Bioshock Infinite

I havn't had time to play sc2 lately, so i went ahead and played bioshock which i had dl'd awhile ago.
(Its easier to be brain dead playing single player games)

Its an amazing game, it has a very fun multiverse-esq thread to the story, and it uses a lot of religious, racism, and political themes. I haven't played a fps since time splitters two, which i only played on a console, so this was my first mouse/keyboard fps.

I wish i had taken some screen shots, but i hope you've all seen how beautiful it is. If not, you need to look up some vids.

I played all the way through on hard mode. Died more than i would have liked to. But i still had money to get all the upgrades i wanted, so it prolly wasn't too bad.

The one thing about hard mode, was it was too difficult for me to master both using 'vigors' (your special abilities) and the regular weapons, so i just got really good at using the regular weapons and ignored the vigors for the most part.

This is prolly completely standard in any game thats polished at all, but it was nice to be able to rebind a lot of the controls to be really comfortable. It made me like using WASD for movement since you have a lot of range of control within that comfortable movement zone from your hand. (i had never played anything with WASD)

I replayed it on medium just for the story and to get more comfortable with using the vigors. A big part of it is just knowing which situation is going to be right for which vigor (you have 8 and only 2 are equiped at a time, so its important that you see the situation coming. even though you can technically pause to equip. it kinda thew off my flow if i had to do that). Cus its also really easy to use the wrong vigor a bunch of times trying to kill everything, then when you realize you should be using something else youre all out of salts so you die anyway.

Im playing in 1999 mode now, which is unlocked by beating it in hard mode.
The enemies are obviously all stronger.
But the hardest part it costs way more to respawn, and if you run out of money it resets you to a checkpoint.
When you respawn you dont lose any progress, and all the dead enemies stay dead, and you get most of your health, + some ammo and salts (vigors).
Ive just been resetting to checkpoint each time instead of picking respawn, cus i feel like you need money a lot more and its more fun to figure out how to beat everything without extra health/ammo.

I also like the 2 weapon system.
It lets you carry around ammo for all the guns, but it only lets you keep two guns at a time.
I think you also get more ammo than most games let you keep. which, if true, allows you to not have to rely on switching between all your guns, and you get good at 2 at a time instead, which i just like.
---

The only thing that i really dont like is that you have to point the camera directly at everything to pick it up/use. Which wouldn't be bothersome, except that the game is so beautiful i want to keep my cam angled up, which makes you miss everything.
It'd be nice if you could pick everything up more passively.

Since this is my third play through i've kinda learned where everything is, so its less of an issue, but still.
I guess the benefit is that it gives it more replay-ability cus you'll notice a lot of things for the first time.

---
Since it was called 'bioshock infinite' and not 'bioshock 3' i didn't realize there were 2 earlier games. ill have to go back and play those at some point.

When this came out, in the chat i said it was an amazing game, i was going to make a post but wanted to play it a 2nd time so i did that instead of making a post which meant i never got around to making a post and since no one responded to what i said about it in chat i figured a post wasnt required

Spoiler:

You will probably really like bioshock 1, the combat isnt as streamlined and can be a bit clunky, but theres more elaborate things you can do
The story is really good

The DLC for infinite takes you back to right before the events of bioshock 1, in an alternate universe of course, and its amazing if youve played bioshock 1 cause it brings back characters from that and shows you how they became what you saw them as in the first game

I wasnt really a fan of bioshock 2 though, its basically a copy of the first game from the perspective of 1 of the enemies from the first game, which sounds like it could be cool except you arent really 1 of the enemies, and they added in lore stuff that makes little sense, and the story isnt nearly as good as the first



Also i didnt like the 2 weapon system, all modern fps are doing 2 weapons and its really annoying, it just means i never use any other weapons other than the 2 that i have on me
Id rather have the ability to carry a bunch of weapons and have ammo be the limiting factor, rather than having plenty of ammo but be limited on my weapons
Ive been playing fps for many years though so i guess im just used to it

I tried 1999 mode on my 3rd play through, i didnt finish it though, i was able to pick up on all the little details on the 2nd play through so i didnt really have motivation to finish it a 3rd time, let alone on 1999 mode

Just beat 1999, woooo.

The only frustrating part was the fight with lady comstock.
Especially cus you have to do the same fight 3 times.
And double especially since reviving is completely useless since she regains full hp, and it doesn't give you any advantage to have killed infinity of her minions.
And tripple especially since that fight goes against the way the rest of the game is played.
I.e. rewarding efficiently killing enemies with smart use of cover and what not.
But in that one its basically just "run up to her with invulnerability and spam your weapons a bunch of times before you run out of salts and hope you're able to do enough DPS before she runs away"
It felt stupid. But oh well, the rest of the game was a lot of fun.

pat1487 wrote:

Also i didnt like the 2 weapon system, all modern fps are doing 2 weapons and its really annoying, it just means i never use any other weapons other than the 2 that i have on me

I stopped liking the 2 weapon system in 1999.
I'd start ditching my 'main guns' in the middle of fights so i wouldn't use all the ammo before finding more, and then it'd be super frustrating to run around staring at the ground to find where i left them.
And i swear the game ate my weapons some times for no reason, even if i never went more than 10 feet in any direction. and other times it would leave them where they were even after i went through a bunch of rooms.

i think the 2 weapon thing would be better if there was a vendor to buy them from, like ammo. Cus it felt like a dumb mechanic to have to backtrack looking for the gun you needed when you didn't have to do that for ammo as much.

Cus sometimes i could tell the game was forcing me to use different weapons, and i didn;t mind that so much. But when it was clear i was supposed to have choices, and i was wasting time backtracking to actually use those choices i got annoyed.

pat1487 wrote:

You will probably really like bioshock 1, the combat isnt as streamlined and can be a bit clunky, but theres more elaborate things you can do
The story is really good

I played it for about an hour after beating infinite the first time. I might put the difficulty on medium instead of hard when i actually play through it, cus it felt really jarring to deal with the 'less streamlined' mechanics.
And im too stubborn so i'd be like "NO. THIS WORKS IN INFINITE. IT'LL WORK HERE TOO" then i die cus its hard mode.
-----

What vigors did you use in infinite?
On hard mode i avoided using them cus killing with regular weapons was more satisfying/fun for me. but i did use shock jokey to deal with patriots, and bucking bronco to deal with crows and firemen.

I never even looked at what return to sender did since its one of the last vigors you get, but it woulda made dealing with handymen much easier.

In 1999 i used possession whenever i got into trouble. Cus that thing is super OP.
It says "only use it on one enemy at a time" But if you spam it then it basically 1 shot kills everything, except the last enemy you hit will stay active for awhile before killing himself like the others.

And i used return to sender a lot to save myself in later fights. And shock jocky/ bronco were still useful.

But i never found ways of using the others that i liked

I just realized, did you get your new computer, bioshock infinite isnt easy to run
If you did post about it in that thread where we were talking about it


In my first play through i was using charge a ton because i had gear that made my melee attack awesome
My gear gave me +25% more melee dmg with melee crit on enemies with low hp, health steal on melee kills and the ability to deal twice as much dmg after the first melee hit all of which stack with charge so i was able to 2 shot crows and firemen with charge and a melee attack after charging, patriots took a charge and 2 melee hits (normal enemies died in 2 hits with just melee)
Since i was going around meleeing a lot i used return to sender after i got it to soak in damage (before i got return to sender i was fairly vulnerable even though i could kill stuff so fast and heal up by killing, if i didnt get kills fast enough i was at risk of dieing and would occasionally have to fall back and use guns, but once i got return to sender i was an untouchable killing machine)
Before i got that combination of gear though i was using devils kiss shock jockey and possession

In my 2nd play through i learned the glorious combo of shock jockey and undertow (it can 1 shot most groups of enemies with upgrades)
But i mainly just used guns (the hand cannon and machine gun) since the undertow combo was expensive and my gear in that play through gave me bonus gun damage, i used bronco and hand cannon for firemen/crows, and for patriots the hand cannon was good enough

A weapon vendor would be annoying and would take a lot of money to keep switching weapons
The DLC does away with the 2 weapon system, you can carry all the weapons at the same time but since the mechanic for having 2 weapons is embedded in the game switching between them is weird
The first bioshock will let you have all the weapons and you can switch between them easily

Make sure you finish bioshock 1 before playing burial at sea, episode 2 of burial at sea should be out on march 25th

Bioshock just barely runs on my laptop. It seemed sorta laggy when i installed it to make sure i had a working copy. I’m not sure if it would have been playable or not.

I didn’t post in the relevant thread cis i’ve been busy and i ended up ‘buying' one of my friends desktops. He was moving out of the country cus jobs with the military are crazy like that. And had gotten a new laptop, so he sold it to me for $150.

Its much newer than my laptop and runs really well, so it was very nice of him to practically give it away.

What are the specs, and is it a pc or mac

What weapon combos did you end up using?
At first i used the carbine/sniper. But that is horrible at dealing with the bosses and minibosses
So on my later run throughs i used carbine + volly gun/rpg
I think volly gun has the highest DPS, but RPG's are the most versatile
Since with a volly gun you have to get direct hits, or else you'll tend to miss completely, whereas rpg's tend to insta kill so long as you get an almost direct hit.
and so long as your kinda close you get the nockback effects

i also started using the machine gun, which i had initially just never used cus i thought it was bad.
What i really like is the repeater + rpg, it almost feels like a carbine, but with a higher clip size and fire rate. Its technically an automatic, but i like using it as a semi-automatic for the most part.

I basically never use the shotgun/repeater, since it basically serves the same role as an rpg/vollygun, but does a much worse job at it.
The rpg is supposed to be bad at close range since it hurts you, but booker can handle it.

The biggest flaw with bioshock is that 'esc' doesn't prompt the 'exit menu' when your in the main menu, so i'll be sitting there spamming the esc key waiting for the game to close.
then i remember i have to actually use the mouse.
-----

500gb hard drive
8gb ram
3ghz processor
its a mac, and 1/5th windows 8
I dont really understand the point of mac desktops, since they dont use a tower.
I feel like they have similar space limitations that a laptop would have, but without the portability.
But maybe they give themselves enough room its equivalent to using a tower/case.

The one terrible thing about a desktop is i cant use all of mac's touchpad gestures on it, which i had gotten really used to for flipping between programs/documents for school work.
But i discovered this archaic piece of technology called a 'keyboard' which you can 'bind' commands to certain 'key combinations' to accomplish a similar effect.

Achilles.42 wrote:

What weapon combos did you end up using?

I said in my other post, hand cannon and machine gun
Mostly the hand cannon because it kills in 1 shot most of the time, and it can even take down big guys with a few more shots

Achilles.42 wrote:

i also started using the machine gun, which i had initially just never used cus i thought it was bad.
What i really like is the repeater + rpg, it almost feels like a carbine, but with a higher clip size and fire rate. Its technically an automatic, but i like using it as a semi-automatic for the most part.

I used the machine gun cause i like having 1 fast firing spammy gun and 1 heavy hitting slower gun in fps's, normally that will be some sort of machine gun/assault rifle and a shotgun/rocket launcher
Ill pretty much always take those 2 types of weapons when you can only have 2 weapons at a time since it covers just about every situation
I generally avoid sniper rifles cause i dont like having to stop to shoot, even for a second, though if a situation comes up where a sniper rifle is the best choice and there is 1 nearby ill take it temporarily

Achilles.42 wrote:

500gb hard drive
8gb ram
3ghz processor
its a mac, and 1/5th windows 8
I dont really understand the point of mac desktops, since they dont use a tower.
I feel like they have similar space limitations that a laptop would have, but without the portability.
But maybe they give themselves enough room its equivalent to using a tower/case.

The one terrible thing about a desktop is i cant use all of mac's touchpad gestures on it, which i had gotten really used to for flipping between programs/documents for school work.
But i discovered this archaic piece of technology called a 'keyboard' which you can 'bind' commands to certain 'key combinations' to accomplish a similar effect.

They make keyboards with touchpads, so if you really want it you can get the gestures back, i have the same problem with mice that dont have at least 5 buttons, cause i use those 2 extra buttons all the time and any time i have to use a mouse without them i find myself trying to push them as if they are there, so i can see how that would be terrible

Now that you can play modern games we should play different stuff like i was saying
Not only tribes, but other stuff too
I know you hate learning, but it shouldnt be hard anymore as knowing rts and fps controls cover most types of games, after that you just need to learn the objectives and goal of the game, but thats not that hard and a lot of them are the same
Like in tribes for example, the objectives are take the flag, wreck the enemies stuff, and shoot at anything that shoots at you, the goal is to capture the flag 5 times, simple



Actually im making an assumption that might be wrong, im assuming you dont want to learn cause youve never played games like that before and it feels overwhelming at first, but now that i think about it there are arcade games in sc2 that you dont want to play cause you dont want to learn them even though they arent too different to stuff youve played before, so its likely that i am wrong and that theres another reason you dont like learning new games

I cant think of another reason though, but im the kind of person that likes learning new games and will play a different game every week so i wouldnt be able to understand it

Quote :

Actually im making an assumption that might be wrong, im assuming you dont want to learn cause youve never played games like that before and it feels overwhelming at first, but now that i think about it there are arcade games in sc2 that you dont want to play cause you dont want to learn them even though they arent too different to stuff youve played before, so its likely that i am wrong and that theres another reason you dont like learning new games

it's probably just too taxing

fatface wrote:

its porbably just too taxing

Thanks seren.
its also cus all the big words i have to read scare me

Its cus i like doing things to completion.
Which was easy back in the day when you beat the single player once and there wasn't much more depth. But now with things like sc2 theres just no end. And even games like infinite when you play through again you do things differently, and then theres the companion bioshock games to complete the story.

So starting new games is a big commitment.
I basically have to decide i really want to play something, or i dont usually bother. Like if i dont think im gonna want to play a single player game more than once through i probably wont bother.
Like i spent a lot of time watching sc2 before i actually got it, and i had watched a play-through of bioshock beforehand.
Ive watched a lot of playthroughs, and usually im like "that was cool. but im done now"

Irrational Games, the devs of bioshock 1 and bioshock infinite are basically shutting down:
http://irrationalgames.com/new-featured/a-message-from-ken-levine-2/

There will probably be more bioshock games in the future but it sounds like none of them will be anywhere near as good as bioshock 1 or infinite was
2K are the devs that made bioshock 2, which didnt have nearly as good of a story as bioshock 1 or infinite did, but it did have some good game play mechanics

Personally i play single player games primarily for the story, as long as the gameplay mechanics arent terrible, and even if they are if the story is good enough and compelling enough to carry it i can overlook bad gameplay, generally in those cases ill just watch a lets play of the game rather than finish playing it
So all 2K needs to do is get better writers and the next bioshock game could still be good



I have no idea why he would decide to do this, bioshock infinite was a huge success and this is the kind of thing you do after a huge failure
You would think he would open a new studio to do his highly replayable games while keeping the other studio and then making double the stuff by hiring more people

Doing it this way just seems silly to me, its like he has no faith in his new idea for a studio so hes preemptively shutting stuff down to make its failure less painful later on when it inevitably fails
I have to assume that hes really passionate about this idea and even though he strongly suspects it will fail that hes still taking that risk, which would be admirable if he wasnt laying 180+ people off to do it
Most of them will probably be fine as part of new dev teams and he is providing them with support until they get new jobs, but still, its a big change for them and there will be those that arent fine, so he shouldnt have taken a risk like that when it effects so many people, he couldve started with a smaller risk with the current studio and seen how gamers responded to that, and if it was positive then expand out like i was saying

Achilles.42 wrote:

So starting new games is a big commitment.
I basically have to decide i really want to play something, or i dont usually bother. Like if i dont think im gonna want to play a single player game more than once through i probably wont bother.
Like i spent a lot of time watching sc2 before i actually got it, and i had watched a play-through of bioshock beforehand.
Ive watched a lot of playthroughs, and usually im like "that was cool. but im done now"

Bioshock didnt have much replayablity, the same thing happens every time, sure you can do different things but its the same story, if you tried to play a game like skyrim youd be there for years with the way you play lol

I rarely play games more than once, usually if i didnt finish a game ill play it again after a couple years pass and focus on the main quest primarily (like what im doing with skyrim, although that hasnt been going well since not only have i not been doing the main quest i havent actually been playing that game recently)
But for me finishing a game isnt that important, i make sure to finish games with amazing stories, as long as they arent 40+ hours long, i guess im used to stories never finishing with the way TV shows always never have a proper ending to the story, where as with you, since you read books primarily, you want an ending, so not finishing a game doesnt bother me too much

Multiplayer games are generally self contained things, you get in, play a match and your done, each match is its own 15-30 minute game and every time you play a match its like replaying the game, so i dont see how that would be a problem for you

I watch a lets play like i was saying above in this post, when the game has an interesting story but really really bad gameplay mechanics that i just dont feel like dealing with
And if i dont have the console that the game comes out on, if its story is said to be incredibly good
And if i played like half of the game at 1 point in time in the past but didnt finish it and i decide i want to finish it but its too much trouble to get (usually with really old games) ill end up just watching a lets play
I never watch a playthrough of a game i intend to play (it spoils it for me), and if i watch a play through it means i will never play the game
Also the person playing the game is important too, they need to be funny but not annoying, they have to like and acknowledge the story, they need to be intelligent enough to understand the plot points at least as well as i do, and they need to shut up during cutscenes, very few lets players meet those requirements so i rarely watch them

Burial at Sea episode 2, the final dlc, came out yesterday
It continues from where episode 1 left off

I just started playing it and my god is it amazing
When you start it recaps the events of bioshock 1 so you dont need to have played it to understand, but there are a ton of little details that reference bioshock 1 in the game and without playing bioshock 1 you wont be able to appreciate them
Also it spoils the end of bioshock 1 so if you intended to play it you should before playing this

I like how it continues the booker/elizabeth story from infinite while expanding on bioshock 1 and rapture

From what ive played so far its more of a stealth game than the others, you get a crossbow that shoots sleeping darts, and can sneak up on people to knock them out
And stepping on water/glass makes noise which alerts enemies to your presence
I intend to play the whole way through without killing anyone, but lets see how long that lasts until i fail at stealth and have to pull out the hand cannon to start blowing heads off


Ill post more about it when i finish it, probably later tonight

Personally I didn't like the end of Bioshock Inf, mainly because I hate games that end with

Read if beat game:

The combat also kind of sucked, as you really had to keep scavenging for ammo.

I finished the DLC and you need to have finished Bioshock 1 or this ending will not make sense, the recap i was talking about isnt enough to understand the ending, you need detailed knowledge from bioshock 1, ill talk more about the story later

But first i want to talk about the gameplay and how im a bit disappointed in it, you cant really fight anything so most of the weapons are pointless
At first i was going through the game without killing anyone because thats the way i wanted to play it, but after a while i realized you had to play that way because the game was impossible if you tried to fight everything head on
There are just so many enemies and such a low amount of ammo/money that you cant kill everyone, and the enemies respawn if you leave the area and come back so you cant clear everything out
The game is actually easier to play in a non-lethal way due to the way stealth works, it takes a while for the AI to notice you even when they are looking straight at you so its hard to be caught, i played on normal so maybe its not so forgiving on harder difficulty levels, but even then, later on in the game you can be invisible forever without spending any eve as long as you dont move (assuming you explore and find everything you need to gain the abilities that allow you to do that)
Before you get plasmids/vigors the game was a decent challenge even with the delayed reaction from the AI since there were just so many enemies, but once you get a couple of them it becomes too easy

Also the gameplay is completely different from any of the other games since it focuses on stealth, i like stealth games so it was fine for me, but i can see how people might expect it to be like the other games
Even though it was fine with me i still think its weird that they switched gameplay types between 2 episodes of dlc, it makes sense that they did it this way but still


The story was awesome though, im going to split the infinite and bioshock 1 parts into seperate spoilers, but all these spoilers are related to episode 2 so dont read them until you finish bioshock 1, infinite, and both episodes of the dlc

Bioshock 1:

Bioshock Infinite:

Spoiler:

MrJoe223 wrote:

Personally I didn't like the end of Bioshock Inf, mainly because I hate games that end with

Read if beat game:

Includes spoilers from the end of burial at sea ep 1 and infinite: