never get to know the place."
It is like a dark carnival ride that keeps you moving so that you can't notice how little is really there - that it is really all just cardboard cutouts and dangling strings." 
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"It gets to the point during the long middle of the game that the gameplay starts to hinder the story. A late, affecting section in a mental hospital, a section that is absolutely crucial to the story, is marred by the horde's of imaginary enemies the game forces you to bludgeon. I wanted to creep through the eerie halls of the place, absorbing mood and thinking about the twist the story had just taken. Instead, I was panicked about running out of ammunition for my machine gun. It is as if, somehow, those masters of storytelling and atmosphere at Irrational don’t trust their storytelling and atmosphere."
(( Bingo. ))
"Infinite is an example of storytelling and world-building in which the main character is able to kill thousands of times more than he is killed, in which ammunition and “health” are everywhere, and in which you can come back from the dead endlessly by paying money. It is fundamentally strange."
When all is said and done, Infinite BS was Just a sub-par Shooter Game with a story disjointedly told through an absurd fantasy plot. Players did not miss all-that-much by ignoring the confused story. 
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"Combat takes place, more often than not, within designed arenas, which means that Irrational's designers WANTED combat to happen. In System Shock 2, the levels were more often real spaces, just like BioShock. If combat happened, it did so because you got caught, not because the game had a fight scripted." 
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"Basically, BioShock Infinite, at a conceptual level, is just a shooter, because someone made poor decisions at the top. Imagine what it would be like if Comstock was desperate to keep news of Elizabeth out of the hands of the people, making it easier for you to blend in with the crowds ? Imagine of the game employed social stealth, like Hitman or Deus Ex, where you could talk your way out of situations. Imagine if the game learned all the lessons of the 'Shock' lineage it descends from, the same lessons employed by Far Cry 2, by Deus Ex, by Thief, by Dishonored, by STALKER, by System Shock 2. Imagine talking to people, rather than fighting them. Imagine losing yourself in a crowd, so the guards searching for you didn't fight.
There was so much potential in the game ... and they turned it into a series of fights. Violence in BioShock Infinite is absolutely excessive. It is violence for violence's sake."
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"BioShock Infinite is a shooter with a problem, but the problem isn't the shooting. The problem is that BioShock Infinite has nothing to say about the shooting. A game that earnestly tries to explore morality and personal responsibility ducks those questions by placing the player on a conveyor belt of hyper-violent sequences, shuttling the player from one narrative set-piece to the next. The shooting is what you do. The story is what you (mostly) hear. The two have little to do with each other."
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Commentary about BS:I - Things Infinite BS was SUPPOSED TO HAVE
* Non-aggressive NPC's that don't realize who you are until you do something drastic, and whom you an interact with in non-violent contextual circumstances.
* Elizabeth reacts to the environment prompting conversations which build depth and character.
* Very dense scenes with NPC setpieces creating a far richer tapestry of the world that you are exploring. Only the opening level of the shipped product is as rich as this scene.
* Vigors based on an inventory stock instead of a refillable Mana bar.
* Very, very, very large environments with HUGE skyline segments, combat on the skylines, and "3D" combat (Ground, Skyline, Zeppelin)
* AI that is noticeably more advanced than the current, including flanking and shifting to different levels in the environment to gain an advantage.
* Dialogue present in the shipped product, but in dramatically different situations and context, implying that the story was scrapped and re-written VERY late in development (this is Q3 2011, remember). Elizabeth's line in the trailer where she mentions asking Comstock for help escaping is itself a potent indicator that the story was vastly different.
* The flowing Vox banners feature Daisies face projected on them in a very 1984-esque fashion, highlighting her similarity to Comstock and adding narrative. There are few to no animated textures of this nature anywhere in the released game, and none on Vox topics. The voice-overs from these can still be heard, truncated, in a few sections.
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Vox Ciphers & Crows Chests are both implied to be recurring elements, to the extent that they even feature voiced dialogue and in-game tutorials about them. Yet there are two ciphers and 3 crow chests, in the entire game.
In the first level, after you find the first Crow chest, you enter a mansion and are given a tutorial prompt which suggests "Try not shooting your gun and drawing attention to yourself". Clearly this is a remnant of the 2011 build in that video, where enemies were not instant-hostile Zerglings, but is useless in the release build as all enemies shoot on sight.
The previously inventory-based vigor system appears to have been changed very late in development, as the old pick-up bottles are still to be found scattered throughout levels, but now only act as Salt refills.
The design of many early levels, such as Soldiers Field, feel very odd and out of context, and not designed for Combat. I suspect these were originally built as the "hub" levels when the game was more an open world, and then pared down when it was cut up into a linear shooter.
There was an interview from 2010, discussed an artist quitting after they axed the Shantytown segment because it made little sense in the context of a floating nationalist utopia. Mysteriously, Shantytown was back in the release build.
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The shipped game is clearly not the one that was in development for so long, and only a pale shadow in terms of depth in both gameplay and world building. The whole thing reeks of bad editing, with major themes and plot points that were introduced early being tossed out, and utterly random scenes (like the asylum) being included for no discernible reason.
Wibbly-wobbly time nonsense began to take over and the exploration of a society like Columbia became irrelevant.
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The Racists Will Rise Again -- A Player Commentary (*WARNING - POLITICAL OPINION EXPRESSED HEREIN*) :
“BioShock Infinite”, is quite simply a left wing propaganda story laden with messages of “the religious are hateful bigots”, “the religious worship the US founding fathers”, “the religious blindly follow madmen and liars”, etc. The makers do a sad attempt at making them look like only the Confederates are like this, as the game takes place in 1912, and gives the impression the city of “Columbia” is made up of post-civil war Southern sympathizers.
Throughout the game, it tries to show you that religion, American values, and the founding fathers are what caused the evil that is Columbia and Comstock. Columbia has statues commemorating George Washington (“Father Washington”), Benjamin Franklin (“Father Franklin”), and Thomas Jefferson (“Father Jefferson”), all part of Columbia’s own propaganda that actually contributes to the subtle propaganda this game tries to push. People pray to the founding fathers, to the Prophet, etc. like saints. It is all rather sickening.
The “Hall of Heroes” tries to justify the themes by making these “Americans” as Confederates that actually succeeded in their secession from the Union. I mean, it is a city in the sky, who’s going to stop them in the late 1800s? They have paintings depicting Abraham Lincoln as a devil and other such images. Such a thing may have been excusable, except for their reasoning that religion causes evil and insanity (the propaganda of the game), and that free choice is but an illusion, according to their view of science ( quantum mechanics and string theory ).
The whole premise is based upon a one-sided telling of the history of the USA as nothing but horrible and bad, with the founders being evil, white people being evil, and religion being the fuel of it all. I am surprised the hammer and sickle wasn’t used as a hero’s battle flag.
This is a game, granted, I will give you that, but what is a shame is an ignorant view of religion, and America’s history. How much propaganda have you swollowed throughout your life before you made this game? May I suggest you actually study history, not from people telling you what it was, but by reading about it yourself from the sources themselves? Maybe, just maybe, you might want to read about those that were in support of the Constitution and founding fathers that were black, like Frederick Douglass, for example. You might want to read about Abraham Lincoln and the history of the party he helped found, as well as the history of the Democrat and Whig parties. You may learn that it was the religious that formed the Republican party, as a small government and anti-slavery party, and against everything the Whigs and Democrats were doing to the original statements of freedom the Constitution guaranteed to every man. You might want to investigate who the real bigots were, the ones that formed the Klu Klux Klan (the southern Democrat Party), the ones that wanted gun control to keep weapons out of the hands of recently freed slaves (the Democrat Party), the ones who were overwhelmingly in favor of secession for the sake of slavery (the southern Democrat Party), the ones who made the Jim Crow laws (Democrats), the ones who kept trying to outlaw the Jim Crow laws (Republicans of the time), etc.
The Whigs were like the Republican party of today, not giving a rats ass about freedom and small government, nor the people. The Democrats haven’t changed much, just as racist, and with a heavy desire to enslave, except they now do it with government welfare and controlling education ( indoctrination and dumbing-down the population ), instead of whips and chains. The Democrats have convinced much of the populace that follows them, that the plantation is safe and desirable full of free stuff(!), and that they can’t take care of themselves.
Sure, it is just a game, but a game so obvious in its message, that you can’t hide behind “artistic license” as an excuse. Propaganda has reached an all time high with this game. Many people hail its ending. I nearly wanted to vomit, I was so disgusted with it.
Where so-called religion becomes a problem, is where the people don’t practice what they preach. They use their position to exercise authority and control over others using their religion as an excuse. The religion itself isn’t the problem, it is those falsely proclaiming to live it ( a possible story explanation the game never indicates ). This is why the USA was created in the first place. It kept the church out of the hands of the government. Unfortunately, now the church of atheism and environmentalism now has control over the government, and exercises tremendous tyranny against the religious.
What am I saying? The entire premise of BioShock Infinite is a lie. It is a house of cards that falls apart a few minutes into it, with anyone that knows anything about religion and US history, who hasn’t been indoctrinated by left wing propaganda of university professors hell bent on destroying both.
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CONTINE ON PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BIOSHOCK_INFINITE_3
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