Bioshock Infinite had a wildly good reception. It’s 91% positive on Steam with 47k reviews.
Comment on What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)?
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I enjoyed Bioshock Infinite. Probably because I hadn’t been infected by the immersive sim brain worm when I played it and didn’t judge games based on their box-stacking mechanics, nor did I care about how it fit into the lineage of *shock games.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Korkki@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I don’t get how game that has 94/100 on metacritic and only lost to GTA5 on it’s release year calling it “not bad” is an understatement to say the least.
wirelesswire@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I enjoyed Infinite as well. The story was good enough to keep me hooked, and despite you having to escort Elizabeth or the majority of the game, she didn’t feel like a burden.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
As someone who didn’t particularly enjoy the first two, I was very grateful that Infinite was different. The only really bad part IMO was the ghost fight. On the higher difficulties, she tanked more ammo than existed in the area.
topcrest@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Surprised to see this in the thread. Agreed it’s a fun game!
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s the #72 highest rated game of all time on Metacritic with a 94/100. I don’t think BioShock Infinite really fits this thread.
Carl@anarchist.nexus 1 day ago
It’s a funny case where it was pretty widely panned by diehard fans of the previous games, but it was extremely popular with basically everyone else. So there was a very vocal minority who shat on the game right after it released. But it hit a broad enough audience that the new/casual players overwhelmed the diehard fans.
Bioshock Infinite is basically the Fallout 4 of Bioshock games. If you played Fallout 4 first, you’d probably think it’s a great Fallout game. The gameplay is decent, you have roleplay choices for the story, there is lots of world building, etc… But if New Vegas is already your favorite game, you probably hated FO4 for not being enough Fallout. It doesn’t mean people enjoying FO4 are wrong. It just means the game didn’t deliver what existing fans were hoping for.
AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Speaking of FO4, my biggest gripe is just the loss of durability of everything, but power armor. That, and power armor becoming something anyone is able to wear and is all over, removing any speciality to it, IMO.
It’s kinda unfair to compare FO4 to FONV, IMO, but it’s still a decent game on its own.
Soggy@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
FO4: Welcome to Fallout! Here’s your nuclear war, here’s your vault, here’s your wasteland, here’s your wacky robots, here’s your dog, here’s your Good Guy Faction, here’s your power armor, here’s your first Deathclaw, now either go find your son or fuck off.
It really tried to cram the entire setting into a playable E3 demo, made most builds nonviable, not to mention how half-baked the modding system and settlement construction tools are.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 day ago
New Vegas will always be superior to Fallout 4 in everything but graphics.
Fallout 4 is a great looter shooter. But its an absolute ass awful fallout game… Like they bought someone elses half finished shooter, and threw super mutants and a fucking horrible RPG system into it awful.
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
No way, FO4 would be mediocre even if I had never played any of the first person Fallout games. Bioshock Infinite just didn’t feel like a Bioshock games, but I honestly thought it was quite good as a stand alone game. It was definitely better, more fun than Bioshock 2 for me.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I agree that infinite didn’t feel like a BioShock game, but I still enjoyed it for what it was. But FO4 was pretty good. Writing could’ve definitely used work, but the gameplay was pretty tight. I remember having issues with the new skinny murder bot event even mid game. I didn’t experience that in New Vegas. As much as I will always love New Vegas, it had some balancing issues that 4 did well.
I try to enjoy games apart from their predecessors.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Maybe my memory is different, but I recall Infinite being extremely well-received at the time. Much better than Fallout 4 was. Like, it was talked about as being one of the greatest games of all-time.
Rather, I think its a rare case where public opinion sours over time. Part of that is because the game itself really doesn’t hold up to being replayed. The best part of the game is the story, and mostly because of the sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and leads up the the big twist reveal at the end. In a lot of media like that, its really fun to go back and are all of the little pieces of foreshadowing that you overlook or misinterpret the first time. Or heck, maybe some people pick up on it and predict the ending, and that can also be incredibly satisfying. But Infinite doesn’t have any of that. When I replayed Infinite a couple years ago, I got to the ending thinking “yeah there was absolutely no way I woukd have been able to figure that out on my own the first time”, which was really unsatisfying.
Not only that, by parts of the story are actively bad when you stop to think about it. There was the whole arc where they go to a different dimension where Daisy is leading a revolt against Comstock and she just kind of decides for no reason that Booker is an enemy who has to die. It really felt like they just ran out of ideas to make the enemies you had been fighting up until then visually interesting so they tried to cram in a different faction somehow. The scene where Elizabeth sneaks up on Daisy and kills her with a pair of scissors to the neck felt incredibly out of character and unearned. There were moments during the revolt sequence when Booker acts sickened by the violence against Comstock’s soldiers, though he never reacted like that to those soldiers oppressing civilians earlier in the game.
Some of it is cultural context too. Fascism has been on the rise globally since the game has come out, so I think a lot of the audience (myself included) is less interested in condemning the oppressed for violence against their oppressors than they may have been at the time of release. When you put it next to BioShock 1, it seems like Ken Levine is just using political extremism in general as a narrative device for conflict rather than actually trying to make any particular statement about politics. That kind of centrism has not aged well.
Without that, the rest of the game falls apart. The peaceful segments are good additions for the sake of pacing, but the NPC’s don’t really interact with you much and are more just scenery. They aren’t people that you ever care about, so changing the world state to the violent one where you’re shooting enemies never feels all that meaningful.
The action sequences are okay, but not good enough to stand the game up on its own like some of its contemporaries did. Games like Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed have their own issues of course, but it was really fun to just run around as Ezio or Drake in most of the games in a way that it never was for Booker. The enemies in Infinite feel repetetive, almost every “arena room” area feels the same. The guns aren’t that interesting and the gimmick of the vigors wears off quickly. Elizabeth isn’t all that interesting in combat, just an occasional extra source of health or ammo. The time rifts are basically the same. The sky hook was cool, but wasn’t used often and there wasn’t usually much of a benefit to being airborne vs grounded anyways.
So the only thing left to really enjoy is the spectacle. It still looks good. The art style is a great balance between realism and stylized that looked great at the time and has aged well. The sound is all good- voice acting, sound effects, music, all of it. The setting and environments are creative and interesting.
So I’d say it is worth playing once for most people, but doesn’t live up to its Metacritic score. In tier terms, it seemed upon release like an S-tier game but has aged into more of a B-tier.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I was a huge fan of the previous games. My friends were huge fans of the previous games. We all loved Infinite. Fallout 4 is another great example of that game being way better, and way better received, than the tone that you tend to see on forums. Perhaps because those people were so burned that they can’t help but talk continually about how upset they were with it? I see this all the time in fighting game circles around Guilty Gear Strive. That series never broke 1M copies sold of a game before Strive, and Strive has sold like 4M+ by now. Not only that, but tournament entrants are consistently healthy at every major. If competitors weren’t happy with it, they’d stop playing, and we know that from plenty of other fighting game scenes. Even if everyone who played a prior Guilty Gear also hated Strive (which isn’t the case), it should be extremely rare to come across those legacy players’ complaints, but even 5 years into Strive’s success, those voices are quite loud in forums.
tal@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I think that every Fallout game other than New Vegas and maybe 2 is like this. There are things that people like, but there are also changes that fans of prior games are really upset about.
Fallout 3 came out, and it was shifting a much-loved isometric game with fully turn-based combat into a pausable 3D shooter. Part of Fallout and Fallout 2 was that it had good world-building. I believe that “Fallout” was originally a play on words, referring not just to the radioactive fallout, but to the societal fallout. It showed a post-apocalyptic society. In Fallout 3 and on, a lot of that world-building made a lot less sense in favor of building little mini-stories.
Fallout 4 shifted from a tradition of being able to drastically affect the world to having dialog paths that almost entirely had no effect other than reputation with one’s companion. Fans complained because the game felt like it was on rails. The skill system went away, which a lot of people didn’t like.
Fallout 76, aside from being buggy at release even by Bethesda’s standards, took a series with lots of characters to interact with and basically eliminated them until later updates brought them back in. It had a weaker plot (especially at launch). Fallout 76 had a bunch of design decisions around being a multi-player game that made it a rather weaker single-player game — in a series with an immersive world, constant reminders about multi-player events and such kind of don’t fit in well.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The best Fallout Experience in the 3d era is New Vegas. Which is fitting, since it was the only one made by the actual fallout creators, that had actual love for the setting that they created.
Fallout 3 was like a collection of short stories all bound into a single hardcover. Because nothing you did in location X, affecting anything out of location X. It tried, but I think the reason it got as much praise as it did in the early days, was simply because it was like muddy water in the desert to people dying of thirst, it whet their lips and throat and as a result was the sweetest thing ever tasted. . Until you got back home and drank proper, clean water again and realized how your desperation was making something bad into something grand.
Fallout 4 is a great looter shooter. But thats all it is, its not a fallout game… Its like Bethesda bought some half finished game and threw super mutants and butchered/ruined the RPG system to enable infinite growth in a system where no one is going to get to level 200 under even egregious gameplay circumstances
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It seemed widely decried at release, but it really stood up in the end.
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Apparently imsimmers really hate it for not being Bioshock 1 But More.