Cliffski's Blog

I bought Bioshock Infinite yesterday. It’s a big budget game that looks intriguing, I enjoyed what I played of Bioshock, and I saw floating cities and thought it could be cool. I also like to ensure I’ve played a few AAA games now and then to remind me how they work :D

I’ve played about 2 hours of it, and it’s kinda cool, very ‘impressive’ and clearly cost a lot. I’m not sure it’s genuinely fun for a player like me, for various reasons. Firstly I’m not a chisel jawed wisecracking American who punches lift buttons with his fists, so I already feel like it’s not really me playing, by my voice and my actions. Secondly, everything seems to be glowing. Nice bloom effect, but give it a rest please. These are fairly minor things though, that I’d happily overlook to experience adventure in what is a very interesting world.

The problems that put me off are more fundamental. Firstly, I don’t really feel like any skill is involved. I picked medium difficulty, but I haven’t run out of ammo, salt or health once, and that’s with me bouncing around like a hyperactive squirrel spraying bullets everywhere. I think I died twice, but it really didn’t matter. As a result, I don’t feel scared, or excited. I basically can’t lose, and am not challenged. I can burst into peoples homes and rummage through their house for money without a second thought, and nobody I’ve encountered has posed any real threat whatsoever.

Maybe that’s fixed on higher difficulty, at least for shootouts, but it certainly doesn’t require any stealth in the way the old thief games (or even dishonored, to a very superficial extent) did.

More fundamentally, there is no real sense of sandbox or player control. They have created an amazing world, but they then wrote a movie script for it, gave me superficial control of a character at certain moments, and spun me around like a puppet on a scriptwriters strings for the majority of the predetermined story. I say things I wouldn’t say, do things I wouldn’t do, and spend a lot of the game running predictably forwards as things fall down just behind me, or to one side. I know I could go slower and it wouldn’t matter. I know the pillar that hits me as it falls is scripted to and I can’t avoid it. I may as well just hold down the W key with one hand and play the game blindfold.

I see games like this as a missed opportunity. I know they appeal to a certain crowd, and are very well made for it. I just wish they could take that same awesome world, awesome design and huge budget and make a free-form sandbox game where I could adventure in that world with entirely emergent gameplay. Apparently GTA games do a lot of it. Thief did it better. Just Cause 2 did it exceptionally well.

To me, this is a horribly expensive use of art assets to just wheel me past amazing vistas as they explode. I know it sells, I just wish we could have true, challenging sandbox games set in such a world. No quests. Just free-form experimentation within systems. basically i want ‘sir you are being hunted’ with Bioshock infinite’s budget.

I sell games to a lot of people with BIG monitors and desktop PCs. But then, a lot of people also play, and surf on smaller-screen laptops. Basically it is about time I stopped serving the exact same web page to everyone. So as of today, positech.co.uk is a little cleverer than before!

check it out, and try resizing the window if you have a big screen:

http://www.positech.co.uk/index.html

The bulk of the site is the same, but depending on screen width, you get 3,4 or 5 little images linking to other games under the big slider thing. I think this makes good use of 1920 res monitors without sticking horizontal scrollbars (ugh) on smaller browser windows. It’s easy to do as well…

You just need to use some CSS, and a few <div> sections here and there. if you name a <div>, you can adjust it’s width based on the browser window inside the css like this:

@media screen and (min-width: 1400px) and (max-width: 1648px)
{
  .gamesection {width: 1316px;}
}

That makes the gamesection div 1316px wide if the screen size is between those 2 values.

I can then hide/show the ‘optional’ boxes with the extra images the same way, using named divs in the html:

@media screen and (min-width: 1400px) and (max-width: 1648px)
{
  #optionalbox { display: block; }
  #optionalbox2 { display: none; } /*hide 5th game box if screen is too short*/
}

I thought it was cool anyway :D