December 7th, 2012Top StoryI've Played 4 1/2 Hours of BioShock Infinite. I'm No Longer Worried About This GameBy Stephen Totilo
On Thursday in Los Angeles, I didn't have to wait any longer. I got to play BioShock Infinite, from the start, on a PlayStation 3. I had my laptop nearby, and after admiring the game's intro, I cracked it open and decided to not-quite-liveblog my experience playing the game. I did this back in 2011 for another game and figured I'd try it again. So what follows are my notes and ideas, typed out in real-time as I played, cleaned up a tiny bit for clarity so you can read through them. Folks, the game is shaping up very well. There will be plenty of spoilers here, so if you want to go into the game knowing nothing, please move on to the next Kotaku article. But if you want to know how this game plays, come along for the ride. Don't worry. I left out a lot of cool stuff and really couldn't type out a 10th of the interesting stuff there is to see in the game's opening levels... Hopefully, you'll get to see for yourself when the game hits in February March next year. 4:54pm PT, Thursday, December 6 This is what you missed: You begin on a row-boat. Wait, let's back up more: I'm on the eighth floor of a fancy hotel in Beverly Hills (in real life, not the game). The royal suite, I think it is called. It's huge. I'm in a long dark room, sitting in a cushioned white chair in front of a flat-screen TV that's running BioShock Infinite on a PS3. There are three people to my right, all seated in front of TVs, same set-up as me. There are four people to my left. They're all games reporters or bloggers or whatever you want to call them. There are a few people on the opposite side of this long room. Same deal. I think there are other rooms in this suite with people set up on 360s and PCs. There are PR folks and other minders. Folks from Irrational, the development studio… or from Take Two, the publisher, I guess (not sure, because I arrived late. Blame the traffic!). I was given a choice of which platform to play. Any console version would do, I said. I was handed headphones and then a minder started the game up for me. Oh, before I sat in my chair I had to remove an action figure from the seat. It was new and in its box. I think it was for the game. There are also snacks on this table and I'm told there will be two dinners. Two! The event goes late. Anyway, back to the game and what I played already. It starts in a rowboat. Off the coast of Maine. 1912. You're rowed to a lighthouse during a storm in an obvious nod to the first BioShock. Then you, alone, as Booker Dewitt, begin to explore the insides of this lighthouse. It's weird in there. The first thing you can do is wash Booker's hands in a basin that's in front of a sign that reads: "Of thy sins shall I wash thee." And then up some stairs you go, past a sign that says "From Sodom shall I free thee." There's more, but I can't go through everything. Up you go and it gets creepier. There's a dead body, an easy puzzle, a lot of coins to pick up and then you're bolted to a chair, rocketing up to the floating city. Around this time, I was feeling quite pleased that I was playing a game in which I get to explore a floating city. That's almost enough for me.
But... back to the game. First impressions of the floating city of Columbia is that it is crazy-religious. Booker's in a church of sorts. There are people in white robes, lots of psalm-like praise written on the walls, all of it referring to a Father Comstock. Wandering through this, I would find a batch of people in white robes awaiting baptism. You accept baptism and damn near get drowned. Then something happens that seems to be a flashback but is maybe also a flash-forward. And then… you/Booker are waking up somewhere sunny in Columbia in front of statues of Jefferson, Franklin and Washington. The statues make it look as if those three guys were saints or religious figures. People are worshipping them. Booker's mission is ostensibly to find a woman named Elizabeth, but clearly he's also going to have to find out why everyone in this place seems like a freak. 5:09 5:11 5:18 Man, the guy to my right is ahead of me in the game. (Is it Rey Gutierrez of the PlayStation blog?) He's not typing! Damn him. Must catch up. Oh, but do you mind if I note that there are lots of hummingbirds in the game? I like that. 5:22 5:31 5:35 5:36 5:39 A fellow games reporter just stopped by to chat with me while I was typing this. He's on the lookout for signs that we're being hoodwinked in the game. "That Beach Boys song," he said. Oh. The one the barbershop quartet was singing? I, um, didn't realize that was the Beach Boys (but it did sound like the song at the beginning of, what was it, Big Love?). What's that mean? This isn't 1912? Mind blown! Or I don't know. Back to playing because the guy to my left has a gun (in the game!) and is setting things on fire. Playing onward! 5:46 5:47 5:48 I asked. After you die, you are revived with some health, not all. You are docked some in-game money. And your enemies recover some, but not all, of the health they lost while you were fighting and being killed by them. You revive in sort of a dream state, come through a door and resume close to where you croaked. 5:54 5:59 6:01 6:09 6:11 6:12 6:13 Ken Levine's agent just stopped by to say hi. Hi, Ophir! Back to the game. 6:23 The main difference so far is this skyhook grapple ability, which is letting me leap to points in the air, hang, switch to a new one and dive down (no sliding along skyrails yet, but I think that's coming). The whole dynamic of having Elizabeth with you, having a smart computer-controlled, adapting character with you—the big idea of this game that I'd heard was the thing they were struggling the most to implement because it was such an ambitious idea—hasn't become part of this experience yet. Oh, and of course the fascinating distinct place this game is set in feels very BioShock. One element from that game that I'm not seeing here? Moral choice along the lines of harvesting or saving the Little Sisters, rudimentary as that recurring choice was in the first game. I've made just one choice so far, and had a meter running while I had to decide. It was an interesting choice that challenged me to take the safe path of being just another Columbia bigot or the bolder path of rebelling. I suspect I'd have wound up in a fight with the police either way, so I'm not sure what the point of the choice is. So far, it's worth mentioning, the people I'm fighting against are big-time racists. My game's been rebooted and I'm back to where it out-saved. Onward… 6:38 6:42 6:50 After the fight, I poked around in the game's menus. Looks like all of my weapons and Vigors can be upgraded. Most of the game is streaming in, but I have hit a couple of loads. Those only take a few seconds. Tech-wise, the game is running fine. Not as stunning as, say, Halo 4 in terms of graphical fidelity, but stellar in terms of art direction. I think the guy to my left just got to Elizabeth. And I have to break for an interview in a moment. And my computer's low on juice. Time to find a socket. 7:30 If you think it might be a tad awkward to interview one of a game's writers while you are in the midst of playing the game, you're right. I knew that I'd be getting to Elizabeth—the game's other protagonist—momentarily, but not before our interview. So we had to talk around things. I asked him about how much of a sex object she is, since there's been some gawking at her looks and her low cut dress ever since she was first shown. Once you experience her story, Holmes told me, that kind of reaction may seem "silly." There's a lot to experience with her, a lot of story to absorb. So the interview itself is a bit of guesswork and a chance to clarify. Ah, right. You can only carry two weapons at a time in this new game, to force the player to make choices. In the first game, the player could carry all their guns. Oh, I hadn't noticed until you mentioned it that the Vigors use up different amounts of Salt, moreso than the various Plasmids did in the first game. This too encourages players to strategize in combat. We talked about the one choice I'd experienced in the game so far—whether to throw a baseball at a white man and black woman or at the person exhorting me to do so. I had a third choice: do nothing. The consequences of my choice weren't the things that happened right after, Holmes told me. The consequences are revealed much later. Choices like these will crop up in the game at unexpected times, he said, because the goal is to sometimes turn a scene that you'd normally just watch into something you're involved in. The team is "forcing you to think about the situations you find yourself in," he said. They want you to feel this world, its time period and the values of its characters. I like that. Back to playing… 7:57 Oh, man. The guy to my left finished. He reached the demo's end. I need to play more. I just escaped a burning zeppelin. Time to meet Elizabeth? 8:03 While I run and fight, Booker is occasionally being addressed directly by the head bad guy, Father Comstock. He is being blamed as some sort of false prophet. Father Comstock is taunting him, attacking him, forcing his followers to drop to his knees so he can then fly in on a skiff and harangue Booker. And now that I've escaped some of that and am approaching the tower where Elizabeth most likely is being held, I'm walking through weird chambers that are full of signs cautioning me not to talk to or interact with the "specimen." It looks like Elizabeth has been some long-term experiment of this crazy cult. It's all weird. Who am I really in this game? What is Booker's deal? The intrigue here is great. Drew Holmes had told me that the writers of the game admired the series premiere of the TV show Lost. They loved how that premiere got its "hooks" in the viewer in so many ways and made people hunger for answers. That's what they've tried to do here, he had told me earlier. And he said answers will all be given in the game… if you explore deeply enough. 8:17 8:33 One thing I do want to mention, though, is that it's striking how prevalent the issue of racism is in this game. So far it's all presented in literally black and white fashion: bad racists keeping black people down. There's no need for sympathy for the racists here, but there's also no apparent deeper message yet other than that racism is bad and that it's infuriating to watch the black characters in this game fill roles that are subservient to the main faction that's also trying to kill or capture Booker and Elizabeth. 9:10 I'd gone to the Hall of Heroes and was getting a hang (no pun intended) of skyline travel, which allows you to improvise your navigation through the game's outdoor areas. Several battles inside the Hall introduced Elizabeth's ability to summon objects and structures into existence. Pointing at a "tear" and holding square might cause her to spawn in a turret or an ammo cache. I'm not sure why you wouldn't have her do these things. They help. She doesn't take damage during battles. She hides. And she can toss out helpful items like health packs, ammo or even useful guns. She's empowering. There's got to be a catch to her usefulness, but I haven't figured out what that is. The Hall of Heroes level was striking in how it mixed intense combat sequences with trademark BioShock storytelling. Both BioShock games before Infinite told stories through the environment and through diegetic voicework. That's amplified in a world as vibrant as Infinite's Columbia. This sky city is both exotic and also coated in familiar Americana. The Hall of Heroes is a bizarre museum offering an alternate-world take on the Battle of Wounded Knee and the Boxer's Rebellion. Our protagonists, Booker and Elizabeth, are also talking about a lot of this stuff, making sense of some of it and adding more mystery. And through all of this, I wonder, what happened to Father Comstock's wife. She died? Oh, she was killed by the rebel leader? But what of this child she had? I find myself wanting to know so much more about this world and it's people. I am hooked. 9:17 9:32 A little more of my gut reaction to what I played: the game feels very smooth; its world has been built well and is more interesting than any game world I've been in in quite some time. Much of what was in BioShock before feels as if it has returned. But the scale does feel grander. The volume has been turned up. If the first game was mostly desolate and led by a mute character, this one is full of people and lively chatter. We even hear a lot from the character we play. The game feels vibrant. It also feels linear, more than I had anticipated. From its description as a city comprised of floating islands, you, like me, may have expected a game that had more of an open world flow. I understand that backtracking will be allowed in this game, but the handful of hours of this that I played have felt as linear as the first BioShock or, to cite a roughly similar game, Dead Space. As the game pulls the player forward, you do find yourself in broader spaces. The "bowls" of combat seem larger, and the skyline allows you to grapple and flank enemies with a finesse that makes combat feel more player-authored, more Crysis and less Call of Duty. It's consistent with the previous BioShocks and is still clearly a shooter that funnels its player through its story, but, in gameplay terms, the action occurs on a slightly larger scale and with more room in which to play. There was a nice variety of enemies. As the demo was winding down, I was encountering trickier bad guys who required agile use of Vigors to defeat. One note of lingering caution: I'm not convinced that Elizabeth is the fleshed-out cleverly-artificial intelligence that she was initially implied to be. She didn't seem to be reacting to things I was doing as Booker and her reactions seemed more canned. Interesting, but not exactly morphing based on what I said. I could be wrong or inferring things that were never promised. I didn't get to play with her at Booker's side for long, so I can't say much about how interesting or successful she is or if she's "merely" BioShock's Alyx Vance. The best compliment that I can pay the game right now as that I wanted to play it more slowly. I wanted to explore its world and learn as much of it as I could. But I'm tired right now. My body's on east coast time and therefore it's nearly 1AM. I wasn't going to lose sleep tonight if BioShock Infinite was a stinker. But I'm nevertheless happy that it showed so well. It plays more like the old game than I'd expected. It looks nothing like the old one, as I'd hoped. Both of those are very good things. Be hopeful. They might nail this one yet. BioShock Infinite is scheduled for release for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on February March 26 (UPDATE: delayed slightly again!). Look for some brand-new BioShock Infinite gameplay footage tonight (Friday) during Spike TV's Video Game Awards, airing at 9pm ET / 6pm PT. We'll embed a stream for you here on Kotaku.  |
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