Why I dropped Bioshock Infinite

I never finished Bioshock Infinite. Never even remotely got into it, really. Does that disqualify me from critiquing it? Maybe as a whole, but I feel the beginning of a game is so vital, and you can spot far reaching issues in those first hours.

You see, what the game does at the start shows a way of thinking and design philosophy that I absolutely knew would not change. It shows a disregard for an artistically sound and consistent experience, and produces quite honestly nothing more than a complex facade that makes the game appear thoughtful, when in reality it shows some of the worst writing I have seen in a while.

It's a game, right?

Chief among these issues is how the game seems to forget, quite honestly, that it's a game much of the time. There were 2 crazy long portions of the game with no substantive gameplay in the bit I played. First was the intro, where you just walk around and pick stuff up as you see the city around you. As well, the sequence where you try to get to Elizabeth in the tower is just a lot of walking and looking.

These sequences fail for a number of reasons. First, because there's not much to discover or think on. If I was a game developer and wanted to put a sequence such as this in, it would have to be for a damn good reason. Maybe the player needs time to take something vital and plot-twisting in and gameplay wouldn't let them think on it. Whatever the reason, Infinite doesn't have a good one. In the first sequence, you will pick up very, very fast that Columbia is an old fashioned city in the sky. The 2^nd one starts off a bit better, but once you learn that the city fears what Elizabeth may be, you're just halfway through, and past that point you learn absolutely nothing.

What Infinite doesn't seem to understand is that slowly seeing more of a place means nothing if that more doesn't teach you anything. I don't care about seeing more of a city if all I need to know (Old fashioned, floating, very religious) was discovered 10 minutes ago. I don't care about seeing more of a prison if all I'm going to know was discovered in the first 5 minutes. No gameplay is useful to take information in, but it has to be constant, relevant, and quick, because the absolute second you dawdle or give useless information, your time would be much better spent on actual gameplay.

Infinite seems to think more visuals are interesting. They're not.

Oh god, why did you do that?

When I see characters acting stupid just to push the plot, I will get the hell out while I can. It's not only bad for the plot, it shows bad, bad writing skills that signal a messy plot to me. I have a habit of dropping stories that show this, and Infinite was no different.

But this game may just have broken a record for how fast they passed the idiot ball over to the entire cast of the game. First, they show the sign of the “False Shepard” on a poster, which Booker has on the back of his hand. Rather than covering it up because obviously it's a bad thing to have, he just traipses around with it for all to see, and he eventually gets caught. This is to give a reason for the first combat encounter of the game to occur because the police see the mark. They could have done this in literally any other way. They could have had Booker cover it up with a bandage, accidentally raise the suspicions of the police, and then they uncover the mark. I literally just wrote a better plot point than the people who are actually paid to write this.

Why does the populace ignorantly go about their business after Booker slaughters dozens of police? Idiot ball. Why do the people of Columbia never take advantage of the magical powers vigors provide? Idiot ball. Why does Booker immediately start murdering police in front of the girl he's supposed to be rescuing, thereby terrifying her? Idiot. Ball.

That last one is my personal favourite, because right after she runs away from you, quite realistically because you just killed dozens of people. For that brief moment, I thought “FINALLY, someone says and does something that makes frakking sense!”. But she is then instantly convinced that Booker's fine and happily walks through the city with him.

That's when I stopped playing.

Ludonarrative Dissonance

Those 2 words are my absolute favourite term about gaming. It refers to the intersection of gameplay (Ludo) and the story (Narrative) within a game. Bioshock Infinite has a massive case of Ludonarrative dissonance, one unlike any other I have ever seen.

The gameplay is all about desperate survival. Fast paced shooting, scavenging supplies, using vigors for your own purposes, it all communicates dirty and violent combat just to survive. And that's all well and good, carried over from the last game where that indeed was the setting.

Only the setting here is a prim and proper city that had no conflict before you arrived, where the vigors have no place in, where scavenging should be the last thing you need to do. This issue has been well documented, and I feel no need to expand on the issue itself.

Instead I want to actually, fully, and honestly draw attention to why this literally failing basic game design 101. You see, motivation is key when it comes to making a compelling gameplay scenario. If there's not a good reason for you doing the stuff you are, it becomes flat, unmotivational, and will make little sense. This happens in every well made game. Whether story driven (Insert story reason here), multiplayer (Winning over real people), or some reward (Awesome new sword), there's gotta be a good reason why you're playing the game.

Infinite lacks that in a big way. It appears as though you have a good reason for your actions (Wiping away crippling gambling debts), but it's a bad reason for the audience. We don't know anything about Booker, and this will fail to engage the player. The reason I'm bringing this up in a section about ludonarrative dissonance is that it would be the game's one and only chance to fill in the gap the dissonance leaves.

There's no rhyme or reason to the story interacting with the gameplay. One minute you're shooting up a ticket station, the next you're happily taking in the sights of a carnival. I checked before dropping it for good, and the game doesn't really ever solve this issue, proving my suspicions right. Ludonarrative dissonance guts the story, makes the gameplay feel off, and again, shows sloppy writing and a general lack of thought. This is what happens when you plunk one game's mechanics into a completely different setting. It should have never happened.

Ok. What's the point here?

A lot of this sounds like simple critique of a game, but my overarching point here is that I saw all this in the first 3 hours. I went from the opening scene to the firefight in the carnival. I saw a game not caring about proper pacing of gameplay, and only cared about the “deep” story. In that story, I saw desperate attempts to appear deep yet in actuality doing very little. I saw a game giving absolutely no thought to how the story and gameplay worked together. I saw a terrible plot for the sake of gameplay, and choppy gameplay so they could insert “thoughtful” story. I saw a badly thought out, sloppy experience that had no value in continuing.

Bioshock Infinite felt like the game that best represented bad “AAA” games of the last generation. It felt like it was simply checking off boxes to make a successful yet thoughtful game, yet not actually thinking about those boxes. Complex story? Check. Messages about religion and racism? Check. A sweeping soundtrack? Check. Standard shooting gameplay that ever consumer knows about? Check.

Bioshock Infinite checks those boxes and nothing else. It has a complex story, yet fails at almost every basic storytelling post. It has messages about religion and racism, but really it has nothing to say and only put them there to appear like it does have something to say. It has a sweeping soundtrack, but a soundtrack that has nothing lasting. It has standard shooting gameplay, only put there because it's popular, ignoring the fact that it doesn't fit the story at all.

I saw Bioshock Infinite as a manufactured, false, focus tested, passionless game in the first 3 hours. That's not the kind of game that deserves my time.