Some Common Complaints About 'BioShock Infinite' (and Why They’re Wrong)

BioShock Infinite, as I’ve said before, is one of my favorite games of all time. It is also a game rife with problems. How can we reconcile this discrepancy? Despite the game’s critical and financial success, it’s no trick to find the same handful of criticisms repeated over and over again, blown up out of all proportion, and left to stew in some concoctive regurgitant of gaming journalism. And some of them are even true!

Those that are less so often feel like they’re coming from the wrong place to begin with. Take for instance the complaint that you can’t interact with most of the game’s non-player characters, despite the token dialogue they occasionally offer you. What were people expecting on this front? BioShock Infinite never advertised itself as an RPG. When I play Halo, I’m neither surprised nor upset that Master Chief can’t have a conversation with any of the nameless Space Marines standing around in Sergeant Johnson’s briefing rooms.

The first BioShock was not only completely devoid of dialogue trees, but the protagonist was also mute. If anything, someone looking for their player character to be more interactive with the game world should praise Infinite for delivering an FPS protagonist with extensive scripted dialogue and a personality more defined than “player surrogate.” If I wanted to know the life story of every generic NPC standing on the street corner I’d play a BioWare game.

Moreover, parts of the game that do offer greater interactivity are often met with indifference or derision. When the player has the option to play a guitar he or she might come across, it’s ridiculed as pretentious, annoying, too on-the-nose. The ability to buy food from vendors on the boardwalk bears no consideration, nor does Elizabeth plucking a rose and wearing it in her hair while you explore the next area.

It’s even possible to trigger a scripted dialogue sequence with some NPCs just by walking up to them, but because BioShock Infinite is a shooter without selectable dialogue options—just like almost every other mainstream shooter—it supposedly fails to establish an immersive game world. I’m all for integrating RPG mechanics into shooters, but why blame the game for lacking something its genre, developer, franchise, and marketing all suggested it wouldn’t have?

This same frustration extends to things as mundane as not being able to free two men in Shantytown from their imprisonment in a pair of stocks. You have a gun and a hook-hand, so why can’t you get them out? Terrible game design! I would guess that the reason is probably because it isn’t feasible to code every possible action the player could take that isn’t connected to the main plot or its side quests. You also can’t shoot the lock off a door, break open a vending machine, or escape Columbia by constructing a parachute and leaping over the side of the city. Should the specific action of freeing these specific prisoners have been coded into the game? I don’t care, but the game is full of people in jails, and it wouldn’t have hurt to be able to help some of them. Really, though, it’s just an example used by critics to illustrate their discontent with the game’s interactivity, a complaint that is due more to the limitations of video games in general than to any shortcoming unique to BioShock Infinite.

That said, it’s true that the game didn’t completely live up to its pre-release marketing hype. Elizabeth’s unscripted tears can do little more than spawn turrets, weapons, ammo, health, and, more rarely, environmental hazards. It’s a great help, but not exactly a highlight of the gameplay. Furthermore, this is a far cry from the wide variety of tactics and applications the tears were talked up to have while the game was in development. I gladly would have waited through another year of development if Irrational Games had been able to implement her powers to the full extent they discussed in the demos, creating doorways to escape from combat and forcing the player to use Elizabeth’s ability more tactically by giving it a recharge timer.

One demo showed Elizabeth being accosted by a homeless man begging for food, and I wish the developers had been able to make the environment come to life and interact with the player in little ways like this. I’m just as disappointed that the final game doesn’t allow you to interfere with the actions of the Vox mob, and it’s completely fair to feel a little cheated that these advertised aspects of gameplay didn’t make the final cut.

Elizabeth mourns a victim of the Vox Populi uprising in a scene altered in the final game.

 

But only a little. The fact is that few games fully incorporate everything their overambitious developers want to include. It’s disappointing, certainly, and arguably even slightly dishonest not to admit which advertised features didn’t make the cut, but it’s hardly a game-breaking flaw. Would BioShock Infinite be more fun if Elizabeth could summon a freight train from another universe to run over enemies? Yes, definitely. Does the lack of this ability impair the gameplay in any way? No more than the absence of any kind of tears in the first BioShock impaired that game.

Speaking of absence, what about the puzzling critiques of the game’s civilian AI during combat sequences? If you’ve played the game, you may have noticed how anyone who doesn’t want to kill you hightails it off the map when the bullets start flying. Apparently this was a confusing programming choice that needed to be singled out for censure. Did it really, though? These aren’t enemy types, they’re just civilian NPCs. When the fighting starts, they run away to avoid being shot, set on fire, blown up, or pecked to death by crows. Is this really such an unusual game mechanic? It makes more sense than programming them to run around haphazardly in the middle of a firefight.

Certain criticisms of the characters ring similarly hollow. Critics often compare Infinite’s dramatis personae to that of the original BioShock, and end up looking down their noses at Columbia’s villains for not writing any poetry about rabbits. While it’s true that the first game’s supporting characters did tend to be more flamboyant and memorable than those in Infinite, it was because they had to be. The main character of BioShock, Jack, has almost no personality or character of his own. He is intentionally left as a blank slate, a pawn of the game’s allegorical meta-commentary on video games. BioShock is more about the city, the madmen who live there, and what they represent than it is the story of any one character.

This is not the case in BioShock Infinite. Booker DeWitt is no stand-in for the player; he is a fully fleshed out and realized character with a detailed past. The player may control his actions, but his identity is his own. Some will argue that comparisons between BioShock and BioShock Infinite are fair game because they both take place in decaying dystopian societies, but this isn’t an apt criterion.

The heart of BioShock Infinite is the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth. While the game is packed to the brim with big ideas—perhaps even bigger ideas than filled its predecessor—the narrative is blatantly character-focused. Jeremiah Fink and Daisy Fitzroy, while interesting characters in their own right, are no Sander Cohen or Dr. Steinman, and Zachary Comstock is certainly no Andrew Ryan—but they don’t need to be, and it’s a mistake to expect something old from a game that’s so obviously doing something new. BioShock Infinite is Booker’s story from beginning to end. Which type of narrative is better is a matter of opinion; that they are intended to be different is not.
 

The relationship between Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth is the heart of BioShock Infinite.

Regarding combat, some will assert that the game provides few opportunities for strategy more complex than shooting enemies in the face until they die, and that your variety of vigor powers doesn’t come into play at all. This is not entirely accurate, however. On lower difficulty levels, it’s true that the different vigors function as little more than fun ways to switch up your method of execution.

On hard difficulty or 1999 Mode, however, the tactical advantages of different vigors against different enemy types do come into play. The best way to stop a rampaging Handyman in his tracks is with Murder of Crows, for instance, and the massive battle at the end of the game is nigh-unwinnable unless you’re able to chain lightning between Motorized Patriots with an upgraded Shock Jockey. Possession in particular becomes invaluable when used tactically to clear rooms full of enemies without engaging them yourself.

But by and large, BioShock Infinite’s combat is not the high point of the game. While the vigors are fun, the weapons are mostly interchangeable and offer no interesting upgrades. The ability to carry only two weapons at a time discourages the player from experimenting with different combinations once they’ve secured something as powerful as the Hand Cannon or paired the shotgun with the vigor Undertow.

This raises the question, however: is combat really one of the main draws of a BioShock game? The answer is almost certainly no. At their most basic level, the games are shooters, but thematically, philosophically, contextually, they’re much more than that, and fans of the series expect much more than that from them. Was the combat in the original BioShock particularly revolutionary? Not really; while perhaps more complex than Infinite’s, it was a pretty standard strategic FPS in a survival-horror environment, plus the ability to shoot magic from your hands. The basic shooter portion of its gameplay may not be particularly inspired, but with its implementation of sky-lines and tears, BioShock Infinite has really only evolved and streamlined the combat mechanics of its predecessors.
 

A Motorized Patriot, part of the game’s “Heavy Hitter” class of enemies.

Perhaps BioShock Infinite’s most hyped advancement was the AI for Elizabeth. And for the most part, her AI is extremely impressive. She almost never behaves in ways that break game immersion or that make her a burden to the player. In a strange catch-22, however, her coding sometimes calls attention to the fact that she’s not calling attention to the fact that she’s a video game companion. While assertions that she is a weak character couldn’t be further from the truth, Elizabeth’s inability to be detected by enemy AI is a bit of a programming oversight.

I suspect this was done to prevent her from inadvertently sabotaging the player’s attempts to use stealth or drawing in a hoard of enemies the player wasn’t yet prepared to face, but it does sometimes detract from the experience. Given the alternative, however, it’s a fair tradeoff. More distracting is when she is occasionally hit by stray enemy fire but has no reaction because she isn’t coded to register hits. I’m glad that you don’t have to protect Elizabeth on the battlefield, but there must have been a way to make her invincible without having her shrug off direct missile strikes to the face.

Despite my objections, however, certain analyses hit the mark more often than not. Columbia’s vigors, for example, are not very smoothly integrated into the game. They made sense in Rapture (well, as much sense as magical sea slugs can ever be expected to make), a society guided by the virtue of selfishness and the unending quest for self-improvement. In a society based around religious fervor, racial supremacy, and good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, however, they just don’t feel like an organic part of the world. But it’s a BioShock game so they had to be there.

Other points stretch from a lack of world-building in the voxophones to the tedious boss battle with Lady Comstock. And why couldn’t we look into the past through any of the scripted tears we encounter? We can hear people talking, but that’s functionally no different from a voxophone. This is such an obvious trick, it’s amazing no one at Irrational thought to put it in the game.

It bears considering, however, that many, if not most, of these and other commonly cited issues don’t appear or affect the game until the final third or so of its length. The point at which the characters start hopping through parallel universes is also the point at which both story and gameplay suffer the most.

Once you enter a world where every faction is trying to kill you, both the previous enemy types and your erstwhile allies, the interactivity issues mentioned above are finally noticeable. Elizabeth becomes less chatty, non-hostile NPCs become less commonplace, and for some reason it seems like the environment itself becomes less organic. You’ll be walking down long, elaborate corridors that, although beautifully rendered, feel like they should be brimming with lootable items or at least stuff that you can knock over or interact with in some way. But it’s all just scenery, and the result is a sense of hollowness and sterility incongruous with the gorgeous graphic design.

I understand it wouldn’t have been feasible for Elizabeth to maintain long-running conversations with you during gameplay, including combat, as she did in the E3 demo, but I also don’t see why she had to shut up completely. In Battleship Bay, she skips stones on the lake, comments on the city’s quantum engineering, and delights in a gift of cotton candy from a vendor. By the time she’s abducted by Songbird and taken to Comstock House, it’s rare to hear her talk outside of combat or cutscenes, and that’s a shame.

So it’s not as if the game is without its flaws. But just because they become more apparent as the narrative enters its home stretch, they don’t retroactively apply to the gaming experience prior to that point. For each disappointing or inconsistent element of gameplay, there are a dozen positive accomplishments to balance it out, and everything that follows the final battle on Comstock’s flagship is as strong as everything that preceded your first journey through the tear. Oh but I guess none of that matters because parts of the magic flying city seem more like a combat arena in a videogame than a place where people would realistically live.

Therein lies the real problem with this flavor of criticism. Instead of evaluating the game for what it is, it condemns it for what it is not. Such points, while cogent, frequently come off as so pedantic, so nitpicky, that they brush aside all the good the game achieves, everything special, memorable, or unique, because it fails to be either the same game as its precursor or a perfect simulacrum of reality. In the Internet age of undeserved negativity and thoughtless criticality, it’s disheartening to see BioShock Infinite, a game that tries so hard and offers so much, be so easily dismissed just because it isn’t perfect.

“The problem with BioShock Infinite,” one critic summarized, “is it’s a game that wants to blow your mind rather than encouraging you to use it.” Ignoring how trite an analysis that is, why can’t it do both? How many people, upon completing the game, immediately started looking for answers, looking to discuss their experience, looking to understand? And yet the game didn’t make them think? Are all of the clues, the foreshadowing, the thematic structure and repetition, the allegory and symbolism, the social and historical commentary so simplistic and obvious as to preclude any consideration from the player? Maybe BioShock Infinite isn’t the greatest game ever made; it has plenty of faults to criticize. But so does the greatest game ever made, whatever it might be—and that doesn’t stop it from being the greatest.

It’s Sneak King, by the way.

5 Things I Still Don’t Get About BioShock Infinite

 

I love BioShock Infinite. BioShock Infinite is one of my favorite videogames, and probably my favorite FPS of all time (maybe that means I just don’t “get” videogames, but the P is way more interesting to me than the S). That said, in any story involving parallel worlds, time travel, alternate history, quantum physics, girls whose menstruation gives them the power to control space and time, and magic potions that let you shoot birds out of your hands, there are bound to be a few things that don’t make sense. Try as I might, there are a few parts of this game I still can’t wrap my head around, and I’m not sure which of us is at fault for that.

 

1. Why does Booker respawn in his office?

We know from the Luteces’ tally board that we begin the game as the one hundred twenty-third version of Booker who has attempted to rescue Elizabeth from Columbia. The Luteces have previously recruited Bookers from 122 alternate universes to fight 122 alternate versions of Comstock, and each of those 122 attempts ended in failure; as Elizabeth says, “Songbird always stops you.” Depending on the player’s skill, it’s possible, even likely, that Booker 123 will fail as well.

The idea behind the respawn mechanic seems to be that when you die in combat and Elizabeth isn’t around to revive you, the version of Booker you were playing as actually does die. The Booker who subsequently spawns in his office is another Booker from another universe, and you continue playing as him. This is a clever way of organically integrating gameplay into the narrative, but it doesn’t seem to work quite as well as the Vita-Chambers in BioShock.

If Booker’s character is to have any kind of meaningful arc or progression (which it must, because that’s the point of the game), every version of Booker we play as throughout the game must be basically the same person, with the same history, experiences, and personality. Say Booker 123 is killed because you kept fighting when you should have taken cover to recharge your shields. When Booker 124 reenters the game through the waypoint of the office and continues from where Booker 123 left off, 124 must have done everything in the game exactly the same as 123, except for not taking cover when he should have. But since the office returns you to the moment after your previous Booker was killed, we have no control over and no way of knowing what the new one did differently.

Since you retain your previous upgrades and find all the remaining loot where you left it, it’s almost as if Booker 124 is picking up from Booker 123 in the same universe where Booker 123 left off. But the Luteces don’t bring new Bookers into the same universe where a previous Booker already failed. I mean, when we first enter Columbia as Booker 123, it’s obvious that 122 versions of him haven’t previously been there shooting up the place. Every respawn must be a new Booker entering a new Columbia

So since we don’t see how Booker 124 survives whatever killed Booker 123, how do we know that 124 did everything else the same as his predecessor? With this in mind, the narrative becomes a fragmented mess seen through the eyes of various different Bookers who didn’t necessarily make all the same decisions that you’ve watched play out under your control.

The Vita-Chambers in BioShock smoothly integrated the game’s respawn mechanic with its narrative.

I’ll admit, maybe I’m putting too much thought into what’s really just a simple gameplay mechanic. The more pertinent question may be: why the office? Booker respawns in his office, then steps through the door back into Columbia and you continue playing from there. But what is this intermediate trip to the office supposed to be? At the end of the game, we see how the Luteces first pulled Booker into Comstock’s world, and it didn’t involve him stepping through his door into a white light.

At various points in the game, when Booker loses consciousness but doesn’t die, he dreams that he’s back in his office because that’s where he was first hired to “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” But what is the connection between these muddled subconscious memories and the way the player takes control of new Bookers? Is there one? Is it just the hallucination of another reality-hopping Booker trying to put his scrambled brain in order? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but with so much thought put into every aspect of this game, the developers must have had a reason for this, too.

2. Why aren’t there infinite Luteces? Alternatively, why isn’t there just one? Also, what the hell?

Just to clarify, because a lot of people still don’t seem to get this: the Rosalind Lutece who appears in the game is originally from Comstock’s universe, and the Robert Lutece who appears in the game is originally from Booker’s universe. The only time Robert Lutece traveled between universes (before Comstock’s assassination attempt scattered his consciousness throughout the probability-space) was when he and Comstock took the infant Anna through a tear back to Columbia. The Luteces’ dialogue in that scene, as well as Rosalind Lutece’s voxophones about her brother’s altered memories, confirm this.

But although we know where the Luteces originally come from, it’s never adequately explained how they fit into the game’s version of the multiverse. Are the Rosalind and Robert Lutece who help us throughout the game just singular individuals from two different universes, or are they the total sum of all Luteces from across all possible universes? If the latter, why isn’t there just a single Lutece, since Rosalind and Robert are just alternate versions of the same person? If the former, is there an infinite number of other spatially displaced Luteces helping an infinite number of other Bookers, and they just never appear or are mentioned in the game?

Every Booker can’t have his own unique Luteces, because the Lutece twins who appear throughout BioShock Infinite have already recruited 122 Bookers prior to the Booker as whom we start the game. Maybe these specific Luteces are the only ones in the entire multiverse who survived Comstock’s attempt on their lives. But why these ones?

The Lutece “twins” are at the heart of many of the game’s more confusing elements.

Furthermore, the baptism after Wounded Knee is supposed to be the critical point from which all relevant timelines diverge, but Lutece had already been born by that time. In the universe where Booker rejected the baptism, Lutece was born a man, and in the universe where Booker became Comstock, Lutece was born a woman. So the timeline had already diverged, by at least one chromosome, before Booker even had the choice to be baptized. Doesn’t that mean his choice is preordained and not really a choice at all?

Let’s suppose that every universe where Booker rejects the baptism is not necessarily a universe with a male Lutece, and every universe where he accepts it doesn’t necessarily have a female Lutece. If Lutece’s sex is a variable like Elizabeth’s pendant or Booker’s choice at the coin toss, that avoids the issue of predetermination.

But this supposition doesn’t seem to mesh with the revelations at the end of the game. Unless our Robert Lutece has the combined consciousness of all Robert Luteces from across the multiverse, he isn’t the same Robert who bought Anna from Booker 123; more likely, he’s the Robert who bought her from Booker 1.

So when Elizabeth returns Booker to the night she was taken, is the Robert Lutece who absconds with her through the tear Robert 1, the same Robert who has guided us through the game, or Robert 123 (or whatever number Booker the player finishes the game on), an alternate version of the character we know? If both undertook the same actions in their respective Bookers’ pasts, is there even a meaningful distinction?

For that matter, are the details of that night even unique to whatever Booker we finish the game with, or are they a constant that played out identically in every universe? If the latter, then we arrive back at the idea that Lutece is a woman in every universe where Booker became Comstock, and a man in every universe where he didn’t. This is the real circle that needs to be broken!

While we’re on the subject, do the Luteces have the same conversation every time they recruit a new Booker? When Elizabeth takes Booker back in time to relive being pulled through a tear by the Luteces and losing his memories, their dialogue suggests that this is the first time they’ve successfully done this. Which we know it isn’t; they’ve recruited Bookers from at least 122 other universes before our Booker.

So do they just have the same conversation every time they drag a new Booker into a new Columbia, or was our Booker somehow reliving the memories of the first Booker they ever recruited, even though that never happens anywhere else? Did Elizabeth intentionally show him the first Booker’s recruitment instead of his own? If so, why?

3. Why does no one act like they’re in a parallel universe?

The Comstock who Booker drowns in the bird bath isn’t the same Comstock who stole his daughter, since Booker and Elizabeth have passed through two tears at that point and end the game in a different universe than the one in which they started. So when Elizabeth is captured, shouldn’t that universe’s Comstock wonder why he now has two Elizabeths? It’s established in the voxophones that the Elizabeth from this universe was moved to Comstock House from Monument Island before Booker (the one who was killed during the Vox Populi uprising) got there, so what happened to the original Elizabeth from that universe? Why did Comstock try to brainwash our Elizabeth instead of his own?

On that note, why does the Songbird from this universe have the same crush-damage to his eye as the first Songbird we encountered? Is Songbird somehow cracking his eye in the exact same pattern a constant in every universe? This also means that the Songbird who helps us at the end of the game and is then murdered by Elizabeth isn’t even the same Songbird who raised her. Doesn’t that somewhat mute the pathos of his betrayal and death?

Every version of Songbird encountered in BioShock Infinite is treated as the same individual, regardless of his universe of origin.

It’s like the characters don’t understand that they’ve crossed over into a different universe. Upon failing to find Daisy Fitzroy’s guns, Booker and Elizabeth travel through a tear into a world where they can complete their mission and trade Fitzroy her guns for their airship. But why would this universe’s Fitzroy uphold the bargain made by her counterpart? How do they know such a bargain even exists in this universe, or that she even has their airship?

Maybe this was done intentionally to show that the nuances of parallel worlds are beyond the ken of a thug like Booker. But by and large the game seems to treat all parallel versions of a given character as the same individual we had encountered before, in however many earlier universes. This makes sense for the linear progression of the plot, but not so much for the concept of infinite worlds with infinite possibilities.

I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for the player to travel back to the original Columbia the game started in, maybe just before Elizabeth is captured. At least that way the final Comstock and the final Songbird we encounter and kill would be the same ones we met at the start of our adventure. Otherwise, if the game is going to treat every version of every character the same, why does it make an exception for Robert and Rosalind Lutece, and for Booker and Comstock?

4. Why are there other Bookers and Elizabeths at the field of lighthouses at the end?

How can any other versions of Booker have succeeded in their mission? They must have, because when Elizabeth becomes a time goddess and takes Booker to the metaphysical sea of doors, they see other versions of themselves exploring other lighthouses. So that means other universes’ Bookers were also successful in destroying the Siphon and giving their universes’ Elizabeth the power to rewrite time. “We swim in different oceans but land on the same shore,” Elizabeth explains, explaining nothing.

This cheapens the game’s story, which seemed to be that we were playing as the only version of Booker that finally broke the cycle, but more importantly, how does it make sense? The Luteces’ chalkboard tally and dialogue about Booker never rowing suggests that they recruited all their Bookers linearly. When one failed, they went to another universe and tried again. But since our Booker succeeded, when and why would they have recruited another Booker who also succeeded?

Was this Booker recruited by one of the mysteriously absent alternate versions of the Lutece twins? Are there an infinite number of Bookers who destroyed the Siphon and an infinite number of Bookers who failed? If so, shouldn’t Future Elizabeth’s woeful assertion that “Songbird always stops you” really have been “Songbird only stops you about 50 percent of the time”?

5. Who drowns Booker?

Who is the lead Elizabeth who drowns Booker at the end of the game? Her character model is the same as our Elizabeth, but she’s missing the pendant that’s remained the same in every scene up until Booker enters the final lighthouse. This in itself could be a simple coding oversight, but Booker seems to confirm that she isn’t who she appears to be: “I remember—wait. You’re not . . . you’re not . . . who are you?”

If she’s not our Elizabeth, why does the game seem to give her special significance, having her remain after all the other alternate Elizabeths have faded away and leaving it ambiguous as to whether she also fades? More importantly, where is our Elizabeth and why didn’t she enter the last lighthouse with Booker? If she is our Elizabeth, where is her pendant, and why does Booker seem to think she’s someone else?

Who are you supposed to be?

To me, these issues are all much more befuddling than any ambiguity over the twist ending. That said, none of them really ruins or even significantly damages the game. These kinds of problems and contradictions come up in every story that involves time travel or parallel worlds. In BioShock Infinite, at least, you have to put in a good deal of thought before you realize that not everything completely adds up. Compare this to something like Looper, which is highly enjoyable as a movie but the time travel mechanics of which make absolutely no sense and continually distract from the story being told.

Then again, maybe these aren’t even really plot holes or inconsistencies at all. Maybe they are intentional gaps in the narrative left to be filled by the player’s own imagination. I can see no other explanation for the post-credits scene, for instance, than the explanation you invent for yourself. No matter how many times you play it, BioShock Infinite will likely always be a game that raises more questions than it answers. Given the hand-holding we can expect from most major media titles, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing after all.