Can you shove big fuckers like handymen or patriots off platforms with undertow?
Just hit my first real showstopper on 1999 with the fight following Fitzroy capping Fink.
Undertow will stun Handymen, but not knock them off. Ditto Patriots, I think. Only enemy it doesn't effect is Sirens.
That fight in 1999 was the first time I really had to start cheesing the "invulnerable after being on skypath" things. 1999 is the only mode I'd call arguably too hard, depending on gear.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
So I just skipped a piece of gear because it was in a room with a guard and I didn't feel like stealing it and causing a ruckus. I figured I could just come back and grab it after things got hostile, except apparently I went a door too far and got arbitrarily locked me out of the area. Am I just boned on grabbing that piece of gear because of the completely shitty lack of a common-sense save system?
Guessing it's the one in Finktown, and it's not an arbitrary lock - you run up a ramp and jump down. It doesn't say "you can't go back after this," but it's kinda apparent that you can't get back up after dropping - it's not after any doors or anything.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I got it figured out. The save system is poor, but at least the "load chapter" option uses saves from your own playthrough instead of stock saves with stock loadouts. Took some trial and error, but I loaded a couple chapters back and just did it over again. It was, at least, a combat section, so getting through it happened as fast as I could gun baddies down.
It wasn't Finktown, but the one-way nature of the game is grinding my gears. Definitely not meeting that standard of an entry in the Shock series. They ever give you a chance to go back and visit old places with a fast transit setup, or is this linear the whole way through? Don't like the linearity at all, but it doesn't seem like there's much of a reason to have a way to visit old places anyway, since most places seem to be a more or less one-shot deal; could understand if they just skipped something like that.
So the gameplay is genuinely a chore for me at this point. I get enough salt for only a fight or two, have to scrounge around or buy salt because Elizabeth's "here, take this!" system to replace the player carrying and using restorative items is butt-grade crap, the fights are super-bland, and ammo counts are arbitrarily low because of the shitty gameplay design decision to try and force the player to keep picking up different weapons (which is especially aggravating when they could've just let me carry all those guns if they wanted to do things like that).
I seriously feel like I'm just pushing through third-rate gameplay to get to see more pretty stuff. I have no idea at all how Infinite got such positive reviews, because this gameplay is about as exciting as old dishwater. Pretty game? Very much yes. Pretty fun game? ...not this half of it, anyway.
Even on maximum difficulty there are only a handful of legitimately hard fights. The resource limits are low, but perfectly adequate as long as you're willing to pick up a different weapon and not spray bullets around
So the gameplay is genuinely a chore for me at this point. I get enough salt for only a fight or two, have to scrounge around or buy salt because Elizabeth's "here, take this!" system to replace the player carrying and using restorative items is butt-grade crap, the fights are super-bland, and ammo counts are arbitrarily low because of the shitty gameplay design decision to try and force the player to keep picking up different weapons (which is especially aggravating when they could've just let me carry all those guns if they wanted to do things like that).
I seriously feel like I'm just pushing through third-rate gameplay to get to see more pretty stuff. I have no idea at all how Infinite got such positive reviews, because this gameplay is about as exciting as old dishwater. Pretty game? Very much yes. Pretty fun game? ...not this half of it, anyway.
It got good reviews because other people in the world have opinions that are different from yours and like things you don't like sometimes.
Are you the magic man?
+7
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
This is not me saying I don't think Infinite deserved its high scores, because I think it did, but it was scored a 9/10 by every major game reviewer the day it was announced and they saw the first screenshots. It's just the way AAA titles like Bioshock games are treated.
IMO the setting and story made it a 8/10 game because it's just that ambitious and I love what Irrational does, but as I've said many times before in this thread, if we're just judging it as a video game, the gameplay pretty much fucking sucks. It's a huge step back in RPG elements, exploration, and just general shooter mechanics from their previous games.
Basically it's a 4/10 in gameplay and a 15/10 in kick ass setting and ambitious story. It just so happens that those things can trump bad gameplay. Gone Home doesn't have good gameplay either, but I understand why people love the experience. Conversely I consider Hotline Miami a 9/10 game but it's like a -5/10 if you care about story and a 20/10 gameplay/music.
I don't think it's unfair at all to say Infinite is a huge step back in gameplay even from Bioshock, but I don't think it makes it not a good game.
you can be critical of the gameplay while still enjoying the story, the pacing, the setpieces, the aesthetics, the music, and the overall game. I didn't have the same issues you all may have with the gameplay, but I found it personally more satisfying and fun than the original bioshock (which I also enjoyed). there a lots of games I love that have crappy save systems; I try not to get hung up on little things like that because I am more about enjoying things than nitpicking them.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited January 2014
I definitely should back up and clarify that I don't get how individual reviews were so overwhelmingly positive in content and left out the big problems, not that I don't think Bioshock deserves positive reviews in general. The game certainly deserves positive reviews, and it hits some major high notes in presentation, setting some new standard outright.
It is not, however, without what I would consider some fairly major flaws, such as the thoroughly linear design, the hefty recycling of enemies (those guys you fought before? They're back with different costumes! Again.), and gameplay that spends much of its time in the "mediocre" range and sometimes gets up to "pretty good" (there is a severe shortage of skyway combat, which should have been in right from the start and I didn't see for hours).
So I absolutely agree that Infinite is very much a good game, just not one I could ever see as being higher than an 8-out-10 range in a nuts-and-bolts sense. Really good, but not amazing beyond a couple of the items that have little to do with the actual gameplay. The gameplay alone will, I know for sure, keep me from ever playing again, because I just won't ever have the patience to trudge through the dull stuff for the sake of some pretty scenery. I expected a Shock game, not a well-developed tech demo with solid writing and nowhere to go but forward.
Ninja Snarl P on
0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
I liked the combat
I had a teleport punch and my Melee incinerated enemies
I tried to play bio shock 1 and the gameplay made me want to kill myself from all the switching between weapons Melee and plasmids
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
In Bioshock 1 and 2, I could also be a health-leeching wrench-fiend that could be invisible before striking, a plasmid-casting nightmare, a bullet-and-explosive-throwing juggernaut with flying gun buddies, or set loads of traps. Or I could mix all of it up. With Infinite, I can carry two guns, I have to just hope for the best with equipment drops, and I get a handful of vigor usages before having to scurry off to stupidly scrounge through boxes/bodies or hope that Elizabeth actually bothers to help me out.
Teleport punch aside, Bioshock 1 could play the way you wanted, but Infinite can't hardly play any of the ways that Bioshock 1 or 2 offered. There's streamlined, and then there's "we didn't make a good combat and skill system, so we're just going to chop it all down to almost nothing instead". It's silly to try and fault a game for having too many great combat options on the basis that somehow simpler is better.
Sure, maybe you enjoyed the simpler system more, but it's just a plain weaker system with little depth or cleverness to it.
+1
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
you seem to have misread my post
having to manually switch between the three main ways of attacking is obtuse and makes for unfun gameplay
having to manually switch between the three main ways of attacking is obtuse and makes for unfun gameplay
... you mean the system which is virtually identical to how Infinite works, except it placed the melee option in the weapons selection (which is virtually always a poor choice in games, but we're talking something 7 years old at this point)? Plasmids in one hands, weapon in the other. I'm not even getting what is too complicated with that, especially since the game paused when you brought up the weapon wheel. Slightly inconvenience, sure, but there was hardly ever a need to use the wrench, unless you specifically wanted to play that way.
And it certainly isn't better then having a good gun or two, then having to constantly switch out to crappy or short-usage weapons from dead enemies in the middle of fights because of a shittily-low ammo system. Being able to carry only a couple guns can certainly work fine and be a good thing (practically the whole Halo series does a great job of it), but Infinite did a really shitty job of it. I would've happily traded having melee mapped to a button if it meant getting reasonable ammo counts and being able to carry a solid weapon selection again.
I'm doing the charge-and-smash thing myself, but the way Infinite is designed, there's virtually no reason not to since it deals so much more damage than basically any other way of fighting. That's pretty limited design, and it gets old when you've been doing it for hours and it doesn't really change.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Nope, you're both right and I was wrong, it's just not something that bothered me much so I didn't remember. Agreed that it's a clunky thing, but that was also three games and seven years ago. It was Bioshock 2 that made the improvement of having plasmid + weapon out.
Infinite did make the slight improvement of having melee on a button, then took a couple of large steps back by stripping you of a huge variety of combat skills, weapons, and plasmids. One minor step forward, some huge honking steps backwards. In terms of gameplay, I'd easily put Infinite behind Bioshock 1, simply because the game actually bothered to give me a real diversity of options, even with clunkier controls. Making it easy to use melee and then making melee the go-to option in combat for most of the game by default is definitely not what I would call an improvement by any means for a series which, traditionally, gave players a healthy selection of ways to let them make combat be more like they wanted it.
Maybe if skyrail combat wasn't so rare I could cut the game more of a break, but for something that's clearly leagues better than walking around on foot and popping out from behind cover to shoot, they sure don't have much of it.
For the record I never bothered with meleeing except to satisfy whatever fury I was feeling at the time
I never really ran out of ammunition, either. Maybe I was just less married to whatever gun I was carrying; none of the fights were very hard to me. You had a set of vigors which gave you the ability to frame a fight, and then guns which allowed you to execute, and you had the option of taking enough ammunition into any fight to finish it
I guess we've kind of hit a disconnect because I really can't wrap my head around some of the complaints about the pacing of Infinite's combat
My favorite combination was the floaty power + shotgun, I must have killed a hundred guys by chaining the float on my first playthrough
+1
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
i was constantly using all three, with teleport punch + melee + upgraded shotgun
The only point at which I started dealing with having to conserve ammo was in 1999 mode, and even then I didn't really prefer to use melee. Hard mode was no problem - I was more a fan of vigor traps, really. Once you get chaining abilities they're just giant flying balls of death.
Also, possession traps can hit multiple people, so I was quite fond of making groups of minions to fight for me
Were skyrails that rare? I seem to remember them being in almost every major "arena" in the game. That could just be bias because the skyrail fights were always more memorable.
Were skyrails that rare? I seem to remember them being in almost every major "arena" in the game. That could just be bias because the skyrail fights were always more memorable.
Hardly. Thinking back, I could recount 3 major areas that had them. Which is a shame because they are one of the better ideas in the game.
With "3 major areas" I mean areas where they can be used for combat primarely, so no areas where they're just used as transportation or you have no other choice but to use them.
I seem to remember, like... 6? It's been months and months since I played through, so I'm probably forgetting a few. Maybe it's about time to try another playthrough.
I seem to remember, like... 6? It's been months and months since I played through, so I'm probably forgetting a few. Maybe it's about time to try another playthrough.
Here's the ones I remember:
1. The fight at the...Emporium? Is that what it's called? The section where you start off peacefully with a lot of stores (bookstore, restaurant), the big area where you need Shock Jockey in order to progress. Has skyrails going over pretty much the entire place, including some nice vantage points.
2. The fight in the area where you later fight Lady Commstock/Siren. Has a Handyman spawning later on as well, skyrails connecting the two levels of elevation and even going under the level.
3. The final battle atop the First Lady.
For the record I never bothered with meleeing except to satisfy whatever fury I was feeling at the time
I never really ran out of ammunition, either. Maybe I was just less married to whatever gun I was carrying; none of the fights were very hard to me. You had a set of vigors which gave you the ability to frame a fight, and then guns which allowed you to execute, and you had the option of taking enough ammunition into any fight to finish it
I guess we've kind of hit a disconnect because I really can't wrap my head around some of the complaints about the pacing of Infinite's combat
My favorite combination was the floaty power + shotgun, I must have killed a hundred guys by chaining the float on my first playthrough
I'm in the same spot. I liked the 2 weapon restriction, because it made my decisions as to which weapons to use tactical, rather than hoovering up everything in sight and using the most powerful constantly. I had a lot of fun running around, dropping a weapon to pick up a new one, using that to kill some chump, only to pick up his weapon and keep going. It took some time for me to be comfortable with that design decision, but once I did it became part of the game.
Also, I'm not sure why people are saying that "there's only one good way to play Infinite, melee madness". I played through 1999 on 3 different specs - heavy guns, heavy vigors, and melee madness. Honestly, the melee in the end didn't do as well for me, probably because I'm not very good at it. In the end, the best spec for me was heavy vigors, and I never had the salt problems that other people did.
I will say that spec can oftentimes be dictated by your gear, and that I do have an issue with. Doing heavy vigor without Salt from Blood is difficult at best, much like doing a melee madness spec without melee gear would be. Even so, it wasn't impossible, with the amount of gear available in the game, to do pretty much whatever I wanted to during each run.
Having all of the weapons available at the same time makes me save the powerful ones. At the end of BS2 I was still using the rivet gun with regular rivets because if/when a tough fight came along I wanted the powerful weapon full of ammo for it.
More linear isn't really a "fault" so much as a different design choice without an inherently positive or negative connotation
I agree that being linear can be a design choice. However, in a shock game where exploring to find audio logs that fill in the story and upgrades is a big part of the experience, I think it's not surprising that people who got bigger areas to explore with maps to uncover, etc. don't like that they just hamfisted the audio logs and equipment upgrades into side rooms of a straight path. It made Columbia feel like a beautiful theme park ride instead of an actual place to explore.
I've been exclusively using the shotgun and hand cannon since I found each of them respectively and have never totally run dry.
Is Ninja playing at a higher difficulty or did he miss the group shock whenever you overkill something gear? If he missed that item then I can see where ammo problems can arise. That thing plus the better crits mod is a room clearer.
You don't so much "miss" equipment as you just don't get lucky on the crapshoot since gear is randomized. There's guaranteed to be a piece of gear in that spot, but the contents aren't the same from game to game.
0
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited January 2014
Oh man, this is gonna be awesome. I wonder who
the dude holding hands with Elizabeth is. Also, it looks like I was right and
Elizabeth is only kinda omnipotent. Or this isn't the omnipotent Elizabeth, but a different part of the collective or whatever.
Posts
Edit: Dem blue numbers. They call to me.
Steam: BrocksMullet http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197972421669/
Undertow will stun Handymen, but not knock them off. Ditto Patriots, I think. Only enemy it doesn't effect is Sirens.
That fight in 1999 was the first time I really had to start cheesing the "invulnerable after being on skypath" things. 1999 is the only mode I'd call arguably too hard, depending on gear.
In my case, it's in the vain hope that there's some news about that third bit of DLC.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Steam: BrocksMullet http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197972421669/
It wasn't Finktown, but the one-way nature of the game is grinding my gears. Definitely not meeting that standard of an entry in the Shock series. They ever give you a chance to go back and visit old places with a fast transit setup, or is this linear the whole way through? Don't like the linearity at all, but it doesn't seem like there's much of a reason to have a way to visit old places anyway, since most places seem to be a more or less one-shot deal; could understand if they just skipped something like that.
Liar! I have seen the line, and it curves!
But it doesn't seem to go very far. :P
Things I didn't notice on my first playthrough. I would purchase a physical version of this thing, for sure.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Even on maximum difficulty there are only a handful of legitimately hard fights. The resource limits are low, but perfectly adequate as long as you're willing to pick up a different weapon and not spray bullets around
It got good reviews because other people in the world have opinions that are different from yours and like things you don't like sometimes.
imo
IMO the setting and story made it a 8/10 game because it's just that ambitious and I love what Irrational does, but as I've said many times before in this thread, if we're just judging it as a video game, the gameplay pretty much fucking sucks. It's a huge step back in RPG elements, exploration, and just general shooter mechanics from their previous games.
Basically it's a 4/10 in gameplay and a 15/10 in kick ass setting and ambitious story. It just so happens that those things can trump bad gameplay. Gone Home doesn't have good gameplay either, but I understand why people love the experience. Conversely I consider Hotline Miami a 9/10 game but it's like a -5/10 if you care about story and a 20/10 gameplay/music.
I don't think it's unfair at all to say Infinite is a huge step back in gameplay even from Bioshock, but I don't think it makes it not a good game.
PS - Local_H_Jay
Sub me on Youtube
And Twitch
It is not, however, without what I would consider some fairly major flaws, such as the thoroughly linear design, the hefty recycling of enemies (those guys you fought before? They're back with different costumes! Again.), and gameplay that spends much of its time in the "mediocre" range and sometimes gets up to "pretty good" (there is a severe shortage of skyway combat, which should have been in right from the start and I didn't see for hours).
So I absolutely agree that Infinite is very much a good game, just not one I could ever see as being higher than an 8-out-10 range in a nuts-and-bolts sense. Really good, but not amazing beyond a couple of the items that have little to do with the actual gameplay. The gameplay alone will, I know for sure, keep me from ever playing again, because I just won't ever have the patience to trudge through the dull stuff for the sake of some pretty scenery. I expected a Shock game, not a well-developed tech demo with solid writing and nowhere to go but forward.
I had a teleport punch and my Melee incinerated enemies
I tried to play bio shock 1 and the gameplay made me want to kill myself from all the switching between weapons Melee and plasmids
Teleport punch aside, Bioshock 1 could play the way you wanted, but Infinite can't hardly play any of the ways that Bioshock 1 or 2 offered. There's streamlined, and then there's "we didn't make a good combat and skill system, so we're just going to chop it all down to almost nothing instead". It's silly to try and fault a game for having too many great combat options on the basis that somehow simpler is better.
Sure, maybe you enjoyed the simpler system more, but it's just a plain weaker system with little depth or cleverness to it.
having to manually switch between the three main ways of attacking is obtuse and makes for unfun gameplay
More linear isn't really a "fault" so much as a different design choice without an inherently positive or negative connotation
... you mean the system which is virtually identical to how Infinite works, except it placed the melee option in the weapons selection (which is virtually always a poor choice in games, but we're talking something 7 years old at this point)? Plasmids in one hands, weapon in the other. I'm not even getting what is too complicated with that, especially since the game paused when you brought up the weapon wheel. Slightly inconvenience, sure, but there was hardly ever a need to use the wrench, unless you specifically wanted to play that way.
And it certainly isn't better then having a good gun or two, then having to constantly switch out to crappy or short-usage weapons from dead enemies in the middle of fights because of a shittily-low ammo system. Being able to carry only a couple guns can certainly work fine and be a good thing (practically the whole Halo series does a great job of it), but Infinite did a really shitty job of it. I would've happily traded having melee mapped to a button if it meant getting reasonable ammo counts and being able to carry a solid weapon selection again.
I'm doing the charge-and-smash thing myself, but the way Infinite is designed, there's virtually no reason not to since it deals so much more damage than basically any other way of fighting. That's pretty limited design, and it gets old when you've been doing it for hours and it doesn't really change.
I appreciated not needing to do that in Infinite
Unless I'm badly remembering how both of those games work
so switching between guns, Melee, and plasmids is clunky in combat
in infinite you just hit the button and it activates
Infinite did make the slight improvement of having melee on a button, then took a couple of large steps back by stripping you of a huge variety of combat skills, weapons, and plasmids. One minor step forward, some huge honking steps backwards. In terms of gameplay, I'd easily put Infinite behind Bioshock 1, simply because the game actually bothered to give me a real diversity of options, even with clunkier controls. Making it easy to use melee and then making melee the go-to option in combat for most of the game by default is definitely not what I would call an improvement by any means for a series which, traditionally, gave players a healthy selection of ways to let them make combat be more like they wanted it.
Maybe if skyrail combat wasn't so rare I could cut the game more of a break, but for something that's clearly leagues better than walking around on foot and popping out from behind cover to shoot, they sure don't have much of it.
I never really ran out of ammunition, either. Maybe I was just less married to whatever gun I was carrying; none of the fights were very hard to me. You had a set of vigors which gave you the ability to frame a fight, and then guns which allowed you to execute, and you had the option of taking enough ammunition into any fight to finish it
I guess we've kind of hit a disconnect because I really can't wrap my head around some of the complaints about the pacing of Infinite's combat
My favorite combination was the floaty power + shotgun, I must have killed a hundred guys by chaining the float on my first playthrough
Hardly. Thinking back, I could recount 3 major areas that had them. Which is a shame because they are one of the better ideas in the game.
With "3 major areas" I mean areas where they can be used for combat primarely, so no areas where they're just used as transportation or you have no other choice but to use them.
Steam ID: 76561198021298113
Origin ID: SR71C_Blackbird
Here's the ones I remember:
2. The fight in the area where you later fight Lady Commstock/Siren. Has a Handyman spawning later on as well, skyrails connecting the two levels of elevation and even going under the level.
3. The final battle atop the First Lady.
Steam ID: 76561198021298113
Origin ID: SR71C_Blackbird
I'm in the same spot. I liked the 2 weapon restriction, because it made my decisions as to which weapons to use tactical, rather than hoovering up everything in sight and using the most powerful constantly. I had a lot of fun running around, dropping a weapon to pick up a new one, using that to kill some chump, only to pick up his weapon and keep going. It took some time for me to be comfortable with that design decision, but once I did it became part of the game.
Also, I'm not sure why people are saying that "there's only one good way to play Infinite, melee madness". I played through 1999 on 3 different specs - heavy guns, heavy vigors, and melee madness. Honestly, the melee in the end didn't do as well for me, probably because I'm not very good at it. In the end, the best spec for me was heavy vigors, and I never had the salt problems that other people did.
I will say that spec can oftentimes be dictated by your gear, and that I do have an issue with. Doing heavy vigor without Salt from Blood is difficult at best, much like doing a melee madness spec without melee gear would be. Even so, it wasn't impossible, with the amount of gear available in the game, to do pretty much whatever I wanted to during each run.
I agree that being linear can be a design choice. However, in a shock game where exploring to find audio logs that fill in the story and upgrades is a big part of the experience, I think it's not surprising that people who got bigger areas to explore with maps to uncover, etc. don't like that they just hamfisted the audio logs and equipment upgrades into side rooms of a straight path. It made Columbia feel like a beautiful theme park ride instead of an actual place to explore.
Is Ninja playing at a higher difficulty or did he miss the group shock whenever you overkill something gear? If he missed that item then I can see where ammo problems can arise. That thing plus the better crits mod is a room clearer.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/